The woman looked at him curiously but didn’t comment. All she said was, “Do you want some hash browns with your eggs?”

“Oh, yes, I think so,” Sandy said doubtfully. He wasn’t sure exactly what hash browns were, and when the human boy put a plate in front of him he was even less sure he wanted them. Or any of it. The “eggs” were round, yellow blobs surrounded by a thin film of white substance, browned at the edges; that was easy to identify. The “bacon” was the meat, and he had seen pictures of that before, too. What was left had to be the “hash browns,” a doughy mess of starch, crisped and browned on top.

He picked up the fork expertly enough; all those hours of practice were paying off. But when he prodded the eggs the yolks broke and spilled oily, yellow fat over the other things on the plate.

He hesitated, aware of the woman watching him with interest. The boy had disappeared, but Sandy heard his muffled voice coming from the other room, perhaps talking to someone. Sandy took a tiny bit of the yolk-drenched “hash browns” on the end of his fork and tasted it.

It was entirely unlike anything Sandy Washington had ever tasted before. He could not say that it was revolting. He couldn’t say the opposite, either, or even that it was edible; apart from the saltiness of it, there were a lot of flavors but none he recognized.

He smiled placatingly up at the woman. With every other sensation that was impinging on him, he was most aware of her femaleness. She wasn’t pretty by any standards Sandy had learned. She wasn’t even young. He had no confidence in his ability to judge human ages, but the difference between them was generational. The boy had called her “Mom,” and that was a clue, because the boy, Sandy thought, had to be more or less his own age, or nearly.

The boy came back into the room. “They’re on their way,” he told his mother.

Sandy glanced at her, perplexed, but all she said was, “Do you want some ketchup for the hash browns?”

“Yes, please,” Sandy said, putting his fork down. The woman plunked a bottle before him and waited expectantly. He picked it up uncertainly. It had a metal cap on it, but that was a known problem; he took the bottle in one hand, the cap in the other and, as gently as he could, tried pulling and twisting until it turned and came off.

There was an empty glass in front of him. Sandy poured some of the thick, red stuff into the glass, barely covering the bottom. When he heard the boy snicker he realized he had done something wrong.

Inspiration struck. “I have to go to the toilet,” he said, and was glad to be escorted into a room with plumbing fixtures and a door.

Once the door was closed behind him he breathed more easily. Making his way among humanity as a secret agent was a lot more difficult than he had expected.

For that matter, so was going to the toilet. The Earthly garments were just enough different from the ones he had worn all his life on the ship that he had trouble making the necessary adjustments, and then there was the question of the plumbing itself.

It all took time, but Sandy had no objection to that. When he had finally found a way to cause the toilet bowl to empty itself and refill, and had rearranged his clothing, he paused to regard himself in the little oval mirror over the washstand.

He pulled the hearing aid carefully out of his ear, looking it over. It didn’t seem to be harmed. He wiped it as dry as he could on one of the fabric things hanging in the bathroom and reinserted it. His ear was sore, but he couldn’t get along without the aid.

The silence inside the bathroom, however, was a blessing. No one was asking him questions. He didn’t have to be ready to respond to a challenge, because there was nothing to respond to. He wished he could stay right there in that room until everyone went away and, somehow, he could get back to the lander, back to the ship, back to the familiar life that had been his . . .

On the other hand . . .

On the other hand, he was home! It was what his whole life had been aimed toward, and now it was real! Already he had been in the presence of two actual human beings—yes, certainly, there had been some little embarrassments and worries, but they had offered him food, hadn’t they? And that must mean something. Yes, certainly, they looked stranger than he had expected. But they had been kind. It was hard to believe that they were of the race of spoilers who had so sadly damaged the planet that it was a devastated ruin . . .

He stopped there, struck by a thought, and went to look out the bathroom window.

His brow furrowed. From this point, the planet didn’t look all that devastated. Actually, the long meadow behind the house was peaceful and green, and he could see that someone had let the cows from the barn out to graze in it.

It was all quite confusing.

He realized he had been in the bathroom for quite a long time. Reluctantly he patted the hearing aid to make sure it was in place in his ear and turned to the door.

There was a new noise, a mechanical one he had not heard before.

He turned around as a shadow passed over the window, and then he saw a flying machine—a “helicopter”—bob slowly to the ground just a few yards from the house. A couple of people in uniform leaped out of it.

When he came out into the kitchen again they were standing there, talking in low tones to the woman and her son. “Hello, sir,” said one of them.

And the other said, “You’re from the spaceship, aren’t you? The one with the funny-looking frogs? We’ll have to ask you to come along with us.”

Chapter 8

One of the reasons the planet Venus is so hot is that its atmosphere contains vast quantities of carbon dioxide, which traps the heat from the sun. One of the reasons Mars is so cold is that its atmosphere is very thin; there isn’t enough carbon dioxide to do the same thing. The Earth’s air is intermediate between them, but the human race has been changing that. Every time they exhale they breathe carbon dioxide out. Every time they burn fuel to run their engines and heat their homes (which is always) they make more of it. So the Earth gets warmer and the ice melts. (There is a reason why the policewoman laughed when Sandy said his home was in Miami Beach. The only present inhabitants of Miami Beach are jellyfish, crabs, tarpon, and bonefish, because Miami Beach, like most of the low-lying coasts of the world, is underwater.) There is more. Because the atmosphere is a heat engine, the more the air warms the more energy there is to express itself as storms, air-mass movements, scouring winds . . . in short, as hurricanes.

Even the word “hurricane” was unfamiliar to Sandy. It was one of those words you heard on old TV weather broadcasts, but there was nothing like a hurricane on the Hakh’hli ship. But on the way to the police helicopter he saw there was a corner of the cowshed that was bent out of shape, and a tree down in the courtyard, and he remembered the other great trees he had seen uprooted in the storm. And the word “hurricane” came back out of his subconscious.

He would have liked to ask the two police officers about it, but they didn’t seem to want to talk. If they had names, they didn’t tell them to Sandy. They didn’t look much alike, apart from the uniforms. The male one was shorter than the female, and his face was flatter and skin darker; he looked quite a lot like the animal herders. The female was paler and thin, like the picture of Sandy’s mother, though neither as young-looking nor as pretty. (Nor, for that matter, as undressed.) They escorted him, politely enough, to their “helicopter” and sat him down in the right-hand front seat.

Sandy tensed when the female one buckled straps around him. Partly it was that she, a female Earth human, had touched him and his startled glands throbbed. Partly it was because they were binding him like a prisoner! He made himself relax when they assured him the straps were only for his safety when the helicopter took off. Anyway, Sandy had no doubt that if things turned bad he could snap those straps in a moment.

What he would do after he snapped them was another question. The male sat next to him, at the controls; but the female was in the seat right behind, and the metal thing she carried at her side was a “gun.” Sandy’s knowledge of guns was perfect, obtained from any number of recorded Westerns and cop shoot-em-ups. He knew that if anyone fired a gun at anyone else, the target fell over in great and often terminal pain. He also knew from the same sources that a uniformed person with a gun had the right to fire it at any “suspect” and splat his brains out.

Sandy didn’t want his brains splatted out, especially by a human female—not a young one, to be sure, but very probably still capable of breeding. He turned his head as far as he could to smile at her.

She didn’t smile back. She only said, “Please sit straight, sir.” And then she leaned forward so that he felt her breath on the back of his neck. “Did you say your home was in Miami Beach?”

“That’s right,” Sandy said, sticking to the script. “I’ve been traveling—hitchhiking—and I guess I lost my way in the, uh, storm.”

There was a skeptical snort from the woman. “Then where are your gills?” she asked.

Sandy frowned. The woman meant something by that, but what?

“Let it rest, Emmons,” the male police officer ordered. “The captain will sort all this out.” And he did something with feet and fingers, and the slow flut-flut-flut of the rotor overhead picked up speed as the helicopter lurched off the ground.

Then Sandy’s big problem wasn’t solving the puzzling conversation, it was trying to keep from vomiting again.

The helicopter did not shudder and leap as the landing ship had when it was bumping through the atmospheric entry. The helicopter’s motion was slower and more tantalizing. But it was equally bad. Hurriedly the woman behind him pushed an air-sick bag at him. Sandy thought that, barring the tiny morsel he had swallowed at the cow farm, his stomach must be empty. But he surprised himself. He used the bag.

Then, sick or not, he had to look out the window. There were more trees down on the slopes around them, and some of the standing ones looked distinctly unhealthy—bare branches or yellowed leaves, some of them with their branches stripped away and nothing but straight, dead poles remaining. No matter. This was Earth! He thrilled to the recognition of that all-important fact. He was home!

The helicopter swayed as it lifted to clear a ridge. Then, as it went through a pass, Sandy could see a road below him—no doubt the very road he had failed to find in the stormy night. He could see that the storm had passed this way, for on the flanks of the mountains still more trees were down in windrows.

The flight covered the distance that had taken him six stumbling, zigzag hours in less than five minutes. Sandy was just beginning to wonder whether he would need the bag again when the pilot said, “There it is.”

There it was. The Hakh’hli landing ship. It squatted peacefully on its skids on a gentle grassy slope, its pale landing lights still on though the sun was high.

The lander looked astonishingly small, squatting in its meadow. It even looked pitiful, because the trip and the storm had not been kind to it. The thin foil that took the sting out of the micrometeoroids in orbit was punctured and wrinkled. The netting the Hakh’hli had tried to string over the craft after the landing, to hide it, had been shredded by the winds. The lander looked hard used.

But what caught Sandy’s eye at once was that it was no longer alone. Five other flying machines surrounded it. Human machines. They were helicopters more or less like the little police craft Sandy was riding in, except that most of them were a good deal bigger. And people, human people, were standing about in clusters. Some of them had television cameras pointed at the landing craft, or at each other, or most of all at the Hakh’hli.

All six of the Hakh’hli had come out of the lander. Two of them—they looked like Polly and Bottom—were talking into the television cameras. A couple of others were hunched possessively beside the ladder-stick to the door of the landing craft. And a couple were vigorously, joyfully showing off for the human spectators, leaping, with the extra strength their muscles gave them in the feeble Earth gravity, over each other in the game the Earth children he had seen on kiddy television shows called leapfrog; and froggy the Hakh’hli indeed did look.

As Sandy got out of the helicopter, Tanya came bounding toward him. The two police flinched away. Their hands strayed toward their holstered guns; but they didn’t draw them, and Tanya, weeping an affable tear, cried in Hakh’hli to Sandy, “You have done badly and not at all well, Lysander. Speak cautiously to these Earth creatures until you have learned new orders!”

Startled, Sandy demanded. “What new orders? You speak confusingly and not with any clarity.”

But she didn’t answer in Hakh’hli. She only patted him in playful reproof, and then turned and bounded away again, crying in English, “So follow me, Sandy! We are all being ‘interviewed’ on ‘television’ by these wonderful Earth people!”

Sandy frowned in bewilderment at the two police officers. The male one shrugged. The female one said, “I guess that’s what you ought to do, sir.”

So he tailed after Tanya, looking around.

His spirits began to rise. In daylight the world was more beautiful and more frightening than Sandy had ever imagined. There was so much of it! Never in his life had he been able to look for more than a hundred feet in any direction. Now there were horizons a dozen miles away—with mountains! and rivers! and clouds! and, brighter than he had dreamed, so bright that it hurt his eyes to look at it, the Sun!

The second most startling thing was the sight of Polly, weeping good-naturedly as she squatted on a flat, sun-warmed rock before half a dozen television cameras. She certainly was not obeying the directives of the Major Seniors. She wasn’t making any secret of their presence on Earth. She was, in fact, advertising it! As Sandy approached, the people with the television cameras turned away from Polly to aim their lenses directly at him, and Obie and Helen loped toward him.

“Welcome to Earth!” called Obie—in English.

Helen, in Hakh’hli, added sorrowfully, “Oh, Wimp, you’ve really screwed it up this time.”

Sandy blinked at her. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Speak Hakh’hli!” Polly commanded, leaping off the rock and waddling toward him. “Because of your folly and incompetence everything has to be changed now!”

“My folly?”

“Yes, and incompetence,” Obie put in, looking reproachful. “You failed to carry out your mission properly. They knew at once you were lying and not speaking truth.”

“Well,” Sandy said reasonably, “all right, but I certainly didn’t tell anybody about the big ship, did I?”

“Don’t argue!” Polly ordered. “We have to attend to these people now and without delay! I have been in contact with the ship. The Major Seniors are very displeased with you, Lysander. However, facts are facts, eggs cannot be unlaid, and so we have new orders. We are to speak openly to these people of our purpose here.”

“Speak openly?” asked Sandy, dazed.

“Oh, please behave in Hakh’hli fashion and not any more in that of a hoo’hik than you must, Lysander! Just follow my lead. Smile. Let them welcome you home. And listen attentively to what I say to them!”

Then she turned to the cameras and spoke in English, weeping apologetically. “Please forgive us. We were simply worried about our dear friend, Lysander. Now can we go on with the ‘interview’?”

