“I see,” Sandy said bitterly. “You are now permitted to share some truths with me. But not all, I suppose?” She scowled at him, not answering. “So besides being my jailer, now you are permitted to give out certain little crumbs of information, to see what I’ll make of them?”
“I’m not your jailer, Sandy!”
“Then what do you call it?”
“The term,” she said primly, “is ‘escort.’ ”
“But you’re a policeman. Woman, I mean.”
“InterSec is not police. Not exactly police, anyway. Oh, hell,” she flared, “what do you expect? It was just a precaution. Naturally we have to make sure of what we’re getting into, so we—” She stopped. She glanced at the ceiling, then said stubbornly, “So we keep an eye on you. Just as you did on us.” She changed the subject. “Do you want some more coffee?”
“Is that what my ‘escort’ takes me to do next?” he asked bitterly. “Then what am I required to do after that to satisfy your natural concern?”
She gave him a look he couldn’t translate. “That’s up to you,” she said.
“Oh, but surely you have instructions,” he persisted.
She stared into space for a moment. Then she sighed and looked at her watch. “It’s almost time for Polly to speak,” she said.
“Then, of course, we have to go there, don’t we? To carry out your instructions for me?”
She didn’t answer that. He turned to leave, but she put a hand on his arm. She glanced at the other people in the room before she spoke. “Sandy,” she said, almost whispering. “You told me you might like to visit the old New York City. We can do that this afternoon, if you want to.”
The tone of her voice was odd, but Sandy was not mollified. “Of course,” he snarled. “I will want to do exactly what you say. What choice do I have, after all?”
Polly was late. Nearly everyone in the audience was already seated when she made her entrance, splatsplatting down the center aisle in the long, galumphing Hakh’hli strides, with Hamilton Boyle grimly keeping up beside her. He lost her when they got to the first row. Boyle pointed politely to the stairs that led up to the side of the stage, but Polly was having none of that. As Boyle turned toward the steps Polly gave him a disdainful look. Then she launched herself in an easy jump onto the platform. By the time he got to her she was already squatting before the podium, studying her notes.
There was a faint titter from the audience.
It was a typically Polly sort of thing to do—no, Sandy corrected himself, a typically Hakh’hli thing. Polly looked up, acknowledging the chuckle with a pleased tear. From Sandy’s seat in the first row, with human beings all around, he looked at her through Earthly eyes, and he had no doubt that to them she looked comical.
While Hamilton Boyle introduced her, Polly preened herself. She looked up, twitching in annoyance, as Boyle pressed a button and a screen descended behind them, and when he finished by saying, “So our distinguished guest will show us some of the astronomical records her people have acquired in their long voyage,” she turned on him.
“Must I?” she demanded.
Boyle looked astonished. “But I thought you wanted to. That’s what you were invited here for,” he reminded her.
She twitched irritably. “Oh, very well. Let’s get that part over with, then. Is this the picture control?” Impatiently she allowed Boyle to show her how to use it, then snatched it away from him. “All right, have the lights turned out,” she ordered, craning her neck to see the screen. Before the room was fully dark she began clicking rapidly. “These are some of your nearby stars,” she said, as the pictures flicked by, half a second apart. “This first series is what you call Gamma Cephei and its two planets—not very interesting; they are what you call ‘brown dwarf’ objects, of no use to anyone. We were leaving the Gamma Cephei system en route to what you call Alpha Centauri when we detected your radio signals and passed here, some fifty of your years ago. Now, this is Alpha Centauri. It does not have any sizeable well-formed planets, only a great many objects which most resemble comets or asteroids. Here they are. Now we come to your own system—why are you interrupting me, Boyle?”
The InterSec man had put a hand on her forearm. He said politely, “Don’t you think you could go a little slower?”
“What for? All these pictures now are in your files, and I have more important things to get to. This is your Sun, and here are some of your planets—” Sandy blinked. The pictures were coming faster than he could take them in, and he could hear people grumbling around him. Polly paid no attention. “Earth, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Mars. The interesting part to you, I suppose, is that these are mostly polar views—taken from north of the ecliptic as we came in from Gamma Cephei, south of it on our trip to Alpha Centauri. There are many other pictures, of course, which will be made available to you later. That is enough on that subject. Lights!” she called peremptorily, and gazed complacently out at the muttering audience as the overheads went on again.
“Now,” she said, “let me get to the more important part of what I have to say today.” She broke off, peering at a man near Sandy, who had his hand up. “Do you want something?” she asked.
“I just want to know if we’ll have a chance to ask questions,” the astronomer called.
“I suppose so, but not until I have finished. Please pay full attention now, all of you. I have been instructed by my superior, ChinTekki-tho, to inform you that you should begin construction of a magnetic-impulse thruster—what you call a ‘railgun’—at once. We have identified two suitable sites. One is on the island you call Bora Bora, the other is the peak you call Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Our specialists are now completing detailed plans for construction, which will be transmitted to you shortly, and we are prepared to land two teams of specialists, one for each thruster, to supervise the construction and then the operation of the machines. The most important use of the thrusters will be to launch needed raw materials to replenish the stores of our interstellar ship, but ChinTekki-tho has decided that, as a special favor, several of the first launches will be to put self-propelled objects into Low Earth Orbit. These will be used to collide with, and thus decelerate, some of the objects that are likely to deorbit in the near future, so that they can be caused to descend in whatever parts of their orbit you think least dangerous to any of your installations or people. Thus,” she finished triumphantly, “we have solved one of your great problems for you. Now you may ask questions if you wish to—but, please,” she added, glancing at her watch, “not for very long, as it is nearly time for my midday meal.”
To Sandy’s surprise, there weren’t any immediate questions. The audience was silent. It surprised Polly, too; she was twitching resentfully as she waited. Then at last she pointed to a man midway back. “Ask,” she ordered.
“I was simply wondering why you didn’t photograph Uranus and Pluto?” he called.
Polly snorted in displeasure. “Why don’t you ask about the more important things I have said? We simply did not happen to observe Uranus and Pluto.”
“But if you missed them,” the astronomer persisted, “how do you know there weren’t some you missed at the other stars?”
“We did not ‘miss’ any planets,” she corrected him coldly. “We did not concern ourselves with possible objects that would be of no use to us, because they were too far from their sun. Of course, there are many more pictures. We Hakh’hli have visited some sixty-five stellar systems in this journey, and of course we have records of many other visitations by other ships.”
Another astronomer called, “Are you still getting them?”
“You mean reports from other ships?” Polly hesitated, then replied unwillingly, “Not at present.”
“How about the planets of your own original system?”
“We have no pictures to show of our own planets. Our ancestors knew it quite well. They had no need of photographs to remind them.”
“Can you at least identify your own star from our catalogues? You said it’s only eight hundred and fifty light-years away; if it’s as bright as the Sun, it should be at least a fourteenth or fifteenth magnitude object, and we’ve got all of them on our atlases.”
Polly hesitated. “It can be identified,” she said.
“By you?”
Unwillingly, she said, “Not necessarily by me, at present.”
“You mean you’re lost, don’t you?”
“We are not lost! It is simply that we have not yet reestablished contact with the home star, because of the great distance involved—as even you should know, to communicate over a distance of eight hundred light-years takes sixteen hundred of your years for a message to be sent and an answer received. When we have accomplished our mission we will notify the home planets.”