A session in the lander simulator was as good as any Earthly video game for a young adult, or actually a lot better. It wasn’t good enough, though. When Sandy had to get out to make way for the first real space cadet from his cohort he was sulking. “I don’t see why I can’t fly it down,” he complained to Polly—unwisely, because she gave him a pinch.
“Because you’re too little, and too clumsy, and too dumb!” she told him. “Now get out of the way so I can check out!”
He glowered after her as she climbed in. Obie touched the small of Sandy’s back in sympathy. “I’d let you fly if I could,” he said. Sandy shrugged morosely; they both knew that Obie’s time for influencing anyone else in the cohort had passed with his brief sexual phase. “Well,” Obie said helpfully, “do you want to do something else? I’m last on the list; we’ve got at least a twelfth and a half before my turn.”
“Do what?” Sandy asked.
“We could watch an Earth film,” Obie proposed. “There’s a ‘Star Trek’ I’d like to see again. I like those funny spaceships.”
“No way,” Sandy said positively, because Earthly ideas of nonexistent spaceships weren’t what interested him; if he were going to watch films on his free time he wanted something with prettier girls in scantier clothing. Or alternatively—
He looked around thoughtfully. The four other waiting members of his cohort had started a Questions Game—name all fifty-three states of the U.S.A. in order, left to right, from Guam to Puerto Rico—and were conspicuously shunning both Sandy and Obie. The communications screen was being ignored. “Well,” he said slowly, “there is a film I’d like to see again. Only it isn’t from Earth. It’s Hakh’hli.”
It took Obie a lot of juggling to find the old records Lysander wanted, but when they appeared on the screen even the other members of the cohort gave up their game to cluster around. That wasn’t particularly welcome to Sandy. What he was seeing was a personal matter; most of the times he watched it he did so in private, because he didn’t want anyone else intruding on the yearning he always felt.
It was the record of the discovery of the lost Earth spaceship, half a century before. It showed the detection of the artifact, in orbit around the planet Mars, and the growing images of it as the interstellar ship drew close to investigate.
There wasn’t any need to launch a lander for it; the Hakh’hli had simply sent out an unmanned probe. The cameras on the probe showed the ship growing large, filling the screen. As the probe cautiously circled, the shape of the thing was clear: a torpedo with a great chemical-fuel nozzle at one end, a transparent cone at the other. And behind the transparency of the cone—
Behind the transparency were two figures in spacesuits. They did not move. Their half-silvered visors showed nothing inside.
“Which one is your mother?” Obie asked sympathetically.
“Now, how the hell do I know?” Sandy snarled. But actually he thought he did. The one on the right was smaller than the other, and its spacesuit had a golden sunburst emblazoned on the breast. Earth females, Sandