When he was out of the shower and dried, he experimented with the flask of men’s cologne that Boyle had loaned him. It certainly smelled pleasant enough. He filled a palm with it and began slapping it onto his body.
His yell of angry surprise woke Polly from the last of her stun time and brought her waddling in to see what was the matter. When he told her indignantly that the stuff stung, she was unsympathetic. “Perhaps you are putting it in the wrong places,” she suggested. “At any rate, it is a human foolishness and, as you are human, you might as well get used to it. Put on some clothing so we can go out and be interrogated some more.”
“They aren’t interrogating us,” he corrected. “They are simply asking us questions, because they are naturally so interested in us.”
“Not just in us,” she said darkly. “What have they been asking you?”
He shrugged, pulling on a new pair of pants and studying himself anxiously in the little mirror. “All sorts of things. Nothing in particular.”
“But in particular they have been asking me about some very serious things,” she said, her tone grim. “About the history of the ship. About whether the Hakh’hli have ever before encountered intelligent beings, and what they did about them. About the technology of our ship’s engines, which are powered by what they call ‘strange matter’—though how they know that I do not know. Especially about we Hakh’hli ourselves—why we allow ourselves to die when it is our turn, how many eggs are kept in storage, for how long, for what purpose . . . there is nothing they do not want to know.”
“And there is nothing we should not tell them,” Sandy said virtuously, combing his hair to see if he could make it look like Hamilton Boyle’s. “That is our purpose here. To exchange information.”
“To exchange, yes,” she agreed, “but what information are they giving us in return?”
“I’m sure they’ll tell us anything we want to know,” he said stoutly.
She gave him a bitter look. “You are quite a human being after all,” she announced. “Please remember to act like one next time we sleep together.”
He turned to gaze at her, surprised by her tone. “Have I offended you, Hippolyta?” he asked.
“You have behaved quite badly in your sleep,” she announced crossly. “You should swallow your own spit! Were you dreaming last night? What were you dreaming of? Twice last night you woke me and I had to push you away, for you seemed to be trying amphylaxis with me. That is foolish, as well as disgusting, Lysander! Save such things for your human female, Marguery Darp.”
“Don’t I wish,” Sandy said wistfully.
There weren’t as many questions as usual that afternoon, but Sandy found the session wearing. What Polly said had spoiled things for him, a little. He didn’t like the idea of being interrogated. He began taking careful note of the number of questions he was asked, and what they were about.
That part was easy. The answer was “everything,” from the Hakh’hli name for their sun, and for airships, and for the lander, to why ChinTekki-tho, though a Senior, was not a Major Senior. Hamilton Boyle had the same curiosity Marguery had shown about the films that had been shown to the entire ship’s company; Marguery wanted to know, all over again, how the landing craft’s magnetic repellers at least slowed down the bits of debris in orbit. Sandy sulked. Even though Marguery complimented him very kindly on how well he looked in his fresh clothes (and, when he asked, yes, on how well he smelled now, too), he was not enjoying the time spent with her and was glad when Boyle announced that they would stop the conversation for a while, because Bottom was on television, speaking from the lander site.
The lander was no longer as Lysander had left it. The Hakh’hli housekeeping crew had been busy; most of the tattered micrometeorite screen was gone, and they had already begun laying on the shiny new one that would be needed for takeoff. And a whole little town had sprung up around it—three big oblong structures on wheels (Marguery explained that they were called “trailers”) formed an arc around the little rocket. Half a dozen fabric things (“tents”) housed some of the human beings who worked in the trailers; half a dozen helicopters sat around, some of them with their rotors steadily turning. It was drizzling in the Inuit Commonwealth, and the Hakh’hli were staying inside. Sandy caught a glimpse of Demmy watching from the doorway, and then the scene switched to pick up the picture of Bottom, squatting inside one of the tents, explaining exactly what the “railgun launcher” was to be like, and where it could be built; and all Polly and Sandy had to do that afternoon was watch and explain some of the details Bottom was leaving out.
By the end of the long day Sandy was exhausted again, but he had discovered that coffee would keep him awake. “I don’t know if you should hit it that hard,” Marguery said, concerned. “It’s all new to your system, isn’t it?”
“It’ll be all right,” Sandy assured her. No risk to his system was going to keep him from spending private time with her. But he finished with a huge yawn.
Marguery looked concerned. “Haven’t you been getting enough sleep?”
“I can’t sleep as long as you do,” he said defensively.
“Well, if you’d like to pack it in for the night—”
“Oh, no! No. I like spending time just with you, Marguery.”
She gave him a kind of Earth-female smile that was totally unreadable to Sandy. “You aren’t about to produce another poem, are you?”
He shook his head, but thoughtfully. Were the poems doing what he hoped for them, after all? But he said, “It’s just that I’m more comfortable with you. Not that Hamilton Boyle isn’t all right, but—I don’t know. I don’t think he trusts me, exactly.”
“Well, he’s a cop,” Marguery said, and then, before Sandy could say it, added, “So am I, of course. But he’s been one all his life. It’s kind of instinctive with him now, I guess.”
“Would he third-degree me, Marguery?”
“Third-degree? Torture? Of course not! Or anyway,” she added unwillingly, “not unless he really had to. Why do you ask a question like that?” Sandy shrugged. “Are you keeping secrets from us?”
Sandy considered the question. “I don’t think so,” he reported. “I mean, I’ve told you everything you asked.”
She sneezed, then looked at him thoughtfully. “And is there anything we ought to know that we haven’t known enough to ask you about?”
“Not that I know of.” Then he looked harder at her. “Do you think there is?”
Marguery said slowly, “There is one thing that I’ve been wondering about, actually.”
“And what’s that? Just ask, Marguery. I’ll tell you if I know.”
She gazed at him for a moment, and then, oddly, asked, “How old are you?”
The question took him by surprise, but he answered promptly. “In Earth years, I’m about twenty-two.”
“Yes, that’s what you’ve told us. And you said you were rescued, unborn, from an Earth spaceship?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” he said, wondering what she was up to.
“But that was right after the war, and that happened fifty years ago.”
“Oh, yes,” Sandy said, grinning with pleasure. It was good to be able to explain something simple to her, when so many of the questions were harder to deal with. “That,” he lectured, “is because for so much of the time the ship was traveling at a major fraction of the speed of light, you see. This causes a time-dilation effect, as your Albert—as Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of relativity. So time passed more slowly for me, on the ship.”
“I see,” she said, nodding. “So it’s actually been about fifty years, Earth time, since you were born. And that was twenty-five years out to Alpha Centauri, and twenty-five years back, right? Only it only seemed like about ten years each way because of time dilation.”
“Exactly,” he said, beaming with gratification at her quick understanding.
She asked, very seriously, “What was it like at Alpha Centauri?”
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
She repeated, “What was it like at Alpha Centauri? I mean, that was only ten years ago as far as you were concerned, right? So you were about ten years old, in your own subjective terms.”
He frowned. “I don’t see your point.”
“Well, Sandy,” she said unhappily, “when I was ten years old I was pretty immature, but I wasn’t stupid. I wouldn’t have been totally oblivious to an occasion like that. I’d remember something about Alpha Centauri, even if it was only how excited the grownups were. Don’t you?”
He scowled more deeply. “I’ve seen pictures of it,” he offered.
“Yes,” she agreed. “So have we. The Hakh’hli have shown us tapes. But I wasn’t there. Were you?”