But that was going too far. Even his friend Obie twitched resentfully, and MyThara gasped, “Thandy! How can you thpeak tho?”
“But it’s true,” he said, and then clamped his mouth shut. He didn’t mind giving offense to his cohort-mates, but MyThara was someone he loved dearly.
“Dear Lythander,” she said seriously, “you shouldn’t talk lightly of the wortht tragedy in our hithtory. Don’t you remember what you have been taught?”
He gave her a repentant look. “I’m sorry, MyThara.” He knew perfectly well that every Hakh’hli in the ship mourned the long-ago day when the Major Seniors of the time, after bitter soul-searching, had made the decision for the ship to go on with its mission even after it had lost contact with the Hakh’hli home worlds.
Obie put in loyally, “He’s just nervous because it’s getting close to the time for visiting Earth. He even wrote a poem about it.”
“Oh? Show me the poem,” MyThara requested. When she had read it she flung her stubby arms around Sandy and gave him an affectionate lick. “It ith a beautiful poem, Lythander. May I have a copy? Oh, thank you! I will keep it in my own netht ath long ath I live. But now, pleathe, it ith work time. We will thtart with buddy thythtem, ath uthual. Lythander, you go firtht with Polly and talk railgun.”
The seven in Sandy’s cohort had a whole planet to learn—Earth language, Earth customs, Earth ecology. Plus all the things every young Hakh’hli had to learn as part of his normal socialization. Plus, for each of them, the harder lessons of his own specialty. Demmy’s was agronomy. Bottom’s was aerosol and food chemistry. Polly’s was piloting and magnetic engineering. Tanya’s was genetic manipulation. Obie’s was astronomy and stellar navigation. Helen’s was chelation, vitrification, and crystal-bonding—in other words, the processes involved in containing toxic and radioactive materials. What Sandy had to learn was easier, but larger. He had to understand something of all the other’s skills, as they all did, for there was always the chance that somehow in the actual Earth mission one of them would be lost. But Sandy had to learn a little more than the rest, because he would be the one to make first contact with the Earth people, and he had to know what to say.
Polly was not Sandy’s favorite to learn from, since she got rough when he was slow to grasp his lessons. As soon as they were alone in her own carrel she commanded, weeping with anticipation of his getting it wrong, “Explain the purpose of the railgun.”
“All right,” he said in resignation, “but no pinching, okay?”
“Maybe not. Get on with it!”
Sandy hunkered down crosslegged beside her—not too close—and began. “In return for all the good things that the Hakh’hli will do for the Earth humans, we ask only a few favors, for example that they help replenish our supplies of some stock things of no great value to them. We ask for oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen in particular. To get these to us, you will show them how to construct a sloping rail system, magnetically driven, which will accelerate canisters of water and solid carbon—they call it ‘coal’—to the ship’s orbit.”
“Why do we need those things?”
“They are fuel,” he said promptly. “All of those elements are to fuel the lander, which is driven by hydrogen peroxide and alcohol fuel, and additional hydrogen is also wanted for reaction mass for the main drives. Do you want me to tell you how the railgun works?”
“I exactly do, Wimp. In detail, and no mistakes.”
He inched a bit farther away, cocking an ear to listen to the background music. It was one of his favorites, an Earth song called “The Man I Love.” He could not help fantasying some female human singing it to him, but he said nothing because Polly would simply have ordered it turned off. “The railgun is to be built somewhere on the Earth’s equator, to take advantage of the planet’s rotation—”
“Which is pretty slow,” Polly put in scornfully. The Hakh’hli ship day was only seventeen and a bit Earth hours long.
“Yes, but their gravity is only about seven-twelfths normal,” Sandy pointed out, “so that makes the launch easier. The railgun will be six what they call miles long, ending at an elevation two miles over the surface. It will be best if they build it on the ‘west’ slope of a mountain. Every twelfth of a twelfth-mile along it there will be a magnetic hoop, each of which is charged in succession. The magnets will be superconducting-wound and will probably require the construction of a whole electrical power plant to supply them—”
“Not nuclear, though. We don’t want to encourage them to do nuclear.”
“Polly,” Lysander said carefully, “these are my people we’re talking about, not hoo’hik. They will do what they want to do.” He ducked away as her thumbs reached warningly toward him, but he was saved a pinch as MyThara called out.
“End of period. Thwitch partnerth now,” she ordered. “Lythander, now you will go to Oberon for athtronomy.”
