HOMEGOING

By Frederik Pohl

Chapter 1

At this time John William Washington, who is usually called “Sandy” by his old nursemaid and his six friends, is biologically twenty-two years and eleven months old. He thinks of himself as roughly a twenty-two-year-old, although timekeeping in the Hakh’hli interstellar ship does not go by Earth years. His age doesn’t really reflect the elapsed time since his birth anyway. Time dilation has cooked the clocks; the ship has spent much of its time traveling at relativistic speeds. Sandy is an excellent physical specimen—not counting such minor problems as deafness (but that is easily remedied by the hearing aid his shipmates have made for him) and a certain squatness of form. He stands only five feet five inches tall, but he masses two hundred pounds—on Earth he would have weighed that, though in the gravity of the Hakh’hli ship he weighs thirty percent more—and he is strong enough to support his own weight in each hand, with his arms outstretched. But Albert Einstein had been right about that, as about many other things. Everything was relative. Among the Hakh’hli on their huge interstellar spaceship Sandy is as frail as a puppy, and his other nickname among his peers—the one they use when they are mad at him—is “Wimp.”

A tiny voice in Sandy’s dreams cried, “Unclasp, unclasp, Sandy-Wimp.” It wasn’t a dream; it was the voice of his cohort-mate Polly, filled with mixed affection and irritation. The reason it was faint was that Sandy’s hearing aid had come loose again during the night. “We’ve got work to do this morning!” she bawled, her sour but pleasant breath stirring his hair. He winced away from her. Polly was not the biggest of the six Hakh’hli in Sandy Washington’s cohort, but she was sometimes the bossiest.

Sandy let go of Demmy with one arm and Helen with the other, sat up, stretched, and yawned. He readjusted the hearing aid, gazing around. The whole cohort slept in a tangle on the matting in one corner of their exercise room, and it was not uncommon for him to wake up with Bottom’s immense right leg pressed across his back and, say, Titania’s two-thumbed claw in his mouth. But this time he was on top, and he jumped off the pile before the inevitable morning rough-housing started.

They splashed and rubbed themselves clean while one of them went for the morning meal cart—it wasn’t anything like the great gobbets of roots and meat they would devour at the main midday meal, just the broth and wafers they called “cookies and milk.” Being sleepy, they didn’t talk much. The morning music was going, since the Hakh’hli disliked silence as much as any Earthly airport manager. It was playing Earth tunes on the special program for the cohort quarter, of course. Sandy hummed along with the Beatles in “Yesterday” as he pulled his clothes out of the locker. He leaned forward to kiss the picture of his mother that was stuck inside the locker door. Then, because it was a work day, he hurried back to the meal cart. They all ate quickly of the salty, steamy broth and the crunchy wafers. There was no special ceremony about eating—on work mornings they didn’t take time for the Kitchen Game or the Restaurant Game—and when they were through they hurried out to the portal of their quarters. A sharp click, a shrill hiss, a deeper, louder thump as the pressure-lock door opened, and they walked through the pressure change. Sandy swallowed. The pressure change from their quarters, maintained at an Earthly 1000 millibars, to the Hakh’hli 1200 wasn’t supposed to hurt his ears any more, but it did. His Hakh’hli cohort, of course, didn’t even notice the difference.

Obie daringly hunched himself out into the corridor for a quick look in both directions. “ChinTekki-tho isn’t here!” he crowed. “He’s late! Maybe we’ll get the day off!”

“Maybe your turds will fly! Get back in here,” Polly commanded, and cuffed him at the base of his stubby tail when he did.

“But it’s hot,” Obie whined, lifting himself on his springy legs to present his tail to Sandy for comforting. It was there to be licked, and Sandy obliged. Everyone knew that Polly was right. Obie shouldn’t have gone out of their quarters without permission. That wasn’t allowed any more. But the whole cohort resented Polly’s bossiness, and besides Obie and Sandy were best friends.

Polly took it upon herself to lecture. “The reason the ship is hot,” she said severely, “is that the navigators had to bring us in close to this star so that we could do the course-change maneuver. That could not be helped, and anyway it is getting cooler now.”

“Praise the navigators,” Obie said instinctively.

Helen echoed, “Praise them a lot!” She was simply sucking up to Obie, of course. She was pre-positioning herself for the time, obviously not far away, when Obie would come into sexual season. Then it would be his whim that could spell the difference between rejection and a successful coupling in amphylaxis.

But Obie wasn’t listening. He was daringly peering out into the corridor again, his spirits completely restored, and it was he who cried, “Here comes MyThara!”

They flocked to greet her. Especially Sandy, who, grinning with the unexpected pleasure of seeing her instead of the teacher, hurled himself on her back as soon as she was within the portal. She shook him off, limping a little. She pretended to be angry. “Get off me, you! What ith the matter with you, Lythander?” Sandy winced; the full name meant she was really angry. “I call that improper conduct for a Cheth who will thoon be carrying out urgent work. ChinTekki-tho cannot come today, therefore I will conduct you to your job. Come along, all of you!”

Weeping amused tears, the cohort followed her into the corridor and across the ship. The whole Earth-mission cohort liked old MyThara, though it was only Sandy who looked on her as the closest thing he had ever had to a real mother. Her full name was Hoh’My’ik perThara-tok 3151. The “Hoh” and the “ik” had to do with her family bloodlines. “My” referred to her status—she was a mature adult, but not a Senior. Tharatok was her personal name; “per” referred to her age—now approaching the end of her life, as Sandy well knew but tried not to think about; and the number distinguished her from any other of her lineage and generation—it was something like the batch number of her particular set of stored, fertilized eggs. Sandy sometimes dared to call her Thara-tok, but formally, to young adults like those of the cohort, she was MyThara.

With the time before the Earth landing growing so short, even Sandy and his cohort had to take a turn at doing shipwork. Sometimes the work was harvesting, pulling out the food plants and cleaning their tubers of soil, separating the stalks and the leaves; before that it was picking the blossoms from the plants when they were in their flowering phase, or collecting the round, pale globes that came when the plants had fruited. Tuber-pulling was dirty work, but not as dirty as what they had to do when the harvest was complete. Then they had to get ready to seed the next crop—pour in the buckets of sludge from the recycling stations and mix them into the soil. The Hakh’hli food plants were marvels. Every part of them was edible, and every part could be prepared and eaten in a hundred different ways. But they left nothing in the soil. So all the nutrients had to be put back—once the remains of the food had gone through the garbage bins or the alimentary systems of the ship’s crew and turned up as sludge in the bottom of the recycling tanks.

Even that kind of shipwork wasn’t as bad as cleaning out the pens of the hoo’hik, the four-legged, hairy, pale, docile, hog-fat food animals. The hoo’hik were as big as Lysander himself and affectionate. They did smell bad. Especially their droppings did. But sometimes one of them would nuzzle up to Lysander, even when he was loading them to the slaughterers—they would even gently pat and stroke the slaughterer himself with their stubby paws as they waited dumbly for the blow that would end their lives. The hoo’hik weren’t much like the dogs and cats Sandy saw on Earthly TV. But they were the closest things to dogs and cats around. There were times when Lysander wished he could have had a young hoo’hik as a pet. But of course that was impossible. No such things as pets were allowed on the big Hakh’hli interstellar ship.

Unless Lysander Washington himself could be considered one.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” MyThara kept calling as the cohort dawdled, gazing wistfully into every compartment and corridor that once had been theirs to roam and now was denied. The Hakh’hli they passed gazed back, because the Earth-mission cohort was now more newsworthy than ever on the ship. They would not normally have had much status. By Hakh’hli standards they were only “cheth,” which was to say that they were adult, but not very. In the normal course of Hakh’hli life none of them would be considered worthy of serious responsibilities for another half-twelve years at least, but the times were not normal. The Earth-mission cohort didn’t have time to grow older and wiser, because the time when they would need to act that way was almost upon them. Consequently, the other Hakh’hli thought of them the way a Japanese cynic in World War II might have regarded an eighteen-year-old kamikaze volunteer. The serious, even vital, job they were going to do entitled them to a certain amount of respect—but they were still kids, and feather-headed ones, at that.

Their shipwork job that morning was to help rig netting in the nurseries. When the ship reached its orbit around the planet called “Earth” it would turn off its motors. Then everything in it would immediately lose weight. At that time the nets the cohort was putting up would be essential, so the newborn Hakh’hli infants, happily springing about the nursery, would not bash their infant brains out against the unforgiving walls.

“Up top, Sandy,” Demetrius commanded when they had looked over the situation. “You’re the lightest.”

“You’ve given me the hardest part,” Sandy complained. Whoever was on the upper part of the walls would have to hang on with one or more limbs and, with whatever limbs were left over, catch the heavy balls of elastic fiber as they were tossed up to him.

“Serves you right,” Helen croaked malignly. “It’s about time you did some real work.” And then, because she was the next smallest to Sandy, though the margin was wide, she was sent to clamber up the far wall to catch his return throws.

So as not to waste the time the cohort organized one of their informal games—they just called this one “Questions”—and tossed hard ones back and forth. It was Helen’s idea, so she got to choose the category. “Middle names,” she decreed.

“Of American presidents?” Bottom ventured. He was always the most diffident one. He was the fattest and shortest, too. Everyone laughed at the clumsy way he hopped about, but when he made a suggestion, if anyone listened at all, they generally found it was a good one.

“That’s okay,” Sandy said eagerly, adjusting his hearing aid to make sure he didn’t miss anything. “Let me start. How about Herbert Hoover?”

“Clark,” Demmy said at once. “His middle name was Clark. Herbert Clark Hoover, 1929-1933. He was president during the stock market crash, 1929, which led to the Great Depression, apple sellers, breadlines, unemployment, miniature golf—”

Polly hurled the ball of cord at him. “Just say the name,” she snapped. “Go again.”

Demmy giggled as he caught the cord, his eyes weeping with pleased vanity. He tossed it to Sandy, who listened as he fastened a loop of it to the wall studs. “All right. How about Richard Nixon?”

“Milhous!” Polly cried at once, already ready with her next stumper. “Calvin Coolidge.” She licked her little tongue in and out in satisfaction, confident she had stumped them. But Bottom fooled her.

“It was Calvin!” he said triumphantly. “Calvin was his middle name; his first name was—was—”

“Was what?” Polly demanded. “You didn’t answer the question.”

“Yes, I did,” he bellowed.

“You didn’t!”

“You silly slabsided sapsucker,” Bottom hissed at her, vain of his Earth slang and the way he pronounced his s’s. “I did, too!”

“Not really, no. I said his name was Calvin. You have to say what his other name was, or else you’ve lost and I go again and—oof!” she gasped as Bottom leaped at her, butting his triangular head right into her belly.

That put a stop to rigging nets for a while. Helen leaped down to join the fray, but Sandy stayed where he was on the wall. These free-for-alls weren’t particularly dangerous for his friends. The young Hakh’hli weighed twice as much as he, and they were pretty evenly matched with each other. Sandy was a different case. He had neither the mass nor the elephant-hide skin to take that kind of brawling lightly. Nor did he have the muscle, for that matter. Any one of the Hakh’hli youths could have wrenched his limbs off as easily as a lover plucking petals off a daisy; and there had been times when they were all much younger when some had come close.

It wasn’t that Lysander Washington was a weakling. Nobody on Earth would have called him that, but the Hakh’hli were something else. They knew it. Even when one of them was mad at him, they didn’t let it get to the stage of physical violence. For one thing, they knew what would happen to all of them if anything bad happened to the one human member of their cohort. For another, they were not ungrateful to him. They were in his debt. They knew very well that if it hadn’t been for the fact that this Earth human, Lysander Washington, had needed some kind of companions to grow up with—not human companions, of course, because there weren’t any of those on the ship, but as close to human as a Hakh’hli could manage—all of them would very likely still be unhatched eggs, frozen in the ship’s vast cryogenic nursery.

While the others were roughhousing, Sandy slipped down from the wall and tucked himself into a corner, behind a squatting bench. He was protected from the combat by the rows of empty infants’ nests—none of the baby Hakh’hli who would occupy them were out of the incubators yet. Comfortable and glad to be off the perch on the wall, Sandy pulled a pad and stylus out of his pocket. He tucked his head down in case of flying objects and began writing a poem.

Writing poetry was not an unusual activity among the Hakh’hli—of course, not counting the nonintellectual oafs who were bred to perform heavy labor outside the ship, or for working in the poisonously radioactive conditions around its motors. All the six others in Sandy’s cohort did it often. It was a way of showing off. Sandy had already written his share of poems, but, like all the others the members of the cohort produced, his had been in the Hakh'hli language, which was written in ideographs rather than letters. In Hakh’hli usage the artistically designed appearance of the poem on paper meant as much as the sense of the words. Sandy’s intention was to do something that none of the others had done: to write a Hakh’hli-type poem, but in English.

He had roughed it out and was settling in to rearrange the individual words into their most artistic patterns when an adult voice cried from the doorway, in Hakh’hli, “O wicked! O persons-who-do-not-contribute-their-share! You are playing and not doing your work. Desist! Return to order! It is commanded!”

Sandy recognized the voice. MyThara was back, belching faintly in anger as she rose to the full height of her legs to tower over them. She switched to English to reprimand them, lisping and getting the words wrong in her exasperation: “What ith matter you? Why you act like hoo’hik? Infantth to be born mutht have thafety plathe!”

Snorting in embarrassment, the cohort froze where it was. They had indeed made a mess. Half the webbing that was already in place had been torn away, and now it sagged in useless strands across the baby nests. “Sorry, MyThara,” Demmy gasped abjectly. “Bottom started it. He jumped on—”

“Not care Bottom! Care people mine act badly and not well! Now, clear up meth and do job right in great hurry!”

Back in the cohort’s quarters when the three twelfth-days of shipwork were over, MyThara commandeered Sandy for a clothes fitting. He was getting really hungry—they all were—but MyThara was MyThara. For most of his life Sandy had thought MyThara was the wisest person in his little world, as well as the best. He still thought so, and out of a vagrant impulse he asked her a question that had often bothered him. “MyTharatok? Are you ever going to be a Senior?”

She was shocked. “Lythander! What an idea! I wathn’t born to be a Thenior, wath I?”

“Weren’t you?”

“No, I wathn’t. You thee, before the eggth hatch the thientithtth fiddle them a little. That’th how your cohort can pronounth all thothe terrible eththeth and everything—”

“I know that. Who doesn’t know that?” Sandy demanded.

