Boyle looked at him speculatively. “You don’t mind, do you? Everyone’s so interested in you.”

“Especially you cops,” Sandy pointed out.

Boyle took a moment to respond, but then he said, easily enough, “Yes, I’m a policeman, more or less. It’s my job to protect society.”

“Like Kojak?”

Boyle’s eyes widened. Then he grinned. “I keep forgetting how many old television shows you’ve seen. But, yes, like Kojak. Like any good cop. I need information, and the best place to get it is from someone on the inside.”

“The inside of what?” Sandy asked. Boyle shrugged. “I don’t know much about cops,” Sandy went on. “Do you still get your information by the—what is it?—the ‘third degree’?”

“I’ve never done that!” Boyle said sharply. Then he added, “I’ve never had to. I admit some cops have, sometimes, but that’s natural enough, isn’t it? Don’t the Hakh’hli ever do anything like that?”

“Never,” Sandy said positively. “I’ve never heard of anything like deliberately inflicting pain, for any reason at all.”

“Not even threatening someone?”

“With pain? No! Do you mean threatening them with death? But that wouldn’t work, either,” he explained. “Hakh’hli don’t fear death the way you do—we do.”

“Yes, that’s what you told Lieutenant Darp,” Boyle agreed. “Therefore—well, suppose one Hakh’hli went crazy. Antisocial. There wouldn’t be any good way of, say, forcing him to tell anything he didn’t want to?”

“I don’t think so. Not by threatening him or torturing him, anyway.”

Boyle seemed to lose interest in the subject. “I wonder what’s holding our breakfast up,” he said, and then smiled. “So you didn’t know we had cameras on you?”

Sandy shrugged. “For that matter,” he added, “until we landed, we didn’t really know if you had TV or not at all anymore. Years ago, the first time the Hakh’hli were in this part of the galaxy, they got all kinds of broadcasts. Radio, television, all sorts of things. This time there was hardly anything; we thought you’d stopped broadcasting for some reason.”

Boyle looked pensive. “Well, in a way we did. With all that stuff floating around, satellites aren’t too useful for communications anymore. So it’s almost all microwave or optical cable. Even local stations have directional antennae, so they don’t waste much energy transmitting to the sky.”

“It’s not because you’re being secretive?” Sandy hazarded.

Boyle looked really surprised. “Of course not! What makes you think that? We didn’t even know the Hakh'hli were out there, did we?” He shook his head. “No, it’s just that we made such a mess up there. It’s not just the physical obstruction; some of those old satellites are still radiating all kinds of stuff. The effects of the Star War will be with us for a long time—but still, I have to admit it was a beautiful light show while it lasted.”

Sandy pricked up his ears. “You saw the war?”

“Well, of course I saw it. I was twelve years old. I didn’t see much personally, I mean with my own eyes—there wasn’t much to see, from Cleveland, Ohio, especially because it was daylight. The Star War started at two o’clock in the afternoon, Cleveland time, and it was all over by sundown. But they had it all on television, and it was pretty spectacular fireworks out in space, believe me.” He hesitated, looking at Sandy. “Didn’t your parents ever tell you anything about it?”

“How could they?” Sandy asked bitterly. “They died before I knew them. I never saw them, really—except for the picture of my mother.”

“Oh? Can I see it?” Boyle studied the little rectangle Sandy pulled out of his pocket. He didn’t speak for a moment, and then chose his words with care. “She was certainly a beautiful woman,” he said. “Would you mind if I made a copy of her picture?”

“What for?” Sandy asked, surprised.

“I think the public would love to know what she looks like,” he said, putting the picture in his pocket. “Did you ever see their ship?”

“My parents’ ship? Not exactly. That is, just pictures there, too.”

Boyle nodded quickly, as though he’d just had an idea. “I’ll tell you what, Sandy. Suppose we showed you all the pictures we could find of spaceships of that time. Do you think you could pick their ship out?”

“I could try, I suppose.”

“And that’s all anyone could ask of you,” Boyle said heartily. “Ah, here’s Lieutenant Darp and our breakfast!”

One of the crew members was following Marguery into the lounge, pushing a wheeled cart. As Marguery greeted them the crew member pulled dishes covered in silver domes out of a heating compartment under the table and set places for three.

Although Sandy’s first interest was in the smells of what they were being offered, he didn’t fail to notice how Marguery looked. She looked beautiful. Her hair was gleaming in its long, scarlet braids, and she wore a completely different outfit than she had the night before—a skirt the color of her hair, that reached barely to her knees, a white, fringed leather jacket, bright blue socks that went halfway up her calf and ended in a plaid of red, blue, and white. Frowning, Sandy noticed that Boyle’s clothes, too, were not the same as the night before, and wondered if he was not making a mistake by continuing to wear the same outfit day after day.

But then it was time to eat the “breakfast,” and that took all of Sandy’s concentration. The “pancakes” were fine, especially with gobs of the thick, sweet “maple syrup.” So was the little dish of cut-up pieces of “fruit.” He nibbled at them very tentatively at first, but the contrasting flavors and textures of “oranges” and “grapefruit” and “melon” were irresistible. And then Polly showed up; and the day’s questioning began, and it wasn’t until Polly retired for her private midday meal and stun time that Sandy had a chance to take Hamilton Boyle aside and ask him if, really, there was any reason to change clothes so often.

He was still blushing as, hastily retiring to his own cabin, he stood in the tiny shower cubicle, with the hot water pouring down on him.

No one among the Hakh’hli had ever pointed out to him that he might smell bad. It was not a Hakh’hli concern. None of the Hakh’hli ever bothered to disguise their natural odors themselves, for that matter; but still, he told himself remorsefully, he should have noticed by himself that the pleasant odors that came from the human beings almost all came out of a bottle.

When he was out of the shower and dried, he experimented with the flask of men’s cologne that Boyle had loaned him. It certainly smelled pleasant enough. He filled a palm with it and began slapping it onto his body.

His yell of angry surprise woke Polly from the last of her stun time and brought her waddling in to see what was the matter. When he told her indignantly that the stuff stung, she was unsympathetic. “Perhaps you are putting it in the wrong places,” she suggested. “At any rate, it is a human foolishness and, as you are human, you might as well get used to it. Put on some clothing so we can go out and be interrogated some more.”

“They aren’t interrogating us,” he corrected. “They are simply asking us questions, because they are naturally so interested in us.”

“Not just in us,” she said darkly. “What have they been asking you?”

He shrugged, pulling on a new pair of pants and studying himself anxiously in the little mirror. “All sorts of things. Nothing in particular.”

“But in particular they have been asking me about some very serious things,” she said, her tone grim. “About the history of the ship. About whether the Hakh’hli have ever before encountered intelligent beings, and what they did about them. About the technology of our ship’s engines, which are powered by what they call ‘strange matter’—though how they know that I do not know. Especially about we Hakh’hli ourselves—why we allow ourselves to die when it is our turn, how many eggs are kept in storage, for how long, for what purpose . . . there is nothing they do not want to know.”

“And there is nothing we should not tell them,” Sandy said virtuously, combing his hair to see if he could make it look like Hamilton Boyle’s. “That is our purpose here. To exchange information.”

“To exchange, yes,” she agreed, “but what information are they giving us in return?”

“I’m sure they’ll tell us anything we want to know,” he said stoutly.

She gave him a bitter look. “You are quite a human being after all,” she announced. “Please remember to act like one next time we sleep together.”

He turned to gaze at her, surprised by her tone. “Have I offended you, Hippolyta?” he asked.

“You have behaved quite badly in your sleep,” she announced crossly. “You should swallow your own spit! Were you dreaming last night? What were you dreaming of? Twice last night you woke me and I had to push you away, for you seemed to be trying amphylaxis with me. That is foolish, as well as disgusting, Lysander! Save such things for your human female, Marguery Darp.”

“Don’t I wish,” Sandy said wistfully.

There weren’t as many questions as usual that afternoon, but Sandy found the session wearing. What Polly said had spoiled things for him, a little. He didn’t like the idea of being interrogated. He began taking careful note of the number of questions he was asked, and what they were about.

That part was easy. The answer was “everything,” from the Hakh’hli name for their sun, and for airships, and for the lander, to why ChinTekki-tho, though a Senior, was not a Major Senior. Hamilton Boyle had the same curiosity Marguery had shown about the films that had been shown to the entire ship’s company; Marguery wanted to know, all over again, how the landing craft’s magnetic repellers at least slowed down the bits of debris in orbit. Sandy sulked. Even though Marguery complimented him very kindly on how well he looked in his fresh clothes (and, when he asked, yes, on how well he smelled now, too), he was not enjoying the time spent with her and was glad when Boyle announced that they would stop the conversation for a while, because Bottom was on television, speaking from the lander site.

The lander was no longer as Lysander had left it. The Hakh’hli housekeeping crew had been busy; most of the tattered micrometeorite screen was gone, and they had already begun laying on the shiny new one that would be needed for takeoff. And a whole little town had sprung up around it—three big oblong structures on wheels (Marguery explained that they were called “trailers”) formed an arc around the little rocket. Half a dozen fabric things (“tents”) housed some of the human beings who worked in the trailers; half a dozen helicopters sat around, some of them with their rotors steadily turning. It was drizzling in the Inuit Commonwealth, and the Hakh’hli were staying inside. Sandy caught a glimpse of Demmy watching from the doorway, and then the scene switched to pick up the picture of Bottom, squatting inside one of the tents, explaining exactly what the “railgun launcher” was to be like, and where it could be built; and all Polly and Sandy had to do that afternoon was watch and explain some of the details Bottom was leaving out.

By the end of the long day Sandy was exhausted again, but he had discovered that coffee would keep him awake. “I don’t know if you should hit it that hard,” Marguery said, concerned. “It’s all new to your system, isn’t it?”

“It’ll be all right,” Sandy assured her. No risk to his system was going to keep him from spending private time with her. But he finished with a huge yawn.

Marguery looked concerned. “Haven’t you been getting enough sleep?”

“I can’t sleep as long as you do,” he said defensively.

“Well, if you’d like to pack it in for the night—”

“Oh, no! No. I like spending time just with you, Marguery.”

She gave him a kind of Earth-female smile that was totally unreadable to Sandy. “You aren’t about to produce another poem, are you?”

He shook his head, but thoughtfully. Were the poems doing what he hoped for them, after all? But he said, “It’s just that I’m more comfortable with you. Not that Hamilton Boyle isn’t all right, but—I don’t know. I don’t think he trusts me, exactly.”

“Well, he’s a cop,” Marguery said, and then, before Sandy could say it, added, “So am I, of course. But he’s been one all his life. It’s kind of instinctive with him now, I guess.”

“Would he third-degree me, Marguery?”

“Third-degree? Torture? Of course not! Or anyway,” she added unwillingly, “not unless he really had to. Why do you ask a question like that?” Sandy shrugged. “Are you keeping secrets from us?”

Sandy considered the question. “I don’t think so,” he reported. “I mean, I’ve told you everything you asked.”

She sneezed, then looked at him thoughtfully. “And is there anything we ought to know that we haven’t known enough to ask you about?”

“Not that I know of.” Then he looked harder at her. “Do you think there is?”

Marguery said slowly, “There is one thing that I’ve been wondering about, actually.”

“And what’s that? Just ask, Marguery. I’ll tell you if I know.”

She gazed at him for a moment, and then, oddly, asked, “How old are you?”

