Polly didn’t look offended, only interested. “And why do you say that?” she asked curiously.

“Because what you have told me about my mother was untrue and not in any way correct. She wasn’t American! Only human ship in space was Russian.”

Polly sneezed quizzically. “And you are upset about this question which is trivial and not at all important? What difference does it make? Russian, American, Chinese—they’re all Earth humans, aren’t they?”

“That difference—” he began grimly. And stopped. It occurred to him that there might be some sort of tactical advantage in concealing just how much he did know. He decided not to say anything about the gender of the Russians, and finished instead, “That difference is that you didn’t tell me what was truth.”

She looked at him with scorn. “I?”

“Yes, you. Plural you,” he amended. “You Hakh’hli! My own cohort, and everybody else, all the way up to Major Seniors, you’ve all lied to me.”

“My dear Lysander,” she said cuttingly. “Are you listening to yourself? What you say is simply contradiction in terms, for how can any Major Senior lie? What one Major Senior says is truth. If some Major Senior says one hoo’hik is not hoo’hik but Hakh’hli of tho degree, then that is so. Otherwise Major Senior would not say it.” She gave a vast yawn and then announced, “This is not useful conversation. It is more important to speak of your activities, which are not satisfactory. Why are you not listening to Bottom’s lecture on soil detoxification?”

“You’re missing it, too. He’s still talking.”

“But I know what he is to say, and you do not.”

Lysander shrugged. “The part I saw didn’t seem very interesting.”

She hissed in reproof. “How can you make such judgment? On other hand,” she said, sounding almost plaintive, “Earth humans did not seem to find it interesting either. I do not understand Earth humans. Do you know that hardly any of them have spoken to me about thruster project? It is as though they do not appreciate what great gift Hakh’hli are making to them.”

“Well,” Lysander said helpfully, “maybe they don’t see it as a gift, exactly. After all, you told them there would have to be Hakh’hli supervisors and not merely Earth humans in charge.”

“But of course there must be Hakh’hli supervisors! Who knows what Earth humans might do otherwise? They are violent and not wholly civilized, Lysander! Remember all you have learned! They are capable of converting all technology into weapons.

“How could they make railgun a weapon?” he asked reasonably.

“That would be easy and not difficult at all! They might shoot one massive capsule up very fast and ram our ship! Can you imagine what would happen in that case? And our ship could not maneuver to get away, since main engines are completely off at present.” She woofed angrily. “It could be even worse! They could send nuclear bombs, such as those they are always dropping on each other.”

“They haven’t dropped any of those for years.”

“For years!” she mimicked. “For years, only! And does not that perhaps make it time for them to use such weapons again?” She glanced over Sandy’s shoulder and made a face. “We will talk of this again if you like,” she said, “but not now. Here is my watchdog coming, and I do not wish to speak to him.”

She hobbled angrily away. To Lysander’s surprise, Hamilton Boyle seemed more interested in him than in his charge, Polly. He nodded to her as he passed, and advanced on Lysander.

“Marguery’s going to be all right,” Boyle said, patting Lysander’s shoulder reassuringly. “It looked bad. In fact it was bad; there’s no doubt that you saved her life by getting her out of there. But it’s just some kind of allergic reaction. They’ve given her histamine blockers, and she’s conscious now. I just left her.”

“I’m going to see her,” Sandy decided, turning toward the emergency room door. Boyle put a hand on his arm.

“Not just now,” he said. “She’s, uh, she doesn’t look her best right now. She’d rather wait until she’s prettier for you to see her.”

Sandy gazed up at him, making a sound that was somewhere between, “Oh, hell,” and “Oh, wow!”—as much delighted that Marguery wanted to look her best for him as he was dejected that he couldn’t go in. “What is an allergic reaction?” he asked; and when Boyle explained, he asked curiously, “But what was she allergic to?”

Boyle tamped his pipe, considering. “It could be a lot of things,” he said at last. “Mold spores, for instance. That vault’s been wet for years; it’s probably full of them. How about yourself?”

“What about myself?”

“Are you having any allergic symptoms? Things like sneezing, itching, dizziness, hoarseness—anything like that? Look, as long as you’re here, why don’t we get the medics to check you out?”

“I don’t see any reason to be checked out,” Lysander said.

“But Marguery would want you to,” Boyle assured him. “It only takes a minute to get a sample, and it doesn’t hurt.”

It took a lot longer than a minute, counting the time for dropping his pants and stretching out, face down, while a gum-chewing young woman in one of the pale green uniforms poked for a soft spot in the fleshy part of his hip; and the part about it not hurting wasn’t true, either. The pokes with the woman’s finger were only annoying—well, “disturbing” was a better word, because Sandy was very conscious of the fact that she was female and he was exposed, and he had not been touched by any other human female but Marguery in such an intimate way. But when the woman had found a spot she liked the next thing was a click and a prod and a sudden sharp stabbing feeling, as though a rattlesnake had bitten him on the butt.

Sandy rolled instinctively away, shouting in astonishment, resentment, and hurt. When he looked around he saw the woman holding up a spring-loaded needle as long as the first joint of his thumb. “Please hold still,” she ordered, annoyed. “It’s only a cell sample, after all . . . There. You can go now.”

Full of vexation, Lysander went back into the waiting room. He did not smile when he saw Hamilton Boyle standing there, puffing his pipe right under a large “No Smoking” sign. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?” Boyle asked genially.

“It was bad enough,” Lysander growled, rubbing his buttock. “Now can I see Marguery?”

Boyle shook his head regretfully: “I’m afraid not. She’s asleep, and they don’t want her disturbed.”

Lysander blinked at him, suddenly worried. “But they said she was doing well!”

“And so she is, my boy! It’s just that she’s had a close call, and so they want to keep her until they get some test results. She ought to be fine tomorrow morning. You can see her then, I’m sure—maybe even take her home.”

“Take her home?” Lysander felt a sudden glow. “That’ll be fine.” He thought for a minute, then had an inspiration. “Flowers! It is an Earth custom to send flowers to people in hospitals, isn’t it? Where does one get flowers?”

But Boyle was shaking his head, amused but tolerant. “It’s late, Sandy,” he pointed out. “The florists are all closed. You can bring some in the morning if you want to, but right now I think I ought to drive you home. My car’s in the lot.”

When they got to the car Boyle drove efficiently and fast, but when they reached the hotel he paused before getting out. ‘There’s one thing I’m kind of curious about, Sandy,” he said. “Did you see your friend Bottom’s speech on television?”

“Not really. I didn’t pay much attention.”

Boyle nodded. “Most of what he said was old stuff, if you don’t mind my saying so—we’ve done a pretty good job of working out detox systems for the soil and water ourselves. Had to, you know. There was just one little thing. Bottom said the Hakh’hli were going to start field trials themselves.”

“Yes? Why shouldn’t they?”

Boyle pursed his lips. “Perhaps there’s no reason. Only he said they wanted to do it in conjunction with the railgun project they want us to build for them. In Africa.”

Lysander shrugged. “Why not? It couldn’t do much harm there, could it?”

“But it couldn’t do much good, either, Sandy. Africa’s about the least affected continent as far as acid rain and heavy metals and so on are concerned. The Hakh’hli seem to be very interested in it, though. I wondered if you might know why?”

Lysander shook his head. “You’d have to ask ChinTekki-tho that,” he said. But as a matter of fact he had a pretty good idea what the answer would be, and an even better one that Hamilton Boyle would not get that answer from ChinTekki-tho.

Chapter 20

It may be that the disease called “AIDS” originated in Africa—the source was never entirely clear. It is certain that it ended there, and it ended the human population of Africa with it. By the time the Star War began ten thousand men and women were dying every day, worldwide. A year later it was a hundred thousand a day. The vaccine came along in time to save the remaining millions in most of the world. But in Africa there simply was not enough of anything to deal with the problem. While America was frantically diking and poldering its coastlines against the rising seas, while Europe was trying to save its crops from scouring winds and sudden freezes and ultraviolet burn, no one had energy to spare for helping the “emerging” countries of the Third World. They were thrown on their own resources, and they didn’t have enough resources for the job. Now Africa’s surviving populations of elephants, gorillas, rhinos, and tsetse flies are reclaiming their old ranges. They don’t have to compete with human poachers or farmers anymore, because the human beings are dead. AIDS didn’t kill the Africans. Neglect did.

For the first time since his landing on Earth, Lysander slept the whole night through. It was broad daylight when he woke, and he would undoubtedly have slept longer if Polly hadn’t wakened him. She wasn’t gentle. She shook him and shouted peremptorily in his ear. “Get up, Lysander! ChinTekki-tho wishes to speak to you, at once and not after any delay. Come quickly!”

Unhurriedly, Lysander opened his eyes and looked at her. “I will come,” he said, “since I have questions to ask ChinTekki-tho. Tell him I will be there in some few minutes.”

“Tell him? Ask questions? Lysander, it is you who must answer questions and not that Senior! He is displeased with you.”

Lysander stretched and yawned. “That makes two of us,” he said in English. “Go now.”

“For this,” she promised, “you will swallow your own spit!” Fuming, she hurried back to the radio in her room.

Lysander didn’t hurry. He methodically pulled on his clothes, then paused in the bathroom to relieve himself and wash his face before he followed. By the time he was in Polly’s room he had made up his mind what he wanted to say. Polly was crouched over the radio, muttering into it. She looked up malignantly as Lysander came in, and hissed in astonishment when he ordered, “Leave us. I want to speak to ChinTekki-tho in private.”

“That is foolish and improper for you to say!” she cried. “Why should I leave you?”

“Because if you do not,” he told her, “I will not speak to ChinTekki-tho.” He waited patiently until she left, licking her tongue out in baffled annoyance; then he turned to the radio.

He spoke in English and left off the honorific in the name. “ChinTekki,” he said, “why was I not told that there was to be a landing in Africa?”

It took a second for the response to come, but then ChinTekki-tho’s tone was icy. “Speak of such things in Hakh’hli and not in the Earth language!” he commanded. “Why do you ask such questions in such tone?”

“Because I have been kept from information and not informed fully,” Lysander said. “Must I learn of Hakh’hli plans from Earth humans and not from Hakh’hli?”

The pause was longer than the round-trip required. Then ChinTekki-tho said slowly, “It was not your habit to speak to me in this fashion, Lysander. Why have you changed?”

“Perhaps I’ve grown up a little,” Lysander said.

