“See?” Centauri turned quickly on the alien officer. “What did I tell you? He’s quick, very quick.”
“What did he say?” the officer asked.
“He immediately identified you as a Rylan.”
“As soon as you identified this world as Rylos. Oh yes, truly a brilliant speciman of the humanoid line. No doubt he’d instantly identify you as an idiot if I informed him that you made your home in an asylum.”
“You’re bein’ unnecessarily snide.” Centauri looked hurt. “No matter what you think of him now, you can’t deny his enthusiasm. See? He’s virtually speechless.”
“Is that an emotional reaction or a reflection of his semantic limits?”
“Entirely emotional.” Centauri utilized a Rylan half-wink. The officer considered the gesture appropriate, coming as it did from a half-wit. “He can’t wait to get started. You have to know how to interpret these alien expressions.”
“I’m sure. He doesn’t look very enthusiastic to me. He looks rather frightened.”
“Not at all, not at all,” Centauri insisted. “He’s rarin’ t’go. Surely you’ve heard of the combative nature of these Earthfolk?”
“Rumors to that effect circulate in occasional command transcripts, yes,” the officer admitted. “But somehow this particular one doesn’t look the part of the battle-ready berserker.”
“What’s he saying?” Alex finally asked.
“He’s explaining how delighted he is that you’ve come, and how anxious they are to show you around.”
“I see.” Alex subsided again and let his attention drift to the numerous and extraordinary life-forms circulating through the chamber.
“What did he say?” the officer demanded to know.
“He’s getting bored with all this inactivity and wonders how soon he can leap into battle.”
“Hmmm.” The Rylan made it sound like a stoned honeybee. “You personally guarantee this one’s abilities?”
“I told you, he was chosen by my own special testing system. His reflexes are inherited, not learned, and he’s just primitive enough to know how to apply those abilities instinctively. He’ll do the League proud.”
The officer hesitated a last moment, then sighed breathily. “All right. I suppose I’ve no choice but to give him a chance. We need all the help we can muster, and if he’s checked out on gunstar fire control . . .”
“Brilliantly, brilliantly.”
“. . . then I guess we have to give him a chance to show what he can do. Auwar knows it’s time to try the unexpected. I’ve been surprised by the abilities of primitives before. Perhaps this is to be another time. I’ll give the necessary orders.”
“Excellent! I’ll inform him. I know how pleased he’ll be. He can’t wait for his first firefight, to bring forth blood and destruction.” He turned back to Alex and switched easily from Rylan to English.
“Good luck to you, my boy. May the luck of the seven psions of Gulu be with you at all times.”
“What’re they?”
“Never mind that now. Just hope that they’re with you.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“First, to the john. After that, elsewhere. Don’t worry, you’re in good tentacles . . . hands.” He glanced up at the thoughtful officer.
“Someday you cheapskates will thank Centauri. Trust me on this one.”
“As I’ve said, we’ve little choice.” He watched Centauri stride toward the far doorway. “And when I’m broken in rank for listening to you, rest assured I’ll find you.”
“Hey, come back!” Alex called. A hand came down on his shoulder. It was gentle but insistent. He looked up to see the Rylan face staring sternly down at him. “Okay, so what now?” he asked the alien.
Evidently the decision had been made to move him along. The first female Rylan he’d encountered at Cen-tauri’s ship appeared and conveyed him to an elevator. Once inside Alex stumbled and had to catch his balance as unexpected acceleration sent him toward a wall. The Rylan barely glanced in his direction but he resolved not to stumble a second time.
It was a hard resolution to keep, since the elevator behaved more like a runaway motorcross bike than a normal lift, bucking and twisting as it traveled through a series of interconnections that ran sideways and backward as well as up and down.
They finally stopped and the doors slid apart. The Rylan nudged him out into another hangar. This one was much bigger than the place where Centauri had parked his ship, and a hive of activity.
Creatures of varying shape and size worked on ships that were strange because they were so recognizable.
