He thought, remembering what the crew member had said, that there were other Earthly pleasures for him to practice enjoying. He found the headphones for his seat, managed to get them more or less comfortably in place without squeezing his hearing aid too painfully and, after a little experimentation, found a channel of music that seemed to fit his mood. He lay back, listening. His mind began to blank out. Just by turning his head he could gaze at the bright stars above, and the infrequent lights of some small town sliding by on the ground below, while Tschaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony lulled him back to sleep.
He woke up to the faint murmur of his own voice.
He sat up quickly, pulling away the earphones that had twisted around his neck. He saw Hamilton Boyle standing by the lounge’s big television screen, and on the screen Sandy saw that he himself was describing to an unseen interviewer the Questions Game he and his cohort had spent twenty years playing.
“Oh, sorry,” Boyle said. “Did I wake you?”
It was a silly question. The facts spoke for themselves, but Sandy said politely, “That’s all right.”
“I was just trying to get some news on the television,” Boyle apologized. “Lieutenant Darp will be coming along in a minute. We thought you’d like some breakfast.”
“Oh, yes,” Sandy said eagerly. The window beside him was bright with sunlight. Fleecy clouds were below them, and the warmth of the sun felt good on his skin. He stood up and stretched. “I think I would like to see some ‘news’ too,” he observed.
Boyle grinned. He was a handsome man, Sandy thought. It was hard to believe that he was sixty-two years old, but that was what Marguery had told him. He had thick, pale hair, close cropped, and his face was not lined. It was a little sharp featured, Sandy thought critically, and the man smiled a lot more than there seemed to be any reason for. But he appeared to be willing to be friendly. “You’re most of the news yourself today, you know,” he said. “The only other thing that’s interesting is a reentry—one of the big old satellites is about to deorbit, and there’s some chance it will come down where it can do some damage. But we won’t know about that for sure for a couple of days yet.”
“Does that happen often?” Sandy asked, interested.
“Often enough,” Boyle said shortly, snapping the set off. He didn’t seem to want to pursue the matter, so Sandy changed the subject.
“I didn’t know you had cameras in the room yesterday. When I was talking about my life on the ship, I mean.”
Boyle looked at him speculatively. “You don’t mind, do you? Everyone’s so interested in you.”
“Especially you cops,” Sandy pointed out.
Boyle took a moment to respond, but then he said, easily enough, “Yes, I’m a policeman, more or less. It’s my job to protect society.”
“Like Kojak?”
Boyle’s eyes widened. Then he grinned. “I keep forgetting how many old television shows you’ve seen. But, yes, like Kojak. Like any good cop. I need information, and the best place to get it is from someone on the inside.”
“The inside of what?” Sandy asked. Boyle shrugged. “I don’t know much about cops,” Sandy went on. “Do you still get your information by the—what is it?—the ‘third degree’?”
“I’ve never done that!” Boyle said sharply. Then he added, “I’ve never had to. I admit some cops have, sometimes, but that’s natural enough, isn’t it? Don’t the Hakh’hli ever do anything like that?”
“Never,” Sandy said positively. “I’ve never heard of anything like deliberately inflicting pain, for any reason at all.”
“Not even threatening someone?”
“With pain? No! Do you mean threatening them with death? But that wouldn’t work, either,” he explained. “Hakh’hli don’t fear death the way you do—we do.”
“Yes, that’s what you told Lieutenant Darp,” Boyle agreed. “Therefore—well, suppose one Hakh’hli went crazy. Antisocial. There wouldn’t be any good way of, say, forcing him to tell anything he didn’t want to?”
“I don’t think so. Not by threatening him or torturing him, anyway.”
Boyle seemed to lose interest in the subject. “I wonder what’s holding our breakfast up,” he said, and then smiled. “So you didn’t know we had cameras on you?”
Sandy shrugged. “For that matter,” he added, “until we landed, we didn’t really know if you had TV or not at all anymore. Years ago, the first time the Hakh’hli were in this part of the galaxy, they got all kinds of broadcasts. Radio, television, all sorts of things. This time there was hardly anything; we thought you’d stopped broadcasting for some reason.”
