Homegoing

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.”