Neither Sandy nor any of the Hakh’hli had ever been “interviewed” before. But they had seen it done often enough on the old Earth television shows, and Polly was behaving like a talk-show veteran. She pulled Sandy to her side, with her hand firmly and affectionately tucked into the belt at his waist, as she spoke into the cameras. If Sandy had not been so busy staring around at the human machines, the human people, the grass and wildflowers and very rocks of the human world, he would have admired her poise. She spoke clearly and persuasively.

“Yes, we are the Hakh’hli, a race of highly technologically advanced people with a recorded history that goes back some sixteen thousand eight hundred of your years. We have come here to share our wisdom with you. Also to return the human, John William Washington. (We call him Sandy.) He is the son of two of your astronauts, whom our ship rescued when they were stranded in space, due to a war you were having, fifty-six of your years ago. We have brought him up as one of our own. The little story he told your food-animal herders was a harmless little deception. We only wanted him to be able to move freely among you, so that the first shock of his return to his native planet could be as gentle as possible, before the inevitable ‘publicity’ that would accompany the news of his real identity. Also, to be sure, we felt it necessary to be cautious in our first approach, so that we could find out what conditions were like in order to decide how best to make ourselves known to you. We wanted to spare you the worst shocks of encountering a race of truly superior beings.” She blinked affably at the cameras for a moment, and then added, “And now, if you will excuse us, we have to go back in the ship for a while, because it is time for our midday meal. We apologize for this necessity, but because of the excessively long day of your world we can wait no longer. Are you coming, dear Lysander?”

Once the Earth humans had been made to understand that when a Hakh’hli wanted to eat his big meal he wanted it, they hospitably offered to feed them out of their own stocks. Of course, the Hakh’hli rejected that proposal out of hand. They were too hungry to prolong the discussion, and so the entire cohort climbed back up the ladder-stick into the landing craft and closed the door.

As soon as they were inside Sandy burst out in Hakh’hli, “What has happened? Why are plans now different and not the same?”

“Because you screwed up,” Obie chortled in English.

“Speak Hakh’hli and not Earth language!” Polly thundered. “Who knows what listening devices Earth creatures have? But Oberon is correct and not in error, Lysander-Wimp. You failed and did not succeed. Those Earth creatures penetrated your ruse at once. How could you have been so foolish and not at all wise, Lysander?”

And Tanya, hurriedly loading the food cart at the far end of the chamber, chimed in, “Your incompetence has endangered our entire plan, Lysander.”

And Helen added, “Major Seniors are displeased and not at all happy.”

And even Oberon opened his mouth for a denunciation of his own, and Sandy might have had a great deal more recrimination to endure, but Tanya was already pulling their midday meal out of the warmer. The Hakh’hli abandoned Sandy for more rewarding fare.

In the confined space of the lander there wasn’t room for all six of them to attack the food at once. As always, Sandy didn’t even try, but waited for the feeding frenzy to subside. Even Obie, the smallest, was pushed out of the way. He tried to squeeze past Polly, but ducked back as she reached to pinch him, bumping into Sandy.

He winced as Sandy glared at him. “I’m sorry about what I said,” he offered. “Only it’s all so very confusing here. They do stare at us so!”

Sandy snorted. “Now you know how I’ve been feeling for the last twenty years,” he said, pleased at the role reversal—mostly pleased, anyway, although it was not altogether pleasing to find that he was no longer the unique center of attention.

Polly, mouth full, turned to glare at them. “I told you to speak Hakh’hli and not Earth language!” she said thickly, chewing. “It is in any case natural that Earth creatures should stare. It is clear in Earth history that such things happen, when primitive savages are suddenly visited by their technological and intellectual superiors; no doubt they think we are ‘gods.’ ” And, godlike, she shoved Bottom out of the way for another go at the meal.

That made room for Obie to squeeze his way in, which he promptly did, leaving Sandy to wait outside the noisy, violent knot. Sandy didn’t mind waiting. Actually, he was mildly repelled by the sight of his Hakh’hli cohort at their food. In the kitchen of the human food-animal herders things had been quite different. No one had been chewing and tearing at the meal there. Why couldn’t the Hakh’hli be as—well—dignified about their eating?

There was another thought that was troubling him, and it was even more somber. How was it possible, he asked himself, that their elaborate first-contact plan had gone so wrong so rapidly? How had the Earth humans discovered the landing ship so fast?

After all, the whole plan had been devised by the Major Seniors themselves. It was their own decision that the landing ship should remain hidden while Lysander, as the human member of the party, reconnoitered with the human beings to make sure that everything was safe before the first Hakh’hli-human contact occurred. Certainly the Major Seniors couldn’t have made an unworkable plan—could they?

But the fact was that the plan had gone wrong from the very beginning; which meant that the Major Seniors had failed to take all the factors into account.

Which was impossible.

The Hakh’hli were beginning to go slack and empty-eyed. As one by one they staggered to their seats Sandy moved soberly to the food cart. He made a selection of what was left and descended the ladder to eat it in the glorious Earthly sunlight.

In just the few minutes he had been inside the lander a new and bigger helicopter had arrived. It was white and powerful-looking, and the side of it bore the cryptic legend InterSec. Its rotors were still turning as its door opened and half a dozen new human beings jumped out.

They approached Sandy as he climbed onto the sun-warmed flat rock to eat his midday meal. The people with the television cameras, and even the police officers who were still hanging around, watching everything, seemed to defer to them. “Hello, Mr. Washington,” one of them called. “I’m Hamilton Boyle.”

Sandy stood up, careful not to spill the tray with his meal. He extended his hand in the approved Earth fashion. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Boyle,” he said, in his well-rehearsed way.

“Glad to know you—” Boyle began, and then ended with a grunt of pain. He pulled his hand back, rubbing it. “You’ve got some grip,” he said, surprised.

“I’m sorry,” Sandy said at once, annoyed with himself. “I forgot how much stronger I am than you are. It’s because of the one point four gravity environment on the ship, you see. Would you—” He hesitated, trying to remember what was appropriate behavior; but surely offering food was a friendly gesture on Earth? “Would you like to try some of this?” He extended a handful of wafers.

Boyle took one and examined it carefully. “I think not, just now,” he said doubtfully. “What is it, exactly?”

One of the female human beings was wrinkling her nose. Sandy wondered what the matter was. “This meat,” he said, holding up the slab in his left hand, “is hoo’hik. That’s a kind of meat animal. The ground-up stuff in the wafer you have is tuber. The things in it are bits of a kind of animal that lives in water—I don’t know what you’d call it, but it’s almost solid meat, except for the shell—no bones, and the internal organs come right out—”

“Like a shrimp, you mean?” one of the humans hazarded.

“I don’t know what a ‘shrimp’ is,” Sandy apologized. “Anyway, that’s what the wafers usually are made of: dried ground tuber flour mixed with protein things. They’re very good, really. Are you sure you don’t want to try some?”

The human looked tempted and repelled at the same time. He sniffed the wafer carefully.

“I’d watch it if I were you,” a female human said.

“They do smell kind of fishy,” the man named Boyle agreed. “But you eat it, don’t you, Mr. Washington?”

“I’ve been eating these things all my life.”

The female human laughed. “Well, you look healthy enough,” she said, looking him over. “Not to say, well, scary.”

Sandy felt pleased. He was almost sure that was a compliment. It was quite clear that he was far stronger than any of the Earth humans—the other Earth humans, he corrected himself—and he was nearly certain that that was a selective breeding advantage in the eyes of human females. He wondered happily when he would have a chance to try it out. Not right now, of course. He knew well that humans did not do amphylaxis in public, as a general rule. But soon! “What?” he said, brought back from his tempting musings.

“I asked how you got your vitamins,” one of the females repeated.

“Vitamins?”

“Chemical substances that your body needs to function, and minerals, and so on.”

“Oh, I’m not your best witness on that,” Sandy apologized. “You’d have to ask Bottom. The food experts arrange all that. They know exactly what we need, and they control the content of the midday meal accordingly. It has everything anyone needs for a day’s nutrition. The cookies and milk don’t, though; they’re just a, what you would call, a ‘snack.’ “And then he had to explain “cookies and milk.” “We usually have them six times a day,” he said, “but here on Earth, with your longer day, probably we’ll have them more often. I don’t know what we’ll do about the midday meal; I don’t know if they’ll want to have stun time more than once . . .”

And then, of course, he had to explain “stun time” to them. The man named Boyle sighed. He took the wafer, which he had been holding all that time, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and stuffed it in a pocket of his suit.

“Is it all right if I keep this, Mr. Washington?” he asked. “I know our food chemists would love to study it—and maybe any leftovers from the rest of the meal?”

“Sure. If there are any leftovers, I mean,” Sandy said obligingly. “They’ll probably be coming out in, let’s see—” He consulted his watch and did a fast mental conversion from Hakh’hli time. “—in about forty-seven and a half of your minutes.”

He paused as he heard a racket from the sky. The small, dark woman turned to look and then said to Boyle, “Marguery’s coming in now.”

“Good,” said Hamilton Boyle, not taking his eyes off Sandy. He was a tall, lean man. Although Sandy had no good way of guessing human ages, he was sure that Boyle was one of the least young around the ship. He was a serious man, Sandy was sure, although he smiled frequently. “Mr. Washington,” he said, “we’re going to need to talk to your, ah, friends as soon as we can. That’s a V-tol coming in, and we’re hoping you’ll all allow us to take you to a more comfortable place.”

It bothered Sandy to have two questions clamoring for answers at once. He passed up the “What’s a V-tol?” in favor of, “I don’t know what you mean by more comfortable, Mr. Boyle. We’re pretty comfortable here.” He had to raise his voice as the ship appeared, dashing through the sky toward them, then almost stopping in the air as thrusters and wing flaps rotated to new positions and lowered it gently toward the ground. Its jets screamed. It was not a helicopter; it had wings almost like the spaceship lander they had come in.

The ear-piercing jet roar stopped abruptly. “I meant to a city,” Boyle said persuasively. “There’s nothing here for you, just farmland. We’d like to welcome you properly, in a more civilized place.”

“We’ll have to ask Polly,” Sandy said, but he wasn’t really listening. The V-tol door had opened. A tall female human was coming out of the aircraft, which had the same InterSec legend stenciled on its side. The human female strode toward them with determination, looking Sandy up and down.

“My,” she said admiringly, “you’re a big one, aren’t you?”

“So are you,” whispered Sandy, gazing up at her. She was not nearly as solid or thick around the waist as he, but she was a good head and half taller, as tall as any of the males; and his heart was gone. And that was how Sandy met Marguery Darp.

Chapter 9

The carbon dioxide warmup of the Earth’s air was real enough to be observed through most of the middle part of the twentieth century, but it didn’t really hit its stride until the twenty-first century began. That is when the global annual mean temperature began to register a seven-degree climb over the norm of the last ten or fifteen thousand years. Humans have done lots of other ingenious things to their air. They have scavenged its ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons, burdened it with acid aerosols, even laced it with radionuclides, but it is the warmup that has produced the most interesting effects. The equator hasn’t changed much, temperature-wise. The poles have. Glacial melt-water pours in Nile-sized streams off Antarctica and the Greenland ice cap. Queerly, the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere haven’t done much warming. Their temperatures are either only negligibly higher—like North America—or even actually colder than before, like Europe. Europe suffers greatly from a change in ocean currents. The massive influx of fresh water, which is less dense than the rest of the sea, has stopped the long conveyor belt that brought warm surface water up from the tropics to moderate Europe’s winters. Contrariwise, the Pacific, at the other end of the world-girdling conveyor, is no longer refrigerated by the sea. It hasn’t meant a lot for the land areas of the Pacific, but in Europe it has meant a lot. Madrid and Monte Carlo, for instance, now have the climate once associated with Chicago.

Obie was the first of the cohort to appear at the lander door when stun time was over. Yawning and scratching, he waved down to Sandy. Then he turned around, presenting his stubby tail to the audience, gripped the center rail with hard thumbs and helper-fingers, and slid down, landing with a thump at the bottom. He turned to face them, laughing. “Oh, Sandy,” he cried rapturously. “Isn’t this light gravity wonderful? I feel as if I could jump a mile.”

“Don’t, please,” Sandy ordered, smiling apologetically at his new human friends. He introduced Oberon and Tanya, who had just come out, to the new human arrivals, stumbling over some of their names—Miriam Zuckerman, Dashia Ali, Hamilton Boyle. He didn’t have any trouble remembering the name of Marguery Darp, though. He watched her carefully, trying to gauge what she was thinking from the look on her face. It didn’t tell him much. She was smiling, nodding, and saying a few polite words of welcome to Earth. But he still felt a little embarrassment. The humans were taking such obvious care not to say anything, well, insulting. Of course, it was inevitable that human beings should experience some culture shock. Looking at his mates through human eyes, Sandy understood that four-foot-high, kangaroo-shaped, English-speaking aliens from a spaceship were certainly going to attract attention. Especially when, like Oberon, they were always taking great, joyous leaps in the air.

“Your friend,” Marguery Darp said to Sandy, pointing at Oberon, “is sure a great jumper, isn’t he?”

“Well, it’s a great temptation here,” Sandy told her. He was heroically resisting the temptation to show off his own 1.4-G strength.