“Perhaps you have grown more Earthly,” the Hakh’hli said thoughtfully. “It is said that you caused injury to one Earth-female through amphylaxis, Lysander. Why did you do that?”

Lysander flushed. “I caused her no permanent harm. Is it not privilege of Earth-human male to perform amphylaxis with Earth-human female? Am I not Earth-human male?”

“It appears,” ChinTekki-tho sighed, “that you are, indeed. Certainly you are no longer true Hakh’hli, for Hakh’hli would not speak in such tone to this Senior.”

“Perhaps,” Lysander snapped, “Hakh’hli would not have such cause. I was not informed of any plan to visit Africa.”

“But why should we not do this?” ChinTekki-tho asked reasonably. “What value has Africa to Earth humans?”

“It’s theirs!”

Lysander could hear the reproachful hiss. “Africa is not in use,” ChinTekko-tho said stubbornly. “We ask little of Earth humans and not very much at all. We ask an island so that railgun can be built to benefit both Hakh’hli and Earth humans, and Earth humans respond that cannot be because inhabitants object. Will they now tell us we cannot have empty Africa because elephants will object?”

Lysander frowned. “I do not understand,” he said. “What is value of Africa to Hakh’hli?”

ChinTekki-tho said sternly, “That is for Major Seniors to decide and not to be decided by one young person not fully mature.” There was silence for a moment, then the voice from the radio resumed, its tone heavy. “I had hoped to speak more profitably to you, Lysander. I perceive that cannot happen. So there will be no more discussion with you. I will speak privately with Hippolyta now. You, Lysander, think carefully of what you do—for remember, it was Hakh’hli, not Earth humans, who gave you life!”

When Lysander reached the hospital Marguery Darp was not in her room. A nurse showed him to a solarium lounge, where Marguery was talking on the telephone. She was dressed and apparently ready to leave, but when she put down the phone she patted a space on the couch beside her. She looked at him inquiringly. “Is something the matter, Sandy?” she asked.

He laughed at her. “Which something do you want to hear about?” he asked.

“You pick,” she said, and listened carefully as he told her about his unsatisfactory conversation with ChinTekki-tho. She looked different today, he thought—not ill, at all; not hostile; not even remote, but somehow more serious than she had seemed before. When he finished she commented, “It looks as though they’ve got more plans for Africa than they’ve told us. Did he say anything about what they’re building out there?”

Lysander was startled. “Building? No. Are they building something?”

“It looks like it,” she said. She hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Lysander? You know we’ve been taping the Hakh’hli transmissions. Would you be willing to translate some of them?”

He frowned over that. “The reason they’re in Hakh’hli is that they don’t want humans to hear them,” he pointed out.

“Naturally. But if they aren’t up to anything, why shouldn’t we know what they’re saying?”

Another hard question to think about. While he was thinking, Marguery added softly, “As a favor to me, maybe?” Then she saw the sudden expression of pain on his face. “What’s the matter?”

He said gruffly, “I’m confused. Are we falling in love, or what?”

She answered him in perfect seriousness. “The only way to tell that is to wait and see how it comes out, I think.”

“Yes, but—but it’s all so mixed up! Are we friends? Or sweethearts? Are we going to get married? Or is all this just because you were assigned to keep me interested so you can spy on me?”

She flared at him, “That was my assignment, yes. In the beginning. What’s wrong with that? Weren’t you assigned to spy on us?”

He scowled. “Well—sort of, I suppose.”

“So we’re even on that, aren’t we? Sandy, dear,” she said, putting her hand on his, “we’ve got two different things going here. One is you and me, and that’ll just have to work itself out however it comes. The other’s a little more urgent. That’s the human race and the Hakh’hli, and you have to decide what side you’re on. Now.”

He looked at her angrily. “Why do I have to take sides?”

“Because there are two sides,” she said firmly, “and there’s no room in the middle. Will you translate?”

He thought it over for a long moment. Then he decided. “If there’s nothing bad in what the Hakh’hli are saying to each other, then I’m not doing them any harm by translating, am I? And if there is—all right,” he said, standing up, “I’ll do it. Let’s take you home.”

She stood up too. “That’s my boy,” she said, applauding. “Only we’re not going home right now.”

“But I thought that was what I came here to do.”

“Dear Sandy,” she said, half-affectionate, half-somber, “you can take me home later. Maybe even often. But right now we’ve got somewhere else to go.”

The “somewhere else” was a windowless, gray granite building that bore a legend incised on its stone facade:

INTERSEC

YORK COMMONWEALTH

DIVISION OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

It was neither surprising to Lysander nor reassuring. They paused at a garage ramp, where Marguery opened the car window and displayed a medallion to a guard. Then they were passed into an underground garage.

Hamilton Boyle was waiting for them at the elevator. “Through there,” he ordered Sandy, pointing at a flat-topped archway. Marguery didn’t say anything; she just motioned to Sandy to go first. As he passed through it he saw a uniformed woman studying a screen beside the arch and realized he had just been inspected for weapons.

“What’s this all about?” he demanded.

“You’ll see. We have to go up to the third floor,” Boyle said.

At least Marguery took Sandy’s hand in the elevator. Boyle noticed, but didn’t comment. When the elevator door opened at the floor a tall, elderly woman with a gun strapped to her belt was standing before a control panel. She nodded to Boyle and pushed a button. To their right a metal-barred gate slid noiselessly back, and Boyle motioned Sandy to pass through.

An armed guard! A prison door! Sandy had seen such things only on television, but he knew what they meant.

He released Marguery’s hand and confronted Hamilton Boyle. “Are you arresting me?” he demanded.

Boyle gave him an unfriendly look. “Why would I do that? We’re on the same side—I hope.”

“Then what?”

“I want to show you something,” Boyle said grimly, motioning for them to enter a room. In the center of the room, almost filling it, was a conference table, with half a dozen chairs around it. On one wall was a large television screen. “Sit down,” Boyle commanded, and took his place at a console.

As the room lights went dim Lysander looked at Marguery and got a faint, unreassuring smile back. Then the screen lit up.

They were looking at the Hakh’hli ship again. It glowed as clearly as before. But it was not the same as before.

Perplexed, Lysander frowned at the picture. Something had been added to the ship. A structure was beginning to take shape. Extravehicular-labor Hakh’hli were visible, using small tugs to move concave metal shell sections of—something or other—into position.

“There it is, Lysander,” Boyle said. “They started doing it yesterday. Do you have any idea what it is?”

Lysander shook his head.

“You’ve never seen it before?” Boyle pressed.

“No. Well, I couldn’t have, could I? I mean, that looks pretty flimsy. It isn’t something they could have built onto the ship while it was in drive; it would have needed all kinds of bracing and support, or it would have just broken away.”

“Maybe they didn’t need it before,” Boyle commented.

Marguery stirred. “There’s a chance that it’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Remember, the Hakh’hli were talking about beaming microwave energy down to us. This could just be the antenna for that.”

In the semidarkness, Boyle turned to stare at her. “Do you believe that?”

She shrugged, and looked to Lysander.

“I don’t actually think so,” Sandy said. “Power transmission isn’t my specialty, but I learned a little about it. I think they use a different kind of antenna.”

“Then what?” Boyle demanded. “It’s awfully big, Lysander. Bigger than anything I’ve seen. Bigger than the old dish at Arecibo, even.” He paused. Then he asked brutally. “Is it a weapon?”

“A weapon?” Lysander cried, startled. “Of course not! The Hakh’hli don’t even have any weapons, that I ever heard of. One of the worst things they used to say about Earth people was that they—we—used weapons all the time; I just can’t believe that they would use any themselves.” He shook his head vigorously. “No, maybe Marguery’s guess was right—a microwave beam, only a different design than anything I saw—”

“But Lysander,” she sighed, reaching for his hand again, “even that could be a weapon, couldn’t it? Can you imagine what a beam like that could do if it struck Hudson City or Brasilia or Denver?”

“And why do we have to guess,” Boyle demanded, “when we’ve got tapes of everything they’ve been saying to each other, if you’d only translate them?”

Lysander looked from one to the other of them, then back at the picture. “Do you know,” he said conversationally, “those extravehicular Hakh’hli are bred to be bigger and stronger than anyone else? So they can do that kind of work? Only they don’t live as long. When I was little I kind of wished I could be one of them.”

Neither of them responded. They just continued to gaze at him.

“You said you’d do it,” Marguery reminded him.

Lysander sighed. “Turn it off,” he said. “All right. I’ll translate your tapes.”

It wasn’t that easy. At least, it certainly wasn’t fast. It appeared that one or another of the Hakh’hli on Earth had been in communication with someone on the ship nearly all the time the ship was above the horizon at the Inuit Commonwealth. Even subtracting the conversations Lysander had already heard and those in English, there were nearly twelve hours of tapes to listen to. Some were sound only. Some were full picture displays.

None of them carried much useful information.

After the first half hour Lysander turned from the screen. “Stop it for a moment,” he ordered. “Did you hear the part I just translated?”

“Of course,” Boyle said. “Wait a minute.” He pushed some keys, a speaker whirred and then emitted Lysander’s voice:

“ChinTekki says they will proceed with the third alternative. Bottom says they have completed the rescreening of the lander and are ready to take off on short notice. ChinTekki says it may be necessary to refuel, so that they can fly in atmosphere to Site Double-Twelve. Bottom says they will ask the Earth humans for fuel.”

“They did ask,” Boyle corroborated. “We told them we’d need samples of their alcohol and hydrogen peroxide so we could duplicate them. But what’s this ‘third alternative’?”

“That’s just it,” Lysander said gloomily. “I never heard of a third alternative. I never heard of a Site Double-Twelve, either.”

Boyle thought for a moment, then stood up. “I’ve got some errands to run. Keep going. Maybe there’ll be something more helpful later on.”

Lysander did keep on—and on and on, through the long day. Either Boyle or Marguery Darp was with him all the time. They brought him sandwiches, which he ate while watching the screen and translating into the recording device with his mouth full. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t much to say.

Late in the afternoon it occurred to him to ask whether he shouldn’t call Polly to let her know he was safe. “That’s all right,” Marguery told him. “Ham’s already told her that you’re with me.”

“Yes, but she’ll wonder what we’re doing all this time,” he objected.

“Sandy,” she said, managing a real smile, “she thinks she knows what we’re doing. Let’s get on with this.”

