A Mirror for Observers

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The office of the Director of North American Missions is a blue-lit room in Northern City, 246 feet below the tundra of the Canadian Northwest Territory. There is still a land entrance, as there has been for several thousand years, but it may have to be abandoned this century if the climate continues to warm up. Behind a confusion of random boulders, the entrance looks and smells like a decent bear den. Unless you are Salvayan — or Martian, to use the accepted human word — you will not find,inside that den, the pivoted rock that conceals an elevator. Nowadays the lock is electronic, responding only to the correct Salvayan words, and we change the formula from time to time.

The Abdicator Namir had not been aware of that innovation. He was obliged to wait shivering a few days in that replica of a bear den, his temper deteriorating, until a legitimate resident, returning from a mission, met him and escorted him with the usual courtesies to the office of the Director, who asked: “Why are you here?”

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