“Well, and I jutht wathnn’t given the traitth to be a Thenior. Withdom, and intelligenth—”

“You have plenty of wisdom and intelligence!” Sandy said loyally.

“For me I do,” she said, touched. “You’re a good boy. But I don’t have the genetic equipment to be a Thenior, do I? And that ith the way it ought to be. I’m happy. I’m doing valuable work. That ith what true happineth ith, Thandy, doing the work you’re meant to do and doing it ath well ath you pothibly can.”

“What kind of valuable work?”

“What do you mean, Lythander?”

“You said you were doing valuable work. I thought you were just taking care of me.”

“Well, and ithn’t that valuable? You’re valuable, Thandy. You’re the only one like you on the whole ship, and that makth you very thpecial. Now let uth get on with your wardrobe, all right?” She leaned past him to put all four of her thumbs on the grips of the display control. The screen rapidly commenced flashing shots of human males in various costumes.

Deciding what Lysander should wear on his mission to Earth wasn’t easy, because human beings seemed to change their dress habits with time. Worse, the Earth television stations had the confusing habit of transmitting historical films, and, even worse, some of the films were golden oldies without any discernible clue to when they had been made. Togas, the Hakh’hli were sure, were out. So were plumed hats and swords. Business suits seemed safe enough, but—well, what kind? Single-breasted or double? Wide or narrow lapels? A tie? A stiff collar? Cuffs on the pants? A vest? And, if so, a vest that tamely matched the jacket, or one in red or yellow or plaid?

Then, of course, there was the vexing problem of what the clothes were to be made of. The best of the television pictures from Earth showed colors and sometimes even surface textures, but there were subtleties no one on the interstellar ship understood. The wisest scholars, poring over nearly a century’s worth of transmissions, had learned much and deduced even more by collation and comparison, but they could not say whether a particular garment should be single thickness or double, or whether they were lined or not, or how, exactly, they were held together. This was far more important for Sandy than for the rest of his cohort, of course. The six Hakh’hli who were his constant companions wore Earth clothes, or at least something like Earth clothes—shorts, suitably modified to accommodate their huge, long, folded legs, and short-sleeved jackets and now and then even caps. Shoes were out of the question for the long Hakh'hli foot, but sometimes they were willing to wear something like sandals. Lysander, on the other hand, dressed human all the time. He had even been required to practice “tying a tie” in front of a mirror, as Earth males had been seen to do. But nothing in his previous life had prepared him for the ordeal of selection that was now confronting him. “I can’t wear those things!” he cried. “How do I excrete?”

“The thcholarth thay it ith betht to remove the pantth,” MyThara soothed. “You’ll work it out all right, Lythander.”

“I’ll look like a fool!”

“You will look very handthome,” MyThara promised, keying the final selections into the machine. “The Earth femaleth will lick your tongue, I promithe.” Sandy, pretending to scowl at her on the outside, felt his heart leap inside him at that thought, as she finished, “Now get ready for the midday meal.”

Since the food cart had not yet arrived for the midday meal, the cohort had begun a game of basketball, both to keep themselves busy and to relieve some of the strain of their bubbling young glands.

Their notion of basketball wasn’t exactly regulation. There were only three on a side, plus one as referee—although until Lysander was through with his wardrobe chores they wouldn’t be able to have a referee at all. And the ball didn’t bounce exactly the way it did on broadcasts of the Knicks and the Lakers, and they didn’t have anywhere near the room for a regulation-size court. But they did the best they could. Sandy Washington urged the others to play as often as he could, because it was the one sport he could, sometimes, beat them in. They were stronger by far, but he was quicker.

He persuaded Obie to drop out to become referee—easily enough, because Obie didn’t much like the game—and plunged in. It was not as good as the games they used to have in the old days, before the Earth-mission cohort were cut off from the dozens of others they had grown up with, when their teams had, sometimes, a dozen players on each side. But it was a good game. The ship had been cooling down a little, now that they were well past the close approach to Earth’s Sun that they had used to slow the ship down. That was both good and bad for Sandy Washington. The good part was that the rest of the cohort didn’t sweat as much. The bad part was that they didn’t tire as rapidly.

He did, though. Long before the midday meal cart arrived he dropped out. While the players were shuffling around and Obie was getting back into position, Polly came over to him, limping and rubbing her immense thigh where Obie had kicked her on his way in.

“He hurt me,” she complained.

“You’re bigger than he is. Punch him out,” Sandy advised.

“Oh, no!” She sounded shocked. She didn’t say why, but she didn’t have to; by now everybody could see that Obie was getting close to a sexual season, so her reasons for keeping on his good side were obvious. “Why don’t you go for the food cart, as long as you aren’t playing?” she asked.

“I went yesterday. It’s Helen’s turn.”

“But that will break up the game,” she explained irritably.

‘I don’t care,” he said, and turned away.

Then Sandy went off in a corner to watch TV on his personal monitor. It was the rule that at mealtime the cohort could watch anything they liked, just so it was in the English language for the practice. The old movie Sandy chose was called The Scarlet Pimpernel. It was certainly not the one he enjoyed most, and he could not pretend that it contributed to his education about Earthly ways. The costumes were all wrong, and exactly who was on whose side in that complicated drama of the French Revolution not even the Hakh’hli scholars had been able to figure out. But Sandy watched it over and over with fascination, because it was about a spy. And that was, after all, the task the Hakh’hli had decreed for him.

Chapter 2

There are some 22,000 living Hakh’hli aboard the vast interstellar ship but there is only one of Sandy Washington. So sometimes he feels outnumbered. It isn’t just that he is alone. He is also—not counting food animals—by a long way the smallest grown-up living thing on the ship. An adult Hakh’hli may mass anywhere from 350 to 750 pounds, depending on age and the purpose it was bred for. Power plant and outside-of-ship workers, for instance, are almost as big as the oldest Major Seniors, though for occupational reasons they seldom live anywhere near as long. Though all Hakh’hli have the same basic body pattern—short, supple forelimbs; long, pointed face like a collie’s; huge hindlegs as powerful as a kangaroo’s—some of the specialized types have stronger hands or shorter tails or even no tails at all. The Hakh’hli hand has three fingers, plus two thumbs and a stubby, hard-clawed digit called a “helper.” It looks quite like a human hand, but with the helper emerging from what would be the heel of the hand in a human. If the Hakh’hli on the ship are diverse, the many times as many Hakh’hli on their home worlds are far more so—partly because they have more various purposes to meet, partly just because there are so many more of them. In all, there are in excess of one trillion Hakh’hli on the planets of their native sun and of the two nearby star systems they have colonized. No Hakh’hli on the ship has ever seen any of those other trillion. Nor have any of the trillion seen that ship, not since it began its voyage, 3000 Earth years ago.

Long before The Scarlet Pimpernel came to its heart-melting conclusion (the refugees safe, Leslie Howard triumphant, The Girl melting into his arms) the food cart arrived with their one great midday meal.

Sandy hung back from the rush. He had never learned to eat “properly,” and all his friends in the Earth-mission cohort had regretfully concluded that he never would. His diffidence in rushing the food cart proved it, for a proper Hakh’hli didn’t eat. He gobbled.

Sandy’s cohort tore into the midday meal with gusto. They made a lot of noise doing it, too. While Sandy picked daintily at his slab of meat, his friends were snapping great chunks out of the carcass and stuffing lumps of tuber and fists-full of the flavored wafers in after. The long, powerful jaws crunched. The throat muscles gulped and swallowed. Sandy could see successive wads of lightly chewed dinner chasing each other down the throats of his friends. None of the Hakh’hli actually snatched from him the morsels he had cut away for himself, but he didn’t expose them too openly. While they chewed they sucked in great quantities of the broth of the day, a sort of fishy consommé with lumps of wafer material floating in it. They sounded like half a dozen sump pumps going at once.

There was no such thing as dinner-table conversation among the Hakh’hli, nothing more than “Pass the broth bowl now!” and, “Hey, that bit’s mine!” Sandy didn’t even try to talk to them. He just sat patiently, cautiously nibbling at his own meal while he waited for the feeding frenzy to subside. In a few minutes it had. The great gobbets of food hit their respective stomachs. The Hakh’hli circulatory system rushed blood toward the digestive organs to meet the need for action. The chewing faltered and stopped, and one by one the Hakh’hli eyes went vacant, the Hakh’hli limbs went slack, and within five minutes every one of the Hakh’hli in Sandy’s cohort was stretched out unconscious in “stun time.”

Sandy sighed and walked slowly over to the food cart. Amid the wreckage there was still a fair-sized chunk of the hoo’hik meat, nibbled at but undevoured, and several handfuls of the flavored biscuits.

He took what he could carry and wandered over to his personal carrel to finish his meal in peace. Having nothing better to do while his cohort was unconscious and digesting their meal he did what he liked best to do anyway. He watched a film.

The best part of Lysander Washington’s life was also the most important part, because it was watching the old recorded television programs from Earth. He had to do that. Everybody in his cohort did, because that was how they learned Earth language and Earth ways. He also loved it. The way he liked best to do it was to curl up next to Tanya or Helen or even, if she was in a good mood that day, Polly, enjoying the smells of their scales and the warmth of their bodies, at least ten degrees hotter than his own. Together they would watch documentaries and newscasts, because they were instructed to, but when they had free choice it would be “I Love Lucy” and “Friends of Mr. Peepers” and “Leave It to Beaver.” They weren’t good recordings. They had been recorded originally from up to a dozen light-years away; in fact, they were the electronic signatures, picked up by the ship’s always-scanning sensors, that had first alerted the Hakh'hli to the fact that there was intelligent, technological life on some planet of that little G-2 star their telescopes had located.

The old family-style television sitcoms were always fun, but they made Sandy a little wistful. Sometimes he wondered what his life would be like if he had grown up on Earth, with human companions instead of Hakh’hli. Would he have played “baseball”? (Out of the question on the ship. They didn’t have the room. Or the players. Or a mild enough gravity to be able to hit a ball as far as Duke Snyder and Joe Dimaggio did.) Would he have “hung” around with his “pals” at the “malt shop”? (Whatever a “malt” was. None of the TV chefs had ever made one, and the Hakh’hli experts hadn’t been able to decide even if it ought to be sweet or sour.) Would he—maybe—have had a girl?

That was the biggest question in Lysander’s mind. To have a girl! To touch one (the touch was “like fire,” “like an electric shock”—how could those things be pleasant? But it was said they were), even to kiss one (kisses sweeter than wine! Whatever wine was), even to—

Well, to do whatever it was that humans did when they were in sexual phase. Exactly what that was he wasn’t sure. He knew what the Hakh’hli did; he’d watched the other members of his cohort often enough when they were sexual. Did humans do the same? Unfortunately he couldn’t know. If there were porn channels for TV on Earth, the ship’s receivers had never picked one up. It was apparent that human males and females kissed. They did that a lot. They took off each other’s clothes. They got in bed with each other. Sometimes they got under the covers and the covers moved about quite a lot . . . but never once did they throw the covers back to show what made those busy lumps go bump.

Every night Lysander dreamed. Almost all the dreams were the same. They were populated with female humans who knew exactly what to do—and did it. (Though he never could remember, when he woke up, exactly what it was they had done.)

Sooner or later, the Seniors promised, Lysander would be back on Earth, with all its nubile female humans. He couldn’t wait.

Sandy switched off the film he had chosen—it was called Jesus Christ, Superstar, and it was too much of a puzzle to watch alone. From his private locker he took out the photograph of his mother and looked at it. She was so beautiful! Slim, fair, blue-eyed, lovely—

The only thing that troubled Sandy was that although he knew from Earth films that men often carried pictures of their mothers and displayed them in moments of great emotion, he had never in any of those films observed that one of the mothers had been photographed in the nude. That was a puzzle that none of his cohort, or even the Hakh’hli scholars who had spent their lives trying to understand the ways of Earth people like himself, had been able to help him solve. It seemed improper to him. It was more than improper, it was confusing—because when he looked at his mother’s picture, so fair, so bare, so inviting, he had exciting, unbidden thoughts that, he was nearly sure, were not at all appropriate to the situation.

He could not understand why that was.

He was not going to understand it today, either, he decided. His meal finished, he carried the crumbs back to the messy cart and returned to the carrel to get back to work on his poem.

Sandy didn’t remember drowsing off and wasn’t aware that he had until he woke with Obie standing over him. “You’re turning into a real Hakh’hli,” Obie told him, approving of the after-meal nap. “What’ve you got there?”

“It’s just a poem I wrote,” Sandy said, covering it up.

“Come on, let me see it. We always show you ours.”

“It isn’t ready,” Sandy protested, getting up just in time to see Polly lumbering toward them irritably.

“Lysander,” she accused, “you didn’t clean up after the meal. Next thing you know we’ll have bugs here, and then we’ll have to get the hawkbees in.”

Sandy was stung by the injustice. “Why are you blaming me? Why am I always the one who has to clean up?”

“Because you’re the one who doesn’t sleep. You know that.”

“Well, today I did sleep. I didn’t have time to clean up.”

“You had time to write a poem,” Obie pointed out treacherously. He turned to Polly. “He won’t show it to me, either. He says it isn’t finished, but it looked finished enough to me.”

“Let’s see the poem,” Polly commanded, pinching her thumbs together in a meaningful way. Resentfully Sandy passed it over as the rest of the cohort, yawning and stretching, straggled toward them.

Oh, my

almost forgotten

terrestrial homeland!

I dream of you each day

and think of you asleep

and wish the experience

of treading upon your

soil would come, O

Earth!

Also

it has the

pretty old

moon

“It’s an attempt to write a Hakh’hli poem in the English language,” the poet explained nervously.

“Hum,” Polly said, not committing herself.

“I think that’s pretty hard to do,” Bottom commented.

“Maybe it’s not worth doing at all,” Helen put in. “It’s not the same thing as a real poem, you know. Those wriggly little characters are just ugly.”

“Besides,” Obie, the astronomer, added, thumping the notepad with his clenched fist, “you’ve got it all wrong. The proportions are inaccurate. The Moon ought to be a lot smaller.”

“I couldn’t fit enough words in that way,” Sandy said defensively.

“Then you just should have made the Earth bigger, of course. And both of them are flattened out more than they ought to be. They look more like the one they call ‘Jupiter.’ ”

Sandy snarled, “It’s a poem. It’s not an astronomy lesson!”