That brightened his mood for a moment. There wasn’t much else that was cheering. When the last tape was played he sat back, rubbing his eyes. He said somberly, “I don’t know what the Hakh’hli are doing. I don’t want to think they are doing anything sinister. But there is a great deal going on that they have never told me about.”

Marguery touched his shoulder comfortingly. “It’s all right, Lysander,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Well,” Boyle said philosophically, “at least we know more than we did.” He caught a fleeting look of inquiry from Marguery Darp, and nodded, grinning. “I think I should tell you, Lysander, that our linguistics people have picked up a few words of Hakh’hli, here and there. You’ll be happy to know that they say your translations seem to check out.”

“Did you think I would lie to you?” Lysander demanded.

Boyle’s face sobered rapidly. “We had to be sure,” he said. “This isn’t fun, Lysander. It might be survival. We’ll do whatever we have to do for the sake of survival.” He seemed about to go on, then changed his mind. The smile came back on his face. “Well, that’s enough for one day,” he said affably. “I’m off.”

“And so are we,” Marguery Darp said, standing up. “Sandy? If you’re really going to take me home—this is the time.”

Marguery’s apartment was on the thirty-fifth floor of an old high-rise building looking out over what she called Lake Jersey. “That used to be all marshland,” she said, “until they filled it in. They built all kinds of things there—look, you can see an old football stadium over there. But when the sea began to rise it all got submerged again.”

He nodded, looking around. Even with all Lysander had on his mind, he found room to be astonished that a solitary human being should have so much space for herself. A “kitchen,” a “bathroom,” a “living room,” a “bedroom.” He stood in the doorway of that one for a moment, looking around with particular interest. But it was all interesting. It was the first time he had been in the actual home of an actual Earth human—farm-animal herders not counted, anyway.

Marguery said apologetically, “It’s a pretty old building. Well, that’s why it’s a high-rise, of course; we don’t build that way anymore. But I’m only in it when I’m not on a mission somewhere. Don’t you want to sit down?”

He did. He looked around, estimating the carrying capacity of all the chairs in the living room, and was unsure of most of them. Marguery saw what he was doing and smiled. She patted the couch next to herself. “This ought to be strong enough to hold you,” she said. When he sat down next to her she looked up at him in an expectant way. He couldn’t be sure, but he really thought she looked as though she intended to be kissed.

He did what was expected of him. Apparently it wasn’t satisfactory, because after a moment Marguery drew back and asked, “What’s the matter?”

Lysander leaned back. He thought over all the things that were the matter and selected one. “I’m hungry,” he said.

“I’m not much of a cook, but we could send out for a pizza.” She looked at him closely. “Is that really what’s bothering you?”

“It’s one of them. Plus about a million others, including betraying the people I grew up with. The people who saved my life in the first place.”

“You haven’t betrayed anything,” Marguery pointed out.

“You mean I couldn’t help you. That just makes it worse. I’m not even a useful traitor!”

Marguery thought that over. Then she said, “Lysander, you’re pretty useful to me.” She hesitated, then added, “There’s something I haven’t told you. I didn’t know how you’d take it.”

“Oh, hell,” he groaned. “You’ve decided we shouldn’t be sweethearts after all?”

She laughed at him. “No. Different. Just—well, you know all those tests they kept me overnight for? They weren’t tests on me, honey.”

“They weren’t?”

“They were waiting for the results on you,” she explained. “The samples they took in the hospital? The results came back and they showed what I was allergic to. Sandy, dear, I was violently allergic to you.”

 He stared at her in horror. Then he shook himself and began to pull away. She stopped him.

“You weren’t listening,” she accused. “The word I used was was. I was allergic to you. But that’s something they can deal with, you know. They’ve given me all these histamine blockers and things. I don’t think you can even make me sneeze any more.”

Then she sat there, looking placidly at him. Lysander frowned, trying to understand what she was driving at. She didn’t give him any clue. She just sat silent for a while. For long enough for Lysander to realize what she was being silent for; and when he did reach out for her, and they kissed again, it was all very clear to him.

She moved her head away to gaze into his eyes. “I think the pizza can wait,” she said judiciously. “I wonder just how strong my bed is. But I think we ought to, you know, make sure those histamine blockers really work.”

The blockers worked. So did the bed. So did the pizza delivery service that Marguery phoned, and though Lysander did not much like the cheese-tomato-oil mixture, he did like the company.

Marguery in a silken robe over nothing was even prettier than Marguery in any of the other ways he had seen her. As she got up to fetch plates and glasses of milk and little jars of olives and nuts Lysander could almost forget all the nagging questions that had come to fill his life. He watched Marguery carefully. He could not quite remember whether she had, in fact, mooed like a cow this time. But as far as he could recall she had shown every sign of enjoying what they had done, and she seemed happy enough, if abstracted, as she moved about her little kitchen.

Marguery finished eating long before Lysander did. She sat across from him, sipping a cup of coffee and regarding him critically. “You’re eating that up pretty well,” she commented. “Are you going to go into stun time now?”

He decided it had to be a “joke,” but he responded seriously. “Oh, no. That’s just the Hakh’hli.”

“I see. And when they’re in stun time, they’re really out of it, aren’t they? I mean, gone.”

Although he couldn’t quite see where the joke was going, he answered, “Yes, they’re asleep, all right. As you say, gone. You really couldn’t wake a Hakh’hli up once he was in stun time.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought,” she said, meditating.

“But I don’t go into stun time, because I’m a human being,” he finished, and waited for the joke part.

It appeared there wasn’t any joke part. Marguery looked at him doubtfully for a moment. Then she said, “You are a human being, aren’t you?”

He grinned at her. “Didn’t we just prove that?”

She didn’t smile back. “No, we didn’t. I mean, what if things don’t go right? Will you take the human side against the Hakh’hli?”

“I just did!”

“You translated some messages for us,” she conceded. “I guess that’s an indication. I don’t know if I could call it a proof.”

The pizza tasted worse than ever. Lysander swallowed the rubbery mouthful he had been chewing and put the rest of the slice down. “Do you know,” he said conversationally, “it sounds to me like we’re back to interrogating me again.”

She sat up straight and gazed at him. Even seated, she was a head taller. “I do still have questions,” she conceded. “Are you willing to answer some?”

“Delighted,” he snarled, to show that he had learned the art of irony.

She ignored it. “All right,” she said. “About the eggs the Hakh’hli have in their freezers. They want to hatch them sooner or later, don’t they?”

“Of course they do, but they can’t.”

“Why not?”

He said sullenly, “That’s a really foolish question. There are millions and millions of the eggs. Some of them have been frozen for centuries. More than centuries. The reason they can’t hatch them is that there just isn’t enough room in the ship.”

“There’s room in Africa,” she said grimly.

“Africa again!” he shouted. “You people are crazy on the subject of Africa! The Hakh’hli won’t just take Africa! What kind of people do you think they are?”

She looked away for a moment, and when she turned to face him he was startled to see tears in her eyes. “More to the point, what kind of people do they think we are, Lysander?” she asked.

He shook his head, baffled. “You’re talking in riddles,” he accused. “What do you mean?”

She said, “I wish I knew the answer to the riddles. Lysander, listen. You told me that the Hakh’hli showed Earth films to the whole ship’s crew once a week or so—”

“Once every twelve-day, yes,” he corrected.

She made an impatient gesture. “You even told me what some of the pictures were. Dr. Strangelove. A Bridge Too Far. The Battle of Britain. Those titles sounded peculiar, so we checked them out. Do you remember what the other pictures were, Lysander?”

He scowled. “There were hundreds of them! Let’s see. Well, I remember one called The Battle of the Bulge. It was all full of tanks and prisoners being shot. And All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Young Lions—and, oh, yes, there were some that weren’t  American. They were in other languages; there was one that was called Hitler Youth Hans, about killing Russians and Americans because they were such war criminals—”

“Lysander,” she said gently, “weren’t they all war movies, every one of them? Did the Hakh’hli show their people any movies at all that didn’t depict human beings as war-crazy?”

He gazed at her. “Well, in our own cohort quarters we saw all kinds of things. There were a lot with dancing, and family situation comedies—”

She brushed that aside. “I don’t mean the ones they just showed you. I mean what they showed the whole ship. It sounds to me as though they were propagandizing them, Lysander. Trying to persuade them that human beings were mad killers. And so I ask you again, Lysander: What kind of people do the Hakh’hli think we are? And if they think we’re killers, wouldn’t they maybe consider it only prudent to get in the first punch?”

He stared at her in horror. Then he said slowly, “I cannot believe that the Major Seniors would do anything like that.”

“Can’t you? Or is it just that you don’t want to?” She looked at him furiously for a moment. Then she jumped up and leaned across the table to fling her arms around him. She kissed him hard, and he felt the dampness of the tears on her cheek.

He pulled away and implored her, “Marguery? What game are we playing now? Is it the I-spy game or the we-love-each-other game?”

“Sometimes,” she said grayly, “the games get mixed up.”

They looked at each other silently for a moment. Then Lysander sighed. “I’d rather play the we-love-each-other game.”

She didn’t hesitate. “All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about making love.” Lysander scowled, more puzzled than ever; the expression on her face didn’t match the choice of subject. “I have some questions about that, too,” she went on. “About the way the Hakh’hli do it. You told me that the females are ready any time; whenever one of the guys is ready they hop to it.”

“That’s right,” he said, torn between embarrassment and anger. To discuss love-making when they had just been doing it was fine, but why did she have to be so clinical?

She became more clinical still. “Do the male Hakh’hli have the same kind of joystick you do?”

He flushed, unwilling to believe he understood her. “Joystick?”

“All right. The same kind of penis, then.”

“Oh, the sex organ. Well, I’ve never really studied one close up, you understand—” But, actually, when one of the males was in season nobody around had any trouble in seeing what it looked like. When he told her, Marguery wanted to hear every physiological detail. All the details. About the everted male organ. About the fleshy crater of the females. About the act of amphylaxis itself, and what it looked like while it was happening, and how long it took, and how every female on the ship was always willing and always able, because the laying of fertilized eggs was their greatest joy.

Marguery looked definitely disapproving, but still queerly determined. “And how do the females know when the male is in heat? Pheromones? Just seeing he has a hard-on?”

When the terms had been explained to him Sandy shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t think it’s either of those,” he said. “I think it’s more they’re always ready. I mean, it isn’t any trouble for them, you know? I mean, for the females. They don’t have to get ready or anything. They just do the amphylaxis, and the girl’s eggs get fertilized, and half an hour later she lays them, and that’s that.”

