And the other said, “You’re from the spaceship, aren’t you? The one with the funny-looking frogs? We’ll have to ask you to come along with us.”
Chapter 8
One of the reasons the planet Venus is so hot is that its atmosphere contains vast quantities of carbon dioxide, which traps the heat from the sun. One of the reasons Mars is so cold is that its atmosphere is very thin; there isn’t enough carbon dioxide to do the same thing. The Earth’s air is intermediate between them, but the human race has been changing that. Every time they exhale they breathe carbon dioxide out. Every time they burn fuel to run their engines and heat their homes (which is always) they make more of it. So the Earth gets warmer and the ice melts. (There is a reason why the policewoman laughed when Sandy said his home was in Miami Beach. The only present inhabitants of Miami Beach are jellyfish, crabs, tarpon, and bonefish, because Miami Beach, like most of the low-lying coasts of the world, is underwater.) There is more. Because the atmosphere is a heat engine, the more the air warms the more energy there is to express itself as storms, air-mass movements, scouring winds . . . in short, as hurricanes.
Even the word “hurricane” was unfamiliar to Sandy. It was one of those words you heard on old TV weather broadcasts, but there was nothing like a hurricane on the Hakh’hli ship. But on the way to the police helicopter he saw there was a corner of the cowshed that was bent out of shape, and a tree down in the courtyard, and he remembered the other great trees he had seen uprooted in the storm. And the word “hurricane” came back out of his subconscious.
He would have liked to ask the two police officers about it, but they didn’t seem to want to talk. If they had names, they didn’t tell them to Sandy. They didn’t look much alike, apart from the uniforms. The male one was shorter than the female, and his face was flatter and skin darker; he looked quite a lot like the animal herders. The female was paler and thin, like the picture of Sandy’s mother, though neither as young-looking nor as pretty. (Nor, for that matter, as undressed.) They escorted him, politely enough, to their “helicopter” and sat him down in the right-hand front seat.
Sandy tensed when the female one buckled straps around him. Partly it was that she, a female Earth human, had touched him and his startled glands throbbed. Partly it was because they were binding him like a prisoner! He made himself relax when they assured him the straps were only for his safety when the helicopter took off. Anyway, Sandy had no doubt that if things turned bad he could snap those straps in a moment.
What he would do after he snapped them was another question. The male sat next to him, at the controls; but the female was in the seat right behind, and the metal thing she carried at her side was a “gun.” Sandy’s knowledge of guns was perfect, obtained from any number of recorded Westerns and cop shoot-em-ups. He knew that if anyone fired a gun at anyone else, the target fell over in great and often terminal pain. He also knew from the same sources that a uniformed person with a gun had the right to fire it at any “suspect” and splat his brains out.
Sandy didn’t want his brains splatted out, especially by a human female—not a young one, to be sure, but very probably still capable of breeding. He turned his head as far as he could to smile at her.
She didn’t smile back. She only said, “Please sit straight, sir.” And then she leaned forward so that he felt her breath on the back of his neck. “Did you say your home was in Miami Beach?”
“That’s right,” Sandy said, sticking to the script. “I’ve been traveling—hitchhiking—and I guess I lost my way in the, uh, storm.”
There was a skeptical snort from the woman. “Then where are your gills?” she asked.
Sandy frowned. The woman meant something by that, but what?
“Let it rest, Emmons,” the male police officer ordered. “The captain will sort all this out.” And he did something with feet and fingers, and the slow flut-flut-flut of the rotor overhead picked up speed as the helicopter lurched off the ground.
Then Sandy’s big problem wasn’t solving the puzzling conversation, it was trying to keep from vomiting again.
The helicopter did not shudder and leap as the landing ship had when it was bumping through the atmospheric entry. The helicopter’s motion was slower and more tantalizing. But it was equally bad. Hurriedly the woman behind him pushed an air-sick bag at him. Sandy thought that, barring the tiny morsel he had swallowed at the cow farm, his stomach must be empty. But he surprised himself. He used the bag.
Then, sick or not, he had to look out the window. There were more trees down on the slopes around them, and some of the standing ones looked distinctly unhealthy—bare branches or yellowed leaves, some of them with their branches stripped away and nothing but straight, dead poles remaining. No matter. This was Earth! He thrilled to the recognition of that all-important fact. He was home!
The helicopter swayed as it lifted to clear a ridge. Then, as it went through a pass, Sandy could see a road below him—no doubt the very road he had failed to find in the stormy night. He could see that the storm had passed this way, for on the flanks of the mountains still more trees were down in windrows.
The flight covered the distance that had taken him six stumbling, zigzag hours in less than five minutes. Sandy was just beginning to wonder whether he would need the bag again when the pilot said, “There it is.”
There it was. The Hakh’hli landing ship. It squatted peacefully on its skids on a gentle grassy slope, its pale landing lights still on though the sun was high.
The lander looked astonishingly small, squatting in its meadow. It even looked pitiful, because the trip and the storm had not been kind to it. The thin foil that took the sting out of the micrometeoroids in orbit was punctured and wrinkled. The netting the Hakh’hli had tried to string over the craft after the landing, to hide it, had been shredded by the winds. The lander looked hard used.
But what caught Sandy’s eye at once was that it was no longer alone. Five other flying machines surrounded it. Human machines. They were helicopters more or less like the little police craft Sandy was riding in, except that most of them were a good deal bigger. And people, human people, were standing about in clusters. Some of them had television cameras pointed at the landing craft, or at each other, or most of all at the Hakh’hli.
All six of the Hakh’hli had come out of the lander. Two of them—they looked like Polly and Bottom—were talking into the television cameras. A couple of others were hunched possessively beside the ladder-stick to the door of the landing craft. And a couple were vigorously, joyfully showing off for the human spectators, leaping, with the extra strength their muscles gave them in the feeble Earth gravity, over each other in the game the Earth children he had seen on kiddy television shows called leapfrog; and froggy the Hakh’hli indeed did look.
As Sandy got out of the helicopter, Tanya came bounding toward him. The two police flinched away. Their hands strayed toward their holstered guns; but they didn’t draw them, and Tanya, weeping an affable tear, cried in Hakh’hli to Sandy, “You have done badly and not at all well, Lysander. Speak cautiously to these Earth creatures until you have learned new orders!”
Startled, Sandy demanded. “What new orders? You speak confusingly and not with any clarity.”
But she didn’t answer in Hakh’hli. She only patted him in playful reproof, and then turned and bounded away again, crying in English, “So follow me, Sandy! We are all being ‘interviewed’ on ‘television’ by these wonderful Earth people!”
Sandy frowned in bewilderment at the two police officers. The male one shrugged. The female one said, “I guess that’s what you ought to do, sir.”
So he tailed after Tanya, looking around.
His spirits began to rise. In daylight the world was more beautiful and more frightening than Sandy had ever imagined. There was so much of it! Never in his life had he been able to look for more than a hundred feet in any direction. Now there were horizons a dozen miles away—with mountains! and rivers! and clouds! and, brighter than he had dreamed, so bright that it hurt his eyes to look at it, the Sun!
The second most startling thing was the sight of Polly, weeping good-naturedly as she squatted on a flat, sun-warmed rock before half a dozen television cameras. She certainly was not obeying the directives of the Major Seniors. She wasn’t making any secret of their presence on Earth. She was, in fact, advertising it! As Sandy approached, the people with the television cameras turned away from Polly to aim their lenses directly at him, and Obie and Helen loped toward him.