“Yes,” Polly said severely, “but you ought to get it right. Also, how can the Earth be ‘forgotten’? You couldn’t forget it. You weren’t ever there to remember it, were you? We picked your parents up in space.”

“That’s poetic license,” Sandy said stubbornly.

Polly lashed her tongue at him in reproof. “Poets don’t have license to tamper with the facts,” she informed him. “Hakh’hli poets don’t, anyway, and it doesn’t make any difference if Earth poets do, does it? Now, no more of this! I vote we watch some films until MyThara comes back.”

But the films the cohort chose to watch were not a kind that Sandy liked. They were all about wars and terrorism, and all those other nasty things humans were known to have done to each other in the twentieth century. When MyThara returned the cohort was quarreling about them. She paused in the door, frowning, as Bottom told Sandy judgmatically, “I think that your Earth governments are fools.”

Sandy said sullenly, “You don’t understand, is all. They probably had their reasons for what they did.”

“What reasons, Sandy? Killing each other? Destroying farms, when neither side has enough food to live on? Spreading poisons? This is not a government of wise leaders who have been bred and trained for the purpose, like our Hakh’hli Seniors. Have you ever seen such outrageous things here on the ship? The hoo’hik tenders attacking the extravehicular workers, for instance?”

“The hoo’hik tenders would be slaughtered if they did,” Obie put in. “Those extravehiculars are tough.”

“That isn’t the point! The point is that such a thing could not happen here on the ship. Hakh’hli do not behave so wantonly.”

Sandy stuck to his defense. “It’s a lot easier to govern a few thousand people than a couple of billion.”

“Oh? Indeed?” Bottom licked out his tongue sarcastically. “And on our Hakh’hli home worlds, where there are a thousand times a billion, have you ever heard of such warfare?”

“I don’t know anything about what’s going on in the Hakh’hli home worlds,” Sandy said belligerently, “and neither do you. When was the last time this ship had any communication with them?”

But that was going too far. Even his friend Obie twitched resentfully, and MyThara gasped, “Thandy! How can you thpeak tho?”

“But it’s true,” he said, and then clamped his mouth shut. He didn’t mind giving offense to his cohort-mates, but MyThara was someone he loved dearly.

“Dear Lythander,” she said seriously, “you shouldn’t talk lightly of the wortht tragedy in our hithtory. Don’t you remember what you have been taught?”

He gave her a repentant look. “I’m sorry, MyThara.” He knew perfectly well that every Hakh’hli in the ship mourned the long-ago day when the Major Seniors of the time, after bitter soul-searching, had made the decision for the ship to go on with its mission even after it had lost contact with the Hakh’hli home worlds.

Obie put in loyally, “He’s just nervous because it’s getting close to the time for visiting Earth. He even wrote a poem about it.”

“Oh? Show me the poem,” MyThara requested. When she had read it she flung her stubby arms around Sandy and gave him an affectionate lick. “It ith a beautiful poem, Lythander. May I have a copy? Oh, thank you! I will keep it in my own netht ath long ath I live. But now, pleathe, it ith work time. We will thtart with buddy thythtem, ath uthual. Lythander, you go firtht with Polly and talk railgun.”

The seven in Sandy’s cohort had a whole planet to learn—Earth language, Earth customs, Earth ecology. Plus all the things every young Hakh’hli had to learn as part of his normal socialization. Plus, for each of them, the harder lessons of his own specialty. Demmy’s was agronomy. Bottom’s was aerosol and food chemistry. Polly’s was piloting and magnetic engineering. Tanya’s was genetic manipulation. Obie’s was astronomy and stellar navigation. Helen’s was chelation, vitrification, and crystal-bonding—in other words, the processes involved in containing toxic and radioactive materials. What Sandy had to learn was easier, but larger. He had to understand something of all the other’s skills, as they all did, for there was always the chance that somehow in the actual Earth mission one of them would be lost. But Sandy had to learn a little more than the rest, because he would be the one to make first contact with the Earth people, and he had to know what to say.

Polly was not Sandy’s favorite to learn from, since she got rough when he was slow to grasp his lessons. As soon as they were alone in her own carrel she commanded, weeping with anticipation of his getting it wrong, “Explain the purpose of the railgun.”

“All right,” he said in resignation, “but no pinching, okay?”

“Maybe not. Get on with it!”

Sandy hunkered down crosslegged beside her—not too close—and began. “In return for all the good things that the Hakh’hli will do for the Earth humans, we ask only a few favors, for example that they help replenish our supplies of some stock things of no great value to them. We ask for oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen in particular. To get these to us, you will show them how to construct a sloping rail system, magnetically driven, which will accelerate canisters of water and solid carbon—they call it ‘coal’—to the ship’s orbit.”

“Why do we need those things?”

“They are fuel,” he said promptly. “All of those elements are to fuel the lander, which is driven by hydrogen peroxide and alcohol fuel, and additional hydrogen is also wanted for reaction mass for the main drives. Do you want me to tell you how the railgun works?”

“I exactly do, Wimp. In detail, and no mistakes.”

He inched a bit farther away, cocking an ear to listen to the background music. It was one of his favorites, an Earth song called “The Man I Love.” He could not help fantasying some female human singing it to him, but he said nothing because Polly would simply have ordered it turned off. “The railgun is to be built somewhere on the Earth’s equator, to take advantage of the planet’s rotation—”

“Which is pretty slow,” Polly put in scornfully. The Hakh’hli ship day was only seventeen and a bit Earth hours long.

“Yes, but their gravity is only about seven-twelfths normal,” Sandy pointed out, “so that makes the launch easier. The railgun will be six what they call miles long, ending at an elevation two miles over the surface. It will be best if they build it on the ‘west’ slope of a mountain. Every twelfth of a twelfth-mile along it there will be a magnetic hoop, each of which is charged in succession. The magnets will be superconducting-wound and will probably require the construction of a whole electrical power plant to supply them—”

“Not nuclear, though. We don’t want to encourage them to do nuclear.”

“Polly,” Lysander said carefully, “these are my people we’re talking about, not hoo’hik. They will do what they want to do.” He ducked away as her thumbs reached warningly toward him, but he was saved a pinch as MyThara called out.

“End of period. Thwitch partnerth now,” she ordered. “Lythander, now you will go to Oberon for athtronomy.”

By the time of the eighth twelfth-day they were all exhausted and ready for the evening “cookies and milk.”

That was not a time of relaxation, though. On MyThara’s orders, they spent it practicing fast food. Demmy and Tanya took their turns at working the counter, and the others collected their “money” and lined up with their orders. “Cheeseburger, small fries, vanilla shake,” Sandy ordered, calculating the cost in his head and pulling out two “dollar bills” and seven “quarters.”

Demmy looked at him angrily. “You should give me three ‘dollar bills’ and three ‘quarters,’ ” he complained, but Sandy stood his ground.

“I want to get rid of some change,” he explained. He’d seen that in one of the taped sitcoms. Demetrius scratched his thumbs across his belly irritably, but he took the money, counted it out, and produced twenty-two “pennies” in change.

“I want to get rid of change, too,” he said, weeping triumphantly.

Well, that wasn’t fair. The counterpeople weren’t supposed to get rid of change, Sandy was quite sure. But he didn’t want another fight with Demmy, so he took his tray over to a table and sat there, examining the food. The “hamburger” was all right; it was simply ground up food animal. The “cheese” was another matter. From the cooking programs on Earth television it was known that “cheese” was something you made by letting milk sour and then doing a number of things to it. No one had determined just what sort of microorganisms did the souring, though, and so, as always, Sandy carefully lifted the slice of “cheese” off his meat and deposited it on the side of the plate. The “bun” was not a real bun—all the experiments at producing something edible out of ground carbohydrates had failed. It was simply a slice of tuber, shaped like a hockey puck and warmed; not really bad. The “fries” were more of the tuber, cooked in hot grease, and Sandy had developed a real taste for them. (He never bothered with the “ketchup” or the “mustard.” Whatever the real things were like, the Hakh’hli imitations were horrible.)

The “shake” was the real daunter. It was made with hoo’hik milk, that much was clear. The rest was incomprehensible. This time it was flavored, unfortunately, more or less like the “cheese.”

Sandy forced it down, hoping he wouldn’t get sick. There was no stun time after so light a meal, and that was fortunate. Just as they were finishing, ChinTekki-tho, their principal tutor, came in. Polly daringly stopped him to display Sandy’s poem before he could speak to the group. He didn’t reprimand her. He seemed in a very good mood. He complimented Sandy. “No, it’s quite a good poem, Lysander. That is, considering. It’s very difficult to write a good poem in a bad language, after all. However,” he added, “that is not why I am here to intrude on your evening snack. I was unable to be with you this morning because final plans are being made. Soon you will appear before the Major Seniors!” There was a stir of excitement in the group; no one got to see the Major Seniors! “Meanwhile, I have ‘watches’ for you.”

“Watches?” Polly said doubtfully, but already he was passing them out, metal things on straps that the cohort examined curiously.

“You put them on your arms to tell time,” he explained. “From now on, you are all to begin reckoning your days in Earth time. The research section has informed me that it is now twenty-three ‘minutes’ past four ‘A.M.’ on what is called ‘Wednesday, July twelfth’ in your landing site, and the watches have been set accordingly.” He paused while the cohort studied the dials, then added softly, “On Monday, July twenty-fourth, you will land on the Earth.”

Chapter 3

The Hakh’hli ship is bigger than any human spacecraft ever dreamed of being, and not a lot smaller than a twentieth-century supertanker of the sea. It is in the shape of a stubby cylinder, 1,100 feet long and 450 feet across. That adds up to something like 175,000,000 cubic feet of volume, two-thirds of which is devoted to fuel storage and the engines that drive it across interstellar space. The ship’s average density is a little less than that of water, mostly because so much of the fuel-storage space is given to hydrogen; if it were somehow deposited gently on a terrestrial ocean it would just about float. The inhabitants of the ship, 22,000 Hakh’hli and Sandy Washington, have an average of not quite 1,000 cubic feet of space apiece, but that includes not only their living quarters (mostly communal, anyway) but whatever space they need for recreation and for work. It isn’t a lot. It was even worse, a few twelves of days ago, when the big ship was cutting near the Sun to change its orbit. Then much of the “spare” space was allowed to heat up so that the vast coolers could keep the rest of it bearable. The Hakh’hli are glad now to be able to reenter the formerly closed off spaces. Even so, they are fairly crowded, at least by Earth standards. But that does not bother any of them, since none of them have had any personal experience of what Earth standards are like.

Of course the cohort were excused from the next morning’s shipwork—being given an audience by the Major Seniors took precedence over any routine duty. The bad part of that was that ChinTekki-tho first put them through a long twelfth-day of interrogation and rehearsal, since it was unthinkable that any of them should say or do the wrong thing.

It was still hot in the common room, and they were all a little irritable from trying to adjust to the queer Earth time ChinTekki-tho had insisted they adopt. Obie was a distracting influence, too. Even Lysander could smell that Obie was close to entering his sexual phase, and more than once ChinTekki-tho had to reprove one or another of the females for showing more interest in Obie than in the lecture. “You must all pay very close attention!” he demanded. “Especially you, Lysander!”

ChinTekki-tho’s s’s were as sharp as any of the cohort’s; he was the best of the ship’s experts on Earth languages and customs, which was why he was their tutor. But he wasn’t always fair. “I am paying attention,” Lysander said, aggrieved. “I’m not the one who wants to get laid.”

“I hope that is true,” snapped ChinTekki. “Now observe!” He displayed a section of the Earth on the screen, pointing to a land area. “This is where you will land. It is a northern area, easily accessible to your landing craft as you come in over the Earth’s pole—”

“It’s called ‘Alaska,’ “Tanya put in, showing off.

“We know it is called Alaska,” the tutor said irritably. “Because of its location it is a cold part of the planet. It will probably be covered with the solid-phase water they call ‘snow.’ So you will all need appropriate clothing. Then, Lysander, after the ship lands, you will go out alone among the natives, carrying a radio. Your mission is to learn what things are like on Earth now, since we are no longer receiving as many broadcasts as heretofore. You will report to your cohort, who will remain with the ship. They will instruct you on what to do. When you speak on the radio you will speak Hakh’hli only, no English. Do you understand why all this is necessary, Lysander?”

 “Yes, of course. It appears that we must be very careful in dealing with human beings because—” He hesitated, then finished sulkily. “Because some of them behave very badly.”

“Not just some, Lysander. Very many of them. I am sure there are good ones, but by and large they are spoilers. You know what they have done to their planet—to your home planet, Lysander! What would our ship be like if we permitted such uncontrolled emission of dangerous pollutants?”

“It would be awful,” Polly volunteered smugly.

“That is true, Hippolyta,” said ChinTekki-tho, “but I am addressing Lysander. Do you know why your human people need our help, Lysander?”

“With verifiable accuracy and no uncertainty at all,” Sandy said, using English words but the Hakh’hli locution just to show his independence. But it did not pay to be too independent in the presence of any Senior, so he hastily went on with the familiar recital. “The human race has raised the heat-retaining capacity of its atmosphere, released acid-forming compounds into the ambient air, cluttered up its low-orbit space with debris, saturated the surface waters with reduced and organic materials, discharged long-half-life radionuclides into the environment, and permitted deforestation and soil erosion.”

“Also,” Demmy chipped in eagerly, “eutrophication. You forgot eutrophication of the lakes.”

“No, I didn’t. That’s part of what I said about reduced and organic materials, isn’t it, ChinTekki-tho? Of course it is.”

“Yes, it is,” the teacher agreed. “But you left out something even worse. Also, your human people are combative. They have weapons. They fight wars among themselves, even, with much killing.”

“I have seen the broadcasts,” Lysander said shortly.

“Yes, you have. So you know that we must be very cautious in approaching them. If it turns out that there can be a peaceful meeting between humans and the Hakh’hli, then we will reveal ourselves. But first we must be certain, and that is your job. We cannot risk the ship.”

“Praise to the ship,” cried Obie, and all the females immediately joined in.

“Yes, praise to the ship,” ChinTekki-tho echoed. “Now, what is your story, Lysander?”

“First off,” Lysander said rebelliously, “my name isn’t Lysander, not when I’m on Earth it isn’t.”

“A good point,” the tutor said with approval. “Go on.”

