“They weren’t?”
“They were waiting for the results on you,” she explained. “The samples they took in the hospital? The results came back and they showed what I was allergic to. Sandy, dear, I was violently allergic to you.”
He stared at her in horror. Then he shook himself and began to pull away. She stopped him.
“You weren’t listening,” she accused. “The word I used was was. I was allergic to you. But that’s something they can deal with, you know. They’ve given me all these histamine blockers and things. I don’t think you can even make me sneeze any more.”
Then she sat there, looking placidly at him. Lysander frowned, trying to understand what she was driving at. She didn’t give him any clue. She just sat silent for a while. For long enough for Lysander to realize what she was being silent for; and when he did reach out for her, and they kissed again, it was all very clear to him.
She moved her head away to gaze into his eyes. “I think the pizza can wait,” she said judiciously. “I wonder just how strong my bed is. But I think we ought to, you know, make sure those histamine blockers really work.”
The blockers worked. So did the bed. So did the pizza delivery service that Marguery phoned, and though Lysander did not much like the cheese-tomato-oil mixture, he did like the company.
Marguery in a silken robe over nothing was even prettier than Marguery in any of the other ways he had seen her. As she got up to fetch plates and glasses of milk and little jars of olives and nuts Lysander could almost forget all the nagging questions that had come to fill his life. He watched Marguery carefully. He could not quite remember whether she had, in fact, mooed like a cow this time. But as far as he could recall she had shown every sign of enjoying what they had done, and she seemed happy enough, if abstracted, as she moved about her little kitchen.
Marguery finished eating long before Lysander did. She sat across from him, sipping a cup of coffee and regarding him critically. “You’re eating that up pretty well,” she commented. “Are you going to go into stun time now?”
He decided it had to be a “joke,” but he responded seriously. “Oh, no. That’s just the Hakh’hli.”
“I see. And when they’re in stun time, they’re really out of it, aren’t they? I mean, gone.”
Although he couldn’t quite see where the joke was going, he answered, “Yes, they’re asleep, all right. As you say, gone. You really couldn’t wake a Hakh’hli up once he was in stun time.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought,” she said, meditating.
“But I don’t go into stun time, because I’m a human being,” he finished, and waited for the joke part.
It appeared there wasn’t any joke part. Marguery looked at him doubtfully for a moment. Then she said, “You are a human being, aren’t you?”
He grinned at her. “Didn’t we just prove that?”
She didn’t smile back. “No, we didn’t. I mean, what if things don’t go right? Will you take the human side against the Hakh’hli?”
“I just did!”
“You translated some messages for us,” she conceded. “I guess that’s an indication. I don’t know if I could call it a proof.”
The pizza tasted worse than ever. Lysander swallowed the rubbery mouthful he had been chewing and put the rest of the slice down. “Do you know,” he said conversationally, “it sounds to me like we’re back to interrogating me again.”
She sat up straight and gazed at him. Even seated, she was a head taller. “I do still have questions,” she conceded. “Are you willing to answer some?”
“Delighted,” he snarled, to show that he had learned the art of irony.
She ignored it. “All right,” she said. “About the eggs the Hakh’hli have in their freezers. They want to hatch them sooner or later, don’t they?”
“Of course they do, but they can’t.”
“Why not?”
He said sullenly, “That’s a really foolish question. There are millions and millions of the eggs. Some of them have been frozen for centuries. More than centuries. The reason they can’t hatch them is that there just isn’t enough room in the ship.”
“There’s room in Africa,” she said grimly.
“Africa again!” he shouted. “You people are crazy on the subject of Africa! The Hakh’hli won’t just take Africa! What kind of people do you think they are?”
She looked away for a moment, and when she turned to face him he was startled to see tears in her eyes. “More to the point, what kind of people do they think we are, Lysander?” she asked.
He shook his head, baffled. “You’re talking in riddles,” he accused. “What do you mean?”
She said, “I wish I knew the answer to the riddles. Lysander, listen. You told me that the Hakh’hli showed Earth films to the whole ship’s crew once a week or so—”
“Once every twelve-day, yes,” he corrected.
She made an impatient gesture. “You even told me what some of the pictures were. Dr. Strangelove. A Bridge Too Far. The Battle of Britain. Those titles sounded peculiar, so we checked them out. Do you remember what the other pictures were, Lysander?”
He scowled. “There were hundreds of them! Let’s see. Well, I remember one called The Battle of the Bulge. It was all full of tanks and prisoners being shot. And All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Young Lions—and, oh, yes, there were some that weren’t American. They were in other languages; there was one that was called Hitler Youth Hans, about killing Russians and Americans because they were such war criminals—”
“Lysander,” she said gently, “weren’t they all war movies, every one of them? Did the Hakh’hli show their people any movies at all that didn’t depict human beings as war-crazy?”
He gazed at her. “Well, in our own cohort quarters we saw all kinds of things. There were a lot with dancing, and family situation comedies—”
She brushed that aside. “I don’t mean the ones they just showed you. I mean what they showed the whole ship. It sounds to me as though they were propagandizing them, Lysander. Trying to persuade them that human beings were mad killers. And so I ask you again, Lysander: What kind of people do the Hakh’hli think we are? And if they think we’re killers, wouldn’t they maybe consider it only prudent to get in the first punch?”
He stared at her in horror. Then he said slowly, “I cannot believe that the Major Seniors would do anything like that.”
“Can’t you? Or is it just that you don’t want to?” She looked at him furiously for a moment. Then she jumped up and leaned across the table to fling her arms around him. She kissed him hard, and he felt the dampness of the tears on her cheek.
He pulled away and implored her, “Marguery? What game are we playing now? Is it the I-spy game or the we-love-each-other game?”
“Sometimes,” she said grayly, “the games get mixed up.”
They looked at each other silently for a moment. Then Lysander sighed. “I’d rather play the we-love-each-other game.”
She didn’t hesitate. “All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about making love.” Lysander scowled, more puzzled than ever; the expression on her face didn’t match the choice of subject. “I have some questions about that, too,” she went on. “About the way the Hakh’hli do it. You told me that the females are ready any time; whenever one of the guys is ready they hop to it.”
“That’s right,” he said, torn between embarrassment and anger. To discuss love-making when they had just been doing it was fine, but why did she have to be so clinical?
She became more clinical still. “Do the male Hakh’hli have the same kind of joystick you do?”
He flushed, unwilling to believe he understood her. “Joystick?”
“All right. The same kind of penis, then.”
“Oh, the sex organ. Well, I’ve never really studied one close up, you understand—” But, actually, when one of the males was in season nobody around had any trouble in seeing what it looked like. When he told her, Marguery wanted to hear every physiological detail. All the details. About the everted male organ. About the fleshy crater of the females. About the act of amphylaxis itself, and what it looked like while it was happening, and how long it took, and how every female on the ship was always willing and always able, because the laying of fertilized eggs was their greatest joy.
Marguery looked definitely disapproving, but still queerly determined. “And how do the females know when the male is in heat? Pheromones? Just seeing he has a hard-on?”
When the terms had been explained to him Sandy shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t think it’s either of those,” he said. “I think it’s more they’re always ready. I mean, it isn’t any trouble for them, you know? I mean, for the females. They don’t have to get ready or anything. They just do the amphylaxis, and the girl’s eggs get fertilized, and half an hour later she lays them, and that’s that.”