“Nevertheless,” put in Tanya, standing back, “he should not make a spectacle of himself in that way.” She waved commandingly to Oberon and, when he leaped back to them with an inquiring look, said in a severe tone, “You are behaving foolishly, Oberon. This Earth human female is disappointed.”

Obie looked hangdog, but Marguery Darp said quickly, “Oh, no, Mr., ah, Oberon! Not at all! I think you jump splendidly. The only thing that I would suggest is—well—don’t you think you should wear a hat? The ozone layer’s still pretty threadbare, this far north.”

Obie stared at her. “Ozone layer? Hat?”

Hamilton Boyle explained smoothly. “Lieutenant Darp is concerned about the ultraviolet radiation in the sunlight, Mr. Oberon. Since the ozone layer was weakened we’ve had a good deal of trouble because of it—skin cancers, crop failures, a hell of a lot of bad sunburn cases. Are you susceptible to sunburn, do you know?”

Obie looked inquiringly at Sandy, who said, “No, he doesn’t know. None of us do. We’ve never been exposed to sunlight before.”

“Then you’ll all need hats,” Marguery Darp said decisively. “And probably some kind of pullover to cover your, ah, arms.”

“Or better still—” Boyle smiled “—we ought to get you all indoors. What about accepting our invitation to come to a city? There’s plenty of room in the V-tol.”

“Go to a city?” Obie squealed.

“I’ll have to ask Polly, of course,” Tanya said. She turned and began to climb back into the lander.

Boyle called after her, “Please say that this is an official invitation from the government of the Yukon Commonwealth, who would like to welcome you all to Earth!” And to Sandy and Oberon, he added, “You’ll like it, I promise. Dawson’s a real city, and I guarantee we can make you comfortable there.”

Marguery was nodding encouragingly. Sandy said, “Oh, I’d like that.”

And Obie said gloomily, “Polly won’t let us.”

But when Polly at last came down from the lander—more decorously than Obie—she was all shrugs and tears of good will. “Of course we accept your invitation to visit your Dawson,” she said. “Our advisor, ChinTekki-tho, asks us to thank you for inviting us. Unfortunately, we cannot all come with you.”

“But the V-tol will easily hold us all,” Marguery Darp said.

“It is not a matter of what the ship will hold. It is a matter of what is necessary. Some of us must remain with the landing ship as a precaution; if we left it alone some Earth person might enter it and do some hurt to himself. Also there is much work to do because of the damage the lander has received in coming to Earth. The micrometeoroid screens must be replaced, for instance; you can see how badly they have been damaged on the way in.”

“But surely you’re not planning to leave right away?” Boyle asked, frowning.

“It is not a matter of what we plan, either,” Polly told him. “Our directives come from the Major Seniors, so we must carry them out. However, the landing craft will not leave at once. Some of us will go with you. Of course, we will have to bring provisions with us so we will have something to eat.”

“There’s plenty to eat in Dawson,” Marguery Darp said.

Polly waggled her head. “But only of Earth food, I’m afraid. However, Lysander and I will go with you, and we will take—” She glanced around, sighed, and finished, “Oberon; I think he can be spared most easily. The others will stay with the lander.”

The flight to Dawson in Marguery Darp’s V-tol plane was almost as rough as the landing from the interstellar ship; even Obie got airsick. But when they landed in the place called Dawson, Sandy got his first look at a human city. “It’s so big!” he cried, staring at the tall buildings. Some of them were nearly a hundred feet high!

“Oh, it’s not that big,” Marguery Darp said reassuringly. “This is just Dawson. It’s the capital of the Yukon Commonwealth; I doubt that there are more than twenty-five thousand people in the whole commonwealth, and most of them aren’t in Dawson. They’re out on the farms.”

Sandy once again regretted the fact that he could ask only one question at a time. “Yukon Commonwealth?” he repeated inquiringly.

“That’s what this area is called,” she explained. “We don’t have big countries any more—things like nations, you know? We just have commonwealths. About ten thousand of them, all over the world. I guess the biggest commonwealth in North America is York, over on the east coast, and that only has about a quarter of a million people. The place where you landed is the Inuit. This is Yukon. Just south of us there’s the Athabasca Commonwealth—that’s where the really big farms are. And over to the west—”

Sandy stopped her geography lesson. “Can’t we go into the city?” he asked.

And Obie put in eagerly, “And get something to eat? Maybe even a real milk shake?”

“Of course we can,” said Marguery, smiling. “Come on. The car’s waiting for us.”

The car was actually a “van”—four wheels, boxy, with seats big enough even for the two Hakh’hli to squeeze in—and it moved rapidly toward the town. All three of the visitors stared at everything they passed, Obie chattering in excitement, Polly supercilious, and Sandy wholly goggle-eyed at the wonders of a real human city. He couldn’t help chuckling to himself, which made Marguery smile, and the two Hakh’hli were dripping saliva in excitement.

This part of the human world was no longer the way it had looked in the Hakh’hli records—not any of the many ways it had appeared. There were cars, of course. The Hakh’hli had seen plenty of Earth-human cars chasing each other endlessly around the “freeways” in the old films, and they knew what cars looked like. These were different. They came in three wheels or four, open ones and sealed ones, big and little. Few of the buildings in Dawson were skyscrapers. They had many stories—the “hotel” Marguery took them to had twenty-five—but most of them were underground. “There’s no sunlight to speak of in the winter here anyway,” she explained, “so what’s to look at? Anyway, this keeps us out of the wind.”

“The wind didn’t seem bad,” Obie offered eagerly, showing off his new connoisseurship, since they had experienced far worse winds in the storm when they landed.

“It isn’t bad today,” Marguery said. “Oh, they don’t get many hurricanes this far inland—that’s what they had in the Inuit Commonwealth when you landed, a hurricane. But they have what they call chinooks, and when one of them comes along they’ll take the hair right off your head—well, not your head, of course, Oberon. Anyway, come on, let’s get you settled.”

“Getting settled” meant “checking in” at a “hotel.” They weren’t alone as they did it. They never were. People clustered around them, goggling, and they never got away from the TV cameras, except in the privacy of their rooms.

Their individual rooms.

That fact by itself startled them all. Whoever heard of sleeping alone? Oberon and Polly decided at once to share one corner of a room floor (they were not quite ready to try a “bed”), but Sandy chose to do on Earth as the Earthies did. “But then I’ll just have Polly to sleep with,” Obie wailed. “I’ll be cold!”

Polly said irritably. “Oh, let the Earthling do what he likes. Only stay with us while I check the radio, Lysander. We have to make sure everything’s all right at the ship.”

Of course, everything was. Tanya responded to the first call and reported that all was well, except that some of the Earthies were eager to be allowed a look inside the landing craft. “Certainly not,” Polly ordered indignantly. “Or not unless ChinTekki-tho gives permission, anyway. Have you maintained contact with the ship?”

“Of course,” said Tanya. “The Major Seniors are considering that question now. Also, they wish to make a ‘broadcast’ to Earth themselves. I have spoken to ChinTekki-tho, and he is going to tell us how to set up a relay from the lander.”

Polly swallowed. “And are the Major Seniors, well, pleased?” she asked.

“They haven’t said they were not,” Tanya reported. So that was all right. Polly signed off, weeping in relief.

Then Marguery came knocking on the door. “Sandy?” she said. “I thought this would be a good time if you all would like to go shopping.”

“Oh, absolutely,” he said eagerly. “I’ve always wanted to see an Earth supermarket.”

“Well,” she said, shaking her head, “that’s fine, sure, some other time. But right now I thought we might go to a clothing store. Your Hakh’hli friends ought to get hats, anyway, and you probably will be more comfortable if you get out of those funny-looking clothes.”

Sandy’s introduction to the human world as a participant in it was wonderful. It was also scary, and sometimes a little repulsive, but it was all, well, wonderful was still the best word. It was just one wonder after another. The biggest thing about the Earth was the space. There was so much of it— and so variously filled! There were lakes and farms and buildings and people. The best, if most worrisome, thing was the smells. They took getting used to because none of them were in any way like the smells of the ship. But even the manure pile behind that first cowshed had been quaintly amusing—sort of—and the smells of the town of Dawson were far more varied. There were nasty ones, like the steamy car exhausts. There were curious ones—food cooking, human sweat—and sweet ones, like flowers and grasses. And then there were the very special smells of women. Marguery giggled, but she helped Sandy identify them when he asked. Perfume. Soap. Hair-spray. Body odors, faint but stirring—they all added up to Human Female, and they made Sandy’s belly twitch in surprising and unexpected contractions.

Human Female was never out of his thoughts, especially with this prime example by his side.

It was curious (but he had never been acculturated to think it was undesirable in any way) that he had to look up when he spoke to her. She was easily six feet tall. She was also, he learned, extraordinarily strong for a Human Female, though to Sandy she seemed willowy. She had red hair that came down her back in two, long, twisty braids; she had green eyes and a strong, almost beaked nose; and it astonished Sandy that in all his twenty-odd years he had never before realized that the ideal Human Female beauty was composed of red, braided hair, green eyes, and a nearly beaked nose.

The only thing that kept him from thinking of nothing else, in fact, was the fact that there were so many other things that were, in different ways, almost equally exciting. Shopping, for instance. When they reached the place where shopping was performed the sign over the door said:

BERNEE’S

Other signs said:

SLAX

SPORTERS

JOGGING

CASUALS

The signs were fascinating to look at for Sandy, because they lighted up in bright colors, because they moved before his eyes, and most of all because they said such tantalizingly mysterious, ineffably human things as the cryptic:

Double Coupon Credits on Thursdays!

In spite of the constant flashing of the signs, the three newcomers were the only ones in the store looking at the signs. Everyone else, store clerks and shoppers as well, was gaping at Obie and Polly.

Obie was clowning again. He had found a huge shoe—it was a window display, certainly not anything meant for any human being to wear—and was holding it against his own immense foot. The laughter embarrassed Sandy, but a cautious peek at Marguery Darp showed that she was laughing, too, and so apparently Obie was not giving any real offense.

Anyway, the process was fascinating. This wasn’t pretend shopping, as they had practiced on the ship, but really taking “money” and exchanging it with a “salesperson” for “clothes.”

“Actually,” Marguery Darp explained, “you don’t really need any money right now.”

“I don’t?”

“Oh, no. You’re our guests. InterSec will pick up your hotel bills—and travel, and all that kind of thing. But if you want to pay for personal purchases yourself—”

“I’d like that,” Sandy assured her. “Where do I get some ‘money’?” That was the easiest part. Marguery took away a couple of his gold nuggets and came back with a sheaf, as thick as her thumb, of rectangular pieces of printed paper.

“That should last for a while,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

“There’s plenty more gold where that came from,” he assured her gallantly. He had already begun fingering some of the clothes. The stuff the Hakh'hli costumers had run up for him, he discovered at once, was nothing like the Real Thing. Trousers were not slick and poreless. Trousers came in soft fabrics that somehow nevertheless held a crease, and inside they were often lined with some fabric even softer. Moreover (ah, so that was how they did it!) the trousers were equipped with “zippers” in the front, so that they could be opened when necessary. Neckties weren’t simple strips of cloths. They were sewn as tubes, and inside was something that stiffened them so they appeared flat. Shoes were not pressed out of a single kind of plastic; they had one kind of thing for the upper parts, a harder kind for the soles, and a hard but springy kind for the heels. Jackets had pockets on the inside. Belts weren’t just ornaments; they had to go through little loops on the trousers, and then they held the trousers up. Hats didn’t just keep your head warm, they protected the scalp from the sun. Socks, underwear, shirts—oh, everything was different, really. And a lot nicer!

The only problem was that none of these wonderful things seemed to fit Lysander Washington at all.

He could squeeze his massive torso into the largest sizes, all right, but then a sweater became almost a calf-length smock, sleeves hung down past his fingertips, and the legs of the trousers had to be rolled up nearly a foot. Marguery explained that those difficulties could be dealt with, though. They just required paying over a few hundred more of these “dollars,” because the store had on its premises half a dozen humans whose only work was to cut and shape the factory-made clothing items to the particular requirements of the individual human frame. “So just pick out things you like,” she said, “and we’ll see about getting them fitted.” She glanced worriedly toward the front of the store, where Obie and Polly were raucously telling the Earth humans the Hakh’hli names for “foot” and “head” and other, less public, anatomical areas. “I’d better see what’s going on,” she said. “Excuse me just a minute.”

So Sandy was allowed to wander almost by himself, marvelling. So many articles of clothing! For so many different parts of the anatomy, in so many fabrics, so many textures, so many colors—and with so very many buttons, laces, zippers, cuffs, pockets, patches, fringes, ruffs, and things of every imaginable kind, structural, ornamental or, Sandy decided, just plain silly. (What could possibly be the purpose of an undergarment without a crotch? It might, he thought, conceivably be an adaptation for the pendulant male anatomy, but why was it in a section marked “Ladies’ Lingerie”?)

He saw that a young woman was gaping at him. She had just come out of an alcove marked “Dressing Room,” and she had tried on a bikini bathing suit; it occurred to him that he should not be in this particular place. He turned hastily away and blundered into the men’s outerwear section of the huge store, which was filled with racks twenty yards long of nothing but “sports coats,” or nothing but “slacks,” or “suits,” or “formal wear.”

He wandered on, until he found himself in the section devoted to shoes. He admired the glossy, glassy finish of some of them—could almost see his own face reflected, though grossly distorted, in the polished surfaces. And the colors! Lavender inset with diamonds of pale green; peach and pale blue; rainbow scarlet, orange, yellow—why had Marguery urged him to get the dull blacks and browns? For that matter, why had the shoes she suggested for him all been flat, when here were rack after rack of perfectly beautiful ones in all colors, with heels that would easily add five inches to his height?

He smiled forgivingly to himself. No doubt she simply liked the idea of being taller than he was. No matter; he had found the shoes he liked. He marched with a pair in each hand to a desk and asked the astonished woman behind it, “Do you have these in my size, please?”

Marguery straightened that out for him. It seemed that shoes were gender-specific things, and men didn’t ordinarily wear such tall heels, but apart from that everything went very easily—not only because buying clothes was considered a quite ordinary, routine kind of thing to do, but because even the sales clerks and the tailors were thrilled to be helping the stranger from an alien spaceship. Everything else waited while the whole staff ran around to do Sandy’s orders. The other customers didn’t mind any more than the store personnel. They crowded around when he was in the open, and some of the men peered openly through the curtains while he was in the changing room. There was no hostility in them, as far as Sandy could tell. Curiosity, yes, a lot of that; but even more, he felt, they were welcoming. Welcoming.

He was home.

And the only really worrying thing was that, with all these humans around him, especially all these human females (none of them as big and glorious as Marguery Darp, but all of them definitely female, all the same), he could not help a certain arousal.

When one of the salesgirls turned her head away, flushed and smiling, as she helped measure his trouser length, and several of the onlookers giggled among themselves, he realized that the bulge of his arousal was showing through the fabric; and what did one do about that?

Among the Hakh’hli, that was an occasion for rejoicing. Any female nearby would have been glad to cooperate. But he wasn’t among the Hakh’hli.

All the films that ever Sandy had watched had not told him exactly how one went about getting it on with a human Earth female, however assiduously he studied them for clues. It wasn’t that there weren’t definite protocols. Indeed, the mating rituals were in fact the main subject of most of the films, especially the ones where the boy and the girl sang love songs to each other and then danced away to the music of an invisible orchestra. Sandy could easily have played the part of Fred Astaire as, in that first, accidental glance, he knew at once that Ginger Rogers was the only woman in the world for him—and was spurned by her with apparent loathing—and, by singing in her ear and whisking her through a waltz or tango, finally melted her frozen heart and tap-danced away with her to, presumably, a bed. But he never heard that invisible orchestra. Besides, he couldn’t dance.

Then there were the ones where the boy saves the girl from the “enemy” in a “war,” or from “gangsters” or “terrorists,” and naturally falls into bed with her; but where was the war? Then there were the more direct ones. The boy and the girl would enter separately into a “singles bar” (whatever a singles bar was), whereupon one would sit down with a drink and the other would come up to her. Then they would address coded remarks to each other. The code was easy enough to break, but hard to duplicate. The conversations all had two levels of meaning, and Sandy was not at all sure that his language skills were up to that sort of thing. Still, it was the most direct way; because as soon as they had received each other’s appropriate recognition signals it was, “Your place or mine?”

Sandy found one encouraging thing about the situation—he did have a place, a hotel room, and all his own—but where was the necessary singles bar to make the suggestion? For that matter, where was the time for such things? As soon as he had clothes to wear (the rest wouldn’t be finished until tomorrow) Marguery whisked him away.

“What about Polly and Obie?” he demanded, looking back to where they were talking with other humans.

“They have their own escorts,” she told him. “But the people of Earth are naturally specially interested in you, and we’ve arranged a television interview for you alone. It’s only a block away.”

She whisked him over to a different kind of building. This was almost unique in Dawson because it extended ten whole stories above the ground, and the place she took him to was on the very top floor. “This is the TV studio,” she informed him. She looked him up and down. “You look very handsome,” she added.

“Do I?” he asked gratefully. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, admiring his new clothes—tan cotton shorts, a short-sleeved shirt open to display his chest, sandals, and knee-length white socks with a strip of red at the tops. “I suppose I do,” he agreed complacently. “Now what do we do?”

“We just go right in here,” said Marguery, conducting him to a large room with eight or ten human beings gathered around, with of course the television cameras (or some kind of cameras) pointed at him.

A man in a blue turtleneck advanced toward him, extending his hand. “I’m Wilfred Morgenstern,” he said, wincing only slightly as Sandy remembered not to squeeze too hard in a handshake. “I’m your interviewer. Why don’t you just start at the beginning and tell us your whole story?”

Sandy looked around, perplexed, but Marguery was nodding encouragingly. “Well,” Sandy said, “a long time ago, when you were having your ‘war’ here on Earth, the Hakh’hli ship came to investigate this solar system . . .”

It was a long interview, and when it was over Marguery said sympathetically, “Would you like something to eat before I take you back to the hotel? I guess it’s been a long day for you.”

Sandy agreed fervently; not only long in that so much had happened, but it was one of those twenty-four-hour Earth days that stretched so much past the normal Hakh’hli span. But he pointed at the window. “It’s still light out,” he observed.

“We have long days here in the summer,” Marguery explained. “It’s quite normal to go to bed while it’s still light.”

He wasn’t listening; he had taken a closer look out the window and he caught his breath. It was nearly sunset. The whole western sky was a mass of color, whipped-cream clouds tinted in shades of pink and mauve and orange where they were not snowy white. “It is beautiful!” he exclaimed.

“It’s just clouds. Probably they’re from the storm you saw in the Inuit Commonwealth,” Marguery said practically. Then she said curiously, “Haven’t you ever seen clouds before?”

“We don’t have them in the Hakh’hli ship, you know. There isn’t even a word for them in Hakh’hli; when the Hakh’hli talk about them they say, ‘ita’hekh na’hnotta ‘ha,’ which means, let’s see, ‘liquid-phase particles suspended in gaseous phase.’ ”

“That’s interesting,” Marguery said. “I hope you’ll teach me some other Hakh’hli words.”

“With pleasure,” he said, and then surprised himself with a yawn. He was sleepy, after all. He ventured, “Will I see you tomorrow?” he asked.

“Of course you will. I’m your personal escort, Sandy. You’ll be seeing a lot of me for a long time.”

He smiled gratefully. “Then let me go back to the hotel; I’ll have cookies and milk with Polly and Obie.”

And, he thought, there was something else he really wanted to do, for a poem was beginning to take shape in his mind.

Chapter 10

The chlorofluorocarbons don’t just trap heat. They also eat ozone. Everyone has known that this is true since the middle of the twentieth century, but of course human beings didn’t let that stop anything. They kept right on manufacturing them and pouring them into the air. After all, they were very profitable to make. The relevant figure-of-merit equation for human behavior has always read “$1 (now) >1 human life (later).” So the flood of ultraviolet over three-quarters of a century has taken its toll. Cloud-covered Alaskan trees have mostly survived (except where killed by acid rain). Clear-skied Scandinavian ones have not. The blistering sunlight has combined with the scourging thermal winds to damage most of the world’s most fertile farmlands. Still, the arable lands that are left are now quite adequate to feed the world’s population, for the simple reason that the human population is a lot lower than it used to be. The things that have helped reduce Earth’s population to a manageable size include melting ice inundating the land, destruction of ozone, acid rain, dust bowl-making winds—and, oh, yes, one other thing. The other thing isn’t around any more—because it has burned itself out—but it was a remarkably efficient population-control device in its time. Its name was AIDS.

When Marguery Darp tapped at Sandy’s door the next morning he was already awake. He had been up for hours. He had spent the time exploring the novelties of his room, practicing with the curious gadgets in the bathroom, and staring at the sights visible out the window. Most of all, he had been busy with a surprise for Marguery.

He would have given it to her the moment he saw her, but he had no chance. She arrived in haste, apologized for being late, and hustled him over to the television studio for a person-to-person talk to the Hakh’hli ship itself. He decided to save the surprise. It was a pleasure he could afford to postpone, because he had plenty of other pleasures going for him. Sandy’s second day on Earth was even more joyous than the first. It was less scary, because he had learned at least the rudiments of Earthly behavior; he had conquered Earthly toilets, elevators, even “shopping,” and besides, at some point he could bring out the surprise he had in his pocket for the woman he loved.

When they got to the studio, his Hakh’hli cohort-mates were less joyous. They were standing in the lobby with their own escorts, Hamilton Boyle and the woman named Miriam Zuckerman. “I’m hungry,” Obie wailed as soon as he saw Sandy. “Polly says we can’t have midday meal yet, but I’ve been up for hours.”

“It isn’t time yet,” Polly said crossly. She, too, was suffering from those long human-Earth days that never seemed to end.

Obie was not consoled. “We should‘ve started practicing living by this dumb kind of time long ago,” he complained.

“You’ll get used to it,” Sandy reassured him, although in fact he was a long way from being used to it himself. In his case it didn’t seem to matter. He felt as though he didn’t need sleep at all. When Hamilton Boyle looked at his watch and said there was time before the broadcast for them all to get some “breakfast,” he assented eagerly.

At the door of the hotel, Boyle stopped them. “Hats on, everybody?” he asked, checking them. “Good. And one other thing. The ultraviolet probably isn’t good for your eyes, either, so Miriam has something for you.”

What the woman named Miriam Zuckerman had were shiny-faced glasses—“sunglasses,” she called them—a large-sized pair for Sandy and two even larger, specially built ones for the two Hakh‘hli that fitted around their heads with an elastic strap. Marguery helped Sandy on with his and paused, gazing at his ear.

“What’s that?” she asked.

He said, embarrassed, “I guess you’d call it a ‘hearing aid.’ I’m kind of deaf, actually. It’s because—well, there’s a pressure difference between Earth and the ship standard atmosphere, you see, and we kept our quarters at the Earth level. So going in and out hurt my ears when I was little, and the Hakh’hli had to fix me up with this.”

“Interesting,” said Boyle. “Mind if we take a look at your ear later on? We have some pretty good doctors for things like that.”

“We Hakh’hli have excellent doctors,” Polly said frostily.

“Oh, no doubt. But perhaps ours have had more experience with human medicine, don’t you think? Anyway, let’s go to the restaurant.”

“I’d rather have cookies and milk in our room,” Obie said wistfully.

“It is not yet time for cookies and milk,” Polly rebuked him. “If you are really hungry you can try some of this Earth food; it will be good to discover if you can digest it.”

“Aren’t you going to try some?” Hamilton Boyle asked politely. “The biologists say we have about the same kind of metabolism, you know.”

Polly looked at him thoughtfully. “And how do your biologists know that?” she asked.

He looked apologetic. “Well, of course, we’ve tested the food samples Lysander was kind enough to give us.”

“Indeed!” said Polly, gazing hard at Sandy. “No matter. We will discuss that another time; but I am not prepared to experiment on myself. An astronomer like Oberon can be spared, but I am in charge of this expedition. I, at least, am not expendable.”

From every side the sensory inputs assailed Sandy—unfamiliar, tantalizing, mysterious—Earthly. He delighted in the smells of the Earth: sweat, perfume, feet, cinnamon, fresh-brewed coffee, pine trees, sewage, roses, gardenias, pepper, bakery bread, roasting meat, boiling cabbage, stepped-on excrement of dogs, fresh-cut grass, laundered clothes, hot oil, wet paving. He was thrilled by the colors of Earth: mountains that were green, brown, white-topped, rust red, mud gray. Human skin in chocolate, olive, pink, black that was almost purple-blue, pale that was almost white. It had never occurred to him that the Hakh’hli were color-deprived until he saw the cars and trucks, from white to cobalt blue and fire red and sunshine yellow; the clothing in every hue and pattern; the signs that flashed (even in daylight!) in every spectrum hue.

Most of all it was the people who thrilled him—pausing to stare, leaning out of windows to gape, calling friendly hellos as they passed. Most of all, of course, it was one particular person. When they crossed a street Marguery courteously took Sandy’s hand. Her touch made him shiver. He didn’t let go of her hand even when they were safely on the other side. Marguery gave him a curious, unsmiling look. But she didn’t resist, and he held her hand all the way to the revolving door of the restaurant, when she gently disengaged herself to let him go through first.

They were expected. The waitress led them at once to a table for six—four chairs and two empty spaces for Polly and Oberon. Around them other breakfasters peered curiously from their tables as the two Hakh’hli arranged themselves, squatting comfortably enough on the floor, their heads at about the same level as the humans.

The variety of Earth food was baffling. There was a whole “breakfast” menu and a quite separate one for “lunch”; Hamilton Boyle explained that they could choose from either one. Neither Sandy nor the Hakh’hli had ever had the necessity of choosing what to eat at any meal. Sandy floundered. All the names of things were familiar—well, reasonably familiar. Though what could “Eggs Benedict” or “avocado melt” be? He had no trouble recognizing such things as hamburgers, fries, milk shakes, fudge, ice cream, and cheese sandwiches. But when the three escorts chose for themselves and the dishes arrived they offered samples, and none of the things tasted anything like the practice foods they had eaten on the ship. Certainly none of them were at all like ordinary shipfare. Hippolyta refused to touch any of them; she had brought a fistful of shipfare biscuits in her pouch and munched them doggedly.