She said, “I can see why it’s great for the males, but what do the ladies get out of it?”

“But I told you! They lay the eggs,” he explained.

Marguery looked pensive. “It almost sounds like the egg-laying is more important than the scr—the amphylaxis, I mean.”

“Well, I suppose it is. The eggs are what count—for the girls, anyway, you know.” He chuckled. “The worst thing you can ever say to a girl is, like, you’ll steal her eggs and flush them down the toilet. They’d get really mad. You wouldn’t even say that, unless you were pretty mad yourself. You wouldn’t dare. If you said it to somebody like Polly she’d kick your belly in.”

She pondered that for a moment, then seemed to relax. “Well,” she said, “that’s all very interesting.”

Lysander didn’t respond. He was waiting for the next curve to be thrown, but Marguery’s odd urgency seemed to have left her. She grinned at him. “Would you like some more coffee?” she asked. He shook his head. She didn’t take any either. She was looking thoughtful. “In some ways,” she decided, “I think sexual intercourse is better for human women.”

 “Do you?” Sandy asked. That seemed a doubtful proposition to him, considering what he knew of the human burden of raising children as against the Hakh’hli system of freezing and professional nurturing. “How’s that?”

“Well, you said it’s only the eggs that matter to the female. So she has to wait until she has a new batch before she can, well, do it again.”

“Yes, but it isn’t that long. It’s all up to the male, really. For the females, a few eggs form every day; anytime from a week to a year after amphylaxis she does it again.”

“Whereas human women,” Marguery sighed, “can do it all over right away. I mean, if the human male can manage it, that is.”

She looked at him in a way that caused him to tingle. All the abrupt changes in subject had made him wary.

Still, he thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained . . . “Well,” he said, “if you’re curious about this particular one, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he could.”

Actually, he could, all right. In fact, he proudly did; but first Marguery made him wait for what seemed an interminable time while she was in the bathroom. It struck Lysander as odd that she stayed there so long. He could hear the water running; he could also, he thought, hear her voice, very faintly. But who knew what private things Earth females had to do before, during, or between amphylaxis? He resolved to ask her, grinning; but when at last she came out she looked so breathtakingly lovely—no, that was the wrong word; the right word was not “lovely” but “ready”—that he forgot all the questions.

Then there was a surprise.

Among the many things that Lysander Washington hadn’t known about human sexual practices was that once they were done it was often the custom for the male and the female to sleep in each other’s arms all the rest of the night.

What made him realize it was discovering that he had drowsed off. When he opened his eyes he saw Marguery Darp lying there beside him. When he started to move she muttered, “Don’t go,” and threw her arms around him.

As a more or less inevitable consequence, they made love again, hardly awake but enjoying it all the same, and when he woke again it was broad daylight and Marguery was already in the kitchen.

She turned to him. She was smiling, but it was a diffident smile. Still, she put her face up to be kissed, as though they had been doing this sort of thing forever.

“There’s a package for you,” she said, pointing to the table.

He looked at it curiously; sure enough, it was a thick brown envelope with his name on it. “It came this morning,” she told him. “It’s tapes and the transcripts of the translations you did yesterday. Ham would like you to play them over and double-check that you got everything right. I’ll show you how to run the machine.”

He picked it up without pleasure. It was heavy. He had hoped for a more interesting day. “Maybe I’d better go back to the hotel first,” he said tentatively. “Polly will be worrying.”

“No,” she said somberly. “Polly won’t be worried.” She glanced at her watch. “Look at the time! I have to make a phone call,” she said abruptly.

There was a phone on the table, but Marguery didn’t use it. Instead, she disappeared into the bathroom and slammed the door.

In a moment Lysander heard water running. And there was another surprise, and once again an unpleasing one. So she hadn’t been singing to herself in the bathroom the night before. It was where she kept another telephone—obviously a private one.

When Marguery came back out he was already prepared for something bad.

He got it. “I’ve got to go do some things,” she said, her face without any expression at all. “I’m afraid I might be gone for some time, but please don’t leave. Here, I’ll show you how to work the recorder.”

And before he could quite believe it was happening she was gone.

She hadn’t lied. It was definitely “some time”—time enough for Lysander to have played nearly all the tapes, as ordered, and to have made any number of pointless, fiddling little corrections on the transcripts. He had been hungry three times and had found nothing more than bare subsistence in her refrigerator.

But he stayed. He did as he was told. He was, he told himself, pretty tired of always doing as he was told, by someone or other.

By the time he heard her key in the door he had passed from angry to depressed. By the expression on her face as she came in, Marguery was depressed enough herself. She came in silently, holding her sun hat and glasses in her hands. She didn’t put them down. She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment before she spoke, and then said sadly, “Oh, hell, Lysander. I wish you’d known more than you did.”

“What’s the matter?” he cried, suddenly alarmed.

“I’m afraid it’s the I-spy game we’re playing now,” she sighed. “Come on. We’ve got to go to headquarters. There’s something Hamilton has to show you.”

Chapter 21

The process of coming of age is not easy for any organism, anywhere in the universe. Insects cocoon themselves and emerge winged, their larval stages forgotten. Crustaceans painfully molt and often enough are eaten by predators before the new shells form; snakes shed their skins, birds leave the safety of the nest, young carnivores are driven from their dams. It is usually painful. Sometimes it is fatal. It is not much better for human beings, even though the change is only partly physiological for them. When a human child ceases to be a child his rites of passage are as painful, and as dangerous, as for any softshell crab. The process of maturing is difficult for anyone, but maybe most difficult for those who—like Lysander Washington—have thought they already were mature, all along.

Lysander was not surprised to find them approaching the InterSec building. “Are you going to show me some more pictures of what the Hakh’hli are building?” he demanded.

“Not this time,” Marguery said, flashing her badge to the guard. “They’re still doing it, though. Fast.”

“And do you still think it’s a weapon?”

She gave him an impenetrable look. “No, I don’t think that is a weapon any more. Give it a rest, Lysander. You’ll hear it all. Here’s Ham Boyle.”

The strange thing about Hamilton Boyle was that, this time, he wasn’t smiling. The champion smiler had a set, determined, unyielding expression on his face. He didn’t say anything until they had gone through the ritual of the passes, the unlocking of doors, and the elevators. Lysander noticed that this time the elevator went down instead of up, and for quite a distance. Both Marguery and Hamilton Boyle watched the numbers flick across the indicator as though they were stock-market quotations on a bad day.

“Here we go,” Boyle said at last, ushering them into a small room. It was not much larger than a cell, Lysander noted as warily he entered. “Sit down,” Boyle commanded, waving Sandy to the strongest-looking of the chairs. There was a smaller one right next to it that Marguery could have taken, but she ignored it. She walked across the room without looking at Sandy, to take a stand by a desk with a keyboard and a video screen; behind her was a slatted thing of the kind they called a venetian blind. The slats were tilted so that no light from the other side came through. But no light could, Sandy thought, since the building had no outside windows.

Sandy frowned. His senses were all tensely alert. This was a hostile place. There was an almost inaudible sound now and then, like a distant keening. It made him uneasy, but he couldn’t be sure of what he was hearing.

“So what are these secrets you don’t want the Hakh’hli to know?” he demanded.

Boyle blinked at him in surprise. “You’ve got it backward. We’re talking about secrets the Hakh’hli didn’t want us to know. Like their plans to attack us.”

In spite of everything Marguery had said to him, the idea remained preposterous to Lysander. “They don’t have any plans like that,” he said positively.

“But, Sandy,” Marguery put in reasonably, “they do. They want to stay here. They want to take over the continent of Africa. They’re going to propose that they will settle for building habitats in orbit around the Earth, but that’s only a stall; what they really want is to live here. In Africa—for openers, anyway.”

“What do you mean, habitats?”

“Big metal shells in space, Lysander,” Boyle said somberly. “Like spaceships, but immense. They’ve got all those millions of eggs waiting to be hatched. They want a place to hatch them.”

“I don’t believe one word of that!” Sandy shouted, leaning forward. His chair creaked alarmingly. He paid no attention. He added, “Even if it were true, what’s wrong with it? They wouldn’t hurt anything on Earth as long as they stayed in orbit, would they?”

“But, Sandy, dear,” Marguery said gently, “they aren’t going to stay in orbit. Once all those unhatched eggs grow up, they’ll move in. Polly told us so.”

Lysander stared at her in total shock. That was the most preposterous thing either of them had said yet. He tried to make them understand. “Polly? No way! She wouldn’t ever tell you anything she wasn’t supposed to—if there were any secrets to tell in the first place, I mean.”

“She didn’t have any choice,” Marguery said somberly.

He glared at her. “What are you talking about? You couldn’t make her. What would you do, threaten her? Torture her? But I told you that wouldn’t work!”

Marguery sighed. “But you also told us what would,” she said, in a leaden tone. She got up and pulled a cord on the venetian blind.

Behind the blind was a window, apparently of oneway glass. Behind the glass was Polly.

Lysander stared incredulously. Polly! Alive! But it was Polly as he had never known her before, crouched bedraggled and whimpering before a communications screen. Marguery turned up a sound control, and the almost inaudible pleading voice Sandy had heard before grew louder. It was Polly’s voice. Begging. In Hakh’hli and in English: “Please! My eggs! Don’t let them spoil!”

Lysander shuddered in horror. The arm of his chair splintered as he pushed on it to rise. Half-stumbling, he glared up at them. “You bastards!” he shouted. “How could you?” He couldn’t find any other words; so Marguery, too, had betrayed him; so there was no one at all Sandy could trust!

Boyle flinched momentarily before Sandy’s rage, but stood his ground. “We had no choice,” he said sharply.

He denied nothing. Sandy listened, appalled at what they had done. To threaten a Hakh’hli female with the destruction of fertile eggs—it was cruelty inconceivable! And how had they managed to make them fertile, without a Hakh’hli male to do the job?

Marguery, face white and expressionless, gave him the answer. “But we did have a male, Sandy. We had your friend Obie.”

It was getting crazier—and worse! “But Obie is dead!”

She nodded. “But we had his body, you see. We didn’t tell you the truth at the time. We didn’t cremate his body. We gave it to a laboratory for investigation. All right, for dissection, then! What else could we do? We had to know all we could!” She was looking pleadingly at Lysander, but he had no compassion left to give her. She went on, “And we saved all the tissue samples, frozen. Including his sperm. When Polly was in stun time we—we took her prisoner. And then we brought her here and inseminated her.”