Sealed behind a transparent wall at the far end of the cavernous room was a waiting area filled with seats of exotic design, created to accommodate exotic backsides. Beyond the seats lay a semicircular chamber alive with lights and glowing screens. Some of the images appeared to hang in the empty air.
As they moved nearer he was able to make sense of some of the images. There was a detailed schematic of a solar system with more than nine planets, a large floating globe which he guessed (correctly) to be Rylos, images of other systems, and a drifting starmap of a portion of one galactic arm. Scattered among these larger projections were graphs and symbols and charts, underscored with scratchings that he imagined to be letters in Rylan or some other alien language. Rylans predominated in the chamber, as they did in the hangar he was walking through. That might be because they were the dominant life-form in this section of space, or simply because this was their home world. Alex still had precious little hard information on which to base his suppositions.
A musical tone sounded repeatedly. His guide gently pulled him aside while a massive ship was shunted past. One thing he did know for certain was the identity of this and the other ships in the hangar. They were identical to those he’d manipulated so casually in computer-generated space on the screen of the videogame back home. They were the same even to the identifying logo on their flanks. It matched the symbol painted on the side of the game console.
“Gunstars. I gotta be dreaming. I gotta be.”
As his mother would so often assure him, wishful thinking would get him nowhere. Wishful thinking, and a nickel. Well, here were the visions of his wishes made whole. They were lined up in even ranks within the hangar, facing a gap which looked out over forest and mountains. Shining like a big fat peridot in the sky outside was the green moon he and Centauri had shot past on their precipitous descent to the surface of this world. That moon was real. As real as Rylos, as Centauri, as the fighting ships standing in silent array before him.
As real as the gulf that lay between this place and home.
Another Rylan beckoned them over and chatted with Alex’s escort. Alex had the feeling he’d been weighed and found wanting. He had no way of knowing that they were even talking about him, of course. It was just a feeling he received. His confidence was not raised.
Then the new Rylan spoke to him.
Alex shrugged. “Sorry. I never was much good at languages. Como se llama? Sprechen Sie deutsch?”
The Rylan muttered to himself, burrowed through a circular drawer that popped neatly out of the wall on verbal command. Extracting something small and brightly colored, he moved toward Alex with one hand outstretched.
Alex took a wary step backwards, but his guide was there to restrain him. She spoke anxiously while the other Rylan waited patiently. Waiting for this terrified primitive to get control of himself, no doubt, Alex thought. Angry at himself he stood and waited for whatever was coming.
The Rylan pinned something on Alex’s shirt, then reached toward his head. Alex steeled himself and watched. If these people wanted to do something to him there wasn’t anything he could do to prevent it.
Carefully the Rylan inserted a small button of soft plastic in Alex’s right ear and then stepped away.
“Now what?” Alex gingerly touched the object that had been inserted in his ear. It was so small he could hardly feel it but it didn’t seem inclined to fall out. “Look, this has been a mistake. I don’t belong here.”
“Your modesty becomes you,” said the officer who’d performed the insert. “Welcome to Starfighter Command.”
Alex blinked, still feeling his ear while trying to balance the awkward bundle of clothing with his other hand. The alien’s words had come through to him clearly, in unaccented English.
“You speak English? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I agree, but I am not speaking your language,” the Rylan informed him. “Your mind interprets my words via the translator button.”
The tiny disc clung securely to the inside of his ear. He let his hand fall. “That doesn’t make any sense either. What would you be doing with a translation of my language? Do you have others of my kind here?”
“No,” said the Rylan. “The button does not actually translate word for word. It adapts to your own thoughts, transcribing the sense of what I say rather than executing a literal transcription. We have discovered that within a certain range, the internal physical makeup of most intelligent species is sufficiently similar to make such devices practical. Structures may differ, but the transmission of ideas still involves the movement of electrical impulses within brains of varying size. The translator reads the current in your brain and works directly from it, as opposed to intercepting the verbalizations which are the translations of those same impulses into sound by your vocal mechanism.”