“My name is John William Washington. I am twenty-three years old. My home is in Miami Beach, Florida, but my parents, who were named Peter and Alice, were killed in an automobile accident. I am a college student, but after my parents’ death I was very upset and I took some time off from school to get away. I have been traveling in Alaska, because I always thought it would be an interesting place to visit. I have been off by myself, mining gold, and I am now getting ready to go back to Miami Beach, but I have lost my way.”

“Yes, that is all right,” ChinTekki-tho said approvingly. He paused, looking them over thoughtfully. Then he asked, “Are there any questions?”

Tanya put up her hand, Earth style. “Why don’t we get as many transmissions anymore, ChinTekki-tho? We’re getting tired of all these old movies.”

“That is not known, Titania. There are certain electromagnetic signals being received all the time, so it is certain that the Earth people have survived their difficulties. To some degree, at least. But the signals we have detected do not seem to carry data. We don’t know what they are. Anyone else?”

Obie piped up, “Why can’t we see the friends who trained with us now?” He was referring to the thirty and more other Hakh’hli youths who had been brought up with them and then, just a few twelve-days before, had been removed to another part of the ship.

“The Major Seniors have decided to segregate you,” ChinTekki-tho explained. That was, really, the only explanation that was needed for any Hakh’hli, but he added graciously, “After all, you six—seven, I mean, Lysander—are special. You are the ones who will land first on this planet.”

“But there were many attractive females in the rest of the group, and all we have left here are these three,” Obie complained. All three of the females hissed angrily, but the tutor overrode them. “That’s enough, Oberon! Now we will go to the chamber of the Major Seniors for your audience. However, there is one thing more. To prepare yourselves for your mission, you must all only speak English even among yourselves from now on—except to the Major Seniors, of course.”

Because the Major Seniors weren’t ready to see them, Sandy and the rest of his cohort had to wait in the compression room for one hour fifty-two minutes by their new watches. At first they were all subdued, because of the solemnity of the occasion. Lysander rubbed his ears ruefully; the compression still hurt, in spite of what had already been done to his ears to relieve it.

The subdued atmosphere didn’t last long; the occasion was too exciting. Obie and Helen began roughhousing, as usual, and Polly had to sit on them to calm them down. That was normal enough, though. Going into the big part of the ship was always an adventure for them. At least it was an adventure when it wasn’t simply drudgery, as when they had to take their turn at shipwork. But there wasn’t much that was interesting in the compression room. It was just a room. It had benches to squat on, and the ship’s screens to watch for entertainment, but what those showed was seldom really entertaining. True, once a twelve-day the whole ship was allowed to view a recorded Earth movie, selected out of the many thousands on file. That was interesting even to the cohort, because in these movies the dialogue was dubbed into Hakh’hli by some of the English-speaking scholars, and it was always amusing to hear a cheth female voice speaking the lines of, say, a hard-bitten infantry sergeant in World War Two. The rest of the time the screens were slaved to the standard ship’s circuits, and all you could get on any of its channels was the check-shots of the engines and farms and pilotage and housekeeping functions, and maybe now and then a boring, a really boring, look at the sun they had just circled and then perhaps a shot of the planet they were aiming at. That would have been interesting enough, except that Sandy’s cohort had their own screens, which were a lot better. They had all the recorded stories and documentaries and gleanings of half a century’s eavesdropping on the planet’s radio and TV transmissions. Although they had been watching those recorded transmissions for three-twelfths of every day for all of their lives, the old broadcasts were still exciting, simply because they were from Earth.

There was nothing like that in the anteroom. It wasn’t very big, either, and the faint odors that arose from Obie were very distracting to the females. It was a lucky break that Tanya found one channel with a sports event. The ship’s wrestling championships were under way. Somewhere in the Hakh’hli recreation space two huge Hakh’hli were competing in the quarter-finals. The cohort immediately chose up sides and rooted for their favorites. Even an Earthman might have been able to follow the action, if any Earthman but Sandy Washington had been there to see it, because the sport was actually an Earth innovation. It was copied from Japanese sumo wrestling and consisted of two Goliaths falling on each other.

And it was certainly exciting. Obie told Sandy enthusiastically, “If your Earthies never gave us anything else, that would be good enough.” But Polly disagreed; and Tanya disagreed with Polly; and while the bout was going on on the screen, naturally another fight broke out among the cohort.

When at last the Major Seniors had reached the point in their deliberations when they were willing to grant audience to Sandy’s cohort, the fight had long since been quelled. Obie was still bleeding slightly from a cut below his eye, but Demmy had torn a strip off his undershorts for a bandage—wearing human-type clothing had its uses, after all—and the whole cohort looked presentable enough as they lined up before the six huge Major Seniors. The Major Seniors were being genial, anyway, so they probably wouldn’t have said anything even if they had noticed. “And how are our Earthlingth today?” the Fourth Major Senior asked—in Hakh’hli, of course. Sandy noticed that she had managed to weep a benign tear of welcome.

The Major Senior had spoken to the group at large, but everyone knew the question was directed mostly at Sandy. “We eat and excrete very well, ancient female,” he said respectfully, in the same language. And then he added, using the English words when there was no Hakh’hli equivalent, “We are studying automobile driving, credit cards and late twentieth-century popular music, and yesterday we played basketball twice.” He enjoyed speaking Hakh’hli when he had just been told it wasn’t to be allowed anymore. It nettled him that his peers spoke better English than he did Hakh’hli. They had all had their vocal systems fiddled a little—surgically as infants or genetically before they were even born. They could make all the sounds of English easily enough, while when Sandy talked Hakh’hli too long his throat got sore from the clicks and glottal stops.

“Satisfactory, satisfactory,” the Major Senior muttered affably. “This First Major Senior will inform you now and not later.”

The First Major Senior always did, but all the same there was a little whiffling snort of resignation from the nostrils of almost everyone in the cohort. When the First Major Senior “informed” anyone, he started way back and left nothing out. Addressing Sandy directly, he did so again.

“Earth person Lythander Washington,” he said, his eyes gazing vacantly toward the gray ceiling of the audience room, “your female parent and your male parent were abandoned in spacecraft when your Earth persons engaged in one war. In course of this war much damage was done by both particle and photonic beams, and by kinetic impact of either solid objects or of chemically or atomically explosive blasts. Your parents could not return to their home. Although we rescued them they were in damaged state and not well. We were unable to keep them alive, but you were already one quickened ovum, near to term, and we were successful in preserving you alive. We supplied you with living necessities and companionship while we—”

“Ancient male,” Sandy said experimentally, “I have already received this information.” He didn’t think it would make the First Major Senior stop, or even blink, and it didn’t. All that happened was that Polly sidled away from Obie’s side long enough to give Lysander a quick, savage pinch from behind. The Fourth Major Senior looked up with thoughtful interest as Polly returned to crouch near the almost-tumescent Obie.

“—investigated certain nearby stars, including Alpha Centauri,” the deep voice rolled on. “That star was of no use or interest. We have now returned to system of your own planet. You are now adult and educated. Confirm that this information is verified and not in error.”

“It is verified, ancient male,” Sandy said, rubbing his bottom. Polly’s two-thumbed hand gave nasty pinches. He was aware that all the females were beginning to move toward Obie.

“We have been observing your planet since first approaching this system. There are certain facts of interest. First, those electromagnetic signals which originally attracted us to this system, and which increased exponentially in energy and in number all through our first approach, are now quite sparse. We do not have good, complete, recent information either by radio or by television. This may be because your Earth people have become either numerically few or technologically backward, due to that war. Alternatively, it may be for some other reason.”

The First Major Senior paused for a moment, interlacing his six-fingered hands across his belly meditatively. No one spoke. The Fourth Major Senior absentmindedly left her elevated seat and waddled in the direction of the cohort, her eyes on Obie.

“One second new fact of interest,” the First Major Senior said then, “is that there are no indications of powered vehicles anywhere in this solar system. From this we conclude that that inability of your Earth persons to enter into space since they blockaded themselves still continues and has not been overcome.”

There was a nasal sigh from all the cohort at that. “Oh, pellets!” Demmy whispered, and Bottom kicked him. None of the Major Seniors showed any sign of hearing. Apart from the First, the others were gazing interestedly at the Fourth, who was sniffing Obie’s spine. Her hip pouches were visibly swelling.

“We will, however,” the First Major Senior said, “be able to make landing with one of scout craft by using one polar entry window. Most of debris remains in the plane of that Earth equator. Significant quantities are orbiting in other trajectories, but our analysts have identified one number of time periods during which approach can be made. Fuel costs will be very high, since no use can be made of rotational speed of planet and power must be applied all through descent phase; and similar costs will be encountered on return flight. However, that landing is feasible.”

Daringly, Polly moved between Obie and the Fourth Major Senior. The Major Senior half raised herself on her hind legs, glaring at Polly, who sidled resentfully away.

The Fourth Major Senior addressed the group of her peers. “Excuse us and do not be offended,” she said decorously, and led Obie away with a grip on the back of his neck.

“Yes, of course,” the First Major Senior said to her back. “Well, I think that is all that need be said in any event. You Lythander, you remember that, though you are Earth human, you are also Hakh’hli. We Hakh’hli gave you life. We Hakh’hli wish only to help your Earth humans to correct errors of their own folly. But we must go with caution, and so we require you to carry out your mission fully and exactly and not without success. Will you, Lythander, do this?”

“I will,” said Sandy, hoping the interview was over.

No such luck. The Second Major Senior stirred herself. “You must be clever and true and not disloyal, Lythander,” she said severely. “Your Earth people are vain, idle, careless, and deceitful. They are spoilers. They have spoiled their planet. You must be like us and not like them in your actions on this Earth.”

“All right,” Sandy growled, shifting from one foot to another.

The First Major Senior shed a consoling tear. “What these people do on their planet is their guilt and not yours, Lythander,” he said generously. “You need not swallow your own spit over this matter. Now you may all go.”

There were no rough-and-tumble games in the waiting room this time. There was only waiting—waiting for Obie to finish his amphylaxis with the Fourth Major Senior and return from their lek. And the waiting was not at all pleasant, because all three females of the cohort were simmering.

By the time Obie came back, looking chipper and pleased with himself, they had reached the boiling point. “Oberon, you’re a hoo-hik turd!” Polly thundered, and Helen and Tanya chimed in. “How could you?” Helen whined, and Tanya complained, “And with an old Major Senior!”

Obie was unrepentant. “You all saw what was going on, didn’t you? Why didn’t one of you squeeze in?”

“Against a Major Senior?”

Obie twitched a shrug. “There’ll be more chances,” he said generously. “And, wow, she was big. I never did it with a Major Senior before! It was all I could do to hold on.”

“Were there lots of eggs?” Bottom asked enviously.

“What do you think? I mean, her being as big as she is? She was just beginning to lay when I left—and, listen, somebody’s got to take them in for freezer tagging. You don’t expect her to do it, do you?”

There wasn’t, really, any particular reason why any one of them, rather than any other, had to perform that task. But, as Obie said, it had to be done. All the females were jealous of the Fourth Major Senior, both the other males were jealous of Obie, Obie himself was too full of himself to consider such a task—one way or another, it was Sandy who wound up twirling the sticky baton to catch each of the egg masses as they emerged from the swollen ovipositor of the Fourth Major Senior.

He had never done that before. It was kind of interesting to do. They looked like that Earth thing called “caviar,” with a salty-sour smell that disturbed him.

As was customary, he wrapped them in transparent plastic and carried them through the halls to the sorting section, all the Hakh’hli he met scattering out of his important way. He lingered while the sorters gently coaxed the masses apart into dishes of warm water; watched while each one was weighed and sniffed and tested and labeled with the codes of Obie and the Fourth Major Senior. He waited until he saw them put into trays and frozen before he left.

Sandy did not know why the whole process was so fascinating to him. He only knew that it was. For all that time he was absorbed, and on the way back to the cohort’s quarters he felt stirrings in his groin and a warmth flooding through his body and, oh, how impatient he was for the day when he would land on Earth, with its countless millions of nubile, human females.

Chapter 4

Although on the ship’s plans the seven-twelfths of its cubage given over to the propulsion systems is described as “fuel storage,” that isn’t quite right. The three drive motors take up no more than a twelfth of a twelfth of that space, and the real fuel takes even less. The fuel for the Hakh’hli drive comes in three lumps. Each one, now, is about the size of a Hakh’hli’s head. They are small, but they are heavy. Each one masses something like four by ten to the fourteenth grams. Although they are matter, they are not normal, baryonic matter, which is composed at root of nothing but up and down quarks. The fuel of the Hakh’hli ship is what Earth physicists called “strange” matter, because it is made up in equal parts of up, down, and strange quarks combined. It is the most violently energetic substance known. What takes up most of the space in the “fuel compartment” is simple hydrogen gas, there for no other purpose than to be fired out of the ship’s nozzles at near light speed when driven by the energies of the strange matter. What takes up the rest of the space is the containment for the fuel itself. Those basketball-sized fuel elements need bracing to keep them in place, because they are heavy. They weigh as much as all the rest of the ship combined, and, since they are what they are, they could not be kept in a galvanized-iron tank. Strange matter has to be held by electromagnetic fields, which themselves have to be braced against the fabric of the ship. Fortunately for the ship’s designers, the fuel core weighs nothing at all when the ship is at rest—because nothing does—and when the drive is in operation the back-pressure against the core is exactly equal to the drive thrust that moves the ship. Newton’s laws of equal and opposite motion hold good here, too. When the core is activated the strange quarks boil off to heat the hydrogen working fluid and shove the ship along as it accelerates, and the masses are in balance. There is enough strange-matter fuel to last for a long, long time. It has been powering the ship for 3000 years, and it is good for 10,000 more before it is used up. In fact, it never will be used up. One of the strangest things about strange matter is that the more you use it, the more you have left; and that is a problem that has been worrying the Hakh’hli on the ship for some centuries.

Sandy had never seen the drive engines. No one on the ship did except for the specially bred drive engineers, who managed to live (though not very long) in the residual radiation that would have killed anyone else, human or Hakh’hli, in hours. Sandy had never desired to be one of them. What he did desire was to be allowed to pilot the great interstellar ship itself. Naturally there was no chance of that. Sandy wasn’t supposed to pilot the landing ship, either, when the time came for him and all his cohort at last to brave the garbage barrier that surrounded the Earth and drop down onto its surface. Piloting the lander was Polly’s job, though any of the others could take over. But the flight simulator that all the members of his cohort trained on—ah, that was another matter.

