Ensign Benson held tight to the stair rail. “Four inside?”
“Well, there’s your captain,” Hank said. “Tall, skinny, distracted fella. A Pisces. And his number two, a nice young boy but not too quick upstairs — probably a Moon Child. Moony, anyway.”
“Show-off,” Jim said. He was still smarting over his fiver.
Hank went on, pretending not to notice. “Then there’s your navigator—”
“Astrogator.”
“Same thing, just gussied up. A highly motivated young person, probably female.”
“Not yet,” Ensign Benson muttered.
“But definitely Virgo.”
“That I’ll go along with.”
“Now, your engineer,” Hank went on, “a solid Taurus, but we just can’t decide if it’s a man or a woman.
“Nobody can,” Ensign Benson said.
“I heard that,” Hester said, coming out onto the platform to shake a wrench at the ensign. “I’m a woman, and don’t you forget it.”
“Why not?”
“Come on, folks,” Hank said, gesturing toward town. “You’ve had a long, hard journey; come along and relax.”
The captain, the lieutenant and the astrogator joined the three other earthlings on the platform and they all looked off toward town. A pretty little place with peaked roofs, a traditional white steeple and a sports ground alive with running, yelling children, it nestled in a setting of low hills where neat farms mingled with elm groves, the whole area very much like bits of Devon and Kent — the parts beyond commuting distance from London. “What a nice place,” Pam said, her slide rule for one instant forgotten.
“You’ll learn to love it,” Hank assured them, “in time.”
“Chick, chick, Nero,” Jim said as Hank explained to the Earthers, “Our energy sources are really very slender. No oil, no coal. Hydropower and solar power give us enough electricity to run our homes and businesses, but there was no way we could keep powered transportation. Fortunately, there were several indigenous animals capable of domestication, including the like of old Nero here.”
Nero, a gray-and-white creature that might very well pass for a horsy steed in the dusk with the light behind it was apparently quite strong; without effort it pulled this ten-seater surrey and its eight passengers along the gently up-and-down crushed-stone road toward the town. A farmer in a nearby field, plowing behind another Nero, waved; Hank and Jim and Billy and Hester waved back.
“Have any birds here?” the captain asked.
“Oh, all sorts.”
Ensign Benson had been deeply frowning, intensely brooding, acutely staring into the middle distance, but now all at once he nodded and said, “Hyperradio.”
Jim frowned around his pipe. “Say what?”
“You must be in hyperradio contact with one of the colonies we already visited.”
“Not us,” Jim said. “Never heard of hyperradio.”
“Then someone else has been here from off planet. Recently.”
“No, sir.” Jim shook his head and Nero’s reins.
Hank said, “You’re our first visitors in five hundred years. You’ll be starting the guestbook.”
Ensign Benson gave him the old gimlet eye. “You knew we were coming. You knew how many of us and where we were from and our mission. Somebody had to tell you all that.”
“Easy,” Hank said, grinning. “The stars told us.”
The town was small but busy, with a bustling, shop-filled main street, Nero-powered surreys and wagons everywhere, and an aura of prosperity and contentment.
“What’s that?” the captain asked as they made their way around a white-stone obelisk in its own little center-of-the-street garden.
“The peace memorial,” Hank said. “We’ve never had anybody to have a war with, but the town plan called for a memorial there — our ancestors’ original town back on earth had one at that spot — so about a hundred years ago, they just went ahead and put up a peace memorial.”
People waved as they went by, and a dressed-up reception committee waited out front of the grange hall. “I know you’ve all had breakfast,” Hank said, “but you could probably tuck into some real food. Come on.”
Everybody climbed out of the surrey. Billy Shelby, a happy and innocent smile on his face, said to Ensign Benson, “Golly, Kybee, isn’t this place nice?”
“I’m not so sure,” the ensign muttered, glowering at all those happy people. “Keep your eyes open, Billy. There’s something wrong here.”
It was a gala breakfast, laid on just for the visitors and with nearly 50 of the most prominent local citizens in attendance. The Terrans were introduced to, among many others, the principals of both high schools, three ministers, one priest, four doctors, both judges, the police chief, the editors of both newspapers… Oh, the list went on and on. Then they all sat at long trencher tables under crepe-paper decorations of umber and sienna — Earth colors — and happy chitchat filled the hall as the food came out.
Real eggs. Real homemade bread with real butter. Real bacon. “Hester,” Councilman Luthguster said, “this is what coffee taste like.”
“Not my coffee,” said Hester.
“I know,” said the councilman.
“How do you like the breakfast?” Hank asked.
“Fine,” said Ensign Benson, though, in fact, it was all as ashes in his mouth. Looking up, he noticed the designs painted high on the walls, just under the ceiling, 12 on each side, six along each end. Beginning at the front left, three designs incorporated rams’ heads, three involved bulls, then… “The zodiac,” Ensign Benson said.
“You know it, then.” Hank Carpenter seemed pleased.
“Astronomy. Publius Nigidius Figulus wrote on astrology.”
“One of the great early scholars in the science.”
Ensign Benson raised such a skeptical brow: “Science?”
Hank offered such an indolent chuckle: “You’re from Earth, of course,” he said, “where it doesn’t operate as efficiently.”
“Oh, really?”
“If you were to take an ordinary chemistry-lab experiment,” Hank suggested, “and try it under water, the results wouldn’t please you. Would that disprove the science or reflect the surroundings?”
“So what makes this place better surroundings than Earth?”
“To begin with,” Hank said, “our being at the center of the universe means there’s no distortion. Then, our year is precisely three hundred sixty days long, so we don’t have to keep eternally adjusting things. And Ptolemy’s system includes ten planets, and our planet has two moons and our sun; twelve. One heavenly body per house.”
“Oh, but you can’t seriously—”
“As the bumblebee said to the physicist,” Hank said, “All I know is, it works.”
The extremely beautiful blond girl to Billy’s left said, “Hi, I’m Linda. What’s your sign?”
“Billy.”
“Billy? No, that’s your name. When were you born?”
“About three-thirty in the morning,” Billy said. “Mom said everybody’s born at three-thirty in the morning. Can that be right?”
Linda thought about that. She had beautiful violet eyes. “You were born in July,” she decided and turned to talk to the person on her other side.
Ensign Benson ate toast, eggs, bacon, waffles; but he did not, in fact, taste a thing. He was thinking too hard. “If astrology works,” he said, “it rules out free will.”