“Show him the tapes,” Boyle ordered.

Imagined horrors were not worse than real ones. What Sandy saw as the screen began to light up was nastier even than he had guessed. First they showed Polly waking up, impregnated. She was already beginning to lay her clutch of eggs—half-dazed from stun time, bewildered, confused—it was by all odds the most unhappy egg-laying Lysander had ever witnessed.

Then he heard Boyle’s voice, speaking to her through a microphone. “Hippolyta, listen to me. You are our prisoner of war. You cannot leave this room. You will be fed, but you can’t leave and you can’t communicate.”

Sandy tore his eyes off the screen and stared at the unhappy reality behind the one-way glass. “Polly!” he shouted. “I’m here! I won’t let them do this to you!”

“She can’t hear you,” Boyle said coldly, “and you can’t help her. Listen!”

On the screen she was saying bravely, “. . . my people will know at once!”

“Your people,” said Boyle’s disembodied voice, “will be told you insisted on going skin-diving by yourself and drowned, and your body was lost.”

“They won’t believe that!”

“They’ll believe you do foolishly risky things, Hippolyta. They won’t doubt it. They’ll remember Oberon.”

On the screen Lysander could see her shaking with fear and rage. Frantically she cried, “My eggs!”

Hamilton Boyle’s icy voice: “There is a supply of nutrient fluid by the freezer. You may do whatever is necessary for them, and then store them in the freezer. We believe the system is as good as the one on the ship. The eggs will be all right—if you tell us what we want to know.”

“Turn it off!” Sandy shouted. “Marguery! You’re a shit!” He glared at her, cold and furious. She returned his look without speaking, but Boyle spoke for her.

“What she is, boy,” he said heavily, “is a human being. Aren’t you? Don’t you want to protect the human race?”

“Against what? The Hakh’hli aren’t going to hurt you!”

Boyle shook his head. “Before you make a bigger fool of yourself than you already have, listen to what Polly says. Get to the important part, Marguery.”

The picture flickered and whirred forward; and then Sandy did listen. With mounting horror.

It was not simply that she confirmed everything Marguery had suggested. Yes, the Major Seniors were determined to have Africa for their own; yes, all those frozen eggs were to be allowed to hatch to fill the continent. Yes, if that were not feasible, then they would insist on building a lot of great orbital habitats out of asteroidal materials; but, Polly confessed, that was only a temporary stratagem. When the eggs were hatched and grown and ready, how could the Earth humans prevent the Hakh’hli from taking whatever they liked? All that was horrifying enough for Lysander to hear.

But when she talked drearily of the landers that were being prepared to move into Low Earth Orbit he sat up in shock. He glanced at Boyle, bewildered. “But—what are they going to do there?”

Boyle said succinctly, “Bombardment.” He turned off the tape, waiting for Lysander to speak.

“You mean like bomber airplanes over Hiroshima? But the Hakh’hli don’t have anything like bombs—I’m sure of that! almost sure,” he amended.

Boyle was shaking his head. “They don’t need bombs, Lysander. They’re there already. Don’t you remember, we talked about the possibility at the science center? Eighteen thousand big objects in orbit, and the Hakh’hli can time them so they all hit cities.”

“Like Albuquerque,” Marguery put in. “Like what almost happened to Perth.”

“And if that didn’t force us to submit,” said Boyle, “you know what they’ve got in reserve. The entire asteroid belt.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he sighed and looked straight at Sandy. “There’s a lot more, if you want to hear it.”

“I don’t think I do,” Lysander said bitterly. “I’ve had enough bad news for one day.”

Marguery said diffidently, “It isn’t all bad, you know. That thing they’re building? It’s just a communications antenna. Polly said they haven’t heard anything from their home world in centuries, and they’re hoping with a big enough antenna they can at least hear if they’re still broadcasting.”

“They’re lost, you know,” Boyle said brutally. “They’re getting desperate, too. So what about it, Lysander? The ball’s in your court now. Make up your mind. Which side are you on?”

“Do I have any choice?” Lysander flared.

“Not much. You can have an accident as easily as Hippolyta. But if you want to help us—”

“Help you how?”

Boyle hesitated. “We have a plan,” he said. “We can make it work with or without your help, but it will go better with it. That big ship is pretty vulnerable right now. But we don’t have a lot of time. Those Hakh’hli landing vessels could be getting ready to nudge some big pieces into place right now, targeting Seattle or Hudson City.”

Lysander looked at each of them in turn, finishing with Marguery Darp. There was nothing to read in her face. She was quite expressionless as she waited for him to speak.

“Tell me what the plan is,” said Lysander at last. It was his first venture into adult guile.

Chapter 22

Three thousand years is a lot of history. Three thousand years ago on Earth history had barely begun. Civilization was a collection of tiny principalities in the Fertile Crescent, and neither China nor Ancient Greece had been invented yet. The three-thousand-year history of the Hakh’hli is just as long and just as cloudy in its origins. The Hakh’hli know that before that time their remote ancestors lived on one or another of a consortium of planets—four of them, in three separate stellar systems—and deployed immense powers. Powers enough to launch a dozen ships like their own, to scour the Galaxy for new homes for the Hakh’hli race. That was their Golden Age, they know. What they also know is that the history of the three thousand years since the ship first began to swim the spaces between the stars has been not golden at all; it is a history of monotonous voyages and fruitless investigations. It is, to be more exact, a history of three thousand long, uninterrupted years of failure.

The flight back to the lander site was in no slow, comfortable blimp. They were in a hurry. Their plane was a high-energy supersonic jet, and it crossed the North American continent, twelve miles up, in an hour and forty minutes. It was not a pleasant trip. The acceleration as they took off and climbed was enough to push even Sandy back in his seat, and the other human passengers were immobilized until the jet leveled off.

Even then there was not much light conversation. Marguery Darp was lost in her own thoughts. Lysander, sitting by one of the tiny windows, spent most of his time gazing out at what could be seen of country sliding past below.

Hamilton Boyle had donned his InterSec uniform for the job, leather boots, holstered pistol, cap, and all. It was as though he needed to be reassured of his official position. When they were flying almost level he turned to Lysander and demanded harshly, “Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”

Lysander turned back from the window. “How could I not?” he asked. “You’ve told me over and over. My job is to get the Hakh’hli out of the landing craft. You apprehend them. Then I turn it over to you.”

“To the human race, Sandy,” Boyle corrected.

“What you didn’t tell me,” Sandy said, “was what you’re going to do with the lander after you get it.”

“We’ll study it, man! We have to find out what kind of technology we’re up against.”

Sandy nodded as though he had expected that answer. He wasn’t signaling acceptance of what Boyle had said, only that he hadn’t expected to be told the truth. He pursed his lips, gazing innocently at Hamilton Boyle. “You know,” he said, “a suspicious person might think you had a different reason. You might be thinking of using the lander to ram the Hakh’hli ship.”

The expression on Boyle’s face told him all he had to know. When Sandy turned to look at Marguery Darp her own expression was dismal. “Oh, hell,” she said. “We might as well start trusting each other, Ham! Sandy, you’re almost right. InterSec has half a dozen fusion warheads hidden away, just in case. Once you turn the lander over to us, Ham wants to put one of them in it and take off. But not to ram it, Sandy! Not unless we really have to.”

“No? Then what?” he asked politely.

“Just threaten it, Sandy! That’s all. They’ll have to surrender; the big ship’s a sitting duck up there, with its drive motors off.”

“I see,” Lysander said noncommitally, and stopped there.

Boyle gave him ten seconds, and then demanded, “What’s the matter? Don’t you think it would work?”

Lysander thought it over carefully. “I never heard of a Hakh’hli surrendering,” he said, “but I guess there’s a first time for everything. As you say, they wouldn’t have much choice, would they? Also,” he went on, struck by a thought, “you probably don’t have to bother with putting a bomb on the lander. Just crashing into the ship would do it, if you rammed it in the drive-systems area. Imagine strange matter splashing around the ship! Of course, whoever piloted the lander would die, too.”

“Do you suppose that would be a problem? There are always human beings who are willing to die for patriotic reasons.”

“So I have been told,” Lysander agreed. “Only—”

“Only what?” Boyle demanded harshly.

Sandy shrugged. “Only I don’t see what your next step is going to be. What are you going to do with the Hakh’hli after they all surrender?”

“We’ll take them prisoner!”

“Yes, I see that much. Then what?”

“Then it’s up to the civil authorities,” Boyle snapped. “Don’t worry about it, Lysander! We’re not going to shoot them. There are rules about the treatment of prisoners of war.”

“Yes, you put them in concentration camps,” Lysander nodded. “How long do you keep them there?”

“As long as necessary,” Boyle said through his teeth.

Sandy mulled that over for a minute. “There’s one other possibility you haven’t mentioned,” he pointed out. “You could just tell them they had to go visit some other star. Would I be correct if I thought you had considered that and decided it wouldn’t work?”

“You would,” Boyle said shortly, but Marguery spoke up, ignoring his angry look.

“They can’t, Sandy,” she told him. “Remember, we said they were desperate. Their drive systems are beginning to wear out. Polly told us that; something about radiation-induced weaknesses in the support structure. She says it’s beginning to get serious. The supports might hold up for a few hundred years yet, or they might go in ten.”

“So they’re stuck here,” Boyle added.

“I see,” Lysander said, nodding. And then he said, “Poor bastards. Well. Is there anything else we need to talk about right now?”

“Only to make sure you know what you’re supposed to do—”

“I do know, Boyle. You think there’ll only be two of the party in the landing craft itself?”

“Usually there are two. They take turns. Two come out and talk to us, two stay in the ship.” Boyle hesitated. “At least,” he said, “I hope so. There’s one little problem.”

“Something else you haven’t told me?” Lysander inquired politely.

“Something I’m telling you now,” Boyle said sharply. “They’ve been out of communication with the interstellar ship for about ten hours now. Interference.”

“What do you mean, interference?”

“We’ve got a high-altitude blimp up there, broadcasting jamming signals,” Boyle explained. “They can’t talk to the ship; the ship can’t talk to them. Don’t give me that kind of look, Lysander! We had to do it. We didn’t want them stirring up trouble when they couldn’t get an answer from Hippolyta or you. It’s possible that they’ll be so concerned about that that they’ll all be in the ship, but probably they’ll take it to be some natural thing, like sunspot effects.”

“You hope,” said Lysander. “Well, it can’t be very comfortable for them in there, so maybe they’ll get out when they can anyway.” He thought for a moment, then added, “I can do what you want me to, I think, although it would be easier if I went in by myself.”

“No. It’s going to be the way I say. Marguery goes with you.”

Sandy shrugged. “And you’ll take them prisoner as they come out?”

“Of course.”

“All right,” said Sandy. “Then there’s just one thing left. I’ll need one of those.” He pointed to the gun at Boyle’s belt.

Boyle raised an eyebrow in surprise. “For what? You said yourself you couldn’t threaten a Hakh’hli.”

Sandy gave him a pleasant smile. “You can kill one,” he said. “And now I’d appreciate it if you’d get me a pencil and paper. And don’t talk to me for a while, please. I think I’d like to write a poem.”

They couldn’t see the little settlement that had grown up around the lander as the jet came down; in that heat-drenched, almost windowless jet they had nothing useful to see out of. Only the pilot had any real visibility.

Peering past the pilot’s head, Lysander caught a glimpse of cloud, sky, mountain, cloud again; and then the aircraft was bouncing along a runway, the jets screaming louder than ever as the reversed thrust slowed them down. The deceleration threw Sandy against his straps.

Then they stopped rolling.

Lysander unbuckled quickly and reached to open the hatch, but Boyle put a hand on his shoulder. “You asked for this,” he said, offering the gun from his holster.

Lysander turned the flat, heavy thing over in his hand, wonderingly. It was so small and so sinister. “This could kill a person?”

“You mean could it kill a Hakh’hli? It could kill an elephant, Sandy. It’s got a shaped charge in the load.”

“Show me how to use it,” said Sandy. Grudgingly Boyle led him around the far side of the ship, toward the open runway. Sandy got only a glimpse of the lander, fully erected, with its brightly colored shrapnel shroud already in place. More than anything else the lander looked like a praying mantis gift-wrapped for Christmas.

It didn’t take long for Boyle to explain safety, sights, and trigger to Sandy. Warned, he braced his arm when he fired it for the first time. Even so the recoil was a surprise. It wasn’t noisy, though. The sound of firing was only a sharp thwuck, rather than the violent explosion he had imagined, but it made a second, louder sound when the charge struck what it was aimed at (or anyway, where it happened to go by courtesy of his inexpert marksmanship). It blew craters a foot deep in the runway as it hit.

Lysander shook his head, turning to Boyle. “That’s no good. I could blow the lander up if I hit the wrong place.”

Boyle said, “Well, I suppose we could give you solid rounds instead of the h.e., but I don’t know if they would kill a Hakh’hli.”

“They won’t know that,” Lysander said. “Give me the rounds.”

Even a dedicated Hakh’hli would not spend days and weeks in the lander if he could help it; it was too cramped, too bare, too uncomfortable—certainly too boring. The humans had obligingly airlifted a sort of cabin in. It was smaller than the common room the cohort had shared back on the big ship. But then, Sandy thought somberly, the cohort was a lot smaller now, too. He saw Bottom peering out of the lander hatch, just above the rodded stick they used for a ladder. Sandy waved to him but didn’t speak. He walked to the door of the Hakh’hli dorm and stood there, looking in.

Tanya and Helena were huddled over a television set. Fortunately it wasn’t in communications mode; they were simply watching the bland Earth networks, long since censored of any news that might disturb the Hakh’hli. Tanya turned to look at Sandy with surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ll show you,” he said in Hakh’hli, putting a finger to his lips.

“Show us what? And what was that noise we heard a little while ago?” Helena grumbled.

Sandy said secretively, “I don’t know. Something the Earth humans were doing, I guess. Don’t waste time.” He peered out the door. “Follow me, and don’t attract attention. All of you. You too, Tanya. Don’t even use the communicator, just come on.”

He didn’t wait for a response. He went out of the cabin, conspicuously nonchalant as he walked toward the tail of the rocket. It cast a long shadow in the hot, late summer day; and he could see by the shadows beside him that the two Hakh’hli were following him.

Marguery was standing at the tail of the rocket, gazing upward as instructed. Tanya stopped short beside Sandy. “Why have you brought the Earth-female here?” she demanded, licking her tongue out suspiciously.

Sandy said easily, “Look and see.” He pointed to a perfectly featureless point on the shroud, and said, “There.”

“There what?” Helena grumbled.

Tanya grunted in annoyance, stretched as high as she could on her long, thick legs, and said peevishly, “I don’t see any—”

That was as far as she got. She toppled forward on her face even before Sandy heard the thwick of the gas gun. Helena managed to whirl long enough to catch sight of Boyle’s sharpshooters, but not in time to do herself any good. It was a fast-acting anesthetic. Both she and Helena were unconscious a moment later.

Sandy signaled to the gunners, crouched at the side of the ship, to take them away and then nodded toward the climbing stick. “Come on then, if you have to,” he ordered Marguery.

As they climbed toward the hatch Bottom popped his head out of the door again, staring curiously but without suspicion at Sandy. Then he caught sight of Marguery coming up behind him. In Hakh’hli Bottom called, “Why are you bringing Earth-female aboard?”

“Tanya asked me same question,” Sandy replied, already at the door level. “Get out of my way, will you?” He pushed Bottom aside. When Marguery was safely inside, he said, “You can hear for yourself. Listen!” he commanded.

Demetrius appeared behind Bottom just as Boyle’s people, hiding under the landing craft, started the tape Boyle had provided. From outside came the recorded pleading, broken voice, sobbing in Hakh’hli, “Please! Please help me!” over and over.

“That’s Polly’s voice!” Demmy shouted, leaping toward the door. “Come on, Bottom, let’s see what’s wrong!”

Marguery leaned out the door. “They’re down,” she reported. “They got them both with the sleep darts. Well, Sandy, I guess we’ve done what we had to—”

“Get out of the way of the door,” he ordered.

“What? What do you mean?” She blinked at him. Then, as he toggled the hatch switch and the door slid shut, she jumped away. “Sandy, what the hell are you doing?”

“I’m strapping myself into this seat,” he said calmly. “You can take the one over there.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t,” he said logically, “you’ll get hurt when we take off.” He turned on the preheater, knowing that almost at once the first faint wisps of hot gas would begin to come out of the thrust jets. He moved uneasily in the pilot seat, hoping the crush wouldn’t be too bad in the acceleration when they took off. The seat had fit Polly perfectly. It was, of course, big enough for two or three like him.

It couldn’t be helped.

He touched the ignitor and opened the fuel throttle the smallest crack he could manage. He heard the hoarse white-noise hiss of the escaping flame, but the ship didn’t even shudder at that low setting. He didn’t expect it to. He only wanted to warn Boyle and the others that the main jets would be on in a moment, and hoped they would have the sense to get out of the way—and would drag the anesthetized Hakh’hli out of the way—before he applied power.

“Sandy! Turn that off!” Marguery shouted.

He said, “I told you to strap yourself in.”

“Stop it! Do you think I’m going to let you do this? I won’t permit it!”

He balanced the flat, heavy gun across his knee. It was pointing in her general direction, and his hand was on the trigger, the safety off.

“You can’t help it,” he pointed out.

She stared at him in horror. “Would you shoot me, then?” she gasped.

He said, “Not seriously. Only in your pretty, pretty leg, if I had to. Just to keep you from coming at me. But I’m not a very good shot, Marguery, and I might easily miss.”

Chapter 23

Although there are more than ninety thousand trackable objects in Low Earth Orbit, the space doesn’t look crowded. Low Earth Orbit, after all, includes a vast volume of space. It is a shell perhaps twenty miles thick, completely surrounding the Earth. The probability that any given orbiting object that is big enough to be detected—say, an expended nuclear pop-up laser—is within a mile of any other—say, an ascending Hakh’hli landing vessel—is very low at any given time. However, the orbital velocities are huge. The pop-up travels that mile in a quarter of a second. And the objects that are too small to be detected move just as fast . . . and there are many more of them . . . and hundreds of thousands of them are just as deadly.

Flying the Hakh’hli simulator was not at all like flying the landing vessel itself. Lysander’s inadequate piloting skills were taxed to the utmost. The only thing that saved them from disaster was that there was nothing very hard to do. Taking off was easier than landing. It was the easiest thing in the world: You didn’t have to go any place in particular, you only had to go up.

Compressed back into the huge kneeling-seat, Lysander could barely reach the Hakh’hli-designed controls. He knew what he had to do. It was just so very difficult to do it. Once they were off the ground he had to release his straps and lever himself forward against the enclosing arms of the seat—forcing every muscle to do more work than it had ever done before—in order to engage the magnetic repellers. Then he let himself drop back, panting.

Behind him Marguery gasped, “What are you doing, Sandy?”

“I am flying this Hakh’hli landing vessel,” he said proudly. “Please don’t get out of your seat.”

“As if I could!”

“Of course you cannot do that now,” he agreed, “but once we are at orbital velocity I will cut the thrust. Then you must remain where you are.”

“Or you’ll shoot me.”

“Oh, no, Marguery. It’s too late for you to keep me from taking off, isn’t it? But if you interfere you may very well crash and kill us both.”

She was silent for a moment, panting. Then she called over the distant thunder of the engines, “Would you really have shot me?” He didn’t answer. He just smiled at her over his shoulder. She tried a different tack. “What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“There is no bathroom on a Hakh’hli landing vessel,” he told her. “In the cabinet behind you and to the right are waste sacks and sponge materials that can be used for that purpose, if absolutely necessary. But for now I think—ow,” he cried, as the lander made a sudden sidewise thrust. He rubbed a bruised shoulder. “We must’ve just dodged a big one! That means we’re getting into the garbage orbit, so hold tight!”

It took more than an hour to dodge and bounce their way through the garbage belt. They were continuously on drive, keeping both of them anchored to their seats. Because they were using the north polar sector of the sky the density of dangerous objects were markedly lower than anywhere else over the Earth. It was still hazardous enough, and definitely a bumpy ride. From time to time alarming noises made Marguery bite her lip, as some microartifact too tiny to dodge splatted against the foil shield and its instant plasma cone clanged against the hull. Some of the clangs were scarily loud . . . but none were followed by the blue-light pressure alarm on the board, or by the hiss of escaping gas.

The little ship’s evasive action threw them about mercilessly. By the time they were clear of the worst of the damage even Lysander was nursing bruises, and Marguery was grunting with pain. Lysander calculated the vectors for converting their circumpolar orbit into the equatorial one of the interstellar ship and applied corrections. “I’m reducing thrust,” he called, squinting with interest at a familiar face that was silently shouting on the pilot’s screen. “You can go relieve yourself now if you need to.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Marguery snarled. “Who’s that looking at us?”

Lysander studied the face. “It’s ChinTekki-tho. He isn’t looking at us, though. At least, he can’t see us, because I’m not transmitting yet. He looks angry, doesn’t he?”

“What a surprise!” she snapped. “What are you going to do now?”

Lysander leaned back against the kneeling-seat, rubbing his bruises. “I’ll answer him pretty soon,” he told her.

“Then what, damn it?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “Then,” he said, “I’m going to do what I want to do. That’ll be a novelty, won’t it? I haven’t had much practice at that. First I did what the Hakh’hli wanted me to do for most of my life. Then I did what you wanted me to do. So this is a new experience, and there’s a good chance I’ll screw up. But we’re going to try it anyway.”

“Damn you, Lysander!” she began, and then, in a different tone, she said, “Please, Lysander. What are your plans?”

“Why,” he said reasonably, “the first thing I have to do is to set course for the Hakh’hli ship. That means there will be a lot of velocity changes, so I’ll have to be careful about that; we don’t have big fuel reserves. No,” he corrected himself, shaking his head, “that’s not the first thing. The first thing is to find the ship.” And, as she started to speak, he finished politely, “Dear Marguery, please shut up. I have to concentrate.”

It took a lot of concentration. It took painstaking searching of the three-hour equatorial orbit before Lysander caught his first glimpse of the interstellar ship. He fumbled with the magnification until he got the Hakh’hli ship large in the screen, then worked the course calculators.

Then he sighed and applied a gentle torque, then a small thrust. “It could be worse,” he observed. “We should be able to reach it in about six hours. Oh, look, Marguery! They’re coming along quite well with that big dish.”

“Great,” Marguery snapped.

“I’d like to ask ChinTekki-tho when they expect to be able to detect signals,” Lysander said cheerfully.

“Go ahead and do it, why don’t you? He sure looks like he wants to talk to you.”

Lysander hesitated, then reluctantly switched over to transmission mode. “Hello, ChinTekki-tho,” he said pleasantly, turning on the sound for the picture. “How are you?”

ChinTekki-tho thundered furiously in Hakh’hli.

“John William Washington, why are you doing this thing and not some proper thing? It is that twelfth-day for sleep now! You delay my rest! Your Major Seniors instruct you to cease this conduct which is improper and not as directed!”

“Speak English,” Lysander ordered. “I want Marguery to hear everything we say.”

ChinTekki-tho twitched his thumbs in furious objection. “But that is unwise and not prudent, Lysander! This Marguery Darp is not only Earth human who will hear!”

“I said, in English!”

“Oh, very well,” said ChinTekki-tho, angrily giving in. “Then tell me! Why are you doing this? Where is your gratitude to the Hakh’hli who gave you life? We saved you!”

Lysander shook his head firmly. “I don’t think I owe you anything for that. You didn’t do it for me. You did it for yourselves, and besides you lied to me about it.”

“Lysander! You are endangering serious plans of Major Seniors for all our progeny. Think of seventy-three million eggs unhatched!”

“I am thinking,” Lysander said harshly, “of seventy-three million Hakh’hli invading the continent of Africa, ChinTekki.”

He deliberately left off the “tho” of respect. The teacher winced, but only said, “What are you talking about?”

“That you are invading the Earth!”

“No, no,” ChinTekki-tho cried. “We are not ‘invading’ the Earth. Why do you use that word?”

“Then what do you call what you are going to do in Africa?”

ChinTekki-tho glanced nervously about, as though looking for some Earth-human eye turned in his direction. He licked his lips and said, “We do no harm in Africa. Africa has plenty of room. No Earth humans are using it.”

“But it’s their Earth. It’s their planet. Shouldn’t you ask them first?”

“Lysander, you speak without thought. What is the use of asking them if we can live there until we know if it is possible for us to live there? No, Lysander! It is not your place to question the decisions of the Major Seniors now! Rather you should explain why it is that you attacked four of your cohort-mates and, without authorization, stole that landing vessel.”

“Oh?” Lysander said, interested. “How did you know that, ChinTekki-tho?”

“How do you think I know it?” the teacher said bitterly. “They’ve been telling us about it for the last hour! As soon as your cohort-mates recovered from your foul attack they demanded that the Earth humans transmit for them. They are speaking to me even now, along with some of the humans. They, too, want you to go back!”

Lysander blinked in surprise; he hadn’t expected them to react so quickly. “Why don’t they talk to me direct?”

“Because you do not have any receiver for Earth transmissions, foolish Lysander!” ChinTekki-tho roared. “Do you not believe me? Here, wait. I will allow you to see for yourself.”

He leaned past the camera to give swift orders in Hakh’hli. In a moment the screen split in two horizontally. On top was the furious face of ChinTekki-tho. Below him were a whole group of people—Boyle and a couple of other humans, and with them Demetrius and Tanya, looking just as enraged. They looked different in other ways, too. Hamilton Boyle seemed to have had his hair cropped short since they saw him last; moreover, he was wearing a burn dressing on one side of his face. Demetrius was bandaged, too, and looked even more resentfully furious. He shouted accusingly: “You endangered our lives, Lysander! If this Earth human had not managed to pull me out of the exhaust before you applied full power I would have died unnecessarily early!”

“I’m sorry you both got scorched,” Lysander said politely. “I see you all survived, though.”

“No thanks to you,” Hamilton Boyle grated. “Come back at once!”

“Sorry,” Lysander said. “I don’t have the fuel. Or the desire, either.”

“Then come simply and peacefully to the ship, Lysander,” ChinTekki-tho pleaded. “We will accept you without harm!”

“The hell you will!” Boyle shouted. “You just want Lieutenant Darp for a hostage!”

“Hakh’hli do not take ‘hostages,’ ” ChinTekki-tho roared. “It is you who now have four of our people held captive! We are not war-loving, violent creatures like Earth humans!”

“We are neither war loving nor violent!” Boyle began, and Lysander took a hand in the conversation.

“Boyle,” he said, “have you told ChinTekki-tho what you peace-loving, gentle people did to Polly?”

That stopped Boyle. He hesitated, glancing at the Hakh’hli beside him, before he muttered, “She is quite all right.”

“No,” Lysander corrected him, “she isn’t. You don’t know how much harm you’ve done, Boyle.”

On the other screen ChinTekki-tho thundered, “If you Earth creatures have dared to harm a Hakh‘hli—”

“Shut up, please,” Lysander said mildly. “Hippolyta’s nowhere near all right now, but she’ll get over it. In fact, all of you shut up, while I tell you what you ought to do. The first thing—oh, hell,” he said, as the babble of raging voices just grew louder. He reached for the sound control and shut it off.

“There,” he said comfortably into the silence. “You can hear me, but I can’t hear a word from any of you, so just shut up. I’ve been thinking. You Hakh’hli can’t have any part of the Earth, because the humans don’t want you there. You humans can’t chase the Hakh’hli out of the solar system, because they can’t afford to go. So the answer is obvious. You have to compromise.”

He sat back, nodding seriously and watching the faces on the screen. At least they were all silent now, though the expressions on the human faces, and the way ChinTekki-tho was snapping his thumbs, showed that they had not stopped being enraged.

From behind him Marguery asked tentatively, “Compromise how, Lysander?”

“There’s only one way that I can see,” Lysander said. “Give the Hakh’hli a different planet. Mars.” He turned and gave Marguery a look of pleasure. “So you see how simple it is?” he finished.

Marguery got up and moved beside him, looking down. He gazed tranquilly back at her.

“Are you serious?” she asked. When he nodded, she objected, “But nobody can live on Mars!”

“Oh, but they can,” he said, speaking as much to the transmitter as to Marguery Darp. “It’s only a matter of energy. The Hakh’hli can beam microwaves down to Mars as easily as to Earth. They can park the big ship in a Martian orbit and start colonizing.”

“But—what if they decide not to do that?”

“Trust has to start somewhere, Marguery,” he said  earnestly. “Besides, we can exchange observers. Hostages, if you like. Put a few hundred humans on the Hakh’hli ship, and then on Mars when they get around to it. Leave a few hundred Hakh’hli on the Earth. They can be like what you call ‘ambassadors,’ and they’ll know right away if either side starts to cheat. No,” he finished, wagging his head, “I’ve thought it all out. It’ll work. Oh, it will take a while. Fifty years, maybe, before we finish cleaning up the Earth and make Mars worth living on—but it’s all going to go the right way, don’t you see? Every year things will get a little better, instead of a lot worse.” He leaned toward her, grinning. He gave her a quick kiss and then turned back to the instruments.

“Now,” he sighed, turning the sound back on, “let’s see what our friends think about it all.”

ChinTekki-tho was the first off the mark. “John William Washington,” he shouted. “Who are you to give orders to the Major Seniors? They will never give in to force! You ask us to swallow our own spit!”

And Hamilton Boyle snarled, “That’s not a decision for someone like you to make, Lysander! Forget it! The Hakh’hli have already proved that we can’t trust them!”

“It is Earth humans who have lied!” ChinTekki-tho shouted.

“Oh, stop it,” Lysander said wearily. “That’s what the, ah, ambassadors are for. Otherwise there’s no doubt you’d both lie and cheat.” He nodded judiciously. “You are both experts in this matter, of course. You have both lied to me too many times for me to believe anything you say now.”

Boyle said earnestly from his half of the plate, “‘We haven’t lied to you, exactly—”

Lysander laughed savagely. “ ‘Exactly,’ ” he mimicked. “And that word is also a lie! Boyle, I know that you lie; I know that Earth people lie easily and well, because I have seen how quickly I myself have learned to do it.”

“But you’re not—” Boyle began, and then stopped. In the ship Marguery’s hand flew to her mouth.

Lysander looked at her, then back at the screen. “I see there are still lies untruthed,” he said grimly. “What is it, ChinTekki-tho?”

The big Hakh’hli flexed his thumbs restlessly. “Ask your Earth-female and not me,” he grumbled in Hakh’hli.

“I’m asking you! And I want it in English.”

“You do not wish it heard in English,” ChinTekki-tho said earnestly. “Believe me in this.”

“Say it in English anyway! You didn’t find my parents alive in a spaceship. I wasn’t born of an American woman. The only ones there were Russian, and they were both male!”

ChinTekki-tho said gently, “That is true, Lysander. They were also both quite dead. They had been dead for some time, and there was no air in their ship; there was not enough viable tissue left, really, to salvage.”

Lysander flinched but held his ground. To hear it said was terrible, but he had been expecting something of the sort ever since the time in the underwater chamber. “What you mean,” he grated, “is that I’m Hakh’hli. You’ve done genetic alteration on me. Isn’t that true?”

But ChinTekki-tho was waggling his jaw negatively. “No, Lysander,” he said, “you are not Hakh’hli.”

And from behind him Marguery, sitting there almost forgotten, whispered, “No, Lysander. You aren’t even Hakh’hli.”

Of all the tones Lysander had heard in Marguery Darp’s voice, he had never heard a tone like that. He turned to search her face. “Is that true? And you knew that?” he croaked.

She nodded. Sadly. Tenderly. “We knew that ever since we checked your tissue samples—first your excretions; we had your toilet plumbing diverted, Lysander. Then the sample they took in the hospital and your sperm—”

“No one ever took a sample of my sperm!”

She managed to smile. “Someone did, dear Lysander. I did.” He flushed, even in that moment. She went on, “As soon as they began studying your DNA they could see that some of it wasn’t human. Naturally we checked it against the Hakh’hli cells from Obie’s body; it wasn’t that, either, though the Hakh’hli DNA was closer. Yours wasn’t anywhere near the DNA from the hawkbees we caught—well, no one expected it would be. But there were other tissue samples—”

He said harshly, “There couldn’t have been any other tissue samples! There wasn’t anything else alive from the ship!”

She shook her head. “I didn’t say alive, Lysander. The other tissue samples were the scraps of food that Polly and the others left over. The—the meat,” she finished wretchedly.

He stared at her incredulously, then turned to the screen. “Please, ChinTekki-tho,” he begged.

And the old Hakh’hli teacher said somberly, “It is true, Lysander. We had to use other sources of DNA. It was very difficult to splice the genes, preserving as many Earth-human characteristics as we could—and then a surrogate mother was needed to bear you. We borrowed some genetic material from the hoo’hik to make you, Lysander, and it was out of the womb of a hoo’hik that you were born.”

Chapter 24

Considered as housing, the planet Mars isn’t the kind of place one can move right into. In real-estate parlance it is what is called a “fixer upper,” but it has fine potential for tenants who are willing to do the repairs. The things that are scarce on Mars are air, water, and warmth. The thing it has plenty of is land. It has far more land surface than the planet Earth, because it doesn’t spend any precious surface area on oceans. For the Hakh’hli, that is what makes it worth having. Energy beamed down from the strange-matter engines in the big ship can boil water out of crystalline rock, cook air from oxides, smelt ores into steel to build all the habitats they want, and glassify rock to let the sunlight in. The Hakh’hli have the energy. Mars can give them the space to let their seventy-three million frozen eggs thaw, and hatch, and grow.

In the landing craft Lysander was staring blankly at the silent screen. It was only silent at the lander’s end of the circuit. Where the people on it came from, both Hakh’hli and human, they were not silent at all. They were shouting. The way they twitched and flung their arms about, the contortions of lips and jaws as they argued with each other made that certain. But Lysander had cut the sound off.

Marguery wasn’t even looking at the screen. Her attention was all on Lysander. Her first impulse was to throw her arms around him for solace, for if anyone had ever needed comforting, it was he. She hardly dared. His face was like granite. When she tentatively touched his cheek her fingertips felt the thump of a muscle pulsing under the skin.

Lysander jerked away from her touch, his face averted. He was saying something, but so softly that she didn’t realize it until he turned questioningly to face her. “What, Lysander?”

He said, in a voice like lead, “What am I, then? Am I human at all?”

She took a deep breath. “Dear Sandy,” she said, “you are John William Washington, and that’s all you need to be. The biologists say you can do everything a human being can do. You can think, you can walk, you can make love—”

“And make you sick while I’m doing it!”

She shook her head. “Not if I take my histamine blockers. We tested that out, remember? They even—” She hesitated. “They even said that it was possible you could father a child.”

He gave her a look of proud scorn. “That’s impossible!”

She said steadfastly, “No. Only, maybe, a little difficult.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said fiercely. “Why does everyone lie to me? Even MyThara did, all those years!” He put a hand to his face and felt something hot and wet. He looked at his hand, and found himself laughing. “At least I’m human enough to cry,” he said, his voice unsteady.

“You’re human enough for me,” Marguery told him. He shook his head despondently. She thought for a moment, and then said, “Sandy? Do you remember on the jet you said you were going to write a poem?”

He looked perplexed for a moment, then fumbled in his pocket. “I’ve got it here. You might as well see it, I suppose,” he said.

“Yes, I certainly want to, but what I was going to say was—”

He wasn’t listening. He had already pulled the scrap of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. It was folded and almost torn, but when she opened it up she was startled at what she saw. “Is that supposed to be a coffin?” she asked.

“It’s supposed to be a poem,” he said somberly. “Do you know what a poem is? It’s how you feel, put on paper. And that was how I felt.”

“Yes, I understand that, but Sandy dear—”

“You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to,” he said gloomily. “I don’t know if it’s any good, anyway.”

Marguery gave up. She straightened out the paper and read the poem over carefully:

Am I womanborn

or of some strange

mating in empty space?

Was I born at all or made?

Perhaps it is better if I

never know for what I do

know of the egg-hatched

or born does not cause

me to envy them, even

less to admire; evil

they do, unthinking

but wicked. Shame

I say & plague on

both your houses

& I really hope

you both lose!

She looked down at him, half-angry, almost amused. “Lysander, that’s dreary. What kind of person would write something like that?”

“Any person who took a good, hard look around him would! It’s a dreary world. Haven’t you noticed? Marguery, look at those people!” He waved a condemning hand at the soundlessly gesticulating figures on the screen.

Marguery looked, but what she saw was puzzling. Boyle was waving his arms across his face. He looked like a baseball fan trying to attract the attention of the grandstand peanut vendor. “What’s he doing? Maybe he wants to talk to you,” she offered.

Lysander shook his head. “What for? There’s no point in talking to me; they need to talk to each other. But they won’t.” The ship lurched slightly, and then they were floating free. Lysander took a quick look at the board. “We’re in coasting orbit,” he said. “That’ll last for about an hour, but you’d better be in your seat before that. Just before the power goes on again the lander’s going to reverse so we can turn around to decelerate.” Marguery made a faint noise. He looked up at her, frowning. “What’s the matter?”

She said, “I thought you were going to ram the Hakh’hli ship.”

He studied her face incredulously for a moment, then laughed. “Why would I do that?” he asked. “We’d get killed.”

“Sandy dear,” she said sincerely, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you say that. But then why did you steal the lander?”

“To keep you people from doing it, of course,” he said in surprise. “Then I thought I’d just go back to the ship and try to reason with the Major Seniors.”

“With me?”

“I didn’t plan on taking you along, Marguery,” he pointed out. “But you came.”

She began to feel apprehensive. “And now?”

“What else is there to do?” he demanded. “Maybe the two of us can beat some sense into them. And—it would be an adventure for you, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t you like to be the first Earth human—the first native Earthborn human—to visit the Hakh’hli interstellar ship?”

Marguery thought it over. “It’s—frightening,” she said. “But I think I would—with you, Sandy.”

He blinked at her. She went on. “See, I wasn’t asking to see your poem a minute ago, dear Lysander. I was trying to tell you that I’d written a poem of my own.”

“But you never said you wrote poems.”

She laughed at him. “Maybe I haven’t written one yet. Read it. Then you tell me.”

He looked at the piece of paper she was holding out incredulously, then he looked up at her. “Oh, my God,” he said.

“Read it, God damn it!”

He obeyed.

Sweet Sandy

the brick shithouse

torso & the quick, kind

heart. You say that you

love me. I think that

I love you as well.

If you invite me

to marry you

I’ll say

Yes!

“Are you sure?” he gasped.

“You fool,” she said fondly. “Don’t ask questions. Just kiss me.”

And it wasn’t until he had done it, and done it half a dozen times more, that Marguery caught sight of the communications screen out of the corner of her eye. The people on the screen didn’t seem to be arguing any more. Hamilton Boyle was holding up both thumbs. ChinTekki-tho was weeping amiably, and Demetrius and Bottom, giggling, were acting out shaking hands.

“Sandy,” she said shakily. “Do you see what I see? Is it possible that they’re trying to tell us that they’ve agreed on what to do?”

He didn’t let go of her, but he craned his neck to see, frowning in bewilderment. “I don’t believe it,” he said. But his voice was uncertain.

“What else can it be? They’re certainly trying to tell us something.”

He said sincerely, “It is impossible that two such good things could happen to me in a single day. I don’t believe that they’ve decided to cooperate.”

“Dummy,” she said lovingly. “Maybe they have. Why don’t you find out?”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe they have,” he said stubbornly; but then he turned on the sound . . .

And they had.

Chapter 25

At this time John William Washington, often called Lysander, and his wife, Marguery Phyllis Darp, no longer called a “lieutenant,” are two of the fifty-four representatives of the human race aboard the big Hakh’hli ship as it orbits the planet Mars. The first settlement is taking shape down on the surface of the planet. The first twelve dozen dozen frozen eggs have been thawed and hatched; as a favor to the Earth representatives, six of them were fathered by Oberon. Marguery and Lysander have been back to the surface of the Earth twice. The first time was a quickie just long enough for Marguery to get her divorce and the two of them to get married. The second time was partly to close up Marguery’s old apartment and get rid of her major possessions, because they will not be back on Earth again for many years, and partly to give them a chance to receive some assistance in a breeding project of their own. (It did require a bit of biophysical help, but the results, they are sure, will be worth it.) On Earth, the first two railguns are already in operation, and the project of deorbiting the most threatening lumps of cosmic junk is well along; the next step will be to launch orbiting vehicles equipped with Hakh’hli-type magnetic repellers to sweep up as many as possible of the smaller ones. It is still not easy for humans or Hakh’hli to traverse the old garbage belt in space; the polar windows are still the only safe places for fragile living beings, but with the railguns everything else can be catapulted past the barrier. The time is in sight when the human-imposed quarantine on space travel will be only an unhappy memory. And as for Lysander and Marguery themselves, they are many things. They are busy. They are useful. They are hopeful. They are expectant; and there is one thing more they are. They are happy.