What made it possible for Sandy to sneak in a few lessons was that flight-simulation took place right after the midday meal and its consequent stun time. Since Sandy was physiologically exempt from stun time he could get there before any of the others. It helped, too, that the instructor in charge was not the smartest Hakh’hli on the ship. The reason he was there was that he had actually been in the crew that was preparing to land somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system. They never did land, because there wasn’t anything big enough to land on, but he was the closest the Hakh'hli had to an experienced lander pilot. Although he had never been authorized to let Sandy try his hand at pilotage, he had never been ordered not to, either. With a little wheedling, Sandy got past him and again took his place in the simulator capsule.

Sandy had brought cushions with him and used them to wedge himself into the kneeling-seat that had never been designed to accommodate a mere human anatomy. For a quarter of a twelfth-day—no, he corrected himself; for about twenty minutes, in the Earth reckoning of his new wrist watch—he was able to go through the whole sequence, from the magnetic-repulsion “launch” of the capsule from its recess in the side of the great interstellar ship, through the course-correction that brought it over the Earth’s pole in a descending slant, through the dodging of space debris and the buffeting of atmospheric entry, and to a good, or at least not catastrophic, landing on a level, snow-covered plain between high mountains. The simulator made it all real. When the “lander” lurched away from the mother ship—pistons gave it a realistic jolt as it happened—the screens showed the black of space, and the green planet underneath, and the great ship shrinking rapidly away. When he “turned” the lander, the same pistons gave his capsule enough of a twist to match physical sensations with the slipping images on the screens, and they filled in again to suggest the terrible jolting of atmosphere entry.

A session in the lander simulator was as good as any Earthly video game for a young adult, or actually a lot better. It wasn’t good enough, though. When Sandy had to get out to make way for the first real space cadet from his cohort he was sulking. “I don’t see why I can’t fly it down,” he complained to Polly—unwisely, because she gave him a pinch.

“Because you’re too little, and too clumsy, and too dumb!” she told him. “Now get out of the way so I can check out!”

He glowered after her as she climbed in. Obie touched the small of Sandy’s back in sympathy. “I’d let you fly if I could,” he said. Sandy shrugged morosely; they both knew that Obie’s time for influencing anyone else in the cohort had passed with his brief sexual phase. “Well,” Obie said helpfully, “do you want to do something else? I’m last on the list; we’ve got at least a twelfth and a half before my turn.”

“Do what?” Sandy asked.

“We could watch an Earth film,” Obie proposed. “There’s a ‘Star Trek’ I’d like to see again. I like those funny spaceships.”

“No way,” Sandy said positively, because Earthly ideas of nonexistent spaceships weren’t what interested him; if he were going to watch films on his free time he wanted something with prettier girls in scantier clothing. Or alternatively—

He looked around thoughtfully. The four other waiting members of his cohort had started a Questions Game—name all fifty-three states of the U.S.A. in order, left to right, from Guam to Puerto Rico—and were conspicuously shunning both Sandy and Obie. The communications screen was being ignored. “Well,” he said slowly, “there is a film I’d like to see again. Only it isn’t from Earth. It’s Hakh’hli.”

It took Obie a lot of juggling to find the old records Lysander wanted, but when they appeared on the screen even the other members of the cohort gave up their game to cluster around. That wasn’t particularly welcome to Sandy. What he was seeing was a personal matter; most of the times he watched it he did so in private, because he didn’t want anyone else intruding on the yearning he always felt.

It was the record of the discovery of the lost Earth spaceship, half a century before. It showed the detection of the artifact, in orbit around the planet Mars, and the growing images of it as the interstellar ship drew close to investigate.

There wasn’t any need to launch a lander for it; the Hakh’hli had simply sent out an unmanned probe. The cameras on the probe showed the ship growing large, filling the screen. As the probe cautiously circled, the shape of the thing was clear: a torpedo with a great chemical-fuel nozzle at one end, a transparent cone at the other. And behind the transparency of the cone—

Behind the transparency were two figures in spacesuits. They did not move. Their half-silvered visors showed nothing inside.

“Which one is your mother?” Obie asked sympathetically.

“Now, how the hell do I know?” Sandy snarled. But actually he thought he did. The one on the right was smaller than the other, and its spacesuit had a golden sunburst emblazoned on the breast. Earth females, Sandy knew, were more inclined toward personal adornment than the men.

On the screen a sudden red streak of fire lanced out from the probe to the Earthly spaceship. A tiny explosion of white and gold erupted from the ship’s surface.

Sandy winced, even though he knew that it wasn’t an attack but only the routine precaution of lasering a little crater on the hull so that the watching Hakh’hli could analyze its composition before they brought it closer to the big ship itself. The glow darkened and died almost as soon as it flared. It left only a tiny pit in the metal.

Then the probe began its cautious circling of the ship again, stem to stern and roundabout. As it shifted views there were, from time to time, quick glimpses of stars, of part of the rusty disk of Mars far below, even a glint of sunlight reflected from the Hakh’hli interstellar ship itself, hovering many miles away. Sandy saw the probe launch its magnetic grapple, the cable snaking behind as it attached itself to the hull of the Earth derelict.

Then the screen went dark.

“That’s all?” Tanya sniffed. “We don’t see the inside of the Earthie ship?”

“Not in this file,” Obie said. “There’s another file, though. I can get it for you if you like, Sandy.”

Sandy shook his head. “Don’t bother,” he said. It wasn’t the bother that he minded, it was having people staring over his shoulder as he watched the recording of the ship being carefully examined and disassembled by suited Hakh’hli. The tape showed the spacesuited figures that were his parents being handled like time-fused bombs. He did not enjoy that. True, it showed nothing of the people inside the spacesuits; it showed them being carefully transported to the Genetics laboratories, where they would be kept quarantined while investigations were made, but once those doors closed the file ended. He did not care to have an audience as he watched that, and anyway the simulator had stopped moving and the door was opening. “Polly’s through,” he announced. “Who’s next?”

But when Polly came out she was in no good mood, and the instructor didn’t help it any. “When you launched from that magnetic grapple you were slow and not at all fast,” he told her. “This is waste of energy, so you must do better and not worse.”

“It was fast enough,” she grumbled. “But if you think I am bad and not sufficiently good, let’s try someone else. Obie! You take next turn and show him what one bad pilot is really like!”

Unfortunately for Obie, he performed almost as badly as Polly said. When he got out of the flight simulator his tail was dragging. “Very bad and not at all good,” the instructor pronounced. “You crashed this ship. You do not at all bring credit to your cohort.” And while Bottom, the next in turn, was getting into the still-warm kneeling seat and buckling himself in, Obie had to stand silently through a lengthy criticism of the way he had failed to deploy his trash deflectors, missed his angle of approach over Earth’s pole, and decelerated too rapidly on landing.

As soon as it was over he growled to Sandy, “Let’s get out of here.”

Sandy had no objection. “Where?”

“Anywhere,” Obie said sulkily. “Listen. We’re outside our quarters, aren’t we?”

“Well, of course we are.”

“So why don’t we do something about it? As long as we’re out we can look around.”

“Look around where?” Sandy asked eagerly, already convinced.

“Anywhere we haven’t been lately,” Obie said, meaning anywhere they weren’t authorized to be going.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to do that,” Sandy said thoughtfully. It wasn’t an objection, just a matter of putting all the evidence on the table, and Obie regarded it as such. He didn’t answer. He just led the way out of the simulator chamber, and they stood for a moment in the corridor, looking around.

Sandy proposed, “We could go see some of the things they’re making us to take to Earth.”

“No, wait a minute!” Obie cried. “Listen, we can do that later, but maybe they’ve got some funny new freaks in Genetics! Let’s go see!”

It wasn’t what Sandy had had in mind. Genetics was a place of stews and stinks, and he didn’t usually like to go there for personal reasons. But when he tried to explain that to Obie they were already on the way there, and anyway Obie was puzzled. “Tell me again what you don’t like, Sandy?”

“I told you. They’ve got my mother there.”

“Oh, Sandy,” Obie said sorrowfully, twitching his thumbs in disagreement. “It isn’t really your mother, you know.” And actually Sandy did know. What the Hakh’hli had taken from his mother’s body after her death was no more than a few microorganisms and cell samples. If they kept them alive as cultures, that was just science.

But Sandy couldn’t see it that way. To him they weren’t cultures, they were his mother—not alive, but not exactly dead, either. “Really, Sandy. The samples they’ve got in there aren’t her. They’re just cultures. All the rest of her fed the titch’hik long ago.”

Sandy flinched. He disliked the thought of his mother’s body being eaten even more than the thought of parts of it being preserved. It wasn’t that Hakh’hli burial customs bothered him particularly. All his life he had been aware that the ultimate fate of every living being on the ship was to be tossed into the tank of the things, more like a limbless starfish than anything else on Earth, called titch’hik; the titch’hik swiftly consumed all the flesh from the bones; then the titch’hik were harvested and fed to the food animals, the hoo’hik, as a valuable protein source; the bones themselves, ground up, went into the nutrients for the plants and to the hoo’hik as a calcium supplement—nothing was wasted. But when it was your own mother you were talking about it was different. Especially when you knew quite well that somewhere in Genetics there were flasks of cultures from her very own maternal body, kept on hand for experiments in gene-splicing.

Obie stopped halfway up the spiral ramp to the Genetics level. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes. I’m serious.”

“But it’s silly! They’ve got a lot of my own ancestors in there, too, you know.”

“They can’t have, or you wouldn’t be here,” Sandy pointed out sullenly.

“Well, I mean, at least from the same batch of eggs in the freezers. And I’ve certainly got children there, you know. Not even counting the ones with the Fourth Major Senior,” he finished with a touch of offhanded pride.

“It’s not the same.”

“It is the same,” said Obie, getting irritated. “Are you coming or not?”

Sandy shrugged and followed, still reluctant. But as it turned out he was spared. They were met at the Genetics doorway by a Senior who told them severely, first, that certainly there were no new organisms created by Genetics at that time—didn’t they know that all of Genetics was preparing for the influx of new creatures from Earth to study and add to their gene pools? So how could they manage to breed funnier-looking or more efficient plants and hoo’hik and titch’hik at such a time? And, second, he pointed out, they had no business there in any case, did they?

They retreated hastily. “Ah, well,” Obie sighed. “You didn’t really want to anyway. I know! Let’s go see what they’re making for us!”

The laboratory rooms were hot, and not just because they had been in the part of the ship that had been allowed to heat up in the solar passage. Things were being made here, and there were furnaces and ovens to make them in.

Sandy was entranced. In the first chamber two old Hakh’hli were tending a plastics blender, out of which fabrics were being extruded in a dozen colors and textures. “For you,” the boss said proudly. “These will be socks, these will be underwear, this is a ‘necktie.’ But if you want to see something really interesting, go next door.”

Next door was really interesting, as promised, and even hotter than the fabric room. Part of the heat came from a furnace. An elderly Senior was standing over a couple of technicians who were carefully maneuvering a crucible. They tipped the crucible, and tiny, shiny, orange-glowing droplets fell into a tall vat. Sandy couldn’t see inside it, but he heard a sudden violent sputtering from within.

Then the senior reached inside—Sandy blinked, but evidently the water inside was still cool in spite of the molten droplets it had quenched—and pulled out a couple of fingernail-sized, irregular lumps of yellow metal. He tossed them back and forth, hissing in amused discomfort, then handed one to Sandy. “Gold,” he said proudly, using the English words. “Ith for you. Ith to give tho can buy thingth.”

“Yes, to buy things,” Sandy nodded eagerly. How many lessons they had had in “buying” and “shopping” and “paying”! The little golden nugget almost burned Sandy’s palm, but he held it with reverence because it was an Earth kind of thing.

“I think buying things is silly,” Obie put in, curiously fondling one of the little chunks of metal. He glanced up, and his eyes sprang a quick tear of surprise. “Theseus!” he cried. “I didn’t expect to see you here!”

It was obvious that the other young Hakh’hli hadn’t expected to see them either. Theseus was one of the three or four twelves of young Hakh’hli who had trained with them through all their childhood and growth, then suddenly been taken away from them when the final half-twelve had been selected for the Earth mission.

The other thing that was obvious was that the goldsmith hadn’t expected them to meet and didn’t like the fact that they had. He excused himself and huddled over a communications screen as Theseus said suspiciously, “You two aren’t supposed to be here.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s orders not, that’s why!”

“That’s not a reason,” Obie said stubbornly, sticking to their story. “We were ordered to stay in our quarters, that’s all. Then we were ordered to go—somewhere—and nobody said we couldn’t look around. What are you doing here?”

“I’m picking some things up,” said the reject. “You’ll be swallowing your own spit if they catch you here.”

“Why? What’s the big secret?”

“We’re not supposed to discuss it,” Theseus said firmly, and he and Obie inched nose to nose, glaring at each other.

It was never a good idea for Lysander to get between any two Hakh’hli who were about to get physical, but these two were his friends—well, Obie was definitely his friend, no doubt of that, and Theseus had at least been a comrade, before the group had been split up. He opened his mouth to try reason.

It wasn’t necessary. A voice from the communicator squawked at them. “John William Washington! HoCeth’ik ti’Koli-kak!” It was MyThara’s voice, and the fact that she called them by their formal names told them how much trouble they were in. Sandy darted a furious glance at the goldsmith for turning them in, but there was no time to argue. “I did not believe the Thenior when he called, but it’th true,” MyThara went on. “You are both where you have no buthiness being! Meet me at onthe in your quarterth, Lythander! And you, Oberon, get back to the thimulator chamber where you belong!”

When MyThara got to the cohort’s quarters, slower than Lysander because she was limping more than ever, she found him at his carrel, gazing at the picture of his mother. It wasn’t entirely guile on his part. When he was in trouble he had always found solace in gazing at the only memento he had of the woman who had given him birth. But it wasn’t entirely without guile, either, because he had learned early on that MyThara’s wrath at any transgression could often be muted if he played on her sympathy.

“That ith no uthe, Lythander,” she said sternly. “You have been very wicked today!”

“I know I have, MyThara,” he said in penitence. But he added, anyway, “MyThara? Why is this the only picture I have of her?”

She hissed reprovingly at him, but he could see that she was taking the bait. “It ith not a Hakh’hli cuthtom to keep picturth of dead people,” she reminded him.

“But I’m not a Hakh’hli!”

“Indeed not,” she agreed, with sympathy creeping into her voice. “Well, thith ith the betht we could do. We found it in your father’th ‘wallet.’ It ith a good likeneth, though.”

