Marconi exploded, “Oh, no!”
“That’s all I can get out of them. I suppose their trajectory can be analyzed, and there must be books. We haven’t been in the ship yet. Nobody goes in until it gets sprayed, rayed, dusted, and busted down into its component parts. Too many places for nasty little mutant bacteria and viruses to lurk.”
“Sure, Captain. ‘Home,’ eh? They’re pretty simple?”
“Happy little morons. Fifteen of them, ranging in age from one month to what looks like a hundred and twenty. All they know is ‘home’ and ‘we wish to see the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation.’ First the old woman said it. Then the next in line—he must be about a hundred—said it. Then a pair of identical twins, fifty-year-old women, said it in chorus. Then the rest of them on down to the month-old baby, and I swear to God he tried to say it. Well, you’re the Haarland Trading Corporation. Go on in.”
2
THEY were all naked. Why not? There’s no weather in a space ship. All of them laughed when Ross and Marconi came in through the lock except the baby, who was nursing at the breast of a handsome woman. Then-laughter was what attracted Ross immediately. Cheerful— no meanness in it. The happy yelping of puppies at play with, a red rubber bone.
A stab went through him as the pleasure in their simple happiness turned to recollection and recognition. His wife of a decade ago. . . . Ross studied them with amazement, expecting to find her features in their features, her figure in theirs. And failed. Yet they reminded him inescapably of his miserable year with that half-a-woman, but they were physically no kin of hers. They were just cheerful laughers who he knew were less than human.
The cheerful laughers exposed unblemished teeth in all their mouths, including that of the hundred-and-twenty-year-old matriarch. Why not? If you put calcium and fluorides into a closed system, they stay there.
The old woman stopped laughing at them long enough to say to Marconi, “We wish to see the representative of the Haarland——”
“Yes, I know. I’m the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation. Welcome to Halsey’s Planet. May I ask what your name is, ma’am?”
“Ma,” she said genially.
“Pleased to meet you, Ma. My name’s Marconi.”
Ma said, bewildered, “You just said you were the representative of the Haarland Trading——”
“Yes, Ma, but that’s all right. Let’s say that’s my other name. Two names—understand?”
She laughed at the idea of two names, wonderingly.
Marconi pressed, “And what’s the name of this gentleman?”
“He isn’t Gentleman. He’s Sonny.”
Sonny was a hundred years old.
“Pleased to meet you, Sonny. And your name, sir?”
“Sonny,” said a redheaded man of eighty or thereabouts.
The identical-twin women were named The Kids. The baby was named Him. The rest of the troop were named Girl, Ma, or Sonny. After introductions Ross noticed that Him had been passed to another Ma who was placidly suckling him. She had milk; it dribbled from the corner of the baby’s mouth. “There isn’t another baby left in the ship, is there?” Ross asked in alarm.
They laughed and the Ma suckling the baby said: “There was, but she died. Mostly they do when you put them into the box after they get born. Ma here was lucky. Her Him didn’t die.”
“Put them in the box? What box? Why?”
Marconi was nudging him fiercely in the ribs. He ignored it.
They laughed amiably at his ignorance and explained that the box was the box, and that you put your newborn babies into it because you put your newborn babies into it.
A beep tone sounded from the ship.
Ma said, “We have to go back now, The Representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation Marconi.”
“What for?”
Ma said, “At regular intervals signaled by a tone of six hundred cycles and an intermittent downward shifting of the ship lights from standard illumination frequency to a signal frequency of 420 millimicrons, ship’s operating personnel take up positions at the control boards for recalibra-
tion of ship-working meters and instruments against the battery of standard masters. We’ll be right back.”