By the time of the eighth twelfth-day they were all exhausted and ready for the evening “cookies and milk.”
That was not a time of relaxation, though. On MyThara’s orders, they spent it practicing fast food. Demmy and Tanya took their turns at working the counter, and the others collected their “money” and lined up with their orders. “Cheeseburger, small fries, vanilla shake,” Sandy ordered, calculating the cost in his head and pulling out two “dollar bills” and seven “quarters.”
Demmy looked at him angrily. “You should give me three ‘dollar bills’ and three ‘quarters,’ ” he complained, but Sandy stood his ground.
“I want to get rid of some change,” he explained. He’d seen that in one of the taped sitcoms. Demetrius scratched his thumbs across his belly irritably, but he took the money, counted it out, and produced twenty-two “pennies” in change.
“I want to get rid of change, too,” he said, weeping triumphantly.
Well, that wasn’t fair. The counterpeople weren’t supposed to get rid of change, Sandy was quite sure. But he didn’t want another fight with Demmy, so he took his tray over to a table and sat there, examining the food. The “hamburger” was all right; it was simply ground up food animal. The “cheese” was another matter. From the cooking programs on Earth television it was known that “cheese” was something you made by letting milk sour and then doing a number of things to it. No one had determined just what sort of microorganisms did the souring, though, and so, as always, Sandy carefully lifted the slice of “cheese” off his meat and deposited it on the side of the plate. The “bun” was not a real bun—all the experiments at producing something edible out of ground carbohydrates had failed. It was simply a slice of tuber, shaped like a hockey puck and warmed; not really bad. The “fries” were more of the tuber, cooked in hot grease, and Sandy had developed a real taste for them. (He never bothered with the “ketchup” or the “mustard.” Whatever the real things were like, the Hakh’hli imitations were horrible.)
The “shake” was the real daunter. It was made with hoo’hik milk, that much was clear. The rest was incomprehensible. This time it was flavored, unfortunately, more or less like the “cheese.”
Sandy forced it down, hoping he wouldn’t get sick. There was no stun time after so light a meal, and that was fortunate. Just as they were finishing, ChinTekki-tho, their principal tutor, came in. Polly daringly stopped him to display Sandy’s poem before he could speak to the group. He didn’t reprimand her. He seemed in a very good mood. He complimented Sandy. “No, it’s quite a good poem, Lysander. That is, considering. It’s very difficult to write a good poem in a bad language, after all. However,” he added, “that is not why I am here to intrude on your evening snack. I was unable to be with you this morning because final plans are being made. Soon you will appear before the Major Seniors!” There was a stir of excitement in the group; no one got to see the Major Seniors! “Meanwhile, I have ‘watches’ for you.”
“Watches?” Polly said doubtfully, but already he was passing them out, metal things on straps that the cohort examined curiously.
“You put them on your arms to tell time,” he explained. “From now on, you are all to begin reckoning your days in Earth time. The research section has informed me that it is now twenty-three ‘minutes’ past four ‘A.M.’ on what is called ‘Wednesday, July twelfth’ in your landing site, and the watches have been set accordingly.” He paused while the cohort studied the dials, then added softly, “On Monday, July twenty-fourth, you will land on the Earth.”
Chapter 3
The Hakh’hli ship is bigger than any human spacecraft ever dreamed of being, and not a lot smaller than a twentieth-century supertanker of the sea. It is in the shape of a stubby cylinder, 1,100 feet long and 450 feet across. That adds up to something like 175,000,000 cubic feet of volume, two-thirds of which is devoted to fuel storage and the engines that drive it across interstellar space. The ship’s average density is a little less than that of water, mostly because so much of the fuel-storage space is given to hydrogen; if it were somehow deposited gently on a terrestrial ocean it would just about float. The inhabitants of the ship, 22,000 Hakh’hli and Sandy Washington, have an average of not quite 1,000 cubic feet of space apiece, but that includes not only their living quarters (mostly communal, anyway) but whatever space they need for recreation and for work. It isn’t a lot. It was even worse, a few twelves of days ago, when the big ship was cutting near the Sun to change its orbit. Then much of the “spare” space was allowed to heat up so that the vast coolers could keep the rest of it bearable. The Hakh’hli are glad now to be able to reenter the formerly closed off spaces. Even so, they are fairly crowded, at least by Earth standards. But that does not bother any of them, since none of them have had any personal experience of what Earth standards are like.