“You know what she looked like?” he asked eagerly. “Of courthe,” said MyThara, and added considerately, “She wath very beautiful. For an Earth perthon, I mean. You look like her, I think.”

Sandy gave her a skeptical scowl. “What are you talking about? She’s so skinny, and I’m so fat!”

“You are not fat, Lythander. That ith muthle.”

“But look at the difference between us!”

“Of courthe there ith a differenthe. The differenthe ith becauthe you grew up here on the ship. Earth gravity ith only eight-twelfthth of ship normal. If your mother had come to uth ath a baby she would be a lot thtockier, too.”

“Yes,” Sandy said reasonably, “I see that, but—”

MyThara’s patience had worn out. “Thandy! Don’t think I don’t know what you are doing.”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, trying to look innocent.

She wrinkled her nose in sorrow, looking weary as well as disappointed. “Oh, Lythander,” she said, shuddering in sadness. “How could you?”

“That’s Lysander,” he snapped, to hurt her feelings.

“Ekthcuthe—I mean,” she said, angrily forcing out the sibilants, “excuse me. I am quite tired, dear Lysander, but I am also disappointed. May I tell you a tht—a story?”

“I don’t see any way of stopping you,” he said.

She looked at him sadly, but began her story. “Once, long ago, when I was only half-tailed, a hawkbee queen escaped. She flew into the thpatheth between the wallth and laid eggth—” she was lisping badly again, but Sandy didn’t have the heart to tell her—“and there wath a whole hawkbee netht that no one knew about. Then she laid queen eggth. When they hatched, the new queenth flew away, and new nethtth were thtarted, all out of thight. No one knew. Only people kept complaining. Where do all thethe hawkbeeth come from? What can they be living on, there aren’t any bugth here, are there?

“And then—” She paused, looking dire. “And then there came a time when the pilot wanted to make a courthe adjuthtment, and he fed hith inthructionth into the thentral command controller machine—and it didn’t rethpond! The ship didn’t change courthe!”

“Golly,” Lysander said.

His nurse waggled her tongue solemnly. “Golly, indeed,” she said. “Of courthe, the backup thythtemth took over, and the courthe change wath made. But when they checked out the mathter machine, it hada hawkbee netht in it! The netht had short-thircuited itth relayth! And, oh, Thandy, you would not believe how hard it wath, for twelveth of dayth after that, to thcan every thpan of the ductth and ventth and pathageth! Everyone wath working an extra twelfth-day every day until it wath cleaned up and the latht wild hawkbee netht wath wiped out. Do you thee the moral of the thtory?”

“Of course,” Sandy said promptly. “Or, no. Not exactly. What is it?”

She touched the tip of her tongue to his arm before she spoke. “The moral,” she said, “ith that even good thingth can do great harm if they are done in thecret. Now do you thee what I mean?”

“Certainly I do,” said Lysander, certain that she would go on to explain it anyway.

“Thertainly you do,” she agreed. “The moral ith that you mutht never keep thecretth from your thuperiorth.”

Sandy thought that over for a moment. “They keep secrets from me,” he objected. “They didn’t tell us why Theseus and the rest aren’t allowed to see us any more.”

“But that’th very different, ithn’t it? You don’t need to know thothe thingth. At leatht you don’t need it now, and when you do, you’ll be told. But the Theniorth need to know, becauthe they’re the oneth who have to make the dethisionth, after all. You don’t, do you?”

“No,” Lysander said thoughtfully. “I don’t make any decisions.” But he wished, all the same, that at least now and then he did.

“Tho,” she said, “when I am not here any longer, I hope you will remember what I’ve taught you.”

“Sure I will,” he said, and then did a double take. He scowled at her, half in anger, half in sudden alarm, and demanded, “What do you mean, when you’re not here?”

She waggled her jaw, like a shrug. “The freetherth have reported that my latht batch of eggth wath mothtly infertile. Tho I’ve retheived orderth to report for a termination examination,” she said.

Lysander was shocked. “MyThara!” he gasped. “They can’t do that!”

“Of courthe they can, Lythander,” she said firmly. “And I think I will fail it, my dear, and then, of courthe, it’th the titch’hik tankth for me.”

And of course they could, so when Lysander finally huddled with the rest of his cohort for sleep that night his drowsing thoughts were not of his return to Earth, or even of scantily clad human females. They were sad thoughts. MyThara had been a part of his life as long as he had had a life. He did not like to think of her being terminated.

Some of the fun was going out of the adventure.

Chapter 5

The great Hakh’hli ship is powered by three main drive engines. Each one of them is capable of shoving the ship through space at 1.4 G. For the sake of simple engineering prudence that seldom happens; ordinarily two are running, at fifty percent thrust, at all times, while the third is available for maintenance and, when rarely necessary, repairs. The great advantage of a strange-matter drive is that you need never run out of fuel. The problem is all the other way. Strange matter breeds. When ordinary matter is introduced into a lump of strange, the strange matter converts it into itself. This does not mean that if you drop a speck of strange matter onto the surface of the Earth it will turn the whole planet strange; it isn’t that easy. Strange matter repels the ordinary. To get past the force of that repulsion, the particles of ordinary matter must be fired into the strange matter with great energy; but that is what unavoidably happens in the Hakh’hli drive system. The result is that the longer the great ship flies, the more “fuel” it accumulates. The lumps at the heart of the Hakh’hli drive engines are each now six times as massive as when the motors first began to thrust. Because they are now so heavy there is that much more mass to accelerate and decelerate—which means more energy is needed—which means that the lumps are getting bigger faster. All the Hakh’hli need to feed it is ordinary matter, of which there is an infinity available in the universe; at every stop they tap asteroids, gas clouds, or the stellar winds for extra supplies—each particle of which adds one more particle to the mass of the ship. The Hakh’hli have known for centuries that they should soon divest themselves of some of that extra mass . . . but it is valuable mass. Like a miser clutching a bar of gold while he is drowning, they have clung to it. But they can’t cling to it much longer.

As the cohort gathered for shipwork the next morning they felt two momentary shifts in orientation, like small earth movements underfoot; it was the navigators making small course corrections as the ship decelerated toward its parking orbit around the planet Earth. It meant that the end of their journey was near. They all chattered excitedly about it, all but Sandy.

When their tutor ChinTekki-tho at last waddled toward them, he took one look at Sandy and asked, “What’s the matter with him?”

The cohort knew at once what the Senior meant, because all of them had noticed his gloomy mood. “It’s MyThara-tok,” Obie volunteered. “She has to take her physical.”

“Sandy doesn’t want her terminated,” Helen added. Polly finished spitefully, “He wants her to stay alive because he likes her better than any of us.”

ChinTekki-tho waggled his tongue in deprecation. “It is good to love one another,” he told Sandy, “but Thara-tok is getting old. She passed her eighteen-twelves of twelve-twelves of days long ago,”—it would have been the Earthly equivalent of fifty years or so—“and so she gets examined every twelve-twelves; that’s the rule, Lysander.”

“I know that,” Sandy said sulkily.

“She may well pass,” ChinTekki-tho pointed out. “I myself have passed five termination examinations. Many Hakh’hli pass as many as eight or nine of them; look at the Major Seniors.”

“Major Seniors always pass,” Tanya put in.

“They don’t always pass,” ChinTekki-tho corrected. “They usually pass, because, after all, they are Major Seniors; that’s all.”

“MyThara doesn’t think she will,” Sandy said. “I can tell.”

The teacher inclined his head. “Then that is that, isn’t it? It’s nothing to be sad about. It happens to us all, sooner or later; otherwise the ship would be too full and everyone would die. And if the old and weak do not go, how would we ever take more eggs out of the freezer to start new lives?”

“And then where would any of us be?” Polly demanded. “You just don’t think, Sandy.”

The tutor reproved her. “Of course he thinks. Lysander is a fully intelligent being, even if he isn’t Hakh’hli. He knows that MyThara-tok has many, many eggs in the freezer, and sooner or later some of them will be allowed to hatch and she will live again in them. He also knows that it is the Major Seniors who have made these decisions. He doesn’t question the Major Seniors. Do you, Lysander?”

Lysander was shocked into a response. “Oh, no! Not at all! Only—” He bit his lip. “Perhaps special exceptions might be made for people as valuable as MyThara.”

“And isn’t that a decision for the Major Seniors, too?” the tutor asked kindly.

Sandy shrugged self-consciously. He was tired of this discussion, which had been going on ever since they woke up. “We’re going to be late for shipwork,” he said, evading the question.

ChinTekki-tho accepted the change of subject. “Well,” he said, “that’s why I’m here this morning. What’s your shipwork for this morning?”

“Tending the food animals, ChinTekki-tho,” Bottom said respectfully. “The hoo’hik are cubbing.”

“Yes,” the tutor said thoughtfully. “Well, the herder will be a little short-handed today. I have a new instruction for you from the Major Seniors.”

The cohort all raised themselves slightly on their hind legs with interest. The tutor gazed at them benignly. “As you know,” he said, “Obie’s season came upon him yesterday and it interrupted our meeting with the Major Seniors.”

“We know that, all right,” Polly said cuttingly, glaring at Obie.

“The Major Seniors have recognized that if this were to occur during your Earth mission it might increase the risk. Suppose Bottom or Demetrius did it while you were in the middle of some important negotiation?”

Polly gasped. “Oh, ChinTekki-tho! You aren’t saying that you’ll give the boys something to keep them from entering a sexual phase?”

“No, nothing like that,” said the tutor, amiably crossing his legs. “The very opposite, in fact. The Major Seniors have directed that we bring on the male season now and get it over with. Then it will be six or twelve twelves of days before the problem comes up again.”

“Really?” Bottom cried. “You mean we’re going to do it now?”

The whole cohort was glowing until Polly cried, “But Obie just did it!”

“Of course,” ChinTekki-tho agreed. “Naturally we don’t want to do him again. One of you would probably get a reduced number of sperm cells, and you don’t want infertile eggs, do you? So we will excuse Oberon today.”

Obie looked downcast. All the females look horrified. Tanya gasped, “But then there’s only two males and three of us—”

“We thought of that,” the tutor said indulgently. “So I will accept a shot myself and join you.”

Amid the shouts of joy Obie wailed, “But what about me?”

“You’ll carry out regular shipwork, of course. Lysander, too. And, hear me, Lysander, when one is dejected for any reason it is good to work with the animals. I found that very soothing when I was cheth.”

If Genetics had been full of smells, the food-animal pens absolutely reeked. Sandy didn’t find it soothing at all. To get to the hoo’hik pens they had to pass the capped tanks filled with writhing, copulating, eating titch’hik, and that was not only unsoothing, it was hardly bearable. (What was it they were eating now—or whom? And what might they be eating a few days from now?) Sandy averted his eyes as he saw that other shipwork crews were respectfully lowering the two Hakh’hli corpses that were the day’s crop into the tanks even as they passed.

Sandy shuddered. At least he could take some comfort in the fact that this time he and Obie weren’t assigned to work with the bones or with the titch’hik. They didn’t have to swamp out the hoo’hik pens, either, because four of the females had littered a few twelfth-days earlier, and it was time to pith the cubs.

“You,” said the herder, grinning at Lysander. “You get the cubs out. No, don’t worry,” she added kindly. “The mothers won’t hurt you. Just let them smell you first, pat them, don’t get them upset. And bring me the cubs, one at a time.”

Lysander peered down into the nearest pen. He had done this before, but he still felt uncertain about it.

The cow hoo’hik didn’t shrink away as he approached. She only gazed mildly up at him, her forepaws protectively pressing two of the cubs to her teats. They were sucking away vigorously.

“Don’t be all twelfth-day,” the herder called irritably.

“Which one shall I get first?” Lysander asked.

“Any one! Hurry up, will you? I’ve got forty of them to do, and then there’s all the milking—”

Lysander took a deep breath and reached down under the cow hoo’hik’s belly, where the other half dozen cubs were squirming blindly around, impatient for their turn. He picked one up at random, a wobbly little thing the size of his head that mewed and gasped worriedly as it felt his hands grasp it. He carried it over to the herder. “Turn it over,” she ordered, picking up a thing like a huge needle. The handle of it was shaped to fit her hand, and it had a dial and a button. She checked the dial and waited impatiently for Lysander to hold the squirming body still. Then with one hand the herder grasped the cub’s head, not roughly but firmly, and with the needle searched out a point at the base of the cub’s skull, just where it joined the neck.

“Did you see that Earth movie last night?” she asked, making conversation as she worked. Sandy shook his head, wishing she would get on with it. “It was called A Bridge Too Far, and it was all about fighting and not being at peace. Oh, Lysander, you must be careful when you go there—”

Then she grunted with satisfaction. “There,” she said. When she pressed the button there was a tiny, almost inaudible bleep of sound. The cub squawked and stiffened, and then relaxed.

“Now get another,” the herder ordered.

It didn’t help Lysander’s mood that Obie, taking turns with him in carrying cubs to be pithed, seemed as depressed as he. Of course, the causes were different.

Obie was simply sulking, thinking of what was going on back in the cohort quarters that he was not a part of, while Sandy’s thoughts were all of MyThara-tok.

Still, the cubs were cute. They didn’t seem hurt by the pithing. They cuddled in Sandy’s arms as he carried them back to the mother, and she accepted them amiably enough. They were shorter and paler than some of the other strains he had worked with. The geneticists were always varying the breed a bit, introducing new textures and flavors, but they all had the sunny dispositions that would last them right up until the time they licked the fingers of their executioners.

Even Obie was charmed by the cubs. He poked one of his thumbs at them as he carried them back to their mothers and giggled as the little things tried to suck on it. By the time they finished with the forty the first twelfth-day had passed, and when he joined Sandy for the wafers and broth he was weeping in amusement, humming along with the omnipresent music, his grievances forgotten.

But Lysander was still troubled. He pushed the wafers away. “Eat, Sandy,” Obie said anxiously. “You aren’t still upset about MyThara, are you?”

“I’m just not hungry.”

“You are still upset about her,” Obie diagnosed. “But our tutor explained all that to you.”

“I know he did.”

Obie nibbled quietly for a moment, absently listening to the background music. It was Hakh’hli music, very unlike the Earth tunes they had recorded and played in their own quarters. Earth music was waltzes, polkas, marches—rhythmic tunes tied to regular foot movements; but Hakh'hli didn’t have the foot anatomy to dance or march. Obie remembered his own grievance and burst out, “And anyway, how do you think I feel? They’re all doing amphylaxis back in the quarters, and here I am with you!”

