Obie looked hangdog, but Marguery Darp said quickly, “Oh, no, Mr., ah, Oberon! Not at all! I think you jump splendidly. The only thing that I would suggest is—well—don’t you think you should wear a hat? The ozone layer’s still pretty threadbare, this far north.”
Obie stared at her. “Ozone layer? Hat?”
Hamilton Boyle explained smoothly. “Lieutenant Darp is concerned about the ultraviolet radiation in the sunlight, Mr. Oberon. Since the ozone layer was weakened we’ve had a good deal of trouble because of it—skin cancers, crop failures, a hell of a lot of bad sunburn cases. Are you susceptible to sunburn, do you know?”
Obie looked inquiringly at Sandy, who said, “No, he doesn’t know. None of us do. We’ve never been exposed to sunlight before.”
“Then you’ll all need hats,” Marguery Darp said decisively. “And probably some kind of pullover to cover your, ah, arms.”
“Or better still—” Boyle smiled “—we ought to get you all indoors. What about accepting our invitation to come to a city? There’s plenty of room in the V-tol.”
“Go to a city?” Obie squealed.
“I’ll have to ask Polly, of course,” Tanya said. She turned and began to climb back into the lander.
Boyle called after her, “Please say that this is an official invitation from the government of the Yukon Commonwealth, who would like to welcome you all to Earth!” And to Sandy and Oberon, he added, “You’ll like it, I promise. Dawson’s a real city, and I guarantee we can make you comfortable there.”
Marguery was nodding encouragingly. Sandy said, “Oh, I’d like that.”
And Obie said gloomily, “Polly won’t let us.”
But when Polly at last came down from the lander—more decorously than Obie—she was all shrugs and tears of good will. “Of course we accept your invitation to visit your Dawson,” she said. “Our advisor, ChinTekki-tho, asks us to thank you for inviting us. Unfortunately, we cannot all come with you.”
“But the V-tol will easily hold us all,” Marguery Darp said.
“It is not a matter of what the ship will hold. It is a matter of what is necessary. Some of us must remain with the landing ship as a precaution; if we left it alone some Earth person might enter it and do some hurt to himself. Also there is much work to do because of the damage the lander has received in coming to Earth. The micrometeoroid screens must be replaced, for instance; you can see how badly they have been damaged on the way in.”
“But surely you’re not planning to leave right away?” Boyle asked, frowning.
“It is not a matter of what we plan, either,” Polly told him. “Our directives come from the Major Seniors, so we must carry them out. However, the landing craft will not leave at once. Some of us will go with you. Of course, we will have to bring provisions with us so we will have something to eat.”
“There’s plenty to eat in Dawson,” Marguery Darp said.
Polly waggled her head. “But only of Earth food, I’m afraid. However, Lysander and I will go with you, and we will take—” She glanced around, sighed, and finished, “Oberon; I think he can be spared most easily. The others will stay with the lander.”
The flight to Dawson in Marguery Darp’s V-tol plane was almost as rough as the landing from the interstellar ship; even Obie got airsick. But when they landed in the place called Dawson, Sandy got his first look at a human city. “It’s so big!” he cried, staring at the tall buildings. Some of them were nearly a hundred feet high!
“Oh, it’s not that big,” Marguery Darp said reassuringly. “This is just Dawson. It’s the capital of the Yukon Commonwealth; I doubt that there are more than twenty-five thousand people in the whole commonwealth, and most of them aren’t in Dawson. They’re out on the farms.”
Sandy once again regretted the fact that he could ask only one question at a time. “Yukon Commonwealth?” he repeated inquiringly.
“That’s what this area is called,” she explained. “We don’t have big countries any more—things like nations, you know? We just have commonwealths. About ten thousand of them, all over the world. I guess the biggest commonwealth in North America is York, over on the east coast, and that only has about a quarter of a million people. The place where you landed is the Inuit. This is Yukon. Just south of us there’s the Athabasca Commonwealth—that’s where the really big farms are. And over to the west—”
Sandy stopped her geography lesson. “Can’t we go into the city?” he asked.
And Obie put in eagerly, “And get something to eat? Maybe even a real milk shake?”
“Of course we can,” said Marguery, smiling. “Come on. The car’s waiting for us.”