Sandy was more daring—or more stubborn. After all, why should human fare be alien to him when he was human? It wasn’t easy, though, until Marguery came to his aid. He let her order for him. Gratefully he found that he could manage the plain boiled potatoes she chose, and graduated from that to dry toast. But everything else he sampled only a nibble at a time, and had to force himself that far.

Oberon was more daring. He had a dozen different things spread before him on the table—a Western omelette, an avocado stuffed with crabmeat, a hamburger, a “Texas chili dog”; Sandy lost track of the names. Obie managed to eat some of the hamburger, but everything else was too startlingly strange. He wheedled a few biscuits from Polly and chewed them morosely. But he cheered up when the waitress brought them “dessert.” It was called “ice cream.” His first tentative spoonful made his eyes pop in surprise, but then he declared it delicious. “It’s cold,” he cried in pleased surprise. “I never heard of eating things that had been refrigerated, but it’s good.”

“If it doesn’t poison you,” Polly said darkly.

ChinTekki-tho’s broadcast from the interstellar ship came to them through a mixture of human and Hakh’hli technology. The ship’s transmission went to the communications equipment in the lander, back in the Inuit Commonwealth. There a human camera inside the lander was to pick the picture up from the lander’s screens to retransmit to all the human world. When Polly heard Bottom explaining the setup she cried sharply, in Hakh’hli, “But that is wrong and not at all advisable! You were given no authority to permit humans to enter our vessel!”

“You are incorrect and not accurate,” Bottom said smugly. “Authorization came from ChinTekki-tho himself.”

“But that should not happen!” Polly began in indignation, and then collected herself. She turned to the humans in the studio and, weeping a friendly tear, said, “I was simply confirming the arrangements with our cohort-mates. Everything is prepared. You will be addressed by our personal leader, the Senior ChinTekki-tho.”

“We’re honored,” Hamilton Boyle said politely. “Of course, we wondered why the Hakh’hli didn’t simply transmit directly to our own Earth stations, instead of going through your landing ship.”

“That was undoubtedly a decision of the Major Seniors,” Polly explained. “They surely had an excellent reason. They always do.”

In the screen, Bottom turned to listen to something, then turned back. “That was the twelfth-twelfth warning,” he said into the camera. “ChinTekki-tho is almost ready to speak.”

And then the picture on the screens in the studio switched to the lander’s own receivers.

It was certainly not a good picture. In spite of the best efforts of humans and Hakh’hli the broadcast systems were not very compatible, and annoying moire figures kept creeping across the screen in pale rainbow tints. But Sandy immediately recognized their old teacher as he beamed out at them.

“Greetings,” ChinTekki-tho said in his precise English, weeping gladly. “It is a very great honor to be the first Senior of the Hakh’hli to speak to our friends and brothers, the human beings of Earth. As our friends in the first landing group have already informed you, we come to you in peace and friendship. Just as you humans do, we Hakh’hli have a tradition that a visitor brings gifts to his hosts,”—Sandy frowned suddenly, since he had never heard of that tradition; but Polly made a quick pinching gesture and he was silent—“and so we have first given you the gift of a member of your own race, John William Washington, known better to his Hakh’hli friends here as Lysander, restored to his native world by us in proof of our good intentions.” Then ChinTekki-tho beamed and hunched himself closer to the camera. “Are you in good health, Lysander?” he inquired. “Are you pleased to be with your own people again?”

Sandy felt Polly’s eyes boring into him. He said at once, respectfully. “It’s wonderful, ChinTekki-tho. I’m very happy here.”

He waited for a response. It took a few moments to arrive, while the Senior gazed amiably into the screen. Of course, Sandy thought; the ship was a good long distance away, and even radio signals at the speed of light took appreciable time for the round trip. Then ChinTekki-tho waggled his head. “That is good, Lysander. Now let me speak of other things. There are many other gifts we Hakh’hli wish to offer the people of Earth. I will describe only a few of them. We are aware of some of your problems. We have certain techniques for dealing with radioactive and other kinds of pollution which we will gladly put at your disposal. We also have ways of gene-splicing new kinds of vegetation to seed your devastated forests and help to redress the carbon dioxide imbalance.”

ChinTekki-tho wept a charitable tear, as he allowed this to sink in for his human audience. Then he added, “There is also the question of energy. The drive engines of our ship produce enormous quantities of energy. We are willing to convert this into electricity and beam it down to the surface of your planet, wherever you direct. This is a free gift. All you need to do is put up receivers for it. Then there is the device we call an ‘electromagnetic accelerator.’ I believe that your own term is ‘railgun.’ With this as a launcher you will be able to put satellites into space again. They will go through the debris orbit so rapidly that no more than from two- to five-twelfths of them will be destroyed. This is acceptably low, since the capsules themselves require no engines or fuel, thus making them so cheap that losses up to six-twelfths or more can easily be tolerated.”

He paused for a moment again, beaming. “Finally,” he said, “we have much knowledge of scientific matters which your own scientists may not have discovered as yet. And, because our ship has traveled so far and observed so much, we have firsthand knowledge of many other stellar systems. All this we will put at your disposal. For a beginning, let me now display some of the astronomical records from our archives.”

And then ChinTekki-tho disappeared from the screen, and it began to show pictures—poor quality ones, unfortunately, because of the discrepancies between human and Hakh’hli broadcasting technology, but nevertheless pictures no Earthly astronomer had ever seen.

ChinTekki-tho’s voice described what they were seeing as the views unfolded. “This is the star you call Alpha Centauri from no more than one thousand radii away. These display the planetoids of the star Epsilon Eridani—as you see there are many of them, but all small and without significant atmospheres. Our colleague Oberon can tell you more of all these things. Now we are seeing the pictures of your own Sun and planets and the Earth itself as our ship approached.”

The astronomical pictures winked away and ChinTekki-tho reappeared. “This is only a beginning, my friends of Earth,” he said. “My dear student, Oberon, is a certified astronomical specialist.” In the studio Obie happily gazed around at the audience, waggling his head in confirmation. “He has with him a library of data in the memory stores of the lander and ten thousand times as much at his command on the big ship itself. He will supply you with as much astronomical data as you can wish. And our other experts also will instruct your specialists in their own areas; and all this we give you as our guest present.” He paused for a moment, beaming into the camera. “And now,” he said, “I will leave you for the moment. But we will speak again—many times—in this new age of shared knowledge and friendship that has opened up for us all.”

The image disappeared. Marguery sighed and uncrossed her legs. “You know,” she said conversationally, “it’s still hard to believe.”

“Believe it,” Sandy said smugly. “The Hakh’hli have all sorts of things they can give you—us, I mean,” he added quickly.

Hamilton Boyle was looking at him quizzically. “I’m sure of that,” he said. “I wonder what they’re going to want in return?”

When the broadcast was over the two Hakh’hli hurried back to the hotel room for their midday meal. “What about you?” Marguery asked Sandy. “Are you hungry? Would you like to have a drink first?”

He hesitated, not because he was in any doubt about what he wanted to do—he wanted to be alone with Marguery Darp, the sooner the better—but because he wasn’t sure of the best way to arrange it. “Do you mean a milk shake?” he ventured.

“I was thinking more of a different kind of drink,” she said, grinning, and took him to the rooftop cafe.

When Sandy discovered that a “different kind of drink” involved alcohol he was startled. “But alcohol’s a poison, isn’t it?”

“Well, I suppose it is,” Marguery agreed. “But it’s a special kind of a poison. It helps relax people, you know? And it’s supposed to help your appetite, too, to have a drink before a meal. Look. We’ll get you a spritzer—that’s just white wine and soda water—not very much wine, all right?”

The magic word for Sandy was “wine.” “Oh, yes,” he said enthusiastically. A glass of wine or two would be just about right to set the scene for his surprise, for he knew that in human affairs wine was inextricably linked with romance. But when the glass came and he tasted it, he looked up at Marguery in pained surprise. “It tastes spoiled,” he said.

“It isn’t spoiled. It’s fermented. That’s how wine is made,” she told him.

“Aren’t fermented and spoiled the same thing?” He didn’t press the point. He was determined to do all the things that human males did in pursuit of human females. The second sip tasted as bad as the first, but then he began to become aware that a sort of inner warmth flowed from the drink. He decided he could get used to it.

He reached for the surprise in his pocket, preparing to smile, but Marguery was getting up. “Let’s go out on the balcony,” she said. “There’s a nice view.”

That was true. He looked around at the town of Dawson and the countryside so near beyond it. Everything seemed propitious for his surprise. As she sat down he remained standing. “Marguery,” he began, “I have something to—ouch!”

He swatted at his neck. When he pulled his hand away there was a drop of blood on it. “What was that?” he demanded.

She inspected his hand. “A mosquito, I guess,” she said, sympathetically. “That was just bad luck; there aren’t usually any up this high. But we’ve had a lot of them these past years. The birds used to eat them, but the birds got pretty well decimated in the bad years, just like us. What was it you were going to say?”

He sat down, rubbing his neck. “Just that I have something to give you,” he said, scowling. He had planned a more graceful presentation, but his neck really itched.

Marguery took the piece of paper he handed her and glanced at it curiously. It was the poem he had written for her that morning:

O my

very

Dear sweet Marguery!

How I desire to love

All the parts of you

The sweet limbs yes

The big breasts yes

The lips & eyes yes

The other parts yes

And all the rest yes

 Love yes!

 Love yes!

 Love yes!

 Love you!

 Yes! You!

“My God,” she said, looking up at him.

He asked eagerly. “Do you like it?”

She didn’t answer right away. She read it over again carefully, then gave him a sidelong look. “Is that supposed to be a picture of me?”

“Well, no, Marguery,” he said, embarrassed. “It’s not a picture. That’s not how Hakh’hli poems go. It’s just supposed to sort of suggest you.”

“You made me look like a man.”

“Oh, but no! Not at all! You don’t look like a man in the least, dear Marguery. If I’ve offended you in any way—”

She put a finger across his lips, laughing. “Sandy, you haven’t offended me. That’s really nice, in fact. I don’t think anybody ever wrote a poem for me before. Only—”

He waited humbly for what was to come. “Yes?”

She bit her lip. “Well, the thing is—I guess I probably should have mentioned it before. I’m married, you see.”

He stared up at her in horror. “Oh, Marguery!” he whispered.

She seemed to be displeased. “Well, you don’t have to take it that hard.”

“Oh, but I do! I had no idea that you were a ‘married’ person. Can you possibly forgive me?”

“Oh, hell, Sandy! Of course I forgive you. There’s no law against hitting on somebody, even if they’re married. Especially if you don’t know they are. It’s really kind of flattering. In fact, I appreciate it.”

“Thank you,” he said gratefully. “I promise I won’t do it again. After all, there are plenty of other Female Hu—of other attractive women around for me to, uh, ‘hit on.’ ”

She didn’t look pleased at that. In fact, she was scowling. “Look, Sandy, slow down a minute, will you?” she commanded. “You’re a nice guy. I like you. There’s no reason to jump into something, like.”

He said simply, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I mean there’s no hurry. We’ve got plenty of time.”

He was puzzled. “But you said you were married?”

“Well, I am,” she said shortly. She picked up her drink and took a thoughtful swallow, while Lysander gazed at her in bafflement. “Only,” she added, “I’m not really working at being married. I haven’t even seen Dave for three or four months.”

“Dave? Is that your ‘husband’?”

She thought that over. “In a manner of speaking. It’s pretty much in the past tense, though. Look,” she said, putting down her glass. “Dave and I got married in college, seven years ago. He was a football player—could’ve done basketball if he wanted to, because he’s seven feet two. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a pretty big woman, and there aren’t that many men that go for my type. You’d think the big ones would, but you look at the couples and you’ll see those seven-footers are always with chicks no more than five feet three.”

“Why is that?” Sandy asked, interested.

“Why? Men! That’s why, because they’re men. Or anyway,” she added fairly. “I don’t know what the reason is, but that’s the way it goes. So when Dave asked me to marry him I didn’t know how long it would be before I got another chance. Anyway, I liked him. And we got along fine, too, while I was still trying to get into astronaut training—maybe he figured that was safe enough, because there weren’t any manned launches—until I signed up with InterSec. Then I think he felt threatened. He didn’t mind me being big, but he really didn’t like the idea of being married to a cop.”

“A cop? You mean, like Kojak?”

She looked puzzled. “What’s a Kojak? I mean a police officer. That’s what InterSec is, you know; it’s the overall security agency for all the commonwealths. Its full name is InterCommonwealth Security. So Dave and I hacked along for a couple of years . . . only the last year or so it hasn’t really worked. He’s asked me if I want a divorce.”

“Oh!” Sandy cried joyously. “I know about divorcées!”

She gave him a hostile look. “You know what about divorcees?” she demanded. “No, don’t answer that. Anyway, I like your poem, and I think I probably like you, too. Only let me think about it a little bit, okay?”

“Oh, right.” Sandy nodded enthusiastically, because that was how they did; the girl never said yes right away, at least not in the kind of movies he liked best, with a lot of tapdancing. But still—

The other thing he knew was that there was a necessary next step.