“You did it already,” Sandy pointed out. “I’m sorry, Obie. I guess I just don’t like pithing cubs.”

“What’s the matter, Sandy? You’ve done it before.”

“I didn’t like it then, either,” Lysander confessed.

“But we have to pith them,” Obie said reasonably. “For their own sake, you know? It keeps them from being too smart.”

Lysander blinked at him. “What do you mean, too smart?”

“Oh, too smart,” Obie said vaguely. “Can you imagine how horrible it would be for them if they grew up with, you know, some kind of rudimentary intelligence? So you’d know that you were alive only so you could be killed and eaten?”

“They can’t be that smart!”

“Not after we pith them, no,” Obie said smugly.

“But— But— But it’s wrong to kill intelligent creatures, isn’t it?”

“They aren’t intelligent. That’s why they’re pithed.”

“But you’re telling me they would be, if we just didn’t pith them. There has to be a better way! Can’t the gene-splicers arrange them so that they aren’t intelligent?”

“Oh, Lysander,” Obie sighed. “Do you imagine they didn’t think of that? They keep trying. But it always spoils the taste of the meat.”

When they straggled back to their quarters it was almost time for the big midday meal, and the other members of the cohort were happily playing a rough-and-tumble game of what they considered to be touch football. “How’d it go?” Obie asked jealously.

“Oof, “ said Tanya, as Polly plowed into her, knocking the tied-rag ball out of her hands. “Oh, it went just fine, Obie. Imagine! I coupled with ChinTekki-tho, and you never saw so many eggs!”

“I bet I saw even more when I did it,” Obie snapped, but there was no point in being resentful. He hunkered down on his strong legs for added strength and then hurled himself across the room at Polly, now scrambling rapidly away with the ball.

“Want to get in the game, Sandy?” called Helen, in hot pursuit.

Sandy shook his head. “No, thanks.” No one was surprised at that, since everyone knew he didn’t belong in body-contact sports with the Hakh’hli, especially when their natural competitiveness was sharpened by hunger for the midday meal.

Sandy simply went over to his own carrel and sat there. He didn’t turn on a flick. He didn’t open his locker to gaze again at his mother’s picture. He didn’t even daydream about the landing on Earth, so very near, with its promise of human females and the almost certain prospect of glorious coupling. He just sat and glowered into space, thinking of MyThara’s flesh being torn away by the titch’hik, while the game finished, and the food cart arrived, and the cohort flung itself, shouting and slobbering, on the meal.

Sandy didn’t even approach the cart until the last of them had staggered, empty-eyed, into stun time. Then he sighed, got up, and surveyed what was left.

There was quite a lot, actually. The main roast had been torn apart, but there were human bite-sized pieces all over.

As he lifted one morsel to his mouth, Sandy stopped to look at it.

It was roast hoo’hik, of the tender kind that came from the very young cubs.

Sandy hesitated for a moment. But then he ate it and, still chewing, strolled back to his carrel to turn on an Earthly musical film with pretty girls in scant costumes.

Chapter 6

The landing vessel which will take the Earth-mission cohort down to the surface of the planet is 150 feet long and shaped pretty much like a paper airplane. Its wings are retractable. Once the lander is in the atmosphere the wings can be extended as needed for the various flight domains they will encounter, stretching farther out and changing shape as speed is reduced. The lander’s rockets are fueled by alcohol and hydrogen peroxide—once in air the atmosphere will supply the oxygen needed, and so the hydrogen peroxide load is only enough for maneuvering while still in space. This is important to the Hakh’hli. The fuel for the lander represents a serious expenditure of irreplaceable materials. The alcohol and peroxide it burns are lost forever to the ship’s recirculatory systems, and must be made up from outside. Most of the weight of the lander is fuel, because it needs to carry enough for a two-way trip. The structure of the ship itself is comparatively light, due to excellent Hakh’hli technology, but even so the total launch weight of the craft is something over 200 tons. Landing on Earth is a piece of cake, because Earth ’s surface gravity is only 1.0. The landing ship can handle twice that. The interior of the ship has squatting seats for a crew of eight. One of them has been removed, and another refitted for Lysander’s non-Hakh’hli anatomy—it is a special, big one, meant for a Senior, but no Senior is going. Because of that it is impossible for Sandy to reach the ship’s controls, but that doesn’t matter. None of the cohort would trust him to fly them anyway.

When at last Sandy’s cohort was sent off to tidy up the lander itself for their flight they all fidgeted nervously on the way. They had never been inside it before, and what little of it they could see from the ports seemed so small. It was also not located in a comfortable place for anyone, Hakh’hli or human. When the lander was not in use, which was almost all the time, it nestled in a recess in the outer hull of the big ship. That was the bad part, because, like most of the outer sections of the ship’s shell, that part had been left uncooled as the big ship made its course change around Earth’s Sun. As they came close enough to feel the heat everyone in the cohort woofed in displeasure. “How do they expect us to work in that?” Bottom demanded.

Polly said shortly, “Shut up.” Then she paused, thinking up some additional remark to put him down with, and found one. She added, “Be glad you don’t have to go outside.”

They were all glad of that. Through the tiny observation ports they could catch glimpses of the hulking lander outside. Around it were eight or ten of the heavy-duty Hakh’hli who were bred for extravehicular duty. They wore spacesuits that were only round balls with a protrusion at one end for their heads and mechanical handling “arms” sticking out all over. The interstellar ship’s roll had been controlled to put them in shade, at least, but that solved only part of the problem. The exterior hull of the big interstellar ship itself had soaked up so much heat that it was still reradiating an invisible, constant glow of mild infrared, and the Hakh’hli outside were beyond doubt sweltering in their suits. It was not only hard work but dangerous—even a Hakh’hli bred for such things could stand just so much suffocating swelter—but it had to be done; their big job was to rig the stiff wiremesh outer shell that would surround the lander and, when overlaid with foil, would intercept the worst of the micrometeorites in Earth’s trash orbits.

It turned out that the interior of the landing craft was even worse. Polly fussily checked the pressure gauges to make sure there was a seal and then popped the door. Out of it came a blast of hot air that reeked of alcohol and decay. “Oh, turds!” Helen groaned. “Do we have to work in that?”

They did, of course. Polly ordered Bottom in first to turn on the air circulators. When he gasped that they were beginning to work she kicked Demmy in the door. The rest followed.

Even with the air circulators working away it stank. There was a concentrated reek of stale and musty disuse. That was natural enough; the lander hadn’t been used either at Alpha Centauri or in the previous visit to Sol—at Alpha because there was nothing to go to, at Sol because the Major Seniors hadn’t liked the looks of things and so decided to give the Earth a little time to settle down.

The previous users had not been neat. Three of the seats had crusted stains on them, and in the cupboards of the landing craft there were shrunken bits of decay that might once have been food. “Slobs,” Sandy gasped. “I’d like to tell them a thing or two!”

“Don’t count on it,” Bottom advised. “They’ve all been minced a hundred years. No one has made a planet landing in—well, when was it, Polly? Six stars ago?”

“Look it up on your own time,” she ordered. “Come on, let’s clean up!”

“Yeah, but hold on a minute,” offered Demmy. “What about that alcohol smell?”

“What about it? It’s clearing out, isn’t it?”

“I don’t mean about the smell, I mean why was it here? How could alcohol fuel get into the cabin? Does that mean there’s a leak?”

“That,” she said grimly, “is one of the things we’re here to check. Probably it’s just seepage, but we’ll have to pull the seals out and check them.”

Pulling the seals was the hardest job—a solid twelfth-day of difficult work—but thankfully there was nothing wrong; the fuel smell was simply the slow, centuries-long seepage of ancient fumes. The fuel compartment was as tight as it needed to be. Once that was done the cohort cheered up.

What they were doing was arduous and not very pleasant, no doubt, but it was for their own sakes that they were doing it. They were going! Even the heat became bearable as they turned to the easier, if nastier, job of cleaning out the waste left by the long-dead previous crew, because what would replace the old moldering garments and food remnants would be their own. “Let’s have a game of Questions,” Tanya proposed, beginning to cheer up. Sandy opened his mouth to suggest a topic, but Polly was ahead of him.

“Certainly not,” she said. “That is immature. We should concentrate on our mission now, not childish things. Let’s drill Sandy on his cover story.”

“Oh, turds,” Sandy said, but the others accepted the idea at once.

“Tell us your name,” Helen demanded.

He shrugged, scouring out the inside of an empty locker. Over his shoulder he said, “John William Washington is my name.”

“Then why do they call you ‘Sandy’?” called Obie, from behind the great pilot seat.

“It’s just a kind of nickname. It’s short for Lysander.”

And Polly cut in. “Can I see your ID?”

That was a new one. Sandy hesitated, with the scouring stick in his hand. He didn’t have any kind of papers. “I don’t know what to say to that,” he confessed.

Demmy helped out. “You can say you were ‘mugged,’ Sandy,” he offered.

“What is ‘mugged’?”

“You know, robbed. Like in Robin Hood.”

“Yes, sure,” said Sandy, beginning to catch the spirit. “I was robbed. They took my wallet and my suitcase—”

Polly interrupted sharply, “Not a suitcase! You wouldn’t be carrying a suitcase, would you?”

“All right, a knapsack. They took my knapsack and all my papers.”

‘Phew,” cried Obie, opening a locker and recoiling. “This is awful.”

“Awful or not,” Polly said grimly, “you have to clean it up. Now, John William Washington, tell me, where are you from?”

“That’s easy. I’m from Miami Beach in Florida. That’s a state. I’m a college student, and I’m taking some time off to travel, and I was, ah, ‘hitchhiking.’ ”

“What are your parents’ names?”

“My parents?” Sandy stopped to think for a moment. “Ah, my parents are named Peter and Alice. Peter is the male. Only they’re both dead. They were killed in a car crash, and—and—well, I was really upset about it. So I quit school for a while. Anyway, I always wanted to go to Alaska.”

Polly sneered, “What a wimp you are, Wimp. You’re going to have to do better than that when you’re on the Earth. Imagine not remembering your parents’ names!”

“Really?” Sandy asked hotly. “And who were your parents?”

Polly waggled her head menacingly. “You know perfectly well that my genetic data is on file,” she said cuttingly. She drew her legs in under her as though about to spring. Sandy braced himself.

He was saved by a shriek from Demmy. “Bugs! This locker is full of bugs! How’d they get in here, anyway?”

Diverted, Polly glared at him. “What difference does it make how they got here?” she demanded. “We’ll have to get rid of them. Go requisition a hawkbee nest at once, Demetrius.”

“And who are you to be giving me orders?” Demmy snarled, crouching down on his own strong legs for a charge.

It didn’t happen. MyThara’s voice stopped them. “What ith thith?” she cried. “You who are about to carry out the urgent inthtructionth of the Major Theniorth acting like new-hatched infantth? Now, tell me what ith going on?”

And when it had been explained to her she waggled her jaw. “Very well, that ith right, we need a hawkbee netht in here to thcavenge out the inthectth. Demmy, go get one. And what ith thith other thtuff?” She was pointing to a heap of foul-smelling debris.

“It’s to go into the titch’hik tanks,” Polly said sullenly. “It’s all decayed.”

“It thertainly ith! Do you want to poithon the titch‘hik? That mutht go in the contaminated binth to be thterilithed. Take it there at onthe, Hippolyta.”

“Why can’t Sandy do it?”

“Lythander can’t do it,” MyThara explained, “becauthe I have inthtructed you to do it. Lythander hath a different job right now. Now get on with it.” She glanced around the interior of the lander. “I thee you have all the lockerth empty,” she said. “That ith good. You may each have one for your own.”

“Only one?” Obie cried. “To go to Earth?”

“Only one,” MyThara said adamantly. “The retht are for nethethary thupplieth and food—after all, you mutht take rationth for three weekth with you, you know.”

“Why just three weeks?” Helen asked, licking her tongue out irritably.

“Becauthe that ith what the Major Theniorth ordered, Helena. Now, Lythander, come with me. It’th time to try on your new garmenth!”

Come back in three weeks? But why did they have to come back in three weeks? As Sandy tagged rebelliously along after MyThara he thought, all right, maybe some of them would return to the ship in three weeks, but not necessarily all of them . . .

MyThara left him at the cohort quarters while she went to get his Earth outfit. At her orders he stripped, putting his everyday suit into the locker—

And in the middle of doing it he began to tremble.

The fact that he was going to leave the ship had not really worked its way into the part of his mind that felt panic before, but now it was making up for lost time.

He glanced around the cohort chamber, shuddering. He was going to leave the ship. But such a thing had never happened! No one ever “left” the ship—they died, true, and were minced and devoured by the titch‘hik, but there was no other way that any person of all the persons he had known in all his life could ever cease to be in the ship. Outside the ship was space.

By the time MyThara arrived, her stubby arms laden with two baskets filled with articles of clothing, Sandy was sitting woebegone on the floor by his locker, his eyes squinted shut, his face drawn. “Now, Lythander!” she cried sharply. “What ith it? Are you ill?”

“I have to leave the ship,” he told her miserably.

“Well, of courthe you do. That’th what you have been trained for all your life.”

“But I’m afraid, MyThara-tok. I don’t want to leave you.”

She hesitated, then gently gripped his arm with one tough, hard hand. He could feel the “helper” spur digging into his flesh—reassuring rather than painful. “You will have a whole new life,” she told him. “Now, pleathe, try thethe on. I want to thee how beautiful my Lythander will look on Earth!”

Slowly he began to obey. MyThara insisted he dress from the skin out, so first he pulled on the white, thin, one-piece garment she called “underwear,” and the “sox”—long black tubes of material, closed at one end. The shirt was a pastel pink, the trousers dark blue, the vest red, the jacket brown, and the shoes black.

“It’th beautiful,” she told him.

“It’s very hot,” he complained.

“But that ith becauthe it’th very cold where you’re going, Lythander,” she said severely. “That ith why you have thethe other thingth, which you mutht altho try on.” And she pulled out of the second basket a second pair of trousers, much thicker and pegged at the ankles, and heavy overshoes that went right over the soft dancing pumps, and a jacket with a hood that weighed more than all the other clothes combined. By the time they were all on Lysander was sweating.

“You look very handthome,” MyThara said sadly.

“I feel like a boiled tuber,” he growled.