The question took him by surprise, but he answered promptly. “In Earth years, I’m about twenty-two.”

“Yes, that’s what you’ve told us. And you said you were rescued, unborn, from an Earth spaceship?”

“Yes, that’s correct,” he said, wondering what she was up to.

“But that was right after the war, and that happened fifty years ago.”

“Oh, yes,” Sandy said, grinning with pleasure. It was good to be able to explain something simple to her, when so many of the questions were harder to deal with. “That,” he lectured, “is because for so much of the time the ship was traveling at a major fraction of the speed of light, you see. This causes a time-dilation effect, as your Albert—as Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of relativity. So time passed more slowly for me, on the ship.”

“I see,” she said, nodding. “So it’s actually been about fifty years, Earth time, since you were born. And that was twenty-five years out to Alpha Centauri, and twenty-five years back, right? Only it only seemed like about ten years each way because of time dilation.”

“Exactly,” he said, beaming with gratification at her quick understanding.

She asked, very seriously, “What was it like at Alpha Centauri?”

He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

She repeated, “What was it like at Alpha Centauri? I mean, that was only ten years ago as far as you were concerned, right? So you were about ten years old, in your own subjective terms.”

He frowned. “I don’t see your point.”

“Well, Sandy,” she said unhappily, “when I was ten years old I was pretty immature, but I wasn’t stupid. I wouldn’t have been totally oblivious to an occasion like that. I’d remember something about Alpha Centauri, even if it was only how excited the grownups were. Don’t you?”

He scowled more deeply. “I’ve seen pictures of it,” he offered.

“Yes,” she agreed. “So have we. The Hakh’hli have shown us tapes. But I wasn’t there. Were you?”

“Of course I was. I had to have been,” he said reasonably, though he was still scowling.

She sighed. “I don’t think you were,” she said. “I think they lied to you.”

He stared at her, thunderstruck and slightly offended. “Why would they do that?” he demanded. She was, after all, talking against the oldest friends he had.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” she said seriously. “What reason could they possibly have? For instance, suppose when they captured your parents—”

“They rescued them,” he snapped.

“When they took them aboard the Hakh’hli ship, then. Suppose your father wasn’t dead. Suppose your mother wasn’t even pregnant. Suppose you weren’t born until early in the return trip, and then something happened to your parents, and they brought you up—”

“Something did happen to my parents. Then the Hakh’hli did bring me up.”

“But you don’t remember anything about Alpha Centauri. So it couldn’t have happened the way they told you, Sandy,” she pointed out.

He was definitely edgy now. He snapped, “What’s your point?”

“Only that they lied to you, Sandy.”

“But that’s silly! There wasn’t any reason for them to lie, was there? Why would they do that?”

And she sighed. “I wish I knew.”

Chapter 14

Good seaports make great cities, but seaports have one inescapable flaw. They are inevitably located at sea level. With the swelling of the oceans New York City has gotten wet. Of the five boroughs the Bronx has suffered the least; the heights around Inwood and Riverdale still stand proud. Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are mostly shallow shoals, apart from the stretches left over from the long glacial ridge, the scrubbings of the last Ice Age, that made their few hills. The island of Manhattan is somewhere in between. Where it rose in hills, even minor ones like Murray Hill, it is still dry. But the Wall Street area is a new Venice. Blue water fills the streets between its skyscrapers. The great bridges rise from water and return to water. Across what used to be the Hudson River—now just a brackish extension of the Lower Bay—the Palisades still tower above the sea, and that is where Hudson City has grown. It has two qualities that make it an important metropolis. One is the salvage industry it supports, for there are treasures still to be rescued from those flooded buildings of downtown New York. The other is sentiment. No former New Yorker could possibly accept a world in which there wasn’t any New York City, even if it had to be in New Jersey.

The blimp landed at Hudson City while Sandy was still asleep. He missed the first sight of what once had been, or once had thought it was, the central city of the human race. He was still bleary eyed as they drove through Hudson to their hotel. Even though he was both sleepy and abstracted, he could not help noticing that Hudson City was orders of magnitude huger and busier than Dawson had been, but the puzzlement in his mind drowned out the curiosity about this huge, human place.

Their quarters weren’t two separate rooms this time. Instead they had a “suite” of three linked rooms, a bedroom apiece and a larger sitting room between. As soon as they were alone Sandy followed Polly into her bedroom to confront her with what Marguery Darp had said.

Predictably, her response was belligerent. “Lie to you?” she cried. “What sort of statement is that? Of course our Major Seniors did not lie to you. Is your mind disordered and not functioning clearly because you are so obsessed with prospect of amphylaxis with that Earth female?”

Sandy made a fist and slammed it against the nearest wall. The wall shook, and Polly giggled in alarm. “Stop talking about me and the Earth female!” he shouted. “Answer the question! What she said was true. I don’t remember the ship visiting that other star. Do you?”

Polly hesitated. “Perhaps not very well,” she admitted. “But what does that prove? Earth people don’t know anything about time dilation, do they? When we get back to the ship you can ask the Major Seniors to clarify your understanding.”

He glared at her. “Who says I’m going back to the ship?”

“Well,” she conceded, “perhaps you are not. I do not know if that has been decided.”

“Perhaps I definitely am not. In any case, who asks the Major Seniors anything?” he growled in English.

“Well, then you can ask ChinTekki-tho by radio. I must call him this morning; when I am finished and not at any earlier time you can speak to him yourself. And speak Hakh’hli to me and not that Earth language,” she finished.

He blinked at her. “What is purpose of that?” he asked, but obeying.

Polly looked sulkily righteous. “You simply have not been using your senses, Lysander. Earth people are observing us at all times. Look in your room. Look here—” She pointed at a lighting fixture in the ceiling. “Do you see that lens? It is a camera. Cameras are in all rooms. I have seen them all along and not now for first time.”

Sandy stared at the tiny, barely visible disk of glass. “Do not look at it so!” Polly ordered. “Do not let them see we have discovered their secrets.”

He looked away. “In all rooms?” he repeated.

“Certainly in all rooms and not just this room,” she said severely. “As you should have observed for yourself. Earth people watch us at every moment, even sleeping. Now you must go away and not return for a twelfth-day—” She paused, consulted her watch, and corrected herself. “For some eighty-five Earth minutes, so that I may speak with ChinTekki-tho in private and not be overheard.”

“Why in private? Why do I have to leave?” Sandy demanded.

“You must leave because you are directed to and not for any other reason,” she said firmly. “Now go. Do not keep the Earth female waiting.”

When Sandy got to the hotel lobby the first thing he saw was Marguery Darp, looking fresh and desirable.

Just the sight of her came close to mending Sandy’s mood, but when he told her that Polly was staying in her room with the radio her expression, too, clouded over. “But Ham Boyle wants to take her to meet some space experts. They need to talk about the conference,” she said. Sandy shrugged. “Well,” she went on, “I suppose that can wait. Everybody’s got Perth on their minds, anyway. Maybe you’d just like me to show you around the city for a while?”

“I am tired of being shown things,” he said bitterly.

She looked at him speculatively. “I guess you got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” she offered.

He said. “I understand that figure of speech. You mean to say that I am in a bad mood. That may be true. It may be that the reason for that is that I am suffering from what is called ‘culture shock.’ There is every reason for that, after all.”

She put her hand on his arm. “Of course there is, Sandy. Well, what would you like? There were some people that wanted to meet you, but I suppose that can wait.” She thought for a moment. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

“Walk where?”

“Anywhere you like. Just around the town, maybe. I’ve got your hat and sunglasses in the car.”

He pursed his lips. “Without being questioned by these people who want to meet me?” he stipulated, and Marguery laughed.

“Sandy, hon,” she said, “it’ll just be the two of us. I won’t promise I won’t ask you any questions, but whether you answer or not, you know—that’s entirely up to you.”

“It is?” he asked, astonished at the thought. “Well, I suppose we could at least try it.” And it was only then that he thought to ask, “What’s ‘Perth’?”

Perth, Marguery reminded him as they strolled through the streets of Hudson City, was a city in Australia, and the reason people had it on their minds was that one 150-ton monster piece of space junk was in the process of deorbiting itself. Unfortunately, its orbit took it right over the city of Perth, in Australia; and since the moment of impact could not be predicted very precisely, the people of Australia were jittery. Which made everyone else jittery.

“I suppose,” he said, as they stopped at a little park that overlooked the swollen river and bay, “that I too am ‘jittery.’ ”

Marguery said comfortably, “You’ll get over it. That’s what’s nice about this place. Looking at large bodies of water is soothing to the nerves.”

“It is?” He considered the thought and decided that it was true that he was feeling more relaxed. He pointed at the skyline across the water. “Is that New York City over there?”

“It’s what’s left of it,” she said. “You can see that parts of it are flooded. They tried diking all around the city when the sea level started to rise, but that only worked for a while. Then the storm surges just came right over the dikes. We can visit it if you like.”

“Now?” he asked, surprised.

“Whenever you want to,” she promised.

He thought about Polly’s call to ChinTekki-tho. “Not right this minute,” he said, looking at his watch, reassured to find that they had been gone only half an hour. He leaned out over the parapet and gazed down. Boats were moving silently up and down it, far below them, and just under them was a strip of sand. People in skimpy costumes were sitting or lying by the water, or actually splashing around in the water itself. “What are those people doing down there?”

She looked over the railing. “Just swimming,” she said. “Would you like to try it?”

“Me?” He gave her a doubtful look, then turned to gaze down at the people by the water. “I don’t know if I can,” he confessed. “I’ve never done that.”

“There’s nothing easier,” Marguery assured him. “I don’t suppose you have a bathing suit, but we can pick one up for you easily enough.”

“Not right this minute,” he said again, temporizing. He looked around at the peaceful scene below and the vista of the old city. “Maybe after lunch,” he finished. “There’s something I need to do at the hotel. Let’s start back.”

“All right,” Marguery said; but as they turned away a young woman in glasses, sun hat, and shorts approached them, holding a notebook and a pen out to Sandy.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but you’re the man from the spaceship, aren’t you. Can I have your autograph?”

When Sandy got back to the hotel room he was far too late to talk to ChinTekki-tho. The radio in Polly’s room was silent, and the table was littered with scraps of her midday meal. Polly herself was snoring stertorously in stun time.

“Oh, turds,” Sandy said aloud. But then he looked more closely at the scraps Polly had left on the meal cart. They smelled attractively familiar, after a few days of trying the exotic Earth foods. He chose a few fragments, piled them onto a silver dish that had, until then, held a vase of flowers, and took them back to his own room.

When he had finished he gazed out of the window for a while. Then, sighing, he sat down once more and began to sketch out another poem.

This one, he decided, would be a real human poem. Well, not rhymed—he wasn’t sure enough of himself for that—but anyway like a human poem, meaning not twisted into the shape of a significant object. By the time Polly came grumpily yawning into his room to complain that he had missed his appointment to talk to ChinTekki-tho, Sandy was smiling again.

Polly was not. “You were late and not on time,” she said accusingly in Hakh’hli.

Unrepentant, Sandy counterattacked. “Did you ask him about why we didn’t remember visiting Alpha Centauri?”

“Why should I have? You could have been here to ask him yourself.”

“But did you?”

