The Lovers   ::   Фармер Филип Хосе

Hal thanked Turnboy and walked to the conference room. He spoke to many. Half of them, like him, had a Mongolian tinge to their features. They were the English-speaking descendants of Hawaiian and Australian survivors of the same war which had decimated France. Their many-times great-grandfathers had repopulated Australia, the Americas, Japan, and China.

Almost half of the crew spoke Icelandic. Their ancestors had sailed from the grim island to spread across northern Europe, Siberia, and Manchuria.

About a sixteenth of the crew knew Georgian as their native tongue. Their foreparents had moved down from the Caucasus Mountains and resettled depopulated southern Russia, Bulgaria, nothern Iran, and Afghanistan.

The conference was a memorable one. First, Hal was moved from twentieth place to the Archurielite's left to sixth from his right. The lamedh on his chest made the difference. Second, there was little difficulty about Pornsen's death. The gapt was considered a casualty of the undeclared war. Everyone was warned, again, about the nightlifers and other things that sometimes prowled Siddo after dusk. It was not, however, suggested that the Haijacs quit their moonlit espionage.

Macneff ordered Hal, as the dead gapt's spiritual son, to arrange for the funeral the following day. Then he pulled down a huge map from a long roller on the wall. This was the representation of Earth that would be given to the wogs.

It was a good example of the Haijacs' subtlety and Chinese box-within-a-box thinking. The two hemispheres of Earth were depicted on the map with colored political boundaries. It was correct as far as the Bantu and Malay states were concerned. But the positions of the Israeli and Haijac nations had been reversed. The legend beneath the map indicated that green was the color of the Forerunner states and yellow the Hebrew states. The green portion, however, was a ring around the Mediterranean, and a broad band covering Arabia, the southern half of Asia Minor, and northern India.

In other words, if, by an inconceivable chance, the Ozagen succeeded in capturing the Gabriel and built ships with it as a model, and used the navigational data aboard to find Sol, they would still attack the wrong country. Undoubtedly, they would not bother to contact personally the people of Earth, for they would want to use the element of surprise. Thus, the Israeli would never get a chance to explain before the bombs went off. And the Haijac Union, warned, would hurl its space fleet against the invaders.

'However,' said Macneff, 'I do not think that the pseudofuture I have just suggested could ever become reality.