The car was actually a “van”—four wheels, boxy, with seats big enough even for the two Hakh’hli to squeeze in—and it moved rapidly toward the town. All three of the visitors stared at everything they passed, Obie chattering in excitement, Polly supercilious, and Sandy wholly goggle-eyed at the wonders of a real human city. He couldn’t help chuckling to himself, which made Marguery smile, and the two Hakh’hli were dripping saliva in excitement.
This part of the human world was no longer the way it had looked in the Hakh’hli records—not any of the many ways it had appeared. There were cars, of course. The Hakh’hli had seen plenty of Earth-human cars chasing each other endlessly around the “freeways” in the old films, and they knew what cars looked like. These were different. They came in three wheels or four, open ones and sealed ones, big and little. Few of the buildings in Dawson were skyscrapers. They had many stories—the “hotel” Marguery took them to had twenty-five—but most of them were underground. “There’s no sunlight to speak of in the winter here anyway,” she explained, “so what’s to look at? Anyway, this keeps us out of the wind.”
“The wind didn’t seem bad,” Obie offered eagerly, showing off his new connoisseurship, since they had experienced far worse winds in the storm when they landed.
“It isn’t bad today,” Marguery said. “Oh, they don’t get many hurricanes this far inland—that’s what they had in the Inuit Commonwealth when you landed, a hurricane. But they have what they call chinooks, and when one of them comes along they’ll take the hair right off your head—well, not your head, of course, Oberon. Anyway, come on, let’s get you settled.”
“Getting settled” meant “checking in” at a “hotel.” They weren’t alone as they did it. They never were. People clustered around them, goggling, and they never got away from the TV cameras, except in the privacy of their rooms.
Their individual rooms.
That fact by itself startled them all. Whoever heard of sleeping alone? Oberon and Polly decided at once to share one corner of a room floor (they were not quite ready to try a “bed”), but Sandy chose to do on Earth as the Earthies did. “But then I’ll just have Polly to sleep with,” Obie wailed. “I’ll be cold!”
Polly said irritably. “Oh, let the Earthling do what he likes. Only stay with us while I check the radio, Lysander. We have to make sure everything’s all right at the ship.”
Of course, everything was. Tanya responded to the first call and reported that all was well, except that some of the Earthies were eager to be allowed a look inside the landing craft. “Certainly not,” Polly ordered indignantly. “Or not unless ChinTekki-tho gives permission, anyway. Have you maintained contact with the ship?”
“Of course,” said Tanya. “The Major Seniors are considering that question now. Also, they wish to make a ‘broadcast’ to Earth themselves. I have spoken to ChinTekki-tho, and he is going to tell us how to set up a relay from the lander.”
Polly swallowed. “And are the Major Seniors, well, pleased?” she asked.
“They haven’t said they were not,” Tanya reported. So that was all right. Polly signed off, weeping in relief.
Then Marguery came knocking on the door. “Sandy?” she said. “I thought this would be a good time if you all would like to go shopping.”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said eagerly. “I’ve always wanted to see an Earth supermarket.”
“Well,” she said, shaking her head, “that’s fine, sure, some other time. But right now I thought we might go to a clothing store. Your Hakh’hli friends ought to get hats, anyway, and you probably will be more comfortable if you get out of those funny-looking clothes.”
Sandy’s introduction to the human world as a participant in it was wonderful. It was also scary, and sometimes a little repulsive, but it was all, well, wonderful was still the best word. It was just one wonder after another. The biggest thing about the Earth was the space. There was so much of it— and so variously filled! There were lakes and farms and buildings and people. The best, if most worrisome, thing was the smells. They took getting used to because none of them were in any way like the smells of the ship. But even the manure pile behind that first cowshed had been quaintly amusing—sort of—and the smells of the town of Dawson were far more varied. There were nasty ones, like the steamy car exhausts. There were curious ones—food cooking, human sweat—and sweet ones, like flowers and grasses. And then there were the very special smells of women. Marguery giggled, but she helped Sandy identify them when he asked. Perfume. Soap. Hair-spray. Body odors, faint but stirring—they all added up to Human Female, and they made Sandy’s belly twitch in surprising and unexpected contractions.