Polly said in triumph, “Of course I asked him. And he gave me an answer. He said, ‘Such things will be discussed when Major Seniors decide it is time to discuss them and not before.’ ”

The “people who wanted to talk to Sandy” were gathered in the hotel’s ballroom when he came down in response to Marguery’s telephone call. “There are so many of them,” he said, displeased, peering in at the nearly a hundred human beings who were sitting there, talking among themselves.

“It’s just what we call a press conference,” Marguery said. “The people just want to get to know you, that’s all. After all, you’re a celebrity.”

“I am?” he asked, pleased.

“Of course you are. Can’t you tell? Why else would people be asking you for your autograph?”

So he let himself be led into the room without protest. He stood at a lectern on a platform at the front. Lights went on. Cameras began winking red-eyed at him. Marguery Darp said a few words of introduction, and the questions began. What did he think of Hudson City? Had he enjoyed his afternoon at the “beach”? What was the Hakh’hli, Hippolyta, going to tell the Earth’s astronomers? Were any more Hakh’hli going to land from the ship? and when? and how many of them, exactly?

The answer to most of the questions was, really, “I don’t know,” but Sandy did his best, aware of Marguery Darp sitting quietly behind him on the platform. But some of the questions made Sandy swallow hard. “Where do you want to live?” for instance. He turned to look at Marguery for help, but she didn’t offer any. “I mean,” the reporter persisted, “will you stay here in Hudson City? Or, actually, are you going to stay on Earth, or will you go back with the Hakh’hli ship when they leave?” A hard question. Sandy had not until that moment considered the probability that indeed the Hakh’hli ship would leave some day for another star. Thinking about it made him furrow his brow. And then, came the question that was hardest of all, because it was the one he had least expected. “If you stay on Earth, what will you do?”

Sandy blinked into the lights. “Do?” he repeated uncertainly.

“I mean, what kind of job will you have?” the woman persisted.

Sandy thought hard for a moment. It had never occurred to him to think of it. Really, what could he do, that would constitute an Earthly “job”? He ventured, “I can pilot a Hakh’hli landing craft.”

There was a faint chuckle all around. “But we don’t have any Hakh’hli landing craft,” the reporter pointed out. Then, at last, Marguery came to his rescue.

“Mr. Washington has any number of skills,” she told the reporters, “but you have to give him time to decide how he wants to use them. Anyway, I think we’ve imposed on his good nature long enough for this session . . . and besides, I’ve promised to take him swimming this afternoon!”

In Marguery’s little car, Sandy tried to tell her why that question was so hard. “I’m not used to having to decide things like that, Marguery. The Hakh’hli don’t pick where they’re going to live or what jobs they’re going to do. The Major Seniors decide that for them.”

She patted his hand reassuringly. “We do things differently here,” she told him. Then she pulled the car into a parking space and turned to look at him before opening the door. “You are going to stay with us, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, that’s definitely what I want to do,” Sandy said.

“And what about the Hakh’hli?” she pressed. “Are they going to go on with their voyage?”

He scratched his cheek. “I suppose they will,” he said.

“You don’t sound very sure,” she pointed out.

He shook his head. “As far as I remember, I don’t think that question ever came up. But what else would they do?”

Marguery nodded soberly. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Anyway, here’s the beach.” She leaned back to reach a package in the rear seat of the car. “I picked up a bathing suit for you in the hotel shop; hope it fits.”

“Thank you,” he said absently, beginning to unbutton his shirt.

“But you don’t undress here,” she said quickly. “There are changing rooms for that. I’ll meet you when you come out.”

That presented another mystery to solve, but a simple enough one this time. He copied what he saw other men doing, aware that they were looking curiously at him, as well. He didn’t think about it. His mind was filled with all the questions Marguery had raised and kept on raising.

There were plenty of questions. What was in very short supply was answers.

For twenty years everything had seemed clear to him: He would come back to Earth, as a gift from the Hakh’hli to the human race, and that would be that. He had never considered the possibility of an “after”—either for himself, or for the Hakh’hli ship.

When Sandy left the row of cubicles marked “Men” he was properly garbed in a pair of bathing trunks that did, just about, go around his considerable girth. Then the unanswerable questions vanished, because there was Marguery, waiting for him at the section marked “Women.”

He swallowed hard. Marguery Darp in ordinary clothes had stirred his passions. Marguery Darp in a bikini took his breath away. She had a loose, thin, nearly transparent robe over her shoulders, but it hid no more than the bathing suit did. “But you’re beautiful,” he told her.

She laughed out loud. “Well,” she said, “you’re certainly good for a person’s vanity, Sandy Washington.” Then she frowned. “I forgot to get you a sun robe, so we’d better not stay out too long. Come on. Let’s get our feet wet!”

And they did, and the experience of entering the water drove all other thoughts out of Sandy’s mind.

He was aware that people were staring at him, but they were smiling encouragingly, taking pictures. He grinned happily at the other bathers. It was fun! To be almost immersed in a liquid that supported, or very nearly supported, his weight! It was like flying—except that when they waded out to waist depth, Marguery holding his hand, and he tried lifting his feet off the bottom under her tutelage, he sank.

He got his feet under him and came up, gasping and snorting and laughing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t swim at all. I think the average density of my body’s a lot more than water.”

She pursed her lips. “You’re pretty solid, at that. Well, that’s not a big problem. We’ll get you a life preserver or something, if you want to try. And I’ll be right with you, all right?”

“Maybe another time,” he said cautiously. “Is it all right if we just, what do you call it, ‘wade’ for a while?”

“Whatever you want.”

He splashed about, thoughtfully. “The water isn’t very cold,” he said.

She laughed. “It isn’t always like this. You should have been here last winter. The whole bay was frozen over!”

Lysander gazed around, perplexed. “You mean ‘ice’? Frozen water? But why?”

“Just because it was winter, of course,” she said, and then had to explain what a “winter” was. “The old people never had freezes like this around here, she said with a certain amount of pride.

“But you said it was warmer now, not colder,” Lysander said humbly. “How could warming up make the air colder?”

“That cold air around here last winter wasn’t any colder than usual,” she explained. “It was just in a different place than usual.” She frowned up at the hot sun overhead. “But it isn’t winter now,” she said, “and I’m afraid we’re getting too much sun. Let’s sit in the shade for a while and dry off.”

He followed her up the little beach to where canvas awnings sheltered the bathers from the ultraviolet. “Be back in a moment,” she said, and disappeared in the direction of a refreshment stand. When she came back she handed him a paper cup with a fizzy soft drink in it. “Do you like it?” she asked, watching him taste it experimentally. “It’s called ‘root beer.’ ”

“Oh, yes,” he said, nodding. Like everything else on Earth, it did not taste at all the way he had expected, but he enjoyed the way it tingled at the back of his nose. “Listen, Marguery,” he said. “I remembered something about winter. When I was little MyThara told me that the Hakh’hli once visited a planet where it was winter all the time.”

He had her sudden full attention. “Really?” she said, waiting for him to go on. But he couldn’t go very far.

“I don’t remember very much about it,” he said. “It was a big disappointment to them for some reason. The Hakh’hli don’t like to talk about disappointments—I guess they’ve had too many of them. But it did happen, MyThara said. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago.” He stopped to think, then shook his head. “That’s all I remember. I could ask ChinTekki-tho about it, next time I talk to him. He’d know. Would you like me to do that?”

“Yes, please,” said Marguery. “I’d like that very much.”

When they separated to get dressed again, Sandy discovered the paper in his pocket. He had completely forgotten about it. It brightened his mood, and when they got back into her little red car, he pulled it out for her.

“I’ve got something for you, Marguery,” he said, smiling tentatively.

She saw what he was doing. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Another poem?”

“A human one this time,” he said proudly. He didn’t hand it to her. He held it up and began to read aloud.

“Tenuous fragile creature

Deliciously lacking a tail,

Without great springing legs

But only long, smooth, slim, sweet ones.

I want to climb those legs, dear lovething,

I want to climb them to the place where you and I join,

For you are the other half of me,

And I want to make us whole.”

She gave him a long look and then took the paper away from him. She read it over carefully before she spoke.

Then she put it down and stared at him. “You really get right to the point, don’t you?”

“I’m trying to do it right,” he said apologetically.

“Well,” she said, “frankly, maybe you’re doing it right enough, but you’re also doing it too fast. If you know what I mean.”

“I don’t,” he admitted sadly.

She laughed out loud. “And I don’t know exactly how to teach you,” she said. “Oh, Sandy!” She was thoughtfully silent for a moment. Then she asked, with an abrupt change of subject, “Would you like to see the real New York City?”

He blinked at her, then waved his hand toward the skyline across the river. “Am I not seeing it right now?”

“I mean see it close up. Maybe even do some scuba diving, if we can find water wings or something to keep you from sinking. We can go underwater and see the actual streets themselves.”

Sandy scowled, thinking it over. He couldn’t see how that related to the previous conversation. He had a vague notion of what “scuba diving” was like from films of that old Frenchman, Jacques Cousteau. It had seemed quite frightening, watching them on the screen of the cohort quarters back on the Hakh’hli ship. But if Marguery were with him—especially if she were wearing, as she certainly would be, that wonderful bikini bathing suit . . .

He smiled up at her. “I’d love it,” he said.

She looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. “I hope you will,” she said, and left it at that.

Chapter 15

At this time, half a century after Star Wars, there are 90,000 trackable objects in Low Earth Orbit. Most of them are too small to survive reentry when, at last, they fall to the surface of the Earth. So they aren’t likely to do anyone on the surface much harm. They range from the size of a monkey wrench to the size of a beach-ball, and when they deorbit they are almost sure to burn up from the friction of the air. All they will contribute to anything on the surface is to add an undetectable additional patter to the steady infall of meteoric dust that has drifted onto the Earth for four and a half billion years. Seventy-two thousand of the Earth-orbiting objects are in that size range . . . but there are eighteen thousand others. These can’t be ignored by the people below. They range in size from kitchen refrigerator to railroad locomotive; some are even bigger. And when one of these chunks of metal decays out of its orbit it will surely strike the ground—at least in fragments—at speeds of several miles a second, with an impact that can level buildings. Nor is that the worst. Unfortunately, some of these big ones still have internal power sources. The sources are generally nuclear, and when they strike it is not merely the kinetic energy of the fall that can kill.

The phone rang as Sandy was on his way to Polly’s room to see if she was up yet. It was Marguery Darp. “Sandy? I’m in the lobby, but I thought I ought to tell you that the meeting has been postponed for an hour because of the deorbiting. Yes, it’s supposed to happen on this orbit. You can go over with me to watch it at Lamont-Doherty, or I’ll come back and get you later. Whichever you want.”

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” he told her, and knocked on Polly’s door.

She was up, all right. She was squatting before the desk in her room, making notes. When he told her about the delay she gave a resentful twitch. “What fuss these Earth humans make about possible damage and loss of life to one city. They have thousands of cities! No, go if you wish, I will remain here.”

“All right,” Sandy said. “Polly? Do you remember when the ship was at Alpha Centauri?”

She grimaced in annoyance. “You have asked me that, Lysander. Why do you ask it again?”

“I don’t remember it at all. Do you?”

She looked up at him. Then she did what he expected her to do. She continued making notes at her table for a moment. Then she gave a superior twitch. “This is no proper occasion to ask silly questions about ancient Hakh’hli history, Lysander. I am too busy and have not time for such things, since I must prepare my address. There will be some surprises in it; I will give them solution to their little problem.”

“What solution do you mean?”