“All right, you can take them off.” She folded each garment neatly as he removed them. “Did you know that they’ve thtarted the perokthide plant?” she asked.

“Oh, really?” Lysander considered that fact. Landing rockets were the only Hakh’hli devices fueled with hydrogen peroxide and alcohol. So the peroxide factory sat idle for decades at a time, sometimes a century or more—there was no need for chemical rocket fuel in the long journeys between stars. Feeling better, he tried a smile. It didn’t quite come off, because there was something in her tone that puzzled him. “Aren’t you happy for me?” he demanded. “I’d think you’d be proud to see me go to Earth!”

“But I won’t, Lythander,” she lisped sorrowfully. “I won’t thee you again at all. I’m to have my phythical tomorrow and, you thee, Lythander, I won’t path.”

And on the day when at last the interstellar ship was at its proper point in its orbit around the Earth and the lander was poised to go, what MyThara said was true. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere anymore. She hadn’t passed the termination examination.

There wasn’t any ceremony about their departure. There wasn’t even anyone to see them off, except for ChinTekki-tho, floating nervously around in the micro-gravity of the ship with its main engines off for the first time in decades. “There are clouds in your landing region,” he announced to the cohort as they prepared to board. “That is good. It means that you will be able to land without being seen.”

“What are ‘clouds,’ ChinTekki-tho?” Obie asked nervously, and was rewarded with a pinch from Polly.

“Clouds are good,” she told him. “Don’t be a wimp like Sandy!”

ChinTekki-tho was looking at Sandy, who was standing by himself, holding his parka and boots, his face damp with tears. “And what is the matter with Lysander?” he asked.

“It’s MyThara. She’s dead,” Polly said.

“Of course she’s dead; she failed her examination. But what is there in that for him to think funny?”

“He doesn’t think it’s funny, ChinTekki-tho,” Obie explained. “He’s a human being, you know. He’s crying. That’s what they do when they’re sad.”

“But what is there in a worn-out Hakh’hli being terminated to make him sad? Oh, Lysander,” ChinTekki-tho said sorrowfully. “At this late time I am beginning to wonder if we have trained you properly, after all. But it’s too late to worry about that. Get in, all of you. You launch in one-twelfth of a twelfth-day.”

Chapter 7

The great interstellar ship is at rest now—or at least so it seems to everyone inside. Actually, of course, it is in orbit around the planet Earth, combining its orbital velocity around the Earth with the Earth’s own orbit around its Sun—and with the Sun’s motion within its galaxy, and the galaxy’s own steady fall toward the Great Attractor; its motion relative to some stationary reference point would look like a corkscrew—if there were any stationary reference point anywhere to compare it with. But the effect inside is as though it had stopped. The engines have stopped. The thrust has stopped. The 1.4-G acceleration (or “gravity”) that everyone on the ship has felt for all of their lives is gone, and Hakh’hli people and things float. So any motion is magnified. Even the tiny thrust of the magnetic grapples as they hurl the landing craft away from the great ship becomes a barely perceptible quiver. All 22,000 Hakh’hli aboard feel it, and all of them cheer; Earth is the best planet they have found in 3000 years of wandering, and now it is almost theirs.

Because there was a lot of velocity to swap around—solar-ecliptic orbit to change to planet-polar, forward speed to kill—the landing craft’s thrusters were going all the way. Thirty seconds after it was flung free of the big mother ship Sandy began to vomit. He couldn’t help it. He had never experienced motion sickness before—had never, really, experienced motion, at least not in a confined space.

The six Hakh’hli, with a different arrangement of the inner ear, didn’t suffer from mal de mer. That didn’t help them. It came to the same thing in the long run, because the violent jolting of atmospheric entry threw their bodies around faster than their stomachs could keep up.

What made it worse was the nastiness all around Sandy’s position. “Control yourself, Wimp!” snapped Demmy. “Wooof! Augh!” moaned Helen, and Polly, at the controls, cried, “Confound you, Sandy, why can’t you use a bag or something?” Then she didn’t have time for any more comments, because the lander was in the garbage belt. The preprogrammed approach certainly missed most of the largest objects, but there was no possible approach that could have been sure of missing them all. So when the radio locator identified a smaller one on a collision course it activated the side thrusters and they lurched away; when they could not lurch far enough to avoid contact entirely the magnetic repellers slowed the impact down.

Even so, everyone in the lander could hear muffled thumps and thuds as slowed and tiny but still worrisome lumps of things hit the outside wall of the lander. Fainter, sharper sounds were even tinier objects splattering themselves into plasma against the foil outer skin, and the plasma thumping harmlessly against the lander skin. Polly shouted in anger as a vagrant hawkbee flitted before her face. “Get that thing out of my way! How am I supposed to fly this heap with bugs flying into my eyes?”

But the hawkbee was thrown away from her face as the lander jolted away from another object; and then the ship was in its final glide path to the only flat meadow the radio-reflection screen displayed. Even through his misery Sandy could hear Polly’s agitated hissing. That should have been the easiest part of the landing. Their velocity was way down, and the automatic feedback controls were supposed to be smoothing out all the vagrant downdrafts and microbursts near the ground. Only they weren’t. “For a pissant little planet,” Polly snarled, “this place of yours sure has some bad weather!” The shaking of the spaceplane proved her point. Ground speed was down to sixty or seventy miles an hour, but the winds outside were gusting a lot more than that. They threw the craft around like a toy.

Polly’s landing was more like a controlled crash, but the lander was built to take punishment. As they touched down the forward thrusters went on to stop them, hurling them all against their restraining nets. They stopped the roll in a couple of hundred yards, well before they were near the line of bending, flailing trees.

“We’re down,” Polly announced.

It didn’t feel that way. Even stopped, the plane was still jiggling uneasily in the wind. Polly belched worriedly a few times as she thumbed the viewscreens on. Two of them flashed together on the bulkhead over the controls. One showed the landing site as simulated from space, the other the actual scene outside the ship. The simulated scene was glacially, whitely static. The actual one was full of horizontally driven rain and tossing evergreens.

The six-pointed star that marked their position was in the same place on both screens, winking rapidly to show that the landing was where it had been planned to be. “Why are we having a storm?” Obie called fearfully. “Did you land in the wrong place?”

“It’s the right place,” Polly muttered in irritated wonder. “But where’s all this ‘snow’?”

A couple of hours later Sandy was in his parka and mukluks, standing in the doorway of the lander. Sentimentally he touched the pocket where he had his mother’s picture, but Polly was in no mood for sentiment. “Go on, Wimp!” she snapped, giving him a nudge.

He went. He managed to catch at the ladder-stick as he went out and climbed down easily enough. The fall was only ten or twelve feet, but even in this weak Earth gravity it could have done real harm if he had missed. He trudged around the back of the ship, catching a faint wind-driven whiff of alcohol from the jets. He oriented himself toward the place where the nearest road should be and began trudging through the mud and the driving rain.

It was not at all the way it was supposed to be.

Something was seriously wrong with the mission planning. This was certainly the part of Earth called “Alaska”; the navigation screens had proved it. Then why didn’t it look that way? Alaska, along with all the rest of the planet, had been thoroughly studied by the Hakh’hli on their first time around. Alaska was known to be cold—at least, mostly cold during all but a brief period in the summer, and then it was only at relatively low altitudes that it could ever be called anything else. The planners had definitely assured them of “snow”; if there was such a thing (and a thousand television programs had testified there was), it might be somewhere on the Earth, but it definitely was not here.

What was here was mud, and a temperature high enough to make Sandy sweat unbearably inside his furs, and an intense, scary, blinding storm.

A storm like this could not be an everyday event, Sandy told himself. Half a dozen times, as he struggled in what he hoped was the direction of the road, he had to detour around uprooted trees—big bastards of trees, a hundred feet from root to crown, and with huge clumps of ruptured earth around their roots still being melted away by the drenching downpour. And the craters left by the uprooted trees were all fresh.

Sandy slapped wearily at one of the flying things that seemed to find their way inside his parka to bite him—were they “mosquitos”?—and resented his fate. The whole thing was definitely worrying.

Worse than that, it was unjust. Nothing in Sandy’s training had prepared him for this. He had heard of “weather.” There had been lectures about it, and the taped old TV news shows were full of talk about it, with maps of isobars and lows and cold fronts. But hearing about it and being out in it were not at all the same. Neither Sandy nor any of the 22,000 Hakh’hli in the interstellar ship had ever had any personal experience with such a thing.

It was not the kind of personal experience Sandy enjoyed. How were you supposed to find your way in this “weather” condition? It had looked easy enough in the shipboard briefings; there were the mountains and the pass between them, and the road he was looking for went straight through the pass. But how could you tell where the mountains were when the rain and clouds cut off everything a hundred feet overhead? And, of course, the ship was already out of sight behind him. He stopped and painfully pulled the radio out from its place in an inside pocket. “This is Sandy,” he said into it. “Fix me, will you?”

Tanya’s voice responded at once. “You’re way off,” she said crossly. “Turn three-twelfths to the left. And what’s taking you so long? You should be almost at the road by now.”

“I thought I was,” Sandy said bitterly, thumbing the set off. He was going to need help from the radio again, he was quite sure, so he slung it by its strap over a shoulder instead of putting it back inside. Sweating and muttering to himself, he moved on through the drenching rain, with slippery mud underfoot and wind-tossed branches lashing him across the face.

It was not at all the way he had expected to return to the Earth.

If it was bad while there was still daylight, it got far worse as darkness fell. The sun had set. The last wan sky glow had disappeared. There was no light of any kind. Total darkness! Another new experience, and a nasty one.

That was when Lysander slipped on a slick mud bank and rolled into a clump of wet, stabbing undergrowth.

That wasn’t the worst of it. When he stood up and tried for a radio fix he discovered the little ravine had had a rivulet at its bottom. The radio was soaked, and it didn’t work any more.

And neither, he discovered from the sudden silence of the storm, did his hearing aid. He batted it a few times against the knee of his sweaty fur pants, but it still didn’t work. Furious, he jammed it in a pocket and looked around.

The lander’s screens had ranged the highway through the pass at no more than two miles away. In five hours of up and down and zigzag detours Sandy had surely walked farther than that. So it was certain that he had drifted from his proper route again.

It came upon Sandy Washington that he was lost.

It wasn’t a useful realization. There wasn’t anything he could do about it. He couldn’t go back to the ship, because he no longer had any way of knowing which way the ship was. He could have gone forward, all right—it was what he desperately wanted—but he no longer had any idea of which direction “forward” was, either.

He also remembered, rather late, that Alaska was known to have wild animals, some of which—they were called “wolves” and “grizzly bears”—would not be pleasant to meet.

He stared around, beginning to be not only angry but afraid.

And that was when he realized that there, off to the right, was a place where the darkness was not quite solid. It wasn’t anything you could call a light. It certainly wasn’t bright, and it was a dull scarlet in color. But it was something different from the darkness around him.

He almost didn’t see the building until he was within touching distance of it. The light outside it was a crimson disk, flowing like the coals of an old fire, over the door. As he moved along the wall he bumped painfully over some metal thing with wheels—could it be a car? He knew what cars were, but did cars draw things with rows of jagged metal spikes? The pain made him blink, but he limped on.

The door opened to a push.

Inside the building three of the same dimly glowing red disks, spaced along a low ceiling, showed him a narrow aisle with stall doors opening off it. The animal reek, the faint shuffling sounds of movement, and the sounds of breathing and munching told Sandy he was not alone in the building.

Even in the gloom, Sandy recognized what sort of living things he was sharing the building with. The huge, patient eyes, the nubby little horns, the slow perpetual motion of the jaws—he had seen them in the old films often enough. They were cows.

One major worry went away. Cows, he was sure, did not eat human beings.

Soaked and exhausted, Sandy pulled off the parka and mukluks. The presence of a building implied the presence of human beings not far away. What he should do, he knew, was find them, make contact, and get on with his mission.

Sandy didn’t do that. Weariness got in the way. He let himself sink into a stack of some sort of dried vegetation. He thought he should at least stay awake so that he could greet whoever “owned” these cows when he came by . . . but as he was thinking, exhaustion won out, and he was asleep.

He woke up suddenly, aware even as he woke of where he was—and that he was not alone.

He blinked his eyes open. Standing over him was a figure in cutoff shorts and long black hair. He grinned placatingly up at the person, and then something very like an electric shock ran through him, taking away the power of speech entirely, as he realized that the person was female. A human female.

He jumped up, holding his arms out with the palms open to show that he meant no harm. He proved it by putting on the friendly, well-meaning smile he had practiced so often in front of a mirror. He brushed bits of dried straw out of his hair and finally regained the use of his tongue.

The woman’s lips were moving, and Sandy realized he hadn’t replaced his hearing aid. He found it in the pocket of the parka, pushed it in prayerfully . . . It worked! “Hello?” the woman’s voice said inquiringly.

“Hello,” he said politely. “I guess you’re wondering who I am. I’m Sandy—I’m John William Washington, I mean,” he said. “I came in here to get out of the storm. I hope it’s all right? You see, I was hitchhiking and I lost my way—”

The woman didn’t seem surprised. She didn’t seem to show any expression at all. She was a lot darker skinned than Sandy had expected, and her face seemed impassive. “You might as well come up to the house,” she said. Turning, she led the way.

The rain had stopped. The skies had at least partly cleared—Sandy gazed entranced at white, fluffy “clouds” and blue “sky,” and the green of the land all around him. They were in a valley. The Hakh’hli landing ship was nowhere in sight, but Sandy could see the mountains that surrounded them—though they did not look as they were supposed to, no doubt because he was seeing them from the wrong angle. “Come on in,” the woman said, holding the door for him.

“Thank you,” he said politely, and entered.

They were in the “kitchen” of a house. Sandy gazed around in fascination. The smells alone were startling. A young male was standing at a “stove,” stirring a flat pan filled with something that sizzled and popped over an open flame. (An open flame!) That was the source of at least one of the odors, both provocative and repellent, but there were others Sandy could not identify.

The youth looked up at Sandy. “He’s a big one, Mom,” he said. “Does he want some bacon and eggs?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sandy eagerly, linking the smells to the familiar words which, until then, had lacked a referent in his experience. “Yes, please. I can pay.” He fumbled in his pocket for one of the little nuggets and began his rehearsed explanation. “I’ve been placer mining, you see. I collect sand and rocks from the stream beds. Then I wash them in running water. The lighter pieces are washed away, and I pick the gold out.”