Then, of course, there was the vexing problem of what the clothes were to be made of. The best of the television pictures from Earth showed colors and sometimes even surface textures, but there were subtleties no one on the interstellar ship understood. The wisest scholars, poring over nearly a century’s worth of transmissions, had learned much and deduced even more by collation and comparison, but they could not say whether a particular garment should be single thickness or double, or whether they were lined or not, or how, exactly, they were held together. This was far more important for Sandy than for the rest of his cohort, of course. The six Hakh’hli who were his constant companions wore Earth clothes, or at least something like Earth clothes—shorts, suitably modified to accommodate their huge, long, folded legs, and short-sleeved jackets and now and then even caps. Shoes were out of the question for the long Hakh’hli foot, but sometimes they were willing to wear something like sandals. Lysander, on the other hand, dressed human all the time. He had even been required to practice “tying a tie” in front of a mirror, as Earth males had been seen to do. But nothing in his previous life had prepared him for the ordeal of selection that was now confronting him. “I can’t wear those things!” he cried. “How do I excrete?”
“The thcholarth thay it ith betht to remove the pantth,” MyThara soothed. “You’ll work it out all right, Lythander.”
“I’ll look like a fool!”
“You will look very handthome,” MyThara promised, keying the final selections into the machine. “The Earth femaleth will lick your tongue, I promithe.” Sandy, pretending to scowl at her on the outside, felt his heart leap inside him at that thought, as she finished, “Now get ready for the midday meal.”
Since the food cart had not yet arrived for the midday meal, the cohort had begun a game of basketball, both to keep themselves busy and to relieve some of the strain of their bubbling young glands.
Their notion of basketball wasn’t exactly regulation. There were only three on a side, plus one as referee—although until Lysander was through with his wardrobe chores they wouldn’t be able to have a referee at all. And the ball didn’t bounce exactly the way it did on broadcasts of the Knicks and the Lakers, and they didn’t have anywhere near the room for a regulation-size court. But they did the best they could. Sandy Washington urged the others to play as often as he could, because it was the one sport he could, sometimes, beat them in. They were stronger by far, but he was quicker.
He persuaded Obie to drop out to become referee—easily enough, because Obie didn’t much like the game—and plunged in. It was not as good as the games they used to have in the old days, before the Earth-mission cohort were cut off from the dozens of others they had grown up with, when their teams had, sometimes, a dozen players on each side. But it was a good game. The ship had been cooling down a little, now that they were well past the close approach to Earth’s Sun that they had used to slow the ship down. That was both good and bad for Sandy Washington. The good part was that the rest of the cohort didn’t sweat as much. The bad part was that they didn’t tire as rapidly.
He did, though. Long before the midday meal cart arrived he dropped out. While the players were shuffling around and Obie was getting back into position, Polly came over to him, limping and rubbing her immense thigh where Obie had kicked her on his way in.
“He hurt me,” she complained.
“You’re bigger than he is. Punch him out,” Sandy advised.
“Oh, no!” She sounded shocked. She didn’t say why, but she didn’t have to; by now everybody could see that Obie was getting close to a sexual season, so her reasons for keeping on his good side were obvious. “Why don’t you go for the food cart, as long as you aren’t playing?” she asked.
“I went yesterday. It’s Helen’s turn.”
“But that will break up the game,” she explained irritably.
‘I don’t care,” he said, and turned away.
Then Sandy went off in a corner to watch TV on his personal monitor. It was the rule that at mealtime the cohort could watch anything they liked, just so it was in the English language for the practice. The old movie Sandy chose was called The Scarlet Pimpernel. It was certainly not the one he enjoyed most, and he could not pretend that it contributed to his education about Earthly ways. The costumes were all wrong, and exactly who was on whose side in that complicated drama of the French Revolution not even the Hakh’hli scholars had been able to figure out. But Sandy watched it over and over with fascination, because it was about a spy. And that was, after all, the task the Hakh’hli had decreed for him.
Chapter 2
There are some 22,000 living Hakh’hli aboard the vast interstellar ship but there is only one of Sandy Washington. So sometimes he feels outnumbered. It isn’t just that he is alone. He is also—not counting food animals—by a long way the smallest grown-up living thing on the ship. An adult Hakh’hli may mass anywhere from 350 to 750 pounds, depending on age and the purpose it was bred for. Power plant and outside-of-ship workers, for instance, are almost as big as the oldest Major Seniors, though for occupational reasons they seldom live anywhere near as long. Though all Hakh’hli have the same basic body pattern—short, supple forelimbs; long, pointed face like a collie’s; huge hindlegs as powerful as a kangaroo’s—some of the specialized types have stronger hands or shorter tails or even no tails at all. The Hakh’hli hand has three fingers, plus two thumbs and a stubby, hard-clawed digit called a “helper.” It looks quite like a human hand, but with the helper emerging from what would be the heel of the hand in a human. If the Hakh’hli on the ship are diverse, the many times as many Hakh’hli on their home worlds are far more so—partly because they have more various purposes to meet, partly just because there are so many more of them. In all, there are in excess of one trillion Hakh’hli on the planets of their native sun and of the two nearby star systems they have colonized. No Hakh’hli on the ship has ever seen any of those other trillion. Nor have any of the trillion seen that ship, not since it began its voyage, 3000 Earth years ago.
Long before The Scarlet Pimpernel came to its heart-melting conclusion (the refugees safe, Leslie Howard triumphant, The Girl melting into his arms) the food cart arrived with their one great midday meal.
Sandy hung back from the rush. He had never learned to eat “properly,” and all his friends in the Earth-mission cohort had regretfully concluded that he never would. His diffidence in rushing the food cart proved it, for a proper Hakh’hli didn’t eat. He gobbled.
Sandy’s cohort tore into the midday meal with gusto. They made a lot of noise doing it, too. While Sandy picked daintily at his slab of meat, his friends were snapping great chunks out of the carcass and stuffing lumps of tuber and fists-full of the flavored wafers in after. The long, powerful jaws crunched. The throat muscles gulped and swallowed. Sandy could see successive wads of lightly chewed dinner chasing each other down the throats of his friends. None of the Hakh’hli actually snatched from him the morsels he had cut away for himself, but he didn’t expose them too openly. While they chewed they sucked in great quantities of the broth of the day, a sort of fishy consommé with lumps of wafer material floating in it. They sounded like half a dozen sump pumps going at once.
There was no such thing as dinner-table conversation among the Hakh’hli, nothing more than “Pass the broth bowl now!” and, “Hey, that bit’s mine!” Sandy didn’t even try to talk to them. He just sat patiently, cautiously nibbling at his own meal while he waited for the feeding frenzy to subside. In a few minutes it had. The great gobbets of food hit their respective stomachs. The Hakh’hli circulatory system rushed blood toward the digestive organs to meet the need for action. The chewing faltered and stopped, and one by one the Hakh’hli eyes went vacant, the Hakh’hli limbs went slack, and within five minutes every one of the Hakh’hli in Sandy’s cohort was stretched out unconscious in “stun time.”
Sandy sighed and walked slowly over to the food cart. Amid the wreckage there was still a fair-sized chunk of the hoo’hik meat, nibbled at but undevoured, and several handfuls of the flavored biscuits.
He took what he could carry and wandered over to his personal carrel to finish his meal in peace. Having nothing better to do while his cohort was unconscious and digesting their meal he did what he liked best to do anyway. He watched a film.