“You will hear when I give it,” she said, weeping a small self-satisfied tear. She returned to her notes—all of them upside-down to Sandy as he stood—with one double-thumbed hand over the top of them so that he couldn’t read what she was writing. As though there were any reason to keep them from him! How annoying she could be!

“You’re not a Senior,” he told her. “Don’t treat me like a child. What problem are you talking about?”

“I am talking about this deorbiting question, which Earth human beings cannot deal with themselves,” she said frostily. “I am talking, as well, about many other things of importance. For these things I have had complete instructions from ChinTekki-tho, in private.”

“In private again!”

She emitted a faint, disdainful belch. “Yes, in private, since this is a matter for Hakh’hli and not Earth persons.

That took Sandy by surprise. “Cohort-mate! Am I not Hakh’hli?”

“Of course you are not Hakh’hli, Lysander,” she said, patiently reasonable. “You are Lysander John William Washington, and if you are not Earth human you are nothing at all, are you? Now leave me, Lysander. I have much to do.” She slapped her stubby tail against the carpeted floor for emphasis. Then, as he was almost at the door, she stopped him by adding. “However, your statement is almost correct and not entirely wrong, Lysander.”

She was looking at him with malignant pleasure, and he had no idea what she was talking about. “What statement is that?” he asked.

“The statement that I am not myself Senior. I would add only one word to make that statement accurate. The word is, yet.”

Sandy was quiet on the way to the meeting hall. He was tired of talking. Every conversation he had seemed to turn up questions he couldn’t answer, and that those who could answer annoyingly wouldn’t. Imagine Polly treating him like a child! Imagine her thinking she might some day be a Senior!—when it was she whose behavior was so childish!

He got out when Marguery parked the car, looking up at the building they were about to enter. It was perched on the edge of the Palisades, tall and glass-walled, and the sign over its entrance gave its name:

LAMONT-DOHERTY SCIENCE CENTER

“Who were these Lamont and Doherty people?” he asked.

“It’s just a name. This used to be a geology center, until they began moving other things into it out of New York City.” She looked around, getting her bearings. They were almost alone in a large terrazzo-floored hall. The few others around were hurrying toward a flight of stairs. “They’ll be watching the deorbit in the auditorium. This way—”

But as they climbed the stairs they heard a sudden outburst of laughter and cheers from the room they were going to. Marguery tugged him ahead. Over the stage was a great screen. It was a television picture, apparently taken from the deck of a ship—it seemed to sway disconcertingly, and sometimes Sandy could get glimpses of what looked like masts and antennae. But the picture wasn’t of the ship. It was of the sky. It was filled with lancing lines of fire stabbing down, like a meteor shower.

Marguery caught the arm of a stranger standing next to her. “What’s happening?” she demanded.

“It’s down. It missed,” he said, grinning. “It started reentry near Madagascar, and it was pretty well broken up twenty minutes ago. That’s the last of it. It’s just about all down now, and it’s still way out in the Indian Ocean. Perth won’t be touched.”

“Thank God,” she said sincerely. She turned and looked at Sandy almost with surprise, as though she had forgotten he was there. “Oh,” she said. “Well, the show’s over. Want to get a cup of coffee?”

“If you like,” he said. And then, curiously, he asked, “Marguery? Did you have friends in Perth?”

“Friends? No. Not that I know of, anyway. I’ve never even been in Australia.”

“But you looked worried,” he pointed out.

She stared at him. “Jesus, Sandy, you say some funny things,” she told him. “Of course I was worried. They’re human beings in Australia, too, aren’t they? And anyway, who knows where the next one might come down? It could be right on top of us!”

He thought of Polly’s promise of mysterious surprises and wondered if he should mention them to Marguery. But he didn’t really know what they were going to be. Instead, he said seriously, “The statistical chances of any particular person being hit are quite small, Marguery.”

“Chances! Sandy, what do you know about it? You haven’t lived your whole life under a slow-motion blitz. It makes you nervous. Come on, let’s get the coffee.” And then as he followed her back into the hallway she softened. “I’m sorry if I bit your head off, Sandy.”

“Bit my head off?” And, while he was asking, he added, “And what’s a ‘blitz’?”

She laughed. “I keep forgetting you’re new around here, Sandy,” she said. She explained while they were waiting in line to get to the coffee table and then she said, “Look, we’ve still got some time now. Do you see what’s down there?”

She was pointing to the end of the hallway. All he saw was a door marked Sky Survey Monitors. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s what it says it is. It’s where they keep tabs at this installation on everything in near-Earth orbit—including the Hakh’hli ship. Would you like to take a look at it?”

There were people working in the room, but Marguery talked to one of them in a low voice. The woman nodded and pointed to a work station. Marguery sat down, frowned over the keyboard for a moment, and then began to tap out codes.

“I guess an InterSec cop can do pretty much anything she wants,” Sandy observed from behind her.

“She can if she has you with her,” Marguery said, studying the screen. “Especially if she used to be in the astronaut corps herself. Here, take a look.”

On the screen a picture began to form—a bright, small object like a soup can, far away.

“We’re watching in the infrared,” Marguery told him. “These are the same kind of telescopes that were tracking the reentry. You’ll see a streak across the picture now and then. Pay no attention to them, they’re just space junk in Low Earth Orbit, like the piece that just fell in the ocean. Here, I’ll zoom in a little closer.”

Sandy stared. It was the Hakh’hli ship, all right! It seemed to glow with its own light. It was stark and clear, and he had never seen it thus. Every detail showed. As it slowly turned to even the heating from the sun, even the little welt on its surface that had been the cradle of his own landing craft was clearly visible.

“I didn’t know you could see the ship from Earth,” he said numbly.

“Well, hell of course we can see you,” she said, cross. “Do you think we’re ignorant savages? We’ve been watching you for nearly two months.”

“Two months?”

She made an impatient gesture. “Just because we can’t go into space doesn’t mean we don’t keep looking. They found the gamma-ray emission weeks ago in a routine sweep. The source was obviously moving pretty fast, so naturally they followed up on it. The gammas came from your drive, I believe.”

She touched a few more keys, and the image grew larger still. “Your ship was still out of the plane of the ecliptic, more than a billion miles out. We couldn’t get decent optics at first. Then, after you came around the Sun, we followed you on radar.”

“Radar?”

“Radio beams,” she explained. “We bounce them off things and pick up the reflections.”

“Ah,” he said, gratified that one point at least was coming clear to him. He nodded. “ChinTekki-tho said there were transmissions from Earth, but the Hakh’hli didn’t exactly know what they were. They didn’t seem to carry information.”

“Not on the way out, they don’t,” Marguery agreed, “but we could see you very clearly from the reflection. Then we could get you optically, too, at least in the infrared—your ship soaked up so much solar heat at perihelion that it sticks out like a light bulb. Sandy? Do you see those lumps on the side of the ship? What are they for?”

He peered at the screen. “Those five in a row, there? They’re other landers. The ship has half-twelve of them, altogether—you can see that landing craft is gone. That was ours.” Then he glared at her. “You watched us coming?”

“Of course we did. Wouldn’t you?” she asked patiently. “We kept a pretty close eye on you. We were listening on all frequencies, too, to see if you would send a signal to let us know who you were. You didn’t, though.”

“Well,” Sandy apologized, “the Major Seniors weren’t sure of what kind of people you were, you know.”

She shrugged. “We weren’t sure of you, either. As soon as you launched the lander we tracked its landing orbit. You didn’t have to wander around in the rain, Sandy. If you had just stayed put, we would have come to you as soon as the storm was over.”

“But why didn’t you tell us?”

“Well, I’m telling you now.” Then, unwillingly, she added, “The fact is that I wasn’t supposed to, before. It’s just been cleared.”

“I see,” Sandy said bitterly. “You are now permitted to share some truths with me. But not all, I suppose?” She scowled at him, not answering. “So besides being my jailer, now you are permitted to give out certain little crumbs of information, to see what I’ll make of them?”

“I’m not your jailer, Sandy!”

“Then what do you call it?”

“The term,” she said primly, “is ‘escort.’ ”

“But you’re a policeman. Woman, I mean.”

“InterSec is not police. Not exactly police, anyway. Oh, hell,” she flared, “what do you expect? It was just a precaution. Naturally we have to make sure of what we’re getting into, so we—” She stopped. She glanced at the ceiling, then said stubbornly, “So we keep an eye on you. Just as you did on us.” She changed the subject. “Do you want some more coffee?”

“Is that what my ‘escort’ takes me to do next?” he asked bitterly. “Then what am I required to do after that to satisfy your natural concern?”

She gave him a look he couldn’t translate. “That’s up to you,” she said.

“Oh, but surely you have instructions,” he persisted.

She stared into space for a moment. Then she sighed and looked at her watch. “It’s almost time for Polly to speak,” she said.

“Then, of course, we have to go there, don’t we? To carry out your instructions for me?”

She didn’t answer that. He turned to leave, but she put a hand on his arm. She glanced at the other people in the room before she spoke. “Sandy,” she said, almost whispering. “You told me you might like to visit the old New York City. We can do that this afternoon, if you want to.”

The tone of her voice was odd, but Sandy was not mollified. “Of course,” he snarled. “I will want to do exactly what you say. What choice do I have, after all?”

Polly was late. Nearly everyone in the audience was already seated when she made her entrance, splatsplatting down the center aisle in the long, galumphing Hakh’hli strides, with Hamilton Boyle grimly keeping up beside her. He lost her when they got to the first row. Boyle pointed politely to the stairs that led up to the side of the stage, but Polly was having none of that. As Boyle turned toward the steps Polly gave him a disdainful look. Then she launched herself in an easy jump onto the platform. By the time he got to her she was already squatting before the podium, studying her notes.

There was a faint titter from the audience.

It was a typically Polly sort of thing to do—no, Sandy corrected himself, a typically Hakh’hli thing. Polly looked up, acknowledging the chuckle with a pleased tear. From Sandy’s seat in the first row, with human beings all around, he looked at her through Earthly eyes, and he had no doubt that to them she looked comical.

While Hamilton Boyle introduced her, Polly preened herself. She looked up, twitching in annoyance, as Boyle pressed a button and a screen descended behind them, and when he finished by saying, “So our distinguished guest will show us some of the astronomical records her people have acquired in their long voyage,” she turned on him.

“Must I?” she demanded.

Boyle looked astonished. “But I thought you wanted to. That’s what you were invited here for,” he reminded her.

She twitched irritably. “Oh, very well. Let’s get that part over with, then. Is this the picture control?” Impatiently she allowed Boyle to show her how to use it, then snatched it away from him. “All right, have the lights turned out,” she ordered, craning her neck to see the screen. Before the room was fully dark she began clicking rapidly. “These are some of your nearby stars,” she said, as the pictures flicked by, half a second apart. “This first series is what you call Gamma Cephei and its two planets—not very interesting; they are what you call ‘brown dwarf’ objects, of no use to anyone. We were leaving the Gamma Cephei system en route to what you call Alpha Centauri when we detected your radio signals and passed here, some fifty of your years ago. Now, this is Alpha Centauri. It does not have any sizeable well-formed planets, only a great many objects which most resemble comets or asteroids. Here they are. Now we come to your own system—why are you interrupting me, Boyle?”

The InterSec man had put a hand on her forearm. He said politely, “Don’t you think you could go a little slower?”

