Hard Truths

While exploring the cosmos, humans sometimes encounter intelligent beings very different from themselves. Dealing with these beings requires learning to understand them. Yet acquiring the knowledge needed to do that is not easy, as the people in these five stories discover. In The Home Song, a pair of ship wrecked space travelers must learn how to get the cooperation of a being whose nature they can hardly imagine. In Survival City, the survivors of a civilization-destroying war have to decide what they should share and what is not worth sharing. In Crucible of Vyath, a teenage boy, captured by the most feared enemy humans have ever encountered, has to find an ally among his enemies before he can find the key to his freedom. In Fatal Flaw, four alien abductees, while coping with what appears to be incomprehensible evil, must look past that evil to understand their captors. In Dilemma, two scientists, working to save a people who follow rules of conduct utterly at odds with their own, must decide if it is ever right to compromise principle as a matter of principle.