room.

He placed the helmet carefully on his head, took time to make sure that
it did not hide too great a portion of his impressively high forehead,
and then walked leisurely to the control room.

In the control room he checked the relative position of two green
lights on the navigation panel, shut off the main drives, clicked the
viewscreen up to maximum magnification and took over the manual
controls. A little less than two hours later, at 11:30 A.M. Eastern
Standard Time, he landed smoothly and quietly near the Jefferson
Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Watching from a port in the airlock, Keeter was impressed with the
restraint of the reception committee. Obviously, the entire city had
been alerted several hours before his arrival. Now, only orderly files
of military equipment could be seen on the city's streets, converging
cautiously toward the gleaming white hull and its lone occupant.

He opened the airlock and stepped out on a small platform which held
him a full hundred feet above the grass covered park. He watched as an
armored vehicle approached within shouting distance, then stopped.
Telling himself that it was now or never, he raised both arms to the
sky, a gesture which spoke eloquently, he hoped, of peace, friendship
and trust.

Later that afternoon, behind locked doors and sitting somewhere near
the middle of an enormous conference table, Keeter nonchalantly
confessed to an excited gathering of public officials that he had
landed on the planet by accident. It was not, he implied, a very happy
accident.

"I didn't know where the hell I was," he explained carelessly, in
excellent English that awesomely contained the suggestion of a
midwestern twang. "Some kind of trouble with the ship's computor--if
you know what a computor is." He suppressed a yawn with the back of his
hand and continued. "Anyway, the thing will repair itself by morning
and I'll get out of your hair. Too bad I had to land in a populated
area and stir up so much fuss, but from the ship this place looked more
like an abandoned rock quarry than a city. Now, if it's okay with you,
I'll get back to the ship and--"

A senator, Filmore by name, at the opposite end of the table jumped to
his feet. "You mean you had no intention of contacting us? My God, man,
don't you realize what this means to us? For the first time, we have
proof that we're not alone in the universe! You can't just--"

Keeter called for silence with an impatient wave