I have done more in one day than you all have done since you arrived. I have accomplished this because I am better at my work than the rest of you. T… - Harry Harrison

What finally decided me was what happened in that village in Tibet; we had airdropped in during the night to get between the Indians and the Chinese. I had never seen poverty or disease like that and I wondered why guns were the only thing we could bring them.

We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment.

They stared at each other, man and alien, or more correctly alien and alien—for this is what they were to each other. Alien meaning different, alien meaning unknown.