He got his feet under him and came up, gasping and snorting and laughing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t swim at all. I think the average density of my body’s a lot more than water.”
She pursed her lips. “You’re pretty solid, at that. Well, that’s not a big problem. We’ll get you a life preserver or something, if you want to try. And I’ll be right with you, all right?”
“Maybe another time,” he said cautiously. “Is it all right if we just, what do you call it, ‘wade’ for a while?”
“Whatever you want.”
He splashed about, thoughtfully. “The water isn’t very cold,” he said.
She laughed. “It isn’t always like this. You should have been here last winter. The whole bay was frozen over!”
Lysander gazed around, perplexed. “You mean ‘ice’? Frozen water? But why?”
“Just because it was winter, of course,” she said, and then had to explain what a “winter” was. “The old people never had freezes like this around here, she said with a certain amount of pride.
“But you said it was warmer now, not colder,” Lysander said humbly. “How could warming up make the air colder?”
“That cold air around here last winter wasn’t any colder than usual,” she explained. “It was just in a different place than usual.” She frowned up at the hot sun overhead. “But it isn’t winter now,” she said, “and I’m afraid we’re getting too much sun. Let’s sit in the shade for a while and dry off.”
He followed her up the little beach to where canvas awnings sheltered the bathers from the ultraviolet. “Be back in a moment,” she said, and disappeared in the direction of a refreshment stand. When she came back she handed him a paper cup with a fizzy soft drink in it. “Do you like it?” she asked, watching him taste it experimentally. “It’s called ‘root beer.’ ”
“Oh, yes,” he said, nodding. Like everything else on Earth, it did not taste at all the way he had expected, but he enjoyed the way it tingled at the back of his nose. “Listen, Marguery,” he said. “I remembered something about winter. When I was little MyThara told me that the Hakh’hli once visited a planet where it was winter all the time.”
He had her sudden full attention. “Really?” she said, waiting for him to go on. But he couldn’t go very far.
“I don’t remember very much about it,” he said. “It was a big disappointment to them for some reason. The Hakh’hli don’t like to talk about disappointments—I guess they’ve had too many of them. But it did happen, MyThara said. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago.” He stopped to think, then shook his head. “That’s all I remember. I could ask ChinTekki-tho about it, next time I talk to him. He’d know. Would you like me to do that?”
“Yes, please,” said Marguery. “I’d like that very much.”
When they separated to get dressed again, Sandy discovered the paper in his pocket. He had completely forgotten about it. It brightened his mood, and when they got back into her little red car, he pulled it out for her.
“I’ve got something for you, Marguery,” he said, smiling tentatively.
She saw what he was doing. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Another poem?”
“A human one this time,” he said proudly. He didn’t hand it to her. He held it up and began to read aloud.
“Tenuous fragile creature
Deliciously lacking a tail,
Without great springing legs
But only long, smooth, slim, sweet ones.
I want to climb those legs, dear lovething,
I want to climb them to the place where you and I join,
For you are the other half of me,
And I want to make us whole.”
She gave him a long look and then took the paper away from him. She read it over carefully before she spoke.
Then she put it down and stared at him. “You really get right to the point, don’t you?”
“I’m trying to do it right,” he said apologetically.
“Well,” she said, “frankly, maybe you’re doing it right enough, but you’re also doing it too fast. If you know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” he admitted sadly.
She laughed out loud. “And I don’t know exactly how to teach you,” she said. “Oh, Sandy!” She was thoughtfully silent for a moment. Then she asked, with an abrupt change of subject, “Would you like to see the real New York City?”
He blinked at her, then waved his hand toward the skyline across the river. “Am I not seeing it right now?”
“I mean see it close up. Maybe even do some scuba diving, if we can find water wings or something to keep you from sinking. We can go underwater and see the actual streets themselves.”
Sandy scowled, thinking it over. He couldn’t see how that related to the previous conversation. He had a vague notion of what “scuba diving” was like from films of that old Frenchman, Jacques Cousteau. It had seemed quite frightening, watching them on the screen of the cohort quarters back on the Hakh’hli ship. But if Marguery were with him—especially if she were wearing, as she certainly would be, that wonderful bikini bathing suit . . .
He smiled up at her. “I’d love it,” he said.
She looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. “I hope you will,” she said, and left it at that.
Chapter 15
At this time, half a century after Star Wars, there are 90,000 trackable objects in Low Earth Orbit. Most of them are too small to survive reentry when, at last, they fall to the surface of the Earth. So they aren’t likely to do anyone on the surface much harm. They range from the size of a monkey wrench to the size of a beach-ball, and when they deorbit they are almost sure to burn up from the friction of the air. All they will contribute to anything on the surface is to add an undetectable additional patter to the steady infall of meteoric dust that has drifted onto the Earth for four and a half billion years. Seventy-two thousand of the Earth-orbiting objects are in that size range . . . but there are eighteen thousand others. These can’t be ignored by the people below. They range in size from kitchen refrigerator to railroad locomotive; some are even bigger. And when one of these chunks of metal decays out of its orbit it will surely strike the ground—at least in fragments—at speeds of several miles a second, with an impact that can level buildings. Nor is that the worst. Unfortunately, some of these big ones still have internal power sources. The sources are generally nuclear, and when they strike it is not merely the kinetic energy of the fall that can kill.
The phone rang as Sandy was on his way to Polly’s room to see if she was up yet. It was Marguery Darp. “Sandy? I’m in the lobby, but I thought I ought to tell you that the meeting has been postponed for an hour because of the deorbiting. Yes, it’s supposed to happen on this orbit. You can go over with me to watch it at Lamont-Doherty, or I’ll come back and get you later. Whichever you want.”
“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” he told her, and knocked on Polly’s door.
She was up, all right. She was squatting before the desk in her room, making notes. When he told her about the delay she gave a resentful twitch. “What fuss these Earth humans make about possible damage and loss of life to one city. They have thousands of cities! No, go if you wish, I will remain here.”
“All right,” Sandy said. “Polly? Do you remember when the ship was at Alpha Centauri?”
She grimaced in annoyance. “You have asked me that, Lysander. Why do you ask it again?”
“I don’t remember it at all. Do you?”
She looked up at him. Then she did what he expected her to do. She continued making notes at her table for a moment. Then she gave a superior twitch. “This is no proper occasion to ask silly questions about ancient Hakh’hli history, Lysander. I am too busy and have not time for such things, since I must prepare my address. There will be some surprises in it; I will give them solution to their little problem.”
“What solution do you mean?”
“You will hear when I give it,” she said, weeping a small self-satisfied tear. She returned to her notes—all of them upside-down to Sandy as he stood—with one double-thumbed hand over the top of them so that he couldn’t read what she was writing. As though there were any reason to keep them from him! How annoying she could be!
“You’re not a Senior,” he told her. “Don’t treat me like a child. What problem are you talking about?”