Homegoing

Chapter 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re down,” Polly announced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It came upon Sandy Washington that he was lost.

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

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

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

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

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

The door opened to a push.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the other hand . . .

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

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

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

It was all quite confusing.

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

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

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

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

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