Manning glared at him.  “Maybe you should, if you think this isn’t serious.  Let’s get this clear:  these old horsefaces that so many of you think are just as quaint as can be have been building in exactly the same style as the Outsiders.  Quaint, are they?  Harmless too, I suppose!”

He stood with his hands on his hips, dropped his head and took a long, deep breath.  When he looked up again his forehead was furrowed into an intense frown.  “Gentlemen ... as I call you from force of habit ... we’ve been finding dead cities of the Outsiders for centuries.  They were all over God knows how many galaxies before your ancestors or mine had stopped playing with their tails; as far as we can tell they had a civilization as tightly-knit as our own, and probably stronger.  And sometime about forty thousand years ago they started pulling out.  They left absolutely nothing behind but empty buildings and a few crumbling bits of machinery.  And we’ve been following those remains ever since we got out of our own star-system.

“Well, we just may have found them at last.  Right here, on Hirlaj.  Now what do you think of that?”

No one said anything for a minute.  Rynason looked down at Mara, caught her smile, and stood up.

“I don’t think the Hirlaji are the Outsiders,” he said calmly.

Manning shot a sharp glance at him.  “You saw the photos.”

“Yes, I saw them.  That’s Outsiders work, all right, or something a lot like it.  But it doesn’t necessarily prove that these ... how many of them are there?  Twenty-five?  I don’t think these creatures are the Outsiders.  We’ve traced their history back practically to the point of complete barbarism.  Their culture was never once high enough to get them off this planet, let alone to let them spread all over among the stars.”

Manning waited for him to finish, then he turned back to the rest of the men in the room and spread his hands.  “Now that, gentlemen, just shows how much we’ve found out so far.”  He looked over at Rynason again.  “Has it occurred to you, Lee, that if these horses are the Outsiders, that maybe they know a little more than we do?  I suppose you’re going to say you had a telepathic hookup with one of them and you didn’t see a thing to make you suspicious ... but just remember that they’ve been using telepathy for several thousand years and that you hardly know what you’re doing when you try it.

“Look, I don’t trust them—­if they’re the Outsiders they’ve got maybe a hundred thousand years head-start on us scientifically.  There may be only a couple dozen of them, but we don’t know how strong they are.”

“That’s if they’re really the Outsiders,” said Rynason.

Manning nodded his head impatiently.  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.  If they’re the Outsiders, which looks like a sensible conclusion.  Or do you have a better one?”