It wasn’t very much like masturbation, either. It was a great deal better. It was so much better that Sandy howled like a slaughtered hoo’hik at the moment of climax, and Marguery was not silent herself; and when it was over they both lay back, spent, on the musty, soggy old couch that seemed to Sandy as though it had been covered with rose petals.
Jubilant and at peace, Sandy turned his head to gaze at the woman he had just successfully made love to. He studied her face carefully. As he had never before seen a human female immediately after sexual intercourse, he did not know how to read her expression. Her face wasn’t as sweaty as he had expected—nothing like his own—but there was a blotch on her cheek that he didn’t think had been there before.
He searched his scant store of knowledge for the right thing to say. “Was it all right for you?” he asked anxiously.
She surprised him. She gave him a penetrating look, as though to try to see if he were joking. When she decided he wasn’t she laughed out loud.
“Dear boy,” she said fondly. “When I moo like a cow, that’s the same as saying, ‘yes, sir, it was dandy.’ Only next time maybe you shouldn’t squeeze quite so hard,” she added, squinting at her shoulder to inspect for bruises.
In the heat of the moment it had not occurred to Sandy to remember how much stronger he was than any normal Earth human. When he looked he saw that the bruises were there, all right. And his fault! “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Quit saying that, will you?” She stood up, wincing slightly, and reached for one of the towels to wrap around her. “Hand me that air tank,” she ordered.
When Sandy picked it up he noticed that it was no longer hissing. Marguery took it from him, glanced at the gauge, and shook it, looking annoyed. She scrabbled around until she found the other one, which was still venting gas into the room.
She turned it off and grinned. “I guess it’s a good thing we left them going,” she said philosophically. “We probably used up a lot of oxygen. Anyway, I can hold my breath long enough to get out of here.”
“Hold your breath?” Sandy was astonished.
“I’ve done it before,” she said. Then she sat down, regarding him. “That,” she said, “isn’t why I brought you here. Although it was very nice. I wanted to talk to you.”
He stared at her. In the vagrant light the blotch on her face seemed both brighter and larger. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for days now?”
She shook her head. “We’ve been talking, all right,” she said grimly, “but every word we said was recorded by InterSec. Wherever we were. Whatever we were doing. I wanted to talk to you in private, where there isn’t anybody listening, because there are some things I’m not supposed to talk to you about.”
Alarmed, he started to speak, but she laid her finger over his lips. “I’ve already been reprimanded for telling you that we’d spotted your ship,” she added. “And I didn’t tell you all of it.”
He stared at her. She looked flushed but determined as she went on. “As soon as the first observers reported the gammas from your ship’s engines everybody began checking their old sky photographs, and we backtracked it to, I don’t know, I think it’s what they call three hundred AUs out. They knew right away it had to be a ship. They began analyzing the spectrum of discharges from your ship. We know what fuels your engines; it’s what they call ‘strange matter.’ We knew that, and the mass of it, and the size, and everything else; and we were ready to meet your lander when it came down. If it hadn’t been for the hurricane, we would have been there in twenty minutes instead of ten hours.”
The exuberance of after-sex was draining away. “You didn’t tell us all that.”
“No. We didn’t. We decided to watch you. There hasn’t been a minute since you got to the dairy farm that you haven’t been watched and recorded.”
“But I thought you liked me!” he wailed.
“Damn your soul, Sandy, can’t you tell I like you? Would I make love with somebody I didn’t like? I’m not some kind of Mata Hari.”
“Mata—”
“Oh, skip it,” she said impatiently. “Let’s get real. Let me ask you something. Have you said anything to Polly about the things I told you?”
“You mean about why I didn’t remember Alpha Centauri?” He looked both baffled and resentful, but finally said, “To Polly, yes. She said to talk to ChinTekki-tho, but I didn’t do that.”
“Ah.” Marguery looked pleased. “Why didn’t you?”
The good after-making-love feeling was dissipating, and Sandy began to feel belligerent. “Do I have to have a reason why not? I just didn’t, that’s all.”
She nodded, gratified. “I was hoping you wouldn’t, Sandy.”
He said logically, “If you didn’t want me to tell them, why didn’t you say so?”
“I wanted to see if you’d do it by yourself. Because—” She hesitated, shifting position uncomfortably, and then finished reluctantly, “Because there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
He looked at her with concern. All he knew about love-making suggested that she should have been relaxed and happy now, but she seemed both ill at ease and uncomfortable. “Are you all right?” he demanded.
“Of course I’m all right! Why wouldn’t I be all right? It’s just—” She grinned at him. “Maybe it’s just that you’re a little stronger than I’m used to, you know what I’m saying?”
Sandy accepted that to be a compliment and allowed himself to preen a bit. But the good feeling didn’t last. He said, aggrieved, “You didn’t really have to spy, you know. You could have just asked.”
“We did ask, Sandy. We’re still asking. I’m asking. But what if there was something the Hakh’hli didn’t want to answer?”
Sandy shrugged. She said, her tone wheedling, almost as though she were asking to be forgiven, “So we simply took normal precautions. We’ve bugged your rooms, wherever you were. We’ve taped everything you’ve said. We’ve listened in on the landing craft’s transmissions to the ship—”
Sandy looked at her, amazed. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“As a matter of fact, we almost couldn’t. That’s some tight beam the Hakh’hli’ve got. We can’t pick it up more than a mile from the lander, but we’ve got our own ground stations right there. And just to make sure we have a high-altitude aircraft orbiting overhead to hear what the lander is sending back.”
“But it’s in Hakh’hli!”
“It’s in Hakh’hli, right,” she agreed grimly. “That makes it tough. We’ve picked up some words from you, and we’ve got a whole bunch of linguistics people analyzing and correlating. We can’t read it all. Just enough to be worrying.” She peered at him. “We have to, don’t you understand? Wouldn’t the Hakh’hli have done the same thing?”
Sandy remembered the hundreds of Hakh’hli who did nothing else—who, for half a century, had done nothing but to pore over every scrap of data from Earth’s broadcasts, trying to penetrate every hidden part of human activities. “Well, maybe so,” he said reluctantly. “It doesn’t matter. You’re not going to find out anything bad.”
“We’re not?” Marguery said sadly.
He stopped short, struck by her tone. “What are you trying to say?” he demanded.
She said unhappily, “Start with your mother. That picture Ham Boyle borrowed from you.”
“What about it?”
“Well—” She hesitated. “Do you remember your mother at all?”
“No. I told you that. She died when I was born.”
“But you did have that picture of her. Well, Ham put it on television to see if anyone would recognize it. A lot of people did. But that picture isn’t of an astronaut, Sandy. It’s of a movie actress from the last century; her name was Marilyn Monroe.”
“That’s impossible!” Sandy shouted.
“It’s true, Sandy. And there’s more. You said she and your father were American astronauts, and they were stuck out in space because of the war.”
“I said that, yes. It’s true!”
She sighed. “Sandy,” she said, “it didn’t happen that way. InterSec has checked the records really carefully. Every space flight was recorded, even during the war. We know for a fact that there weren’t any manned American rockets in space at the time of the war.”
“But,” Sandy said reasonably, “there must have been. That’s where the Hakh’hli found my parents.”
She shook her head. “The records show that there was one spacecraft that was out at the time,” she said. “Just one. It was a Mars orbiter. They had sent a probe down to the surface of the planet, and they were waiting for it to come back with samples. But it wasn’t American. It was Russian.”