“What for? All these pictures now are in your files, and I have more important things to get to. This is your Sun, and here are some of your planets—” Sandy blinked. The pictures were coming faster than he could take them in, and he could hear people grumbling around him. Polly paid no attention. “Earth, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Mars. The interesting part to you, I suppose, is that these are mostly polar views—taken from north of the ecliptic as we came in from Gamma Cephei, south of it on our trip to Alpha Centauri. There are many other pictures, of course, which will be made available to you later. That is enough on that subject. Lights!” she called peremptorily, and gazed complacently out at the muttering audience as the overheads went on again.

“Now,” she said, “let me get to the more important part of what I have to say today.” She broke off, peering at a man near Sandy, who had his hand up. “Do you want something?” she asked.

“I just want to know if we’ll have a chance to ask questions,” the astronomer called.

“I suppose so, but not until I have finished. Please pay full attention now, all of you. I have been instructed by my superior, ChinTekki-tho, to inform you that you should begin construction of a magnetic-impulse thruster—what you call a ‘railgun’—at once. We have identified two suitable sites. One is on the island you call Bora Bora, the other is the peak you call Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Our specialists are now completing detailed plans for construction, which will be transmitted to you shortly, and we are prepared to land two teams of specialists, one for each thruster, to supervise the construction and then the operation of the machines. The most important use of the thrusters will be to launch needed raw materials to replenish the stores of our interstellar ship, but ChinTekki-tho has decided that, as a special favor, several of the first launches will be to put self-propelled objects into Low Earth Orbit. These will be used to collide with, and thus decelerate, some of the objects that are likely to deorbit in the near future, so that they can be caused to descend in whatever parts of their orbit you think least dangerous to any of your installations or people. Thus,” she finished triumphantly, “we have solved one of your great problems for you. Now you may ask questions if you wish to—but, please,” she added, glancing at her watch, “not for very long, as it is nearly time for my midday meal.”

To Sandy’s surprise, there weren’t any immediate questions. The audience was silent. It surprised Polly, too; she was twitching resentfully as she waited. Then at last she pointed to a man midway back. “Ask,” she ordered.

“I was simply wondering why you didn’t photograph Uranus and Pluto?” he called.

Polly snorted in displeasure. “Why don’t you ask about the more important things I have said? We simply did not happen to observe Uranus and Pluto.”

“But if you missed them,” the astronomer persisted, “how do you know there weren’t some you missed at the other stars?”

“We did not ‘miss’ any planets,” she corrected him coldly. “We did not concern ourselves with possible objects that would be of no use to us, because they were too far from their sun. Of course, there are many more pictures. We Hakh’hli have visited some sixty-five stellar systems in this journey, and of course we have records of many other visitations by other ships.”

Another astronomer called, “Are you still getting them?”

“You mean reports from other ships?” Polly hesitated, then replied unwillingly, “Not at present.”

“How about the planets of your own original system?”

“We have no pictures to show of our own planets. Our ancestors knew it quite well. They had no need of photographs to remind them.”

“Can you at least identify your own star from our catalogues? You said it’s only eight hundred and fifty light-years away; if it’s as bright as the Sun, it should be at least a fourteenth or fifteenth magnitude object, and we’ve got all of them on our atlases.”

Polly hesitated. “It can be identified,” she said.

“By you?”

Unwillingly, she said, “Not necessarily by me, at present.”

“You mean you’re lost, don’t you?”

“We are not lost! It is simply that we have not yet reestablished contact with the home star, because of the great distance involved—as even you should know, to communicate over a distance of eight hundred light-years takes sixteen hundred of your years for a message to be sent and an answer received. When we have accomplished our mission we will notify the home planets.”

“What is your mission, exactly?”

She paused, then flared up. “Our mission is to explore and learn! Have you no better questions to ask than this?”

“Have you no better pictures than this?” an astronomer demanded. “These are just optical-band photographs! Don’t you have infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma ray observations to go with them?”

“It is not our custom,” Polly said sharply. She was obviously beginning to get angry. “Are not any of you going to ask questions about the magnetic launchers?”

There was a pause, then Hamilton Boyle leaned forward to the microphone. “I have one,” he said. “These plans you’re going to give us. Have you ever built a launcher from them?”

“I myself? Of course not.”

“Or anyone on your ship?”

“Not recently, no,” she conceded.

“So how do you know they’ll work?”

She glared at him, divided between astonishment and anger. “They are Hakh’hli plans,” she explained. “They have been approved by the Major Seniors! Of course they’ll work. Aren’t there any sensible questions?”

When it appeared there were not, Polly stormed off to her midday meal, refusing Hamilton Boyle’s offer to accompany her. As the meeting broke up, Boyle caught up with Marguery and Sandy. “Got any plans for lunch?” he asked amiably.

Marguery answered for both them. “We’re going to explore New York,” she said. “I think we’ll just get some sandwiches and eat them on the way.”

Boyle nodded, gazing shrewdly at Sandy. “Your friend wasn’t happy with us, I’m afraid,” he offered.

Sandy decided not to mention that Polly was seldom happy. “I think she was surprised that no one seemed to want to talk about the railgun offer.”

“Oh?” Boyle said, raising his eyebrows. “Was that what it was, an offer? It sounded like marching orders to me.”

“That’s just her way, probably,” Sandy said.

Boyle nodded. “Do you think it’s a good idea?” he asked.

Sandy looked at him in surprise. “Of course it’s a good idea. The Major Seniors wouldn’t approve it if it wasn’t. You can put thousands of capsules into orbit, very cheaply. And what about kicking some of that garbage out of orbit in safe areas? Don’t you want to save your cities from the kind of thing that almost happened to Perth?”

Boyle sighed. “Yes,” he said meditatively. “That certainly sounds very good, shoving the trash around so that it will miss cities. It’s the other side of that coin I’m thinking about.”

“I don’t understand,” Sandy said.

Boyle shrugged. “Well, if you can make an object deorbit to miss a city,” he said, “don’t you think it would be just as easy to make it hit one?”

Chapter 16

The four lasting legacies of the twentieth century are radionuclides, atmospheric gases, toxic chemicals, and plastics—and plastics is the greatest of these. Ten billion transitory hamburgers are long since digested, excreted, and gone; but they have left ten billion immortal Styrofoam boxes behind. Plastics are generally light enough to float in water. So when nylon fishing nets are lost overboard by trawlers they drift eternally through the seas and kill fish as long as they hold together, which is forever. Coca-Cola jugs and shampoo bottles wind up in the oceans and bob onto all the beaches of the world. The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, but a plastic six-pack container will never die. Like diamonds, plastics are forever. For some members of the animal kingdom, this is good news. Jellyfish, for instance, benefit from the situation. The animals that feed on jellyfish are likely to eat a drifting sandwich bag by mistake and die of it, so the jellyfish survive uneaten and prosper. But it is bad news for seals, diving birds, turtles, fish . . . and people.

On the trip across the wide Hudson River to old New York Marguery was curiously silent and detached. Sandy hardly noticed. He was thinking hard himself—not, for a wonder, about whether he would get seasick again, although the river was rough at first, the river current flowing south to collide with the tide sweeping in to the north, but about what Hamilton Boyle had said.

“Would you like another sandwich?” Marguery asked, delving into the box she had brought.

Sandy saw that he still had almost all of the first one in his hand. “Not right now. Marguery? Do you think the Hakh’hli would do anything like that?”

“Blast our cities? I don’t know, Sandy. Do you?”

“No! It’s totally against all their principles, I’m almost certain.”

She nodded, but all she said was, “Finish your sandwich.”

Once they were out of the currents of the Hudson it was more like the pleasure trip it was supposed to be. The little inertial-drive motor purred reassuringly as they glided to a landing on what Marguery said was West 34th Street.

There wasn’t a “shore” to land on. The old shore was underwater. Buildings were on every side, and with them breaking the force of waves and current the water was placid. Often it was even so clear that, peering over the side, Sandy could see the bottom—streets, with abandoned cars and trucks and huge things Marguery told him were city buses.

They beached the little boat between two tall buildings, and the two of them pulled it up past the high tide mark. The sidewalk was littered with brightly colored scraps of plastic brought up by waves. When Marguery explained casually that they were leftover garbage from the old days, Sandy looked back at the water with distaste. “Do you actually ‘swim’ in garbage?” he asked.

“Oh, the biological stuff is gone long ago,” she assured him. “There’s nothing in the water that’ll make you sick. Not here, anyway. If you went a little farther south there are real problems—when the old nuclear power plants went underwater all sorts of nasty stuff soaked out—but that’s there. Now, do you want to go up to the top of that building?”

Sandy squinted at what she was pointing at, shrugging out of the funny orange “life preserver” Marguery had made him wear. “What is it?”

“It’s the Empire State Building,” she said shortly. “From the top of it you can see all around. Well?”

He stepped back as a gentle wave from the river came close to his shoes. “Oh, sure,” he said sourly. “We’re having fun, right.”

It was almost true. If it hadn’t been for his injured feelings it would have been wholly true, because certainly what they were doing and seeing was exactly the sort of thing he had dreamed of all his young life. He was right in the heart of the Big Apple! It wasn’t at all the way he had expected it to be, to be sure, but there it was, all around him. Overhead were blue sky and towering white clouds; all around them were the windows and facades of the buildings that had made Manhattan the first skyscraper city.

They were not alone. Back on the river, just a block away, other little boats, inertial driven like their own or puffing steam from their purring little hydrogen motors, were skittering about, filled with people on errands he could not guess. There was a great barge moored stem and stern between two buildings at the river’s edge, and cranes were lowering masses of objects into it: spaghetti strands of cable, office machines, lighting fixtures.

“They’re mining,” Marguery said briefly. “These buildings are full of useful things, and it’s all going to go to waste here if the water gets any higher. Which it probably will . . . The amount of copper those old people used! So we just take what we want while we can.”

“It looks dangerous,” Sandy offered, watching two men in a building far over his head leaning out to guide a descending bundle of what seemed to be metal rods.

“Well, it is, a little,” Marguery said. “A lot of those buildings are rotten at their foundations—the water has eaten them away. Every once in a while one falls. But you don’t have to worry about the Empire State. It was built for the ages!”

Staring up at it, with his head thrown back until his neck hurt, Sandy wasn’t as much concerned about the building’s falling down as he was about getting up to the top of it. He didn’t think it was much of a worry for himself; the muscles that had grown up on the Hakh’hli ship were ready enough to lift him a mere thousand feet or so. He wondered if Marguery could make it. When they entered there were water stains in the lobby. When he pointed them out Marguery nodded somberly. “When there’s bad weather you can get storm surges all the way in here,” she told him. “They’re getting worse, too; I guess we haven’t finished with the warmup. Come on!”

It turned out they didn’t have to climb all the way to the top of the Empire State Building. From the lobby they had four flights of stairs to go, passing stories filled with stacked materials and a whole floor of buzzing, whining electrical generators, hydrogen fueled and providing power to the floors above. There wasn’t any external electrical power in most of the city, Marguery explained, because the underground mains were now also underwater. But because of the generators they were able to ride in a comfortable elevator to the observation platform eighty-odd stories up.

No one else was there, and even if they had had to climb, the view would have been worth it. In spite of himself, Sandy found that he was entranced. He was gazing down at the whole human world! There was Hudson City to the west and north, across the wide span of river and bay; there was the almost-unbroken sweep of ocean to the south and east, punctuated with the few islands that had been heaped up in Brooklyn and Queens by the glacial drift ages earlier; there were the surviving lesser towers of old New York City, and the greater pair at what had once been the tip of the island. And there—he could see it plainly—sticking up from the middle of the great sweep of the bay was the body and upraised lamp of that most famous of heroic sculptures, the Statue of Liberty.

