“Now?” he asked, surprised.
“Whenever you want to,” she promised.
He thought about Polly’s call to ChinTekki-tho. “Not right this minute,” he said, looking at his watch, reassured to find that they had been gone only half an hour. He leaned out over the parapet and gazed down. Boats were moving silently up and down it, far below them, and just under them was a strip of sand. People in skimpy costumes were sitting or lying by the water, or actually splashing around in the water itself. “What are those people doing down there?”
She looked over the railing. “Just swimming,” she said. “Would you like to try it?”
“Me?” He gave her a doubtful look, then turned to gaze down at the people by the water. “I don’t know if I can,” he confessed. “I’ve never done that.”
“There’s nothing easier,” Marguery assured him. “I don’t suppose you have a bathing suit, but we can pick one up for you easily enough.”
“Not right this minute,” he said again, temporizing. He looked around at the peaceful scene below and the vista of the old city. “Maybe after lunch,” he finished. “There’s something I need to do at the hotel. Let’s start back.”
“All right,” Marguery said; but as they turned away a young woman in glasses, sun hat, and shorts approached them, holding a notebook and a pen out to Sandy.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but you’re the man from the spaceship, aren’t you. Can I have your autograph?”
When Sandy got back to the hotel room he was far too late to talk to ChinTekki-tho. The radio in Polly’s room was silent, and the table was littered with scraps of her midday meal. Polly herself was snoring stertorously in stun time.
“Oh, turds,” Sandy said aloud. But then he looked more closely at the scraps Polly had left on the meal cart. They smelled attractively familiar, after a few days of trying the exotic Earth foods. He chose a few fragments, piled them onto a silver dish that had, until then, held a vase of flowers, and took them back to his own room.
When he had finished he gazed out of the window for a while. Then, sighing, he sat down once more and began to sketch out another poem.
This one, he decided, would be a real human poem. Well, not rhymed—he wasn’t sure enough of himself for that—but anyway like a human poem, meaning not twisted into the shape of a significant object. By the time Polly came grumpily yawning into his room to complain that he had missed his appointment to talk to ChinTekki-tho, Sandy was smiling again.
Polly was not. “You were late and not on time,” she said accusingly in Hakh’hli.
Unrepentant, Sandy counterattacked. “Did you ask him about why we didn’t remember visiting Alpha Centauri?”
“Why should I have? You could have been here to ask him yourself.”
“But did you?”
Polly said in triumph, “Of course I asked him. And he gave me an answer. He said, ‘Such things will be discussed when Major Seniors decide it is time to discuss them and not before.’ ”
The “people who wanted to talk to Sandy” were gathered in the hotel’s ballroom when he came down in response to Marguery’s telephone call. “There are so many of them,” he said, displeased, peering in at the nearly a hundred human beings who were sitting there, talking among themselves.
“It’s just what we call a press conference,” Marguery said. “The people just want to get to know you, that’s all. After all, you’re a celebrity.”
“I am?” he asked, pleased.
“Of course you are. Can’t you tell? Why else would people be asking you for your autograph?”
So he let himself be led into the room without protest. He stood at a lectern on a platform at the front. Lights went on. Cameras began winking red-eyed at him. Marguery Darp said a few words of introduction, and the questions began. What did he think of Hudson City? Had he enjoyed his afternoon at the “beach”? What was the Hakh’hli, Hippolyta, going to tell the Earth’s astronomers? Were any more Hakh’hli going to land from the ship? and when? and how many of them, exactly?
The answer to most of the questions was, really, “I don’t know,” but Sandy did his best, aware of Marguery Darp sitting quietly behind him on the platform. But some of the questions made Sandy swallow hard. “Where do you want to live?” for instance. He turned to look at Marguery for help, but she didn’t offer any. “I mean,” the reporter persisted, “will you stay here in Hudson City? Or, actually, are you going to stay on Earth, or will you go back with the Hakh’hli ship when they leave?” A hard question. Sandy had not until that moment considered the probability that indeed the Hakh’hli ship would leave some day for another star. Thinking about it made him furrow his brow. And then, came the question that was hardest of all, because it was the one he had least expected. “If you stay on Earth, what will you do?”
Sandy blinked into the lights. “Do?” he repeated uncertainly.
“I mean, what kind of job will you have?” the woman persisted.
Sandy thought hard for a moment. It had never occurred to him to think of it. Really, what could he do, that would constitute an Earthly “job”? He ventured, “I can pilot a Hakh’hli landing craft.”
There was a faint chuckle all around. “But we don’t have any Hakh’hli landing craft,” the reporter pointed out. Then, at last, Marguery came to his rescue.
“Mr. Washington has any number of skills,” she told the reporters, “but you have to give him time to decide how he wants to use them. Anyway, I think we’ve imposed on his good nature long enough for this session . . . and besides, I’ve promised to take him swimming this afternoon!”
In Marguery’s little car, Sandy tried to tell her why that question was so hard. “I’m not used to having to decide things like that, Marguery. The Hakh’hli don’t pick where they’re going to live or what jobs they’re going to do. The Major Seniors decide that for them.”
She patted his hand reassuringly. “We do things differently here,” she told him. Then she pulled the car into a parking space and turned to look at him before opening the door. “You are going to stay with us, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, that’s definitely what I want to do,” Sandy said.
“And what about the Hakh’hli?” she pressed. “Are they going to go on with their voyage?”
He scratched his cheek. “I suppose they will,” he said.
“You don’t sound very sure,” she pointed out.
He shook his head. “As far as I remember, I don’t think that question ever came up. But what else would they do?”
Marguery nodded soberly. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Anyway, here’s the beach.” She leaned back to reach a package in the rear seat of the car. “I picked up a bathing suit for you in the hotel shop; hope it fits.”
“Thank you,” he said absently, beginning to unbutton his shirt.
“But you don’t undress here,” she said quickly. “There are changing rooms for that. I’ll meet you when you come out.”
That presented another mystery to solve, but a simple enough one this time. He copied what he saw other men doing, aware that they were looking curiously at him, as well. He didn’t think about it. His mind was filled with all the questions Marguery had raised and kept on raising.
There were plenty of questions. What was in very short supply was answers.
For twenty years everything had seemed clear to him: He would come back to Earth, as a gift from the Hakh’hli to the human race, and that would be that. He had never considered the possibility of an “after”—either for himself, or for the Hakh’hli ship.
When Sandy left the row of cubicles marked “Men” he was properly garbed in a pair of bathing trunks that did, just about, go around his considerable girth. Then the unanswerable questions vanished, because there was Marguery, waiting for him at the section marked “Women.”
He swallowed hard. Marguery Darp in ordinary clothes had stirred his passions. Marguery Darp in a bikini took his breath away. She had a loose, thin, nearly transparent robe over her shoulders, but it hid no more than the bathing suit did. “But you’re beautiful,” he told her.
She laughed out loud. “Well,” she said, “you’re certainly good for a person’s vanity, Sandy Washington.” Then she frowned. “I forgot to get you a sun robe, so we’d better not stay out too long. Come on. Let’s get our feet wet!”
And they did, and the experience of entering the water drove all other thoughts out of Sandy’s mind.
He was aware that people were staring at him, but they were smiling encouragingly, taking pictures. He grinned happily at the other bathers. It was fun! To be almost immersed in a liquid that supported, or very nearly supported, his weight! It was like flying—except that when they waded out to waist depth, Marguery holding his hand, and he tried lifting his feet off the bottom under her tutelage, he sank.