The wine was helping out his decisions. He leaned closer to her in a preparatory way. She look worried, then comprehending. “Sandy,” she began. “People are watching us inside the bar—”

But when he put an arm around her she didn’t resist.

As a kiss it wasn’t much, apart from the startling discovery Sandy made. He hadn’t expected her mouth to be open, after all! But as a definite first step toward doing It, the sensations were dizzying. He was breathing hard when she broke away, laughing. “Ouch, Sandy,” she said, rubbing her neck. “You don’t know your own strength, do you?”

“Oh,” he said abjectly. “I’m so very sorry—”

“Oh, cut that out! I liked it, only next time don’t squeeze so hard. You’ve heard the expression about being built like a brick, uh, outhouse? Only in your case it isn’t brick, it’s granite slabs.”

He hadn’t even heard the last part of that. “Next time?” he repeated, eyes wide with hope.

She sighed and patted his arm. “I did say next time, didn’t I? Okay, but just remember that next time isn’t this time. Give it a rest. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right around you; that’s my job, after all.”

He sighed and straightened up. “All right,” he said, and took another swig of his drink. The warm feeling was becoming even more pronounced, and it seemed to have spread agreeably to his groin. He was smiling to himself when he saw that Marguery was watching him out of the corner of her eye. “What?” he asked, surprised. He wondered if he had missed an obvious cue.

She hesitated for a moment. Then she asked, “What’s it like?”

He looked at her in puzzlement. “What’s what like?”

“Being in space. Tell me what it’s like. Please. I’ve always wanted to know.”

He sat up straight, peering at her. She was in dead earnest. She wasn’t being flirtatious or even friendly; she was staring at him as though he had some kind of secret that her life depended on, waiting for him to speak.

But he didn’t know what to say. “Oh,” he said, waving a vague hand, “you know.”

“I don’t know,” she said harshly. “I want to know.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry,” he said. “Only there isn’t much to tell about what it’s like. When you’re in the big ship it doesn’t feel like you’re in space. It doesn’t feel like you’re anywhere in particular, just there. The engines are going at the regular G-thrust all the time, and you don’t feel anything except when there’s a course change, like when we went around the Sun—”

“Around the Sun?” she whispered, her eyes wide with fascination. So he had to tell her every bit about it—what they saw in the screens, what they felt as the ship heated up, what it was like when the main engines at last were turned off in Earth orbit, and most of all how it felt as they came down in the lander. “And you flew that thing?” she asked, her eyes bright.

“Oh, no,” he admitted. “They wouldn’t let me do the actual piloting. That was Polly’s job. I know how, though.” And then he had to tell her about the hours in the flight simulator.

Before he finished she had whispered to the waiter, and two new drinks were in front of them—not wine for him this time, but a carbonated soft drink that made him sneeze. “Gesundheit,” she said dreamily. “You know, I trained in one of those things, too.”

He blinked at her. “A Hakh’hli flight simulator? But you weren’t on the ship!”

“No, of course I wasn’t on your ship. How could I be? But we had flight simulators of our own. There are still volunteers to go into space, you know.”

“But they can’t, can they? That ring of debris—”

“Right,” she said bitterly. “We can’t get through the garbage ring. Unmanned satellites, yes. Sometimes. We send them up every once in a while, and about one out of five of them survives for a year without damage. Well, without being totally destroyed, anyway. That’s not bad, for unmanned satellites. We can always make more of them. But it isn’t good enough odds to send up people. People are a lot more fragile. So when I signed up for astronaut training Dave and I had a big fight. He called me a kamikaze—well, actually it was, ‘You kamikaze bitch!’ ”

“Kami—? Oh! You mean, like the Japanese suicide pilots from your World War Two?”

“That’s right. It meant he thought volunteering to go into space was like committing suicide. The way it turned out, he was pretty near right. The first two ships they launched did, in fact, kill their crews. Four astronauts. Two in each ship. People I’d trained with. So they called off the program, and then the rest of us never got up there at all.”

“But you’d still like to?”

She blazed at him. “You’re goddamn well told we’d like to. Not just me! There are millions of kids out there who’d give their right eyes to do what you’ve done—and hundreds of millions of grownups who’d kill you in a hot minute to take your place.”

“Really?” he asked, alarmed. “But that wouldn’t work, Marguery. The Hakh’hli wouldn’t be fooled. They’d know right away—”

He stopped, because she was laughing at him. “I’m sorry, Sandy,” she said. “I didn’t mean that literally. But I didn’t exactly not mean it, either, only I don’t mean you should worry about somebody actually trying it. No one will.”

“I didn’t really think anyone would,” he assured her, almost truthfully.

“But don’t think the human race isn’t interested in space! In fact, there’s going to be an astronomical convention in York next week. They’re probably going to ask all three of you to come to it, so they can see the pictures and listen to you talk—and, I guess, most of all just to be in the same room with somebody who’s been there.”

Sandy took a thoughtful sip of his drink. The fizziness in his nose stopped just short of being actually painful; he decided he liked it. “Marguery?” he asked. “How did you get into such a mess?”

“Mess?”

“The mess in the world. The debris in space. And letting things warm up so the ocean levels went up, depleting the ozone layer, acid rain. All those things. How did you human beings let it all get so bad?”

“Us human beings? And what are you?” she demanded harshly. “Chopped chicken liver?” And then, as he opened his mouth for a puzzled question, she shook her head. “Never mind. I know what you mean.” She reflected for a minute. “Well, I guess the only answer is that the old people didn’t know they were doing wrong. Or anyway the ones that did know it was wrong didn’t count, and the ones that counted didn’t care.”

“They didn’t know war was wrong?”

“Oh, well,” she said doubtfully. “I guess they knew that, all right, only they got themselves into a place where it just happened. There was a place called the Near East—”

“Near to what?”

“That’s just what it was called, Sandy, the ‘Near East.’ Anyway, they had a little war, only they got to using what they called ‘tactical nukes.’ And then people outside that part of the world got involved, and then the big countries began using the big nuclear missiles. On each other. Well, the orbital defenses took care of most of them, but it was really a mess, you know.”

“I wish I did know,” Sandy said wistfully. “We stopped getting your broadcasts along about then, you know.”

“Really? Well, all right, I guess I can fill you in. It’s a long time ago, but I think I know most of it, anyway. About five percent of the nukes got through. A submarine-launched one took out Washington, D.C.—that was where the government was then—and a bunch landed in New Mexico and Arizona and so on, but, really, it wasn’t a big nuclear war. I think altogether only fifteen warheads hit their targets. Only that was really all it took, you see. And after that—”

She paused, staring into her drink. Then she said, “Well, things got pretty bad. There were a lot of people sick from radiation, and then it was hard to get food to the cities, and nothing could come at all from the Near East, where it all started, and a lot of fuel came from there . . . and then there was the AIDS. That was bad stuff, Sandy. It was bad around the old United States, but in lots of places it was just, well, there wasn’t anybody left after a while. Before they got the vaccines they’d just send people with it to Africa to die, because everybody there was going to be dying, anyway. Not just from AIDS; from malaria, and typhus, and just plain starvation.” She looked sad. “They had ten times as many people back then. Now Africa’s empty. There’s only about half a billion alive in the whole world. A single country like China or India had a lot more than that all by themselves before the war.”

“Are you telling me that five billion people died?” Sandy gasped.

“Sandy,” she said reasonably, “they’d probably all be dead by now, anyway. And—” She hesitated, then burst out, “And they deserved it, damn them! All of them! The thing I can’t forgive them for is that they shot us out of space, forever!”

Chapter 11

The thing that keeps the human race trapped on the surface of the Earth is its own previous activities in space. Just as has happened often before in human history, the human race has been defeated by its own success. As soon as the first rockets reached Low Earth Orbit they began shedding pieces of themselves. By the 1980s more than seven thousand objects were routinely tracked—pieces the size of a baseball and up, from a wrench dropped by a space-walking astronaut to abandoned fuel tanks the size of a box car. In those days it required a full day’s computing before any Shuttle flight to plot an orbit that would not result in a catastrophic collision with some spinning piece of space junk. But at least the big pieces could be located. The ones too tiny to be tracked were the real killers. At least half a dozen working satellites were by then known to have been damaged or destroyed. Any scrap of metal—any crumb, even a chip of paint—at the velocities of Low Earth Orbit could puncture and even destroy another satellite. But that was only the beginning. Then along came Star Wars. Some people thought the Strategic Defense Initiative wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, it almost did. After the war, all those thousands and thousands of pop-up lasers and killed satellites and “smart rocks” and exploded missile parts filled the Low Earth Orbit volume with an impenetrable spinning mine field of junk. So space travel came to a shuddering stop, just when it had become almost easy. There were places where the minefield was thinner than other places—the least dangerous were above the planet’s poles—but even in the thinnest places only armored satellites could hope to get through, at great cost in launch mass because of their great weight and the fact that they had to be launched without help from the Earth’s spin. Even those stayed operational only as long as it took for some colliding scraps of metal, plastic, or paint to pit their mirrors and fry their instrumentation. Of manned flights after that, there were none at all. Not successful ones, anyway. Not for more than half a century, and none likely until the junk orbits decay, a matter of hundreds of years.

The Major Seniors saw how obviously hungry the human race was for space, anything that had to do with space. That was good news for the Major Seniors; they decided to authorize the trip to York Commonwealth.

Polly got the news relayed from the lander by Tanya, and she greeted it, as she greeted most news, with an irritated twitch of the forearm. “But the Major Seniors have not instructed which of us to go and not remain behind,” she complained.

“For this reason,” Tanya said smugly, “it appears you must decide. Their order cannot now be questioned. Ship’s orbit has taken it below Earth horizon and not in range of our transmissions.”

Polly switched off the radio and looked at Obie and Sandy grimly. “Then that is how it will be,” she declared. “Let me see. Obie, you are our astronomical expert, therefore you must go.”

“Oh, pellets!” Obie grumbled. “Do you mean that I am to go alone and not with company?”

“Of course not. You would behave irresponsibly and not with adult Hakh’hli prudence. I myself will accompany you.”

“No, I want a friend,” he said in English. “I want Sandy to come with me.”

Polly glared at him, pinching her thumbs together warningly in air. Obie quivered but belligerently stood his ground. After a moment’s thought Polly gave a shrugging twitch of her forearms and declared grandly, “I decide that that is how it is to be; we will all three voyage to this York. Lysander, instruct your Earth female that this is so.”

“Gladly!” he cried, and hurried out ahead of the others to meet Marguery Darp.

The news seemed to make her happy. In fact, they were all happy. Sandy was pleased because Marguery Darp was pleased. Polly was self-righteously pleased to be doing what the Major Seniors wished of her. And Obie—well, Obie had decided to be ecstatic. At the curbside, he showed it with a whole new repertory of cries and cavorting. “New York, New York,” he shouted, leaping to the top of the hotel marquee and down again. “Oh, Sandy! We will have so much fun on the Great White Way! We will give our regards to Broadway, and remember everyone to Herald Square—but what,” he asked, coming breathlessly down beside Marguery Darp, “is a ‘Herald Square’?”

“I think it was an old street corner in New York City,” she said. “I guess it’s underwater now.” And then, to Sandy, she said, “I’m really pleased. Hudson City’s a great town. I have a place there myself, and it’ll be fun showing you around.”

“Thank you,” Sandy said promptly. “I too think it will be fun, only—” He hesitated, swallowing. “Only, will it be necessary to travel again in that very rapid aircraft of yours?”

She patted his arm. “Not at all. We don’t use those vertical-takeoff planes for long distances; they use too much fuel, even if it’s only hydrogen. No. We’ll go by blimp. It’s a little over a twenty-four-hour trip, and I promise you’ll love it. It’s almost like a cruise.”

“A cruise? Like ‘Love Boat’?”

She frowned. “I don’t know what ‘Love Boat’ is, and you’re not starting that again, are you? Because we’ve got a busy day today. If you’re all going off to York, there are about a hundred people here in Dawson who are dying to ask you questions.”

Obie made a face. Sandy didn’t, because he did not want to be undignified in Marguery Darp’s presence, but all the same he complained, “They’re always asking us questions. Don’t we get any time off?”

“This evening,” she said firmly. “After all your interviews. We’ll have a kind of a bon voyage party, up on the rooftop. All right? But now let’s get busy.”

Busy they certainly were. For the morning’s interrogation they were all three confronted by half a dozen polite, insistent questioners. And the questions they asked! Why did the Hakh’hli freeze their eggs instead of letting them hatch? What were the names of the Earth films shown to the entire ship’s company? What was the Hakh’hli word for “magnetic repeller”? What would happen if, say, something like a little asteroid struck the interstellar ship in its drive compartment? Even Polly shivered when she was asked that last one. “It would be terrible,” she said, presenting her tail to be licked in sympathy (but none of the humans understood the gesture, and Obie and Sandy were too far away). “It would wreck the ship.”

It was a sour note to end the morning’s questioning. Polly muttered darkly that she didn’t see how she could even eat after that, but of course she and Obie did. Sandy was not so lucky. Marguery Darp had disappeared on some errand, and all he had was a sandwich before the afternoon session began.