He said happily, “It’s great up here!”

Marguery didn’t answer. She was looking at a fixture in the ceiling, and when she looked back at him her gaze was clouded.

“Marguery?” he ventured.

She shook herself and glanced around. They were still alone on the old observation deck, though they could hear the hammering of a salvage crew only a floor or two below. She glanced at the fixture in the ceiling and then she seemed to make her mind up—about something, though Sandy could not tell what. She turned to him with an unexpectedly warm smile.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s really nice to be alone, isn’t it?”

Surprise made him scowl at her. The woman almost seemed to be giving him some sort of sexual signal! He cursed internally at the baffling rites of the human libido. What was he supposed to do? Should he throw his arms around her and do that right here, on the sundrenched observation platform of the skyscraper, with every chance that someone would step out of that elevator at any moment?

It almost seemed that he was. She had moved a step closer to him, still smiling. She had even bent her head toward him, so that her lips were no more than an inch or two above his own.

Angrily Sandy lifted his face to her and reached out for her. To his great astonishment, though she allowed his arms to circle her and even put her own around his neck, she turned her face away. She nuzzled his ear. When he tried to twist his face to hers she held tight.

He realized she was whispering to him.

It was only her breath that told him that; she was whispering into the wrong ear. He pulled back and said, “That’s the wrong one. The hearing aid is on the other side.”

She scowled, then quickly put the smile back on her face. She moved her lips closer to the good ear, and whispered again.

“Sandy. Don’t say anything. This is important. I’m going to ask you if you want to do something. Just say yes, and then we’ll do it. And don’t argue.”

He pulled away, perplexed, and was even more perplexed to see that she was smiling at him in a way even more overtly inviting than before.

“Ah, Sandy,” she sighed, caressing the back of his neck, “this place isn’t quite perfect, is it? Listen, hon. I know a neat place downtown—you’ll have to swim to get there, but we can work that out. What do you say? Would you like to find a more private spot, so you and I can get together?”

And she winked at him.

Sandy exhaled a deep sigh. Whatever was going on, it was sure to be interesting. “You bet,” he said, and then added, “Hon.”

Chapter 17

New York city’s central island of Manhattan does not have many hills. It used to have them, long ago. The English colonists and the Dutch before them, the Indians who were there first of all—they all spoke of hills, valleys, ridges, wide streams, and ponds big enough to sail on. Only vestiges have remained of any of these. When New Yorkers began the task of covering their island with concrete, they didn’t want any grades steeper than a horse could pull a wagonload of bricks—or, later, than an eighteen-wheeler tractor could pull twenty tons of steel girders. So they lopped off the tops of all the hills, and they filled all the ravines, and they piped all the streams into sewers underground. They did not count on what might happen to that flattened island when the carbon-dioxide warmup began. When it happened, their descendants tried diking the island to keep the rising waters out. But storms overrun dikes when the storms are big enough . . . and the storms of the Age of Warmup are definitely big enough.

“I should have brought your bathing suit,” Marguery sighed when Sandy came out from behind the shelter on the building roof in only his bright green underwear. She inspected him absently. Her mood was still curiously detached, almost somber—considering, Sandy thought resentfully, that she had all but promised that they were going to do it. She concluded, “I guess you look all right. Nobody’s here to see, anyway. Here, put these on.”

He took the inflated rubber thing she handed him and managed to squeeze his head through the hole, tying the tabs at his waist as ordered. They were on the roof of a low building—the water level was only feet below. He could not help being distracted as he saw Marguery peel off her slacks. She had her bikini bathing suit on underneath her other clothes and looked quite ready for anything.

Sandy was a long way from ready—for anything. All this equipment was bafflingly new. There was not just the air-filled rubber thing to get on, there was a backpack tank to strap into place, and a mask to try to learn to breathe through, and weights to hang on his belt for what Marguery called “neutral buoyancy.” Sandy scowled. “Can’t we just let a little of the air out?” he asked.

“I don’t want to drown you. No,” she said shortly. “Let’s get in the water. We really shouldn’t stay exposed to the sun this far south.”

She sat on the edge of the roof and eased herself over, floating easily in the water just below him. “Well?” she called, waiting.

Sandy took a deep breath and followed her example.

He didn’t do it as rapidly as she. He took a firm grip on the parapet and lowered himself, inch by inch, into the water. As soon as his legs were in he gasped in astonishment; it was cold. Well, not really cold, he conceded; it wasn’t really unpleasant, except at the first unprecedented shock. But it was water rather than air that his legs were in, far quicker than any gases at soaking heat out of his body.

If Marguery Darp could stand it, he could. Grimly Sandy lowered the rest of his body into the unfamiliar medium. It took an effort of will to make his fingers release the edge of the wall.

Then he was floating.

It was a queer sensation. It was a dozen different queer sensations, none of them ever experienced before. When he moved his arms through the water his body moved in the other direction—just like the main drive engines on the interstellar ship; action and reaction held here, too! The first chill disappeared as his skin got used to the surrounding liquid. It felt, actually, rather nice. When he ducked his face under the water experimentally, some got into his mouth; it was salty, but not at all unpleasant.

He called to Marguery, floating watchfully a yard away, “I think I like it!”

“Let’s get your weights adjusted,” she said.

That didn’t take long. Marguery had made a good guess, and only two small ones needed to be added to counteract the buoyancy of his floats, so that his whole body, flesh, floats, tanks, weights, and all, added up to just about the density of the water he was in.

Then there was the necessity of learning to breathe out through his nose and in through the rubber tube held in his mouth. Sandy choked and strangled half a dozen times before he finally got the hang of the breathing procedures.

Then he peered down into the water. It was less clear here than it had been in midtown, or perhaps simply deeper. “What’s down there?” he asked.

“You’ll see. Nothing to worry about. There’s not much that can hurt you around here, outside of the occasional shark.”

“Shark?” Sandy gasped.

“They won’t bother us,” she promised. “You just keep an eye on the little fish; as long as you see them, there aren’t any sharks around.”

Sandy wanted to believe her. He tried to believe her, but he couldn’t help ducking his head underwater to see if some great, gray, mean thing was down there.

She stopped him. “Don’t go all the way under yet.” She meditated for a moment, then said, “I guess you’re as ready as you’re going to be. Is that hearing-aid thing of yours waterproof?”

Sandy considered. “I don’t think so.”

“Then give it to me,” she ordered. “Will you be able to hear me at all with it out?”

Glumly, he said, “No.”

“Then, when I give you the sign, spit on your faceplate like this—” She demonstrated. “—and follow me down.” She carefully stowed the little button in a pocket in her scuba gear, sealed the pocket, and gave Sandy a meager smile. She said something. He knew she was saying something because he could see her lips move, but he didn’t hear a sound.

“What?” he bellowed.

She frowned, shrugged, and pointed to the face mask. When he followed her example and spat in it before pulling it on, she looked as though she were sighing, but only waved to him and fell backward into the water beside him.

And they were on their way down, into the dimness of the Wall Street underwater canyon.

He clung to one of Marguery’s heels, letting himself be towed as he stared at marvels. He almost forgot to breathe properly and found himself coughing and gagging before he got the procedure right. But it was worth it!

At street level there were abandoned cars, tossed at crazy angles by the tides. It was twilight there, the sunlight dwindling, but Sandy could pick out objects: a fire hydrant, a bent bicycle frame, a garishly painted cart on which the words “PRETZELS * FRESH JUICE * TOFU” were still visible.

Marguery tapped his shoulder, pointing to a great doorway. Once a revolving door had been the way of entrance, but its wings were folded back. She swam inside, towing Sandy.

They were swimming through what seemed to have been one of those places that the humans called a “bank.” Inside, things became both easier and more difficult. Easier because there were railings and counters to cling to, so that Sandy’s amateurish efforts at swimming weren’t needed. Harder because there was no sunlight at all inside the great room, only diffuse, pale light from outside.

Marguery didn’t seem to mind. She did something to an object on a band around her head, and a beam of light sprang out. Then she swam ahead, beckoning Sandy to follow, right through the doors of a vault. Sandy’s eyes began to compensate, and he could see that inside were cabinets, their doors broken and hanging loose, all empty. At the far end of the vault was a spidery spiral staircase. Marguery pulled herself up it, Sandy following; and at the top of the staircase—

Marguery wasn’t swimming any more. She was walking up the staircase. The water level stopped just before the ceiling of the vault, and the staircase opened into a dark chamber that was not flooded.

When Sandy poked his head out of the water to follow her he saw that she had flipped her breathing mask off. Wondering, he followed her example and found that he was in a room with couches and chairs—all moldering, with a not wholly unpleasant smell of damp.

Marguery was moving around, touching things, the beam of her headlamp picking out walls, ceiling, fixtures—a pole light went on, and they were in a chamber with its own bubble of air trapped under the surface of the flood. She was speaking to him over her shoulder, as he saw when the light came on, but he couldn’t hear anything. “I . . . can’t . . . hear . . . you,” he said.

She paused and opened the pouch on her belt. She unwrapped the little hearing-aid button, rubbed it dry on a cloth over the table, and handed it to him. As soon as he had screwed it into his ear she said, “Do you like this place?”

He looked around. “What is it?”

“It was where the old people kept their valuables. It’s what they call safe-deposit boxes.” She waved at the walls lined with little doors, most of them open. “They kept money here, and jewels, and their wills, and their divorce papers, or anything they wanted to make sure wouldn’t get lost. Then they’d come in here and go into one of those little rooms and clip their coupons, or whatever.”

“What is ‘clip their coupons’?”

She laughed. “Well, that’s a long story. They all had ‘stock’ and ‘bonds’—the rich people did, the kind that used a place like this—and so if they had money it made more money for them, only every once in a while they had to cut off a piece of one of the ‘bond’ certificates and mail it in and then they would get the money.” While she was talking she was taking towels off a rack, tossing one to Sandy, and drying her hair with another. The towel was musty, but dryer than his body. He found himself shivering. Marguery noticed. “Ah, wait a minute,” she said. She touched another switch, and a ring of orange-red light began to glow in a round metal reflector on the floor. “It’s always wet in here,” she said, “but I like it anyway. The electric heater will dry us out a little. Every once in a while I have to recharge the batteries, but they’re good for a few hours yet.”

“Why do you need ‘batteries’?”

“There isn’t any other electrical power down here, of course. There isn’t any communication with the outside world at all.”

Sandy sat down on the leather couch, testing it to make sure it would support his weight. It creaked, but it was a sturdy piece of furniture. He looked around curiously. “What do you use this place for?”

She hesitated. “Well,” she said slowly, “mostly it’s just a place I use to get away to.” She looked at him for a moment. Then she added, “Also it’s about the only place in the world where I can be absolutely sure nobody is watching me or listening to me. Give me your tank, will you?”

He unbuckled it and handed it over, while she opened the valve on her own to just a hiss. “We do need to bring in a little more oxygen now and then,” she said. “Outside of that, it’s a real home away from home, don’t you think?”

Sandy didn’t answer. He was wishing his skills at reading human expressions and tones of voice were a little more highly developed. Marguery seemed different, somehow—her conversation a little forced, and her movement rapid.

