"Civilization is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta."At  least, that's what Master Space Explorer Ainson thought! That was before man stumbled unexpectedly on an alien race. They looked at it rather differen They  believed  that civilisation was the proximity man to his own excreta.It was strange. Man could never communicate with aliens. Yet, somehow, their ideas communicated th selves only too easily. In no time at all, Earth devastated by a terrible conflict!This challenging novel of interplanetary morality is of the finest by Brian Aldiss - Britain's leading write science fiction.