Boyle looked pensive. “Well, in a way we did. With all that stuff floating around, satellites aren’t too useful for communications anymore. So it’s almost all microwave or optical cable. Even local stations have directional antennae, so they don’t waste much energy transmitting to the sky.”
“It’s not because you’re being secretive?” Sandy hazarded.
Boyle looked really surprised. “Of course not! What makes you think that? We didn’t even know the Hakh’hli were out there, did we?” He shook his head. “No, it’s just that we made such a mess up there. It’s not just the physical obstruction; some of those old satellites are still radiating all kinds of stuff. The effects of the Star War will be with us for a long time—but still, I have to admit it was a beautiful light show while it lasted.”
Sandy pricked up his ears. “You saw the war?”
“Well, of course I saw it. I was twelve years old. I didn’t see much personally, I mean with my own eyes—there wasn’t much to see, from Cleveland, Ohio, especially because it was daylight. The Star War started at two o’clock in the afternoon, Cleveland time, and it was all over by sundown. But they had it all on television, and it was pretty spectacular fireworks out in space, believe me.” He hesitated, looking at Sandy. “Didn’t your parents ever tell you anything about it?”
“How could they?” Sandy asked bitterly. “They died before I knew them. I never saw them, really—except for the picture of my mother.”
“Oh? Can I see it?” Boyle studied the little rectangle Sandy pulled out of his pocket. He didn’t speak for a moment, and then chose his words with care. “She was certainly a beautiful woman,” he said. “Would you mind if I made a copy of her picture?”
“What for?” Sandy asked, surprised.
“I think the public would love to know what she looks like,” he said, putting the picture in his pocket. “Did you ever see their ship?”
“My parents’ ship? Not exactly. That is, just pictures there, too.”
Boyle nodded quickly, as though he’d just had an idea. “I’ll tell you what, Sandy. Suppose we showed you all the pictures we could find of spaceships of that time. Do you think you could pick their ship out?”
“I could try, I suppose.”
“And that’s all anyone could ask of you,” Boyle said heartily. “Ah, here’s Lieutenant Darp and our breakfast!”
One of the crew members was following Marguery into the lounge, pushing a wheeled cart. As Marguery greeted them the crew member pulled dishes covered in silver domes out of a heating compartment under the table and set places for three.
Although Sandy’s first interest was in the smells of what they were being offered, he didn’t fail to notice how Marguery looked. She looked beautiful. Her hair was gleaming in its long, scarlet braids, and she wore a completely different outfit than she had the night before—a skirt the color of her hair, that reached barely to her knees, a white, fringed leather jacket, bright blue socks that went halfway up her calf and ended in a plaid of red, blue, and white. Frowning, Sandy noticed that Boyle’s clothes, too, were not the same as the night before, and wondered if he was not making a mistake by continuing to wear the same outfit day after day.
But then it was time to eat the “breakfast,” and that took all of Sandy’s concentration. The “pancakes” were fine, especially with gobs of the thick, sweet “maple syrup.” So was the little dish of cut-up pieces of “fruit.” He nibbled at them very tentatively at first, but the contrasting flavors and textures of “oranges” and “grapefruit” and “melon” were irresistible. And then Polly showed up; and the day’s questioning began, and it wasn’t until Polly retired for her private midday meal and stun time that Sandy had a chance to take Hamilton Boyle aside and ask him if, really, there was any reason to change clothes so often.
He was still blushing as, hastily retiring to his own cabin, he stood in the tiny shower cubicle, with the hot water pouring down on him.
No one among the Hakh’hli had ever pointed out to him that he might smell bad. It was not a Hakh’hli concern. None of the Hakh’hli ever bothered to disguise their natural odors themselves, for that matter; but still, he told himself remorsefully, he should have noticed by himself that the pleasant odors that came from the human beings almost all came out of a bottle.