Dan Greene

Dan Greene is a Milotan secret agent living under a human disguise in Washington Heights with his wife, May Greene. His decisive importance lies in the compromise he embodies: he is committed to Milotis’s covert colonization of Earth, yet he must conduct that mission through an improvised family life whose child may become more attached to Earth than to the society that sent him. Dan’s practical caution repeatedly confronts May’s hope, and his eventual consent to raise Terence Greene on Earth turns a private crisis into a possible model for mass infiltration.

Identity and Assignment

Dan is a medium-sized, stocky man of roughly May’s age. Without his disguise, his skin is a dull, natural light green and his pupils are a restrained maroon red, features that make him visibly nonhuman on Earth. The ordinariness of his appearance was part of his selection for the assignment on Milotis: he was chosen not only for ability but because he could pass as unremarkable in both Milotan and Earth terms. In the apartment, however, the disguise is removed and the physical cost of the mission becomes evident. May peels a silk-thin plastomask from her face and removes her contact lenses, while Dan’s own altered body remains part of the concealed reality of their marriage.

The assignment is not a temporary posting. Dan and May have changed their Milotan names to the closest possible Earth equivalents and use those names even in private so that neither will make a public mistake. Their adaptations include amputations, leaving them as much bodily monstrosities on Milotis as they would appear on Earth in their natural forms. They cannot simply return home and resume their former lives, because their bodies can no longer be readapted. Dan therefore inhabits a permanent exile: Earth is the place where he can function, but not a place where he belongs, while Milotis remains home without being a fully recoverable destination.

The Pregnancy and the Decision to Stay

Dan first responds to May’s visit to Dr. Robinson as a medical emergency. When she reports that she is ill, he moves toward her protectively, assuming that an Earth virus might be attacking her and recalling their supposed immunity to all Earth diseases. When she explains that the condition is organic and that Robinson cannot treat it adequately, Dan immediately concludes that they must return to Milotis. His alarm is therefore both personal and institutional: pregnancy threatens their assignment, their standing with the Bureau, and the carefully maintained fiction of their ordinary Earth household.

The Bureau had sent them to Earth on the assumption that May was sterile or beyond childbearing. Dan knows that the authorities will blame both of them for failing to take proper precautions, even though the pregnancy had seemed impossible. When Robinson offers to end the pregnancy without reporting it to Milotis, Dan recognizes the practical solution, but he does not force it. May has wanted a child throughout her life, and her decision to accept the Earth posting had rested partly on the belief that motherhood was no longer possible. Dan understands that, if he insisted, she would comply because of her deep love for him, yet he refuses to make that love the instrument of an abortion.

His hesitation is not simple sentiment. Dan has become accustomed to spending the rest of his life on Earth, despite disliking the secret-agent role and feeling little affection for the natives. The work is well paid, and their Earth living standards are better than what they would face after a dishonorable discharge from Milotis. He therefore weighs the pregnancy against a life already built around permanence. His question about what else they can do is both a practical inquiry and an admission that the mission has left them with no clean alternative.

May proposes that the child remain hidden through masks and lenses, but Dan initially rejects the idea. A child could be kept at home while very young, he concedes, but compulsory schooling at about six would make concealment much harder. Medical examinations would create another danger, and even a child who passed a superficial examination would leave the family in constant fear. A tutor would not solve the problem: an affluent private arrangement would make them conspicuous in Washington Heights, while bringing another Milotan into the apartment would expose their secret. Dan’s instinct is to preserve the ordinary, middle-class cover on which the entire operation depends.

A Colonial Strategy in Family Form

May’s counterargument transforms Terence from an unwanted complication into an experiment. Milotis already has thousands of secret agents scattered across Earth and expects their number eventually to reach hundreds of thousands and then millions. Dan agrees that the project will take centuries to organize, but he also believes Milotans can plan across that scale. When May suggests that children born within Earth culture would be less likely to make mistakes because they would genuinely belong to that culture, Dan sees the strategic force of the proposal.

May imagines young married couples being sent to Earth specifically to bear children there. Such children could become agents more economically and rapidly than adults subjected to years of indoctrination. If the Bureau accepted the proof provided by their family, it might forgive the Greenes’ failure and turn their personal disaster into an official breakthrough. Dan’s consent is thus inseparable from the bureaucratic pressure surrounding them: they have little to lose, and a successful child-born agent might restore their honor as well as advance Milotis’s program.

Yet Dan identifies the danger that May’s plan tries to evade. The children could identify with the natives, and Milotis’s intentions toward Earth are ultimately hostile. A child who grows up among humans may become part of the human crowd before reaching the maturity needed to understand Milotan purposes. Dan pauses over these competing possibilities rather than offering easy confidence. He finally agrees to try the experiment, but explicitly remains unhappy with it. His acceptance is a risk calculation, not a conversion to May’s optimism.

