“Captain,” Ensign Benson said, “we really should talk about Casino.”
“In a moment.”
Ensign Benson, a social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, the man whose job it was to define each of the lost colonies once it was found, to study it and describe what it had become in its 500 years of solitude, brimmed to overflowing with facts about Casino, the first colony they were to visit. The name itself, Casino, had been a brave, irony; the colonists had been a group of compulsive gamblers, who had joined to flee the temptations of society. What had they become in the past 500 years? “Captain—”
“This is the most delicate moment, Ensign Benson.” The captain inserted a glittering green eye; balefully, one-eyed, the Latter Sneezer glared at Ensign Benson.
Why me?
“There’s a spaceship coming!”
“Six to five it crashes.”
Astrogator Pam Stokes, beautiful, brainy and blind to passion, entered the captain’s office to find the captain stuffing yet another bird and Ensign Benson ‘hopping tip and down on a nearby chair, rather birdlike himself. “Captain,” Pam said, “we’re about to land, sir.”
The captain looked up, startled, the one-eyed bird impaled on his right hand. “Land! Why?”
“Because we’re here, sir.”
“Here?” The captain looked at the bird, which looked back.
“Casino, Captain,” Ensign Benson said. “I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Pam nodded. “That’s right, sir. Fourth planet of the star Niobe.” Whipping out her ever-present slide rule, she said, “Fifteen sixteenths Earth’s size, one point oh oh seven six Earth’s density, fifteen point one six—”
Rising, the captain said, “Yes, yes, yes, Astrogator, thank you very much.”
“Just trying to keep you informed, sir. I may say, as astrogator, I had quite some time finding this spot. Celestial drift, you know.”
The captain, removing the bird from his fingers and edging toward the door, said, “Is that right?”
Absorbed in her slide rule, Pam said, “Given a mean deviation of point oh seven five—”
“I’ll just go supervise the landing,” the captain said and left with the bird.
“Alter for nebular attraction,” Pam mumbled, working the math, “on a scale of—”
Ensign Benson was beside her now. Stroking her smooth, tanned forearm with the tiny golden hairs all along its rounded length, he said, “I know a couple of mean deviations myself.”
“Oh, hello, Kybee,” she said, gave him a distracted smile and went away to think about the math.
On a grassy field not far from town, the spaceship landed, light as a feather (automatic pilot). A dozen citizens of Casino approached the great gleaming sausage and watched in admiration as an oval door in its side slid away to permit a ladder slowly to descend. Down that ladder, smiling heroically in the sunlight, resplendent in his Galactic Patrol uniform, came Lieutenant Billy Shelby, Hopeful’s handsome, idealistic second in command. Pausing two steps from the bottom, he raised his hand like a Roman centurion and cried, “Hail, Casinomen! We come in peace!”
A citizen approached. “Seven to two,” he said, “you don’t know what day it is.”
Billy’s smile went lopsided. He said, “What?”
“Do we have a bet, stranger?”
Billy shook his head. When things confused him — as they frequently did — he just went on doing what he was supposed to do. “I’m here to find out if you’re warlike,” he explained.
The citizen frowned. “What’s ‘warlike’?”
“It’s OK, Captain,” Billy called.
The captain appeared, birdless, looked at the far horizon and fell down the stairs. Billy helped him pick himself up as Ensign Benson also emerged from the ship, accompanying stout Galactic Councilman Morton Luthguster, who came massively down the ladder as though down a grand staircase to his coronation.
“So this is Casino,” the captain said, dusting himself off, looking around at a tree-studded landscape that looked much like northern Wisconsin in late September.
The citizen sidled up to him. “Seven to two you don’t know what day it is.”
The captain looked at his watch. “It’s ten minutes to six in the morning. Greenwich time, on Earth.”
“What day it is.”
With another look at his watch, the captain said, “August seventh, eleven thousand, four hundred and six.”
Of the citizen’s patience, not much was left. “Not the date,” he said. “the day.”
“The day?” The captain shook his head. “Where?”
“Here!”
“Back on Earth, it’s Tuesday. Unless my watch stopped.”
Councilman Luthguster, having reached the second step from the bottom, now spread his arms wide and declaimed, “Welcome, Casinomen! Welcome to the bosom of Mother Earth! I am Councilman Morton Luthguster; I am here among you to represent the Supreme Galactic Council, and I have full treaty-making powers.”
A citizen standing beside the ladder said, “Guess your weight.”
Luthguster looked down askance: “I beg your pardon.”
The citizen said. “Ten lukes says I can guess your weight within five-kilograms.”
“I would prefer if you didn’t,” Luthguster told him. Looking around himself, realizing there was no one responsible here, that these were all layabouts and scalawags, he said, “Take me to your leader.”
It was a normal day in the main plaza of downtown Casino. At benches and tables and grassy patches on the plaza itself — a large round area rather like a roulette wheel — pairs and small groups contested together, using various kinds of dice, cards, paddles, marbles, game boards, magnets and lengths of string. Some needed no equipment at alclass="underline" “Bet you two lukes that cloud passes the hill before that cloud.” Next to three employment buses, potential fruit pickers, meat packers or assembly-line button pushers played 14-card monte against the employment agents; the winners took their ten Iukes’ wages and went elsewhere, while the losers climbed, muttering, aboard the buses, resigned to a six-hour workday for no pay. Through the crowd passed a ragged beggar, limping, rattling something in a tin cup and whining, “Gimme a break, will ya? Gimme a break.”
A prosperous-looking citizen counting out a recent handful of winning’s turned toward the beggar his self-confident eye: “What’s your proposition?”
The beggar rattled his cup. “Dice. High number. Two lukes — against a kick in the shin.”
“You’re on.”
As they bent over the cup, the Earthmen arrived in the plaza, escorted by several of the citizens who had watched them land, one of whom pointed across the plaza at a large white wooden structure that looked rather like an old Mississippi riverboat. “That’s the chief tout’s mansion there.”
“Ah,” Luthguster said, nodding his pompous head. “The man I must see. Captain Standforth, you and your men wait here. We don’t want to startle the head of government with a show of force.”
“Yes, sir.”
Luthguster waddled off with several citizens toward the chief tout’s mansion. Billy Shelby and Ensign Benson gazed around at the citizenry, many of whom gazed back in a rather predatory fashion. Captain Standforth, head back, mouth open, gaped skyward in an abstracted fashion, till all it once he whipped out his stun gun and fired into the air.
All around the plaza, losers ducked for cover while winners crouched protectively over game boards, card layouts and die tosses. A large, big-bellied bird, with a pink tuft on top of its orange head and a lot of bright scarlet feathers on its behind, fell out of the sky and landed dead at the captain’s feet. Admiringly, the captain picked it up by one green claw, while its fleas hurriedly packed their bags, left a note for the milkman and went leaping away. “Wonderful specimen,” the captain said, turning his prize this way and that. “Never seen anything like it.”