This time he was questioned alone, by three separate waves of interrogators. Most of them he had never seen before, and though they unfailingly told him their names and, wincing, accepted a handshake of greeting, he could not tell them apart. The first batch wanted to hear his personal story, starting with the Hakh’hli discovery of his parents’ spaceship. They took a full hour to cover every detail of his childhood, his education, and his relationships with the other members of his cohort—with ChinTekki-tho and MyThara, too. It was almost the first time Sandy had given his dear, lost nursemaid a thought since the lander pulled away from the interstellar ship, and he almost wept with sorrow and guilt. The second batch was more specific. In his training, they said, he had spoken of games and contests. Were any of those, well, military? (Oh, no, he assured them; the wrestlers used to fight to the death, but even they didn’t do that any more.) And no one used ‘weapons’? (Of course not! Why would a Hakh’hli use a ‘weapon’ against another Hakh’hli?) Not even ‘police’? (But of course not again! The Hakh'hli didn’t have ‘police’— what would they be needed for? The Major Seniors did not permit ‘crime,’ and no Hakh’hli would go against the wishes of the Major Seniors.)

After the first two shifts of questioners, the third was almost like a casual chat. One count in that shift’s favor was that Marguery Darp was a member. She sat down in front of him and said simply, “We want to know everything there is to know about the Hakh’hli, Sandy. So please just start at the beginning—whatever you think the beginning is—and tell us whatever you think we ought to know.”

That was easy enough. The more Sandy saw of Marguery Darp the easier he found her to talk to. He simply sat there, telling her everything he could think of about Hakh’hli and titch’hik and the way the magnetic repellers made the lander lurch as they came in and the fact that his mother, or anyway some part of his mother, was still alive, or in a manner of speaking alive, in the genetics files on the interstellar ship; and she listened. She listened very well. She didn’t speak, except now and then to give an encouraging grunt or a “Then what happened?” but her broad, strong, interested face spoke for her.

It was almost an annoyance when there was a knock on the door. Hamilton Boyle leaned in to report that the two Hakh’hli were finished with the afternoon’s interrogation; they were having their “cookies and milk,” and did Sandy want to go with them? Marguery answered for him. “Oh, I don’t think so, Ham. We’ll go upstairs and get a drink until they’re ready to join us—if Sandy doesn’t mind.”

Well, of course he didn’t mind. In fact, it was close to perfect. “What would you like?” Marguery asked as they found a table, warm in the afternoon sun. “I’m going to have a cup of coffee. Care to try one?”

“Certainly,” he said, bracing himself for another ordeal by ingestion but pleased for a chance to try to redeem himself for that unisex poem. As the waitress brought the two cups and the silver pot, he reached for his pocket, but as he opened his mouth to speak Polly and Oberon appeared in the doorway. He scowled at them. “I didn’t expect you so soon,” he said accusingly.

“We wouldn’t be here if the Earth people were behaving properly,” Polly said disagreeably, advancing out into the sunshine of the patio. She had every appearance of being in a pinching mood.

“What’s the matter?” Sandy asked.

She bore down on Marguery Darp. She said, “I’ve been talking to our cohort-mates. Do you know that some of your Earth people have been taking ‘souvenirs’?”

Marguery looked astonished. “What do you mean, souvenirs?”

“They’ve stolen pieces of the lander shield. Tanya says big chunks of it have been cut away while they were in stun time.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Marguery said contritely. “Did you mention it to Hamilton Boyle?”

“I haven’t seen Hamilton Boyle since I discovered the crime. You must deal with it. It is an offense to the Hakh’hli to steal parts of our lander. I want it stopped.”

Obie put in, “I told her it didn’t matter, Sandy. It was only the old shield anyway; it was all going to be replaced.” He ducked as Polly turned toward him, but added defensively, “Well, it’s the truth.”

Marguery Darp said firmly, “No, Obie, she’s right. That was a bad thing to do, and I’ll see that it doesn’t happen any more. I apologize, Polly.”

Polly flounced. “And that’s not all of it. Your Boyle person has been grilling me all afternoon about how the lander works, what kind of fuel we use, whether we can take off again without refueling—it is very tiring, to be asked so many questions! And that other person has been doing the same to Oberon, and Titania and Bottom and Helena and Demetrius have all been interrogated. We come in friendship! We should not be cross-examined like Perry Mason!”

“Who’s Perry Mason?” Marguery asked; and then said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’re all so very curious about you, uh, you very advanced people from space.”

Sandy decided to get into the conversation. “It’s all right, Marguery. We understand that. If you have any other questions, ask them.”

Marguery hesitated, nibbling at her lower lip and smiling a little. “You’re sure you’re not too tired?”

“Of course not!”

“Well—” She thought for a moment, then smiled apologetically. “There is one little thing that I’ve been wondering about. It’s silly, really, but—your names.”

She stopped there. Waiting for the question, Sandy said encouragingly. “Yes? What about them?”

“Well, this is really unofficial. Just my own curiosity, but they don’t sound like Hakh’hli names or anything, do they? Where did you get them?”

“Oh, our names,” Sandy said, flushing. “Well, they’re just a kind of a joke, you know.”

And Obie jumped in, relaxed now that Polly had stopped making pinching motions with her thumbs. “Yes, a kind of a joke,” he said happily. “They come from a play. An Earth play; we all did it, years ago. We performed it for the whole ship! They were fascinated! It was a great hit; of course, they didn’t understand the language—it was the first we did in English. Sandy? Can we show her? Polly?”

“Show me what?” Marguery Darp asked, sounding a little apprehensive.

“We can’t. We don’t have Theseus here,” Sandy objected.

Obie wriggled in protest. “We don’t need him. I know his lines! And I’m sure Polly knows her own part still, and maybe you could do Egeus—here, let’s do it!”

Obie leaped, laughing, to the top of a parapet and began to declaim:

“Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace. Four anxious days bring in

Another moon, but oh, methinks, how slow

This old moon wanes, like to a step-dame or a dowager,

Long withering out a young man’s revenues.

“Now you, Polly,” he coaxed.

Polly looked sullen, but played along. “All right,” she sighed.

“Four days will quickly steep themselves in night.

Four nights will quickly dream away the time.

And then the moon, like to a silver bow

New-bent in heaven, shall behold

The night of our solemnities.”

As Sandy opened his mouth, trying to remember the next lines for Egeus, Marguery said, startled, “But that’s Shakespeare!”

“Right, right!” Obie cried happily, leaping down beside her. “It’s called A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oh, it was wonderful, the way we did it. Shall we go on?”

But all Sandy could remember of Egeus’s part was “Full of vexation come I, with complaint against my child, my daughter Hermia,” and then he stalled.

“Aw, try,” Obie coaxed. Sandy shook his head. “Well, we could get the others on the radio,” he offered wistfully, but Marguery shook her head, marveling.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “I see the point. Really, that’s wonderful. Is that how you all learned English?”

“One of the ways. That was the best, only ChinTekki-tho got angry at MyThara for getting us to do it. He said we were learning the wrong dialect.”

“We really weren’t,” Sandy said, loyal to MyThara still. “We all knew the difference.”

“But we did keep those names,” Obie said. “Which is lucky for you, Marguery Darp, because you wouldn’t want to have to learn our Hakh’hli ones. Don’t you want to do just a little more, Polly?”

Polly waggled her forearm negatively. “I’m going back to tell Tanya you said that the vandalism would be stopped,” she told Sandy frostily, “so she can advise ChinTekki-tho. Are you coming with me, Obie?”

“No, no! I’m going to stay here and talk to Marguery about New York New York—Times Square, Harlem, Wall Street—” Weeping, he leaped away, singing to himself.

Marguery stared after him. “What did he mean about your real names?” she asked Sandy.

He shifted position, trying to follow Obie as he leaped happily around the almost-empty sun deck. “Well, the Hakh’hli names tell a lot about the person,” he began, and explained about the way the name reflected lineage and status in the Hakh’hli society; and how the numbers that followed the names reflected the egg batches in storage, which led inevitably to the Hakh’hli habit of freezing eggs as soon as they were laid, so as not to overburden the ship’s carrying capacity.

“And Polly says that if you human beings had done that,” Obie called from three tables away, “you wouldn’t have got yourselves into all this trouble.”

“Thank her for her good advice,” Marguery said, which caused Sandy to give her a sharp look. The words and the tone had not matched.

“That’s irony, right?” he asked.

She started to answer, then sneezed instead. Sandy, startled, asked, “Are you all right?”

“Just say gesundheit, all right? I’m fine. What were you asking me?”

“I said—”

“No, now I remember what you said,” she interrupted. “Yes, Sandy, that was irony. There’s something about your friend Polly that gets my nose out of joint.”

He stared at her. “Your nose out of—?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! I just mean she irritates me. I’m sorry about that.”

“Why would you be sorry? She irritates me, too. She irritates all of us; she’s always been the bossiest one in the cohort.”

“Oh, really?” Marguery seemed to relax. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t like to think that all the Hakh’hli were as snotty as she is.”

“ ‘Snotty’?”

“Mean, uh, well, unlikeable. As a matter of fact,” she added, looking to the far end of the terrace, where Obie was practicing high jumps, “I do like Obie. He’s a little, ah, youthful, isn’t he? But he’s cute.”

“He’s my best friend,” Sandy said. He thought about asking exactly what “cute” meant in that context and decided against it. “He and I, well, we’ve been together all our lives, you know—” And he yawned.

“Aren’t you getting enough sleep?”

“I just can’t sleep as long as you people do,” he said defensively. “We only sleep two twelfth-days, back on the ship, and it’s hard to stay in bed longer than that. Anyway,” he added, “I was awake last night doing something.”

“Oh?”

“It’s another poem,” he said, and passed the paper over to her.

This

is to

my

dearest Marguery

whom I much love

with all my sins

of which I do hope

there will be shared

great numbers, jointly

undertaken with Marguery

herself, happily and often

 Love Yes!

 Love Yes!

 Love Yes!

 Love You!

 Yes! You!

She gave him an ambiguous look and thought for a moment before speaking.

“Well, I guess you got the gender right this time, anyway,” she commented at last, handing it back.

Sandy had hoped for more. “Don’t you like it?”

She looked at him with fond exasperation. “Well, hell, of course I like it. Kind of. You do come right to the point, don’t you? But anybody would like having a poem written to her, wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know. I hoped so.”

“Well, she would. I would. Only—” She hesitated. “Only, look, Sandy, this is all very confusing, you know? I’ve got a job to do, and I don’t want to be mixed up.”

“No more kissing, you mean?” Sandy asked doubtfully.

She laughed, and then ducked as Obie landed near her. He peered over her shoulder and then said, “He finally showed the poem to you?”

“He showed it to me, all right.”

“I think it’s a really good poem,” Obie said loyally. “For one in English, I mean. He could write a lot better in Hakh’hli if you wanted him to.”

“Why don’t you leave us alone?” Sandy demanded. Obie gave him an injured look but leaped away. Sandy said apologetically to Marguery Darp, “He’s pretty excited about going to New York.”

“It isn’t exactly ‘New York’ any more, Sandy—”

“Well, York, then. Or whatever you call it. Anyway, we’ve seen so many old films about it . . . and, really, he’s quite young, you know.” And the funny thing was that when he heard himself say that he realized that he had been thinking it for some time. Marguery’s comment had been right on target. The Hakh’hli of his cohort, with all their rambunctious, playful, heedless, sometimes sulky ways were really rather childish—not at all like John William Washington, who was not only adult but, something no Hakh’hli would ever understand, “in love.”

But Obie heard him. “I am not a child,” he cried, “Look how far I can jump! Could a child do this?”

And, eyes on Sandy, he launched himself to the top of the elevator housing and squatted there, grinning down at them.

“I guess he is a little young,” Sandy said apologetically.

Marguery nodded without comment. Then she looked over Sandy’s shoulder. “Oh, there it is!” she cried. “See it, off to the left there, just above that cloud? It’s our blimp! It’ll stay here overnight, and then we’ll get on it tomorrow for the trip to York.”

Sandy craned his neck to see, delighted. From behind him he heard Obie call, “Here I come!”

And he jumped—his eyes on the blimp, and not on the parapet he was aiming for.

That was a mistake. He misjudged his trajectory—just slightly—too much. He did hit the railing, but he didn’t stop there. Marguery screamed; Sandy shouted and jumped up to reach for the Hakh’hli, but it was too late. Obie, legs scratching in terror as he tried to stop himself, hit the parapet. He bounced and kept right on going, over the edge. They could hear him squealing all the way down to the ground.

Chapter 12

A person falling off the top of a twelve-story building hits the ground at a speed a little faster than seventy miles an hour, and that is easily enough to kill him. A Hakh’hli falling the same distance strikes the ground at the same velocity. True, a Hakh’hli is used to a gravitational force forty percent higher than the Earth’s. A Hakh’hli can survive decelerations that would cripple or kill any Earthman, but even for a Hakh’hli there is a limit. In relative terms Obie’s fall was only as though he had fallen, say, seven or eight stories. But a fall of seven or eight stories is enough to kill either human or Hakh’hli, anyway, and the impact was quite enough to do the job.

