‘You know,’ he said to Rugon, ‘I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don’t like our little Federation?’ He waved once more toward the star-clouds that lay massed across the screen, glowing with the light of their countless suns. ‘Something tells me they’ll be very determined people,’ he added. ‘We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one.’ Rugon laughed at his captain’s little joke. Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny.