“I didn’t know you spent much time in this city,” he said, watching her.

“InterSec’s headquarters is in Hudson City,” she said. “I just like to have a little private place of my own.”

The word “private” again. And she seemed so agitated—almost as much, Sandy thought, as he himself felt in her presence.

Was it possible that human females and Hakh’hli were not so different after all? Could she be reacting to his own growing horniness?

There was only one sure way to find out. It was a risky way, but at that point Sandy’s need to know exceeded his fear of being rejected again. He sat down on the couch beside her and put his arms around her. She stiffened. “Wait a minute, Sandy. Do you think I got you here for some kind of romance?”

He kissed her ear. “Think? No,” he said, trying to be exact. “More like ‘hope.’ ”

She squirmed away. “Cut it out! You’re just as childish as the Hakh’hli.”

He was offended. “The Hakh’hli are not childish,” he protested.

“Well, what do you call it? It’s like boys’ camp, or—” She hesitated. “You know, we used to have things called armies here.”

“I’ve heard of armies, of course,” Sandy said, trying to get closer to her again.

“Of course you have. You probably know more about them than I do, but my grandfather was in one. The way they did in the army, it seems to me, is a lot like you people do on the Hakh’hli ship. In the army they got up at reveille and fell out to go to breakfast, and that was how they did everything all day long. Like, they were ordered. Granddad called it doing things by the numbers. And that was like, I don’t know, like treating all the soldiers like they were children. And because they were treated like children, that’s how they behaved. Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” said Sandy, putting his arm around her again. “The Hakh’hli don’t have armies.”

“But they act that way, don’t they?”

“If you say so,” he said, kissing her on the mouth.

Almost at once she pulled her lips away—almost. “But really—” she began, and then he was kissing her again.

She kissed him back, and then suddenly threw her arms around him. She was strong for a human being, and he was surprised at the power of her grip.

“Oh, hell,” she whispered into his neck. “After all, why not?”

It was not in the least like amphylaxis; there was a lot more moving around, just as the bumpy lumps in the television-film blankets had promised.

It wasn’t very much like masturbation, either. It was a great deal better. It was so much better that Sandy howled like a slaughtered hoo’hik at the moment of climax, and Marguery was not silent herself; and when it was over they both lay back, spent, on the musty, soggy old couch that seemed to Sandy as though it had been covered with rose petals.

Jubilant and at peace, Sandy turned his head to gaze at the woman he had just successfully made love to. He studied her face carefully. As he had never before seen a human female immediately after sexual intercourse, he did not know how to read her expression. Her face wasn’t as sweaty as he had expected—nothing like his own—but there was a blotch on her cheek that he didn’t think had been there before.

He searched his scant store of knowledge for the right thing to say. “Was it all right for you?” he asked anxiously.

She surprised him. She gave him a penetrating look, as though to try to see if he were joking. When she decided he wasn’t she laughed out loud.

“Dear boy,” she said fondly. “When I moo like a cow, that’s the same as saying, ‘yes, sir, it was dandy.’ Only next time maybe you shouldn’t squeeze quite so hard,” she added, squinting at her shoulder to inspect for bruises.

In the heat of the moment it had not occurred to Sandy to remember how much stronger he was than any normal Earth human. When he looked he saw that the bruises were there, all right. And his fault! “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Quit saying that, will you?” She stood up, wincing slightly, and reached for one of the towels to wrap around her. “Hand me that air tank,” she ordered.

When Sandy picked it up he noticed that it was no longer hissing. Marguery took it from him, glanced at the gauge, and shook it, looking annoyed. She scrabbled around until she found the other one, which was still venting gas into the room.

She turned it off and grinned. “I guess it’s a good thing we left them going,” she said philosophically. “We probably used up a lot of oxygen. Anyway, I can hold my breath long enough to get out of here.”

“Hold your breath?” Sandy was astonished.

“I’ve done it before,” she said. Then she sat down, regarding him. “That,” she said, “isn’t why I brought you here. Although it was very nice. I wanted to talk to you.”

He stared at her. In the vagrant light the blotch on her face seemed both brighter and larger. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for days now?”

She shook her head. “We’ve been talking, all right,” she said grimly, “but every word we said was recorded by InterSec. Wherever we were. Whatever we were doing. I wanted to talk to you in private, where there isn’t anybody listening, because there are some things I’m not supposed to talk to you about.”

Alarmed, he started to speak, but she laid her finger over his lips. “I’ve already been reprimanded for telling you that we’d spotted your ship,” she added. “And I didn’t tell you all of it.”

He stared at her. She looked flushed but determined as she went on. “As soon as the first observers reported the gammas from your ship’s engines everybody began checking their old sky photographs, and we backtracked it to, I don’t know, I think it’s what they call three hundred AUs out. They knew right away it had to be a ship. They began analyzing the spectrum of discharges from your ship. We know what fuels your engines; it’s what they call ‘strange matter.’ We knew that, and the mass of it, and the size, and everything else; and we were ready to meet your lander when it came down. If it hadn’t been for the hurricane, we would have been there in twenty minutes instead of ten hours.”

The exuberance of after-sex was draining away. “You didn’t tell us all that.”

“No. We didn’t. We decided to watch you. There hasn’t been a minute since you got to the dairy farm that you haven’t been watched and recorded.”

“But I thought you liked me!” he wailed.

“Damn your soul, Sandy, can’t you tell I like you? Would I make love with somebody I didn’t like? I’m not some kind of Mata Hari.”

“Mata—”

“Oh, skip it,” she said impatiently. “Let’s get real. Let me ask you something. Have you said anything to Polly about the things I told you?”

“You mean about why I didn’t remember Alpha Centauri?” He looked both baffled and resentful, but finally said, “To Polly, yes. She said to talk to ChinTekki-tho, but I didn’t do that.”

“Ah.” Marguery looked pleased. “Why didn’t you?”

The good after-making-love feeling was dissipating, and Sandy began to feel belligerent. “Do I have to have a reason why not? I just didn’t, that’s all.”

She nodded, gratified. “I was hoping you wouldn’t, Sandy.”

He said logically, “If you didn’t want me to tell them, why didn’t you say so?”

“I wanted to see if you’d do it by yourself. Because—” She hesitated, shifting position uncomfortably, and then finished reluctantly, “Because there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

He looked at her with concern. All he knew about love-making suggested that she should have been relaxed and happy now, but she seemed both ill at ease and uncomfortable. “Are you all right?” he demanded.

“Of course I’m all right! Why wouldn’t I be all right? It’s just—” She grinned at him. “Maybe it’s just that you’re a little stronger than I’m used to, you know what I’m saying?”

Sandy accepted that to be a compliment and allowed himself to preen a bit. But the good feeling didn’t last. He said, aggrieved, “You didn’t really have to spy, you know. You could have just asked.”

“We did ask, Sandy. We’re still asking. I’m asking. But what if there was something the Hakh’hli didn’t want to answer?”

Sandy shrugged. She said, her tone wheedling, almost as though she were asking to be forgiven, “So we simply took normal precautions. We’ve bugged your rooms, wherever you were. We’ve taped everything you’ve said. We’ve listened in on the landing craft’s transmissions to the ship—”

Sandy looked at her, amazed. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“As a matter of fact, we almost couldn’t. That’s some tight beam the Hakh’hli’ve got. We can’t pick it up more than a mile from the lander, but we’ve got our own ground stations right there. And just to make sure we have a high-altitude aircraft orbiting overhead to hear what the lander is sending back.”

“But it’s in Hakh’hli!”

“It’s in Hakh’hli, right,” she agreed grimly. “That makes it tough. We’ve picked up some words from you, and we’ve got a whole bunch of linguistics people analyzing and correlating. We can’t read it all. Just enough to be worrying.” She peered at him. “We have to, don’t you understand? Wouldn’t the Hakh’hli have done the same thing?”

Sandy remembered the hundreds of Hakh’hli who did nothing else—who, for half a century, had done nothing but to pore over every scrap of data from Earth’s broadcasts, trying to penetrate every hidden part of human activities. “Well, maybe so,” he said reluctantly. “It doesn’t matter. You’re not going to find out anything bad.”

“We’re not?” Marguery said sadly.

He stopped short, struck by her tone. “What are you trying to say?” he demanded.

She said unhappily, “Start with your mother. That picture Ham Boyle borrowed from you.”

“What about it?”

“Well—” She hesitated. “Do you remember your mother at all?”

“No. I told you that. She died when I was born.”

“But you did have that picture of her. Well, Ham put it on television to see if anyone would recognize it. A lot of people did. But that picture isn’t of an astronaut, Sandy. It’s of a movie actress from the last century; her name was Marilyn Monroe.”

“That’s impossible!” Sandy shouted.

“It’s true, Sandy. And there’s more. You said she and your father were American astronauts, and they were stuck out in space because of the war.”

“I said that, yes. It’s true!”

She sighed. “Sandy,” she said, “it didn’t happen that way. InterSec has checked the records really carefully. Every space flight was recorded, even during the war. We know for a fact that there weren’t any manned American rockets in space at the time of the war.”

“But,” Sandy said reasonably, “there must have been. That’s where the Hakh’hli found my parents.”

She shook her head. “The records show that there was one spacecraft that was out at the time,” she said. “Just one. It was a Mars orbiter. They had sent a probe down to the surface of the planet, and they were waiting for it to come back with samples. But it wasn’t American. It was Russian.”

He gaped at her. “Russian? Oh, no. That has to be wrong. The Hakh’hli told me my parents were American. The Major Seniors wouldn’t make a mistake like that. I mean, by the time the big ship got here the Hakh’hli had been monitoring broadcasts for fifty years. They’d know the difference.”

“That’s true,” Marguery agreed.

“So my parents couldn’t’ve been Russian!”

“Well,” she said sadly, “I would tend to agree with you about that. That was the only Russian spacecraft out, and it had only two people in it. I don’t see how they could have been your parents, though, because InterSec has double-checked the records and the cosmonauts were both men.”

Chapter 18

The countries of Earth, which are now broken up into commonwealths too tiny to be called “countries” anymore, try as much as they can to eliminate governmental power. Especially international power. They know they can’t get along without any at all, though. They do need some sort of network to deal with criminals—thieves, murderers, people who damage the peace and security of others in any way—who are quite capable of flitting from one commonwealth to another. (As everyone is, since there are no such things as “passports” or “visas.”) There aren’t as many criminals as there used to be, even considered as a percentage of the much diminished world population. But they are there, and they need to be dealt with. That’s what InterSec is designed to do. What it is not designed to do is keep track of alien visitors from space . . . but who else is there to do it?

“InterSec’s records are wrong!” Sandy shouted. “That’s impossible.”

Marguery didn’t answer. She looked very tired. She only shook her head.

“But if they’re right—what am I?” he howled.

Marguery took the question at face value and answered it. “You’re a man,” she said positively. “It also happens that you’re a man I like very much—couldn’t you tell that?”

“But—”

“But we don’t know how you got to be a man, exactly,” she agreed. “Right. That doesn’t change anything, does it?” She paused to cough. “I really don’t feel so well,” she said reflectively.

He wasn’t even listening. “I can’t believe what you said about my mother,” he told her somberly.

