She said, “I can see why it’s great for the males, but what do the ladies get out of it?”
“But I told you! They lay the eggs,” he explained.
Marguery looked pensive. “It almost sounds like the egg-laying is more important than the scr—the amphylaxis, I mean.”
“Well, I suppose it is. The eggs are what count—for the girls, anyway, you know.” He chuckled. “The worst thing you can ever say to a girl is, like, you’ll steal her eggs and flush them down the toilet. They’d get really mad. You wouldn’t even say that, unless you were pretty mad yourself. You wouldn’t dare. If you said it to somebody like Polly she’d kick your belly in.”
She pondered that for a moment, then seemed to relax. “Well,” she said, “that’s all very interesting.”
Lysander didn’t respond. He was waiting for the next curve to be thrown, but Marguery’s odd urgency seemed to have left her. She grinned at him. “Would you like some more coffee?” she asked. He shook his head. She didn’t take any either. She was looking thoughtful. “In some ways,” she decided, “I think sexual intercourse is better for human women.”
“Do you?” Sandy asked. That seemed a doubtful proposition to him, considering what he knew of the human burden of raising children as against the Hakh’hli system of freezing and professional nurturing. “How’s that?”
“Well, you said it’s only the eggs that matter to the female. So she has to wait until she has a new batch before she can, well, do it again.”
“Yes, but it isn’t that long. It’s all up to the male, really. For the females, a few eggs form every day; anytime from a week to a year after amphylaxis she does it again.”
“Whereas human women,” Marguery sighed, “can do it all over right away. I mean, if the human male can manage it, that is.”
She looked at him in a way that caused him to tingle. All the abrupt changes in subject had made him wary.
Still, he thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained . . . “Well,” he said, “if you’re curious about this particular one, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he could.”
Actually, he could, all right. In fact, he proudly did; but first Marguery made him wait for what seemed an interminable time while she was in the bathroom. It struck Lysander as odd that she stayed there so long. He could hear the water running; he could also, he thought, hear her voice, very faintly. But who knew what private things Earth females had to do before, during, or between amphylaxis? He resolved to ask her, grinning; but when at last she came out she looked so breathtakingly lovely—no, that was the wrong word; the right word was not “lovely” but “ready”—that he forgot all the questions.
Then there was a surprise.
Among the many things that Lysander Washington hadn’t known about human sexual practices was that once they were done it was often the custom for the male and the female to sleep in each other’s arms all the rest of the night.
What made him realize it was discovering that he had drowsed off. When he opened his eyes he saw Marguery Darp lying there beside him. When he started to move she muttered, “Don’t go,” and threw her arms around him.
As a more or less inevitable consequence, they made love again, hardly awake but enjoying it all the same, and when he woke again it was broad daylight and Marguery was already in the kitchen.
She turned to him. She was smiling, but it was a diffident smile. Still, she put her face up to be kissed, as though they had been doing this sort of thing forever.
“There’s a package for you,” she said, pointing to the table.
He looked at it curiously; sure enough, it was a thick brown envelope with his name on it. “It came this morning,” she told him. “It’s tapes and the transcripts of the translations you did yesterday. Ham would like you to play them over and double-check that you got everything right. I’ll show you how to run the machine.”
He picked it up without pleasure. It was heavy. He had hoped for a more interesting day. “Maybe I’d better go back to the hotel first,” he said tentatively. “Polly will be worrying.”
“No,” she said somberly. “Polly won’t be worried.” She glanced at her watch. “Look at the time! I have to make a phone call,” she said abruptly.
There was a phone on the table, but Marguery didn’t use it. Instead, she disappeared into the bathroom and slammed the door.
In a moment Lysander heard water running. And there was another surprise, and once again an unpleasing one. So she hadn’t been singing to herself in the bathroom the night before. It was where she kept another telephone—obviously a private one.
When Marguery came back out he was already prepared for something bad.
He got it. “I’ve got to go do some things,” she said, her face without any expression at all. “I’m afraid I might be gone for some time, but please don’t leave. Here, I’ll show you how to work the recorder.”
And before he could quite believe it was happening she was gone.
She hadn’t lied. It was definitely “some time”—time enough for Lysander to have played nearly all the tapes, as ordered, and to have made any number of pointless, fiddling little corrections on the transcripts. He had been hungry three times and had found nothing more than bare subsistence in her refrigerator.
But he stayed. He did as he was told. He was, he told himself, pretty tired of always doing as he was told, by someone or other.
By the time he heard her key in the door he had passed from angry to depressed. By the expression on her face as she came in, Marguery was depressed enough herself. She came in silently, holding her sun hat and glasses in her hands. She didn’t put them down. She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment before she spoke, and then said sadly, “Oh, hell, Lysander. I wish you’d known more than you did.”
“What’s the matter?” he cried, suddenly alarmed.
“I’m afraid it’s the I-spy game we’re playing now,” she sighed. “Come on. We’ve got to go to headquarters. There’s something Hamilton has to show you.”
Chapter 21
The process of coming of age is not easy for any organism, anywhere in the universe. Insects cocoon themselves and emerge winged, their larval stages forgotten. Crustaceans painfully molt and often enough are eaten by predators before the new shells form; snakes shed their skins, birds leave the safety of the nest, young carnivores are driven from their dams. It is usually painful. Sometimes it is fatal. It is not much better for human beings, even though the change is only partly physiological for them. When a human child ceases to be a child his rites of passage are as painful, and as dangerous, as for any softshell crab. The process of maturing is difficult for anyone, but maybe most difficult for those who—like Lysander Washington—have thought they already were mature, all along.
Lysander was not surprised to find them approaching the InterSec building. “Are you going to show me some more pictures of what the Hakh’hli are building?” he demanded.
“Not this time,” Marguery said, flashing her badge to the guard. “They’re still doing it, though. Fast.”
“And do you still think it’s a weapon?”
She gave him an impenetrable look. “No, I don’t think that is a weapon any more. Give it a rest, Lysander. You’ll hear it all. Here’s Ham Boyle.”
The strange thing about Hamilton Boyle was that, this time, he wasn’t smiling. The champion smiler had a set, determined, unyielding expression on his face. He didn’t say anything until they had gone through the ritual of the passes, the unlocking of doors, and the elevators. Lysander noticed that this time the elevator went down instead of up, and for quite a distance. Both Marguery and Hamilton Boyle watched the numbers flick across the indicator as though they were stock-market quotations on a bad day.
“Here we go,” Boyle said at last, ushering them into a small room. It was not much larger than a cell, Lysander noted as warily he entered. “Sit down,” Boyle commanded, waving Sandy to the strongest-looking of the chairs. There was a smaller one right next to it that Marguery could have taken, but she ignored it. She walked across the room without looking at Sandy, to take a stand by a desk with a keyboard and a video screen; behind her was a slatted thing of the kind they called a venetian blind. The slats were tilted so that no light from the other side came through. But no light could, Sandy thought, since the building had no outside windows.
Sandy frowned. His senses were all tensely alert. This was a hostile place. There was an almost inaudible sound now and then, like a distant keening. It made him uneasy, but he couldn’t be sure of what he was hearing.