Then there were the ones where the boy saves the girl from the “enemy” in a “war,” or from “gangsters” or “terrorists,” and naturally falls into bed with her; but where was the war? Then there were the more direct ones. The boy and the girl would enter separately into a “singles bar” (whatever a singles bar was), whereupon one would sit down with a drink and the other would come up to her. Then they would address coded remarks to each other. The code was easy enough to break, but hard to duplicate. The conversations all had two levels of meaning, and Sandy was not at all sure that his language skills were up to that sort of thing. Still, it was the most direct way; because as soon as they had received each other’s appropriate recognition signals it was, “Your place or mine?”
Sandy found one encouraging thing about the situation—he did have a place, a hotel room, and all his own—but where was the necessary singles bar to make the suggestion? For that matter, where was the time for such things? As soon as he had clothes to wear (the rest wouldn’t be finished until tomorrow) Marguery whisked him away.
“What about Polly and Obie?” he demanded, looking back to where they were talking with other humans.
“They have their own escorts,” she told him. “But the people of Earth are naturally specially interested in you, and we’ve arranged a television interview for you alone. It’s only a block away.”
She whisked him over to a different kind of building. This was almost unique in Dawson because it extended ten whole stories above the ground, and the place she took him to was on the very top floor. “This is the TV studio,” she informed him. She looked him up and down. “You look very handsome,” she added.
“Do I?” he asked gratefully. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, admiring his new clothes—tan cotton shorts, a short-sleeved shirt open to display his chest, sandals, and knee-length white socks with a strip of red at the tops. “I suppose I do,” he agreed complacently. “Now what do we do?”
“We just go right in here,” said Marguery, conducting him to a large room with eight or ten human beings gathered around, with of course the television cameras (or some kind of cameras) pointed at him.
A man in a blue turtleneck advanced toward him, extending his hand. “I’m Wilfred Morgenstern,” he said, wincing only slightly as Sandy remembered not to squeeze too hard in a handshake. “I’m your interviewer. Why don’t you just start at the beginning and tell us your whole story?”
Sandy looked around, perplexed, but Marguery was nodding encouragingly. “Well,” Sandy said, “a long time ago, when you were having your ‘war’ here on Earth, the Hakh’hli ship came to investigate this solar system . . .”
It was a long interview, and when it was over Marguery said sympathetically, “Would you like something to eat before I take you back to the hotel? I guess it’s been a long day for you.”
Sandy agreed fervently; not only long in that so much had happened, but it was one of those twenty-four-hour Earth days that stretched so much past the normal Hakh’hli span. But he pointed at the window. “It’s still light out,” he observed.
“We have long days here in the summer,” Marguery explained. “It’s quite normal to go to bed while it’s still light.”
He wasn’t listening; he had taken a closer look out the window and he caught his breath. It was nearly sunset. The whole western sky was a mass of color, whipped-cream clouds tinted in shades of pink and mauve and orange where they were not snowy white. “It is beautiful!” he exclaimed.
“It’s just clouds. Probably they’re from the storm you saw in the Inuit Commonwealth,” Marguery said practically. Then she said curiously, “Haven’t you ever seen clouds before?”
“We don’t have them in the Hakh’hli ship, you know. There isn’t even a word for them in Hakh’hli; when the Hakh’hli talk about them they say, ‘ita’hekh na’hnotta ‘ha,’ which means, let’s see, ‘liquid-phase particles suspended in gaseous phase.’ ”
“That’s interesting,” Marguery said. “I hope you’ll teach me some other Hakh’hli words.”
“With pleasure,” he said, and then surprised himself with a yawn. He was sleepy, after all. He ventured, “Will I see you tomorrow?” he asked.
“Of course you will. I’m your personal escort, Sandy. You’ll be seeing a lot of me for a long time.”
He smiled gratefully. “Then let me go back to the hotel; I’ll have cookies and milk with Polly and Obie.”
And, he thought, there was something else he really wanted to do, for a poem was beginning to take shape in his mind.
Chapter 10
The chlorofluorocarbons don’t just trap heat. They also eat ozone. Everyone has known that this is true since the middle of the twentieth century, but of course human beings didn’t let that stop anything. They kept right on manufacturing them and pouring them into the air. After all, they were very profitable to make. The relevant figure-of-merit equation for human behavior has always read “$1 (now) >1 human life (later).” So the flood of ultraviolet over three-quarters of a century has taken its toll. Cloud-covered Alaskan trees have mostly survived (except where killed by acid rain). Clear-skied Scandinavian ones have not. The blistering sunlight has combined with the scourging thermal winds to damage most of the world’s most fertile farmlands. Still, the arable lands that are left are now quite adequate to feed the world’s population, for the simple reason that the human population is a lot lower than it used to be. The things that have helped reduce Earth’s population to a manageable size include melting ice inundating the land, destruction of ozone, acid rain, dust bowl-making winds—and, oh, yes, one other thing. The other thing isn’t around any more—because it has burned itself out—but it was a remarkably efficient population-control device in its time. Its name was AIDS.
When Marguery Darp tapped at Sandy’s door the next morning he was already awake. He had been up for hours. He had spent the time exploring the novelties of his room, practicing with the curious gadgets in the bathroom, and staring at the sights visible out the window. Most of all, he had been busy with a surprise for Marguery.
He would have given it to her the moment he saw her, but he had no chance. She arrived in haste, apologized for being late, and hustled him over to the television studio for a person-to-person talk to the Hakh’hli ship itself. He decided to save the surprise. It was a pleasure he could afford to postpone, because he had plenty of other pleasures going for him. Sandy’s second day on Earth was even more joyous than the first. It was less scary, because he had learned at least the rudiments of Earthly behavior; he had conquered Earthly toilets, elevators, even “shopping,” and besides, at some point he could bring out the surprise he had in his pocket for the woman he loved.
When they got to the studio, his Hakh’hli cohort-mates were less joyous. They were standing in the lobby with their own escorts, Hamilton Boyle and the woman named Miriam Zuckerman. “I’m hungry,” Obie wailed as soon as he saw Sandy. “Polly says we can’t have midday meal yet, but I’ve been up for hours.”
“It isn’t time yet,” Polly said crossly. She, too, was suffering from those long human-Earth days that never seemed to end.
Obie was not consoled. “We should‘ve started practicing living by this dumb kind of time long ago,” he complained.
“You’ll get used to it,” Sandy reassured him, although in fact he was a long way from being used to it himself. In his case it didn’t seem to matter. He felt as though he didn’t need sleep at all. When Hamilton Boyle looked at his watch and said there was time before the broadcast for them all to get some “breakfast,” he assented eagerly.
At the door of the hotel, Boyle stopped them. “Hats on, everybody?” he asked, checking them. “Good. And one other thing. The ultraviolet probably isn’t good for your eyes, either, so Miriam has something for you.”
What the woman named Miriam Zuckerman had were shiny-faced glasses—“sunglasses,” she called them—a large-sized pair for Sandy and two even larger, specially built ones for the two Hakh‘hli that fitted around their heads with an elastic strap. Marguery helped Sandy on with his and paused, gazing at his ear.
“What’s that?” she asked.
He said, embarrassed, “I guess you’d call it a ‘hearing aid.’ I’m kind of deaf, actually. It’s because—well, there’s a pressure difference between Earth and the ship standard atmosphere, you see, and we kept our quarters at the Earth level. So going in and out hurt my ears when I was little, and the Hakh’hli had to fix me up with this.”