Marguery shrugged and made an effort to be responsive. “I’m really tired,” she said apologetically. “It’s been a pretty tough few days—spending all your waking hours with you, then as soon as you’re tucked in I have to go for briefing and debriefing. Find out everything else that’s been going on, so I’ll know what to ask you about.” She shook her head, and then added, “Maybe that’s why I’m acting this way. I can’t believe what I’ve been doing. I’m not in the habit of making love with the suspects I’m surveilling.”

“Suspects!”

“Well,” she said reasonably, “people that I’m assigned to keep an eye on. I didn’t mean for the lovemaking part to happen, Sandy. Ham’s going to be really ticked off.”

“That’s none of his business!” Sandy barked.

“Sandy, hon. Everything is InterSec’s business.” She shook her head, looking exhausted and worn.

Sandy’s heart melted. “Oh, Marguery,” he wailed, and reached out blindly toward her. They held each other for a moment, while Sandy shuddered and shook . . . until the tactile quality of the smooth, soft female flesh he was touching began to suggest possibilities to him, and he altered his grip.

Marguery fended him off, smiling wanly. “Not this time, hon. You’re almost too much, you know? You’ve got me sore.”

She released him suddenly to sneeze. “Actually, Sandy,” she said in the tone of someone making a not agreeable discovery, “I don’t feel particularly well for some reason.”

Sandy saw with concern that her lips were swollen. He scowled, perplexed. He had not expected anything like this. He knew that postcoital Hakh’hli were uniformly euphoric. Why weren’t Earth humans? Could they be this different? And if they were so different, if this sort of thing were normal, why in the world did they do it?

She had gotten back into her bathing suit and was wrapping both the damp towels around her, sitting as close to the electric heater as she could. All the same, she was shivering. She tried to smile at Sandy. She said, “It would probably be a good idea for us to get out of here. But this is the only chance we’ve had to talk in private. And there’s more.”

His heart sank. “What more?” he asked. What more could there possibly be?

“Oh, I don’t mean anything else about you, hon,” she said, trying to reassure. “There are some things that the Hakh’hli haven’t told us, and we don’t know what to make of them. The bugs, for instance.”

“I don’t know anything about bugs,” he said positively.

She explained. “The people at the lander have caught three new insects—well, technically they’re not insects, they say. Bugs, anyway. They’re all the same, and the entomologists say they’re not related to any Earthly species at all. And one of them was seen coming out of the lander when one of the Hakh’hli was standing in the doorway.”

“What do they look like?”

She made a restless gesture. “Big as my thumb,” she said. “They fly.”

“Oh,” said Sandy, enlightened and reassured. “I bet I know what they are. They’re just hawkbees. They’re harmless. Except to other bugs, I mean. A few got trapped in the lander with us, but you don’t have to worry about them. There wasn’t any queen with them, and so all we had were sterile males.”

She didn’t answer at first. He looked at her with concern. She was breathing hard, and her eyes were closed. Suddenly, without opening her eyes, she giggled. “Sterile males, hey? Remind you of anything?”

He frowned at her. “What are you talking about?” he demanded harshly. But she wasn’t listening to him. She was talking. At least, it seemed she thought she was talking, because her lips were moving and there were faint sounds. But even with his hearing aid almost touching her mouth Sandy could make out no coherent words.

Sandy knew what the word “delirious” meant. It was what people were in hospital beds, while the policeman was begging them to name their murderer; but he had had no previous experience of it at first hand.

It seemed probable that she should be gotten to medical attention as quickly as possible. But how?

There was no telephone in the room. There was no doorway that opened to the surface. There was no hope that Marguery could lead them back through the underwater passages to safety—even if they still had two air tanks.

Which they didn’t.

When he touched her again, Marguery’s skin was hot, and she was breathing very raggedly. Worse than that, one of her eyes was no longer closed; it was halfway open, but the pupil had rolled up under the lid so that she looked . . . she looked . . . the only word Sandy could find to fit the case was “dead.” And if she hadn’t been breathing so raggedly he might have believed that to be true.

She had to be gotten out of there!

There wasn’t any question about it. What she needed was medical help, and Sandy couldn’t supply it himself.

With only one air tank, what could he do? Not to mention the fact that he couldn’t swim.

It was impossible; but it was also absolutely necessary, and so, grimly, Sandy fitted the mask over the unconscious, groaning woman and clumsily attached the one filled air tank. He closed his eyes, visualizing the path they had traced on entering. Down the spiral staircase. Across the bank floor. Out into the open water, then up to the surface.

It had, he thought, taken no more than five or ten minutes for them to enter in the first place. That was with Marguery in command, and Marguery knew what she was doing; so call it fifteen for him to make it out. Well, then. He could hold his breath for, probably, three minutes—call it two and a half to be safe. That meant he needed to empty his lungs and fill them again half a dozen times.

Was that possible?

The only way to find out was to try. Holding his breath, he slipped his hand under the mask on Marguery’s unconscious face and pulled the mask away. His great hand covered her mouth and nose easily as he exhaled all the air his lungs would surrender. His other hand put the mask over his own face long enough to refill his lungs, and then he replaced the mask.

Then he squatted on his heels in dismay. He was not at all sure that he would be able to keep water from entering Marguery’s lungs, but that wasn’t the worst thing. Still worse was the fact that the process took far too much time. He couldn’t go on breathing only once every two minutes for very long. There was another consideration, too: He didn’t have enough hands to go around. He needed one to keep the water out of Marguery’s nose and mouth, one to hold the mask to his own, and a third one to hold onto whatever rail or article of furniture was mooring them at the moment, and still a fourth hand to hold Marguery.

The whole thing was impossible. It wouldn’t work. They needed two tanks—

Abruptly Sandy roared with surprised satisfaction, making the unconscious woman stir and moan. They had two tanks! The only problem was that one of them was empty.

By the time he had figured out how to bleed some of the contents of the full tank into the other Marguery’s moaning had stopped. She seemed to be asleep. She simply did not rouse from that sleep, even when he shook her.

Sandy hooked her into her gear, slipped his own mask on, and began the long climb down into the water and under it, pulling himself hand over hand along the rail of the spiral staircase, retracing their steps. Finally, once they were down, he could see the glow of sunlight outside.

Three minutes later he was at the surface, bawling frantically for help to the people who were staring at him from a passing work boat.

Chapter 19

Because the Earth human body is constantly exposed to attack by organic things of all kinds from its environment, most of which would do it harm if they could, it has a complicated and very effective system of defenses. Antibodies form. Glands flood the system with prophylactic agents. The body mobilizes to defeat the attacker. The system works very well—that is why life has survived on Earth for four billion years—but sometimes the very mobilization of defense systems by itself causes fever, itching, sneezing, the formation of pimples or blisters or blotches—even syncope; even, sometimes, death. Then the syndrome is called “an allergic reaction,” and it can be more serious than the original attack.

When one of the air-evac medics took time to explain that to Sandy, he understood—more or less. What he understood best was that it was serious. It kept the medics busy. By the time the helicopter had made the ten-minute flight to Hudson City and was swooping down on the roof marked with a squared-off red cross, Marguery was shrouded in blankets, with a tube in her nose and another tube taped to a needle that entered a vein in her arm and her face mostly hidden under a mask.

She wasn’t talking, even incoherently. She was unconscious. After those first quick words of explanation, the medics weren’t talking, either, or at least not to Lysander Washington. No one paid any attention to him at all, at least not until they had pushed the wheeled stretcher Marguery was on into one elevator and hurried Lysander himself into another, with instructions to sit in the emergency waiting room—and the only attention he got then was from the other people sitting around, some with crutches, some with babies in their arms, some half asleep, some nervously pacing back and forth as they waited to hear the prognosis on their friends or relatives within.

The seats were flimsy aluminum-tubing things with canvas backs. Sandy did not want to trust his weight to them. He was more inclined to join the pacers, anyway, because the whole thing was a terrible mystery to him, and he couldn’t help feeling that in some way—what way it could possibly be he couldn’t imagine—the whole thing was his fault.

And no one would tell him anything.

A little girl in shorts and tennis shoes was staring at him, diverted from the situation comedy on the waiting-room TV screen. She had a carton of popcorn from a vending machine in her hand, but she wasn’t eating the popcorn because her thumb was in her mouth. She pulled it out long enough to ask, “Mister, are you the spaceman?”

He scowled at her. He was not in a talkative mood. “No,” he lied. Why should he be truthful when all about him deceived? “I’m, uh, just a normal Earth human waiting for my wife to have a baby.”

“I don’t think that’s so,” the child said critically, “because we go to the other side of the hospital when we come here for babies. My brother’s getting a marble out of his nose; he’s dumb. Do you want some popcorn?”

He shook his head and got up to visit the drinking fountain. He peered down the forbidden corridors of the hospital, pale green and white, with carts that bore unplugged machines and stacks of linen, and people in pale green smocks hurrying back and forth. Ignoring the girl, he went to the reception desk again. “Can you tell me anything about Marguery Darp?” he begged.

“The doctor will be with you when she can,” the receptionist said, eyeing him curiously. “There’s a film room down the hall if you’d like to watch some other kind of television while you wait.”

“Do they have decent chairs?” he asked ungraciously.

The receptionist studied his build. “They have couches, anyway. I think they’re pretty strong,” she offered.

“Then maybe I will,” Sandy growled, but what he decided to do first was to visit the men’s room. He was brooding. This world was entirely too full of unexpected crises! He was tired of being taken by surprise. It wasn’t the way he had been brought up; on the big interstellar ship you at least always knew where you stood, and if there was ever any doubt about what to do next the Major Seniors would tell you.

He did not want to face the curiosity of the people in the lounge again. When he found the film room the couch did, at least, look sturdy enough to bear him. But as soon as he sat and gazed at the screen, he was taken aback to see a familiar face. It was his old cohort-mate, Bottom! He was on a platform, just as Polly had been, and he, too was lecturing an invisible audience. Not on astronomy, of course. His topic was biological control of radioactive and toxic wastes, and he was showing microscope pictures of tiny organisms that, he said, would concentrate all the undesirables into their own bodies, simply by feeding on them, and then the little things could be harvested and disposed of. Result: clean water and soil.

Once the initial shock of seeing an old friend had worn off, Sandy decided the subject was boring. He had heard all that long since, in the buddy sessions with his cohort. It surprised him, though, that even the Earth people weren’t interested—at least, he was alone in the film room. And when finally he gave up and went back to the lounge, the TV there was still playing its sitcoms.

The little girl, however, was waiting for him. “I think you really are the spaceman,” she announced triumphantly, pointing to the door, “because if you weren’t why would that creepy thing be looking for you?”

Sure enough, Polly was galumphing toward him through the door, escorted by a uniformed hospital attendant and looking surly as always. And maybe a little surlier than usual, he decided, because it was close to her bedtime “cookies and milk” meal, and she certainly was not going to get fed in this place.

“What stupid thing have you done now, Lysander?” she demanded—speaking rudely in Hakh’hli, to exclude the humans who were giving them their full attention. “Why do I have to come running to this hospital place simply because you are once again in some sort of trouble?”

“I’m not in trouble,” Lysander said, hoping it was true. “I didn’t do anything. Marguery must—got sick,” he finished wretchedly.

“Got sick from what? I am told that you forced her to go underwater, where oxygen-breathers cannot live. That was wrong of you and not right at all! Why did you do that?”

“I certainly didn’t force her! It wasn’t my idea, anyway.”

“Was it then hers? If so, why?”

“Because she wanted a private place to tell me something. I’ve just found out that you’ve been lying to me all my life!”