Eight months later, Terence Greene is born on Earth, in the United States of America, with a genuine birth certificate and citizenship. Because he is born there, he does not need forged papers and is, technically speaking, not even a Milotan. Dan has helped create a paradox at the center of his own mission: the child is biologically connected to Milotis but legally and socially produced by Earth. The covert agent’s most successful disguise is no longer a mask placed over an adult body; it is a native birth that makes the disguise appear to be an ordinary identity.

Fatherhood, Labor, and Economic Strain

Dan continues working while May stays home with the baby, because the Greenes must conform to Earth customs and cannot rely on the robots that would have cared for a Milotan infant on Milotis. The arrangement distributes both labor and risk unevenly. May performs the exhausting daily care, while Dan’s continued employment becomes necessary after the loss of her income. Their terrestrial salaries were meant only to supplement allowances from their own government, and life on an alien planet is so expensive that the family soon sacrifices not merely luxuries but necessities.

Dan gives up the specially imported tobacco substitute from Milotis, while May abandons the food delicacies sent from home and repackaged as Rice Krispies and Coca Cola. These details make the colonial mission material rather than abstract: every disguise, imported comfort, and medical intervention costs money, while the child who is supposed to make infiltration more efficient initially makes the family poorer. Later, Dan reacts sharply to Terence’s growing school bill, including an additional hundred dollars for extras such as French and washing. His irritation is partly financial and partly ideological, because the education designed to produce a competent native-born agent is also drawing Terence deeper into the culture he may be expected to oppose.

Dan and May raise Terence bilingually, speaking both Milotan and English at home, while warning him never to use Milotan in public. They keep him away from other children as much as possible and tell him only that they come from a far-off place. Dan argues that Terence should learn the truth early, because the parents must prevent him from identifying with Earth. The concealment is therefore deliberate but incomplete: Terence is taught the language of his origin before he is given an explanation of that origin.

Schooling and the Fear of Identification

When Terence turns six, Dan accepts that school is unavoidable under Earth law. May enrolls him in a private day school, using the explanation that the Greenes are Christian Scientists so that he will not undergo medical examinations. The school’s high fees help make the principal accommodating, but those same fees later intensify Dan’s resentment. Education is simultaneously their legal obligation, their cover, and their proposed instrument of agent formation.

Dan watches Terence’s assimilation with increasing unease. Terence learns Earth subjects, acquires linguistic aptitude, and joins the school’s cultural routines. When he treats Milotan as something like Esperanto or pretends not to understand it, Dan interprets the behavior as proof that the boy is identifying with humans and does not want to be different. Dan’s fear from the original debate has become visible in daily life: the native-born strategy may be succeeding as cultural adaptation precisely where it threatens Milotan loyalty.

The family’s cover also exploits the political atmosphere around them. After Mrs. Danko snarls about the child’s privileged schooling and invokes commissars while making a sign against the evil eye, Dan proposes allowing a Russian story to stand. He suggests implying that the Greenes come from one of the Balkan states swallowed up by Russia and are keeping quiet because reprisals might threaten relatives there. The lie is carefully indirect, designed to explain their foreignness without stating anything that could be checked too closely. Dan understands that suspicion can be redirected rather than eliminated, and that a human political narrative may protect an alien one.

The Swimming-Lesson Crisis and Dan’s Legacy

The arrangement collapses when Terence’s school begins swimming lessons. The lesson exposes the body that masks and lenses have concealed, and Terence returns home saying that he is different in a tone that accuses May and Dan of having made him alien. The school dismisses him after the resulting scene. May turns the expulsion into an opportunity, announcing that the family may move from Washington Heights to the suburbs and transfer him somewhere nobody knows him, while the principal urges her to tell the authorities what is wrong with him beforehand.

Dan is not present in the final confrontation at the school, but its consequences complete the argument he began when he warned that schooling and examinations would make concealment impossible. His earlier caution proves accurate, yet the exposure also produces the intimacy he feared might replace Milotan allegiance. Terence clings to May’s hand on the way to the car, and she feels closer to him than at any time since infancy. The child who began as a strategic experiment becomes, through danger and dependence, unmistakably a son.

That night, May plans to send a beam to Milotis describing Terence. Dan’s role in this ending is implicit but central: the experiment he reluctantly authorized has generated evidence for the Bureau, while the boy’s request to hear about Milotis shows that his origin has not disappeared. Dan wanted Terence to avoid identifying with Earth, but the outcome is more complicated than a recovered operative. Terence has been shaped by Earth and now seeks knowledge of Milotis through the language and trust of his family. Dan’s significance rests in that unresolved contradiction: he is a loving husband and father, a disciplined operative of a hostile colonial project, and the man who recognizes that biological success may produce cultural disloyalty.