“But he was my friend,” Sandy wailed. He could not get out of his mind the picture of Oberon splatted on the sidewalk of Dawson, the eyes wide and empty and the body simply burst open. Twelves of human beings had crowded around to stare, fascination and revulsion mixed. They had no right to gape at Obie, so exposed.

“Of course he was your friend,” Marguery Darp soothed. “Sandy? I know you don’t want to think of such things now, but—well, are there any special Hakh’hli funeral arrangements that should be made?”

“Funeral arrangements?”

“For the disposal of the body,” she said. “They’ve, uh, picked it up in an ambulance, but what do we do now?”

He stared at her. It did not seem the time to remind her what the Hakh’hli used for “funeral” arrangements, especially as there was no possible way to manage them in this place. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Ask Polly.”

“But Polly’s not here,” Marguery pointed out. “She’s in her room, talking to somebody—the people on the big ship, I suppose. And when we asked her she said she didn’t care.”

“Well, she doesn’t,” Sandy muttered. “I don’t suppose any of them do. What do you do here for that kind of thing?”

“It depends. Whatever the family wants. Burial sometimes. Cremation, usually.”

“Burial?” He winced at the thought; Obie’s corpse thrust into the Earth, to rot and decay? He shuddered. “Whatever you think best. Cremation’s all right—but, oh, Marguery, this is terrible!”

When at last Polly came grumpily out of her room she showed little enough interest in what had been done with Obie’s body. It was the future that concerned her. “This is terrible,” she said, in Sandy’s exact words but a context all her own. “HoCheth’ik ti’Koli-kak was our only—what? Oh, Oberon, then. Oberon was our assigned astronomical specialist. ChinTekki-tho says the Major Seniors do not wish to send another one down.”

Marguery asked tentatively, “Does that mean you don’t want to go to York for the conference?”

Polly sniffed and writhed her torso in disgust. “Not at all! The Major Seniors direct that I take Oberon’s place; after all, I am well informed in the area of astronomy, too. So I suppose we might as well go on with it. And anyway,” she added, looking almost amiable for a moment, “I do think it would be interesting to ride in a ‘blimp.’ Don’t you, Sandy?”

But Sandy was too deep in misery to agree.

Chapter 13

If a world traveler of the twentieth century were brought back he would wonder greatly at the map of the Earth. The coastlines are all different. All the land San Francisco and Chicago had stolen from the lake and the bay the waters have won back as they rose. Libya’s Qattara Depression is a brackish lake, half rainwater and half overspill from the Mediterranean Sea. Bermuda is a memory. The polders of the Netherlands are part of the North Sea again, and a sluggish oozing of the lower Mississippi River has drowned out New Orleans—the main channel of the river has long since broken through the dams put up by the Corps of Engineers and forced its way through the Atchafalaya. Hawaii has lost the tourist traps of Waikiki, though there is plenty of the islands left—they began as volcanic mountains, after all. All along the east coast of North America the low, sandy barrier islands are only shoals now. Sharks nose hungrily through the gambling casinos of Atlantic City, and coral grows on the golf courses of Georgia’s sea islands. New York Bay is three times its former size, pocked with islands, and the Statue of Liberty stands with her feet wet up to the ankles. When the ice around the North Pole began to melt it made no difference. It was floating anyway, and so it added nothing to the oceanic water levels. The glaciers were a different matter. But even they were as nothing, nothing at all, compared to what happened when Antarctica lost the Ross Ice Shelf. So the edges of the continents are awash; and in their centers the searing, drying winds have left new dust bowls.

Aboard the blimp, Polly perched on a settee that groaned underneath her weight. She was peering out through the slanted windows at the ground and commenting acidly on what she saw. “Your Earth people,” she commented dispassionately to Sandy, “certainly are wasteful. Look at all this space down here, and hardly anyone using it.”

Sandy didn’t answer. He wasn’t thinking about the faults of Earth humans. He was thinking of his dead friend. Halfway across what had once been the province of Manitoba, he had not yet gotten used to Obie’s loss.

Yet . . . he was on a “blimp,” and the blimp was taking him to new experiences in the world of mankind.

It was certainly an interesting experience. It wasn’t in the least like any of the other forms of transportation he had already experienced. The blimp was helium filled and carried three hundred people with staterooms, music rooms, lavatories, and a dining room. One didn’t sit strapped in a seat on the blimp, one moved around. And yet it wasn’t like the interstellar vessel, either, because it moved underfoot; it throbbed with the noise of its engines and bobbled in the winds that struck it, and most of all it had windows you could look out of to see the ground.

As the blimp found an altitude without much turbulence, Sandy began to get used to the physical sensations, and his mood lightened. When Marguery Darp knocked on the door and invited him to join her for a drink, he accepted, glad enough to get away from Polly; even more glad to have Marguery for company.

They sat side by side on a light, soft settee, gazing out. The trip, Marguery said, would take a day and a half, and the dark of the first night was coming early, because they were heading toward it. Below them the darkening plains rolled past, and Marguery took Sandy’s hand.

“I’m really sorry about what happened to your friend, Oberon,” she said.

He squeezed her hand—gently, as she began to wince. “I know you are. He was my best friend, you know.”

“Yes.” She was silent for a moment, regarding him. Then she said, “Do you want to talk about him?”

“Oh, can I?” And, yes, he discovered, that was exactly what he wanted, very much. He wanted it even more than he wanted to work on the new poem he was meditating—even more than any of the other things he wanted to do with Marguery Darp. And so she listened, quietly sympathetic, while he told her about their childhood on the Hakh’hli ship, and the scrapes they’d gotten into together, and the way Oberon would be his buffer and bodyguard in the roughest of the Hakh’hli games, and how they’d share their “cookies and milk,” sometimes, just off by themselves—and about the funny scene when Oberon came into season with the Major Seniors, and how proud he was to have fertilized the Fourth Major Senior’s eggs. “And I miss him,” he said, squeezing her hand again.

She didn’t wince this time. She squeezed back. Then she said, “There’s something that surprises me. I mean, the other Hakh’hli don’t seem really broken up about it, do they?”

“Well, death isn’t a big thing with the Hakh’hli,” he explained. “See, there was my old teacher—well, maybe you’d call her a nursemaid. Her name was MyThara, and she was pretty nearly a mother to me.” And he told Marguery about the way MyThara had gone uncomplainingly to the titch’hik when the medical examination showed she was wearing out. Marguery shuddered. Sandy said quickly, “That’s the way they are. MyThara felt she was doing the right thing, you know? She was making room for another egg to hatch. Nobody ever really objects when it’s time to die, that I ever heard of. And nobody mourns.”

“But you do, Sandy,” she pointed out.

“But I’m not a Hakh’hli,” he said with pride.

The door opened and Polly stalked into the lounge toward them. “Sandy,” she complained, “it is sleeping time. I wish you would come to bed with me. I’m, what is the word, lonesome!”

“But I don’t want to come to bed with you,” Sandy said reasonably. “I want to be with Marguery.”

Polly licked her tongue out unhappily. “Will she come to bed with us?”

“Certainly not,” Sandy said, flushing. “Polly, you are on Earth now, and you must learn Earth ways. Earth people sleep alone, except during amphylaxis.”

“But I don’t like it,” she wailed. “I miss Obie, too!”

That decided him. He knew that what Polly missed, of course, was only warmth and company in the sleeping tangle. Nevertheless, there was nothing she could have said that would have melted Sandy’s heart more. “I think I should keep her company, just for a while,” he told Marguery Darp. “I’ll be back, I think. Probably.”

But the fact of the matter was that he, too, was tired. These long twenty-four-hour Earth days were taking their toll on him, too. In Polly’s stateroom, his arms around her and her arms around him, he found himself relaxing.

He really wanted to go back to Marguery Darp, too. When Polly’s gentle, hiccoughing snores told him she was asleep he tried gently disengaging himself. He didn’t succeed. Polly moaned and reached out, pulling him back . . .

And the next thing he knew he was waking up next to her, and he knew that a good many hours had passed.

As he moved, Polly snorted a huge sigh and rolled over. He detached himself and scuttled out from under just in time to avoid being crushed. Moving as quietly as he could, he stood up, looking around. The stateroom window was still black. He had no idea of the time. He thought for a moment of lying down next to Polly again, soaking in the warmth of her great, muscular torso; but there was, he thought, the possibility that Marguery Darp was still in the blimp’s lounge, waiting for him to return.

It was a silly thought, and of course it was wrong. No one moved in the narrow passageways of the blimp. The lights were all turned down. The lounge was empty.

Sandy sat down on a window seat, gazing out. The sky was dark, but filled with bright stars. The gentle motion of the blimp wasn’t worrying any more; it was almost comforting. Perhaps he was getting his “sea legs,” Sandy thought, and then leaned forward, perplexed. For a moment he thought he saw another constellation of stars, actually below him, a bright cluster of red and white and green lights.

It wasn’t stars. It could only be another blimp, sliding silently along a thousand feet below them, crossing their track from somewhere to somewhere else.

“Sir?”

He turned around guiltily. A sleepy-eyed crew member was peering at him from the doorway. “Would you care for some coffee, sir?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, please,” he said at once. “With a lot of cream and sugar.”

“Right away, sir,” she said, and hesitated. “I can turn the television on for you, if you like. Or there’s music on the ship system—there are headphones at your seat.”

“Maybe later,” he said politely. He wasn’t quite ready to watch Earthly television. He wasn’t even quite ready to talk to Marguery Darp, he decided, even if she had been available, because there was a lot that he needed to think about. The first, and worst, thing, of course, was Obie. He felt the tingle at the back of his nose that warned him that tears were nearby as he thought about Obie. He didn’t try to restrain them. He was, he realized, probably the only person in the universe who would even consider crying over Obie. Certainly no one on this planet would. Just as certainly, no one on the Hakh’hli ship would mourn, though a few members of the ship’s crew might be interested enough to check the name and lineage of HoCheth’ik ti’Koli-kak 5329 against their own, out of curiosity, to see what sort of kin they might have been.

But Obie was dead.

And Obie was not the first. One after another, the people dearest to Sandy went and died on him—his mother, before he was born; MyThara, going voluntarily to feed the titch’hik; and now Oberon, foolishly showing off and paying for his folly. But he wasn’t the only one who had paid! Sandy had to pay, too! He wasn’t merely grieving for Oberon, he realized; he was definitely angry at him.

When the coffee came, Sandy swallowed the first sweet, thick cup fast enough to make his throat burn, then poured another. The sugar relieved the nagging hunger he hadn’t realized he was feeling. It also, for some trivial reason he could not quite identify, elevated his mood—not a lot, maybe, but to a point where the tears were no longer threatening. Partly, he thought, it might have been the fact that “coffee” contained “caffeine” and “caffeine” was called a “stimulant.” Partly it was a kind of interior pride that he was adjusting so well to Earthly foods and drinks. The next time Marguery suggested a “drink,” he decided, he would be a little more adventurous than diluted wine. He had seen Hamilton Boyle drinking what was called a “Scotch on the rocks,” and if Boyle could enjoy it, Sandy could, too.

He thought, remembering what the crew member had said, that there were other Earthly pleasures for him to practice enjoying. He found the headphones for his seat, managed to get them more or less comfortably in place without squeezing his hearing aid too painfully and, after a little experimentation, found a channel of music that seemed to fit his mood. He lay back, listening. His mind began to blank out. Just by turning his head he could gaze at the bright stars above, and the infrequent lights of some small town sliding by on the ground below, while Tschaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony lulled him back to sleep.

He woke up to the faint murmur of his own voice.

He sat up quickly, pulling away the earphones that had twisted around his neck. He saw Hamilton Boyle standing by the lounge’s big television screen, and on the screen Sandy saw that he himself was describing to an unseen interviewer the Questions Game he and his cohort had spent twenty years playing.

“Oh, sorry,” Boyle said. “Did I wake you?”

It was a silly question. The facts spoke for themselves, but Sandy said politely, “That’s all right.”

“I was just trying to get some news on the television,” Boyle apologized. “Lieutenant Darp will be coming along in a minute. We thought you’d like some breakfast.”

“Oh, yes,” Sandy said eagerly. The window beside him was bright with sunlight. Fleecy clouds were below them, and the warmth of the sun felt good on his skin. He stood up and stretched. “I think I would like to see some ‘news’ too,” he observed.

Boyle grinned. He was a handsome man, Sandy thought. It was hard to believe that he was sixty-two years old, but that was what Marguery had told him. He had thick, pale hair, close cropped, and his face was not lined. It was a little sharp featured, Sandy thought critically, and the man smiled a lot more than there seemed to be any reason for. But he appeared to be willing to be friendly. “You’re most of the news yourself today, you know,” he said. “The only other thing that’s interesting is a reentry—one of the big old satellites is about to deorbit, and there’s some chance it will come down where it can do some damage. But we won’t know about that for sure for a couple of days yet.”

“Does that happen often?” Sandy asked, interested.

“Often enough,” Boyle said shortly, snapping the set off. He didn’t seem to want to pursue the matter, so Sandy changed the subject.

“I didn’t know you had cameras in the room yesterday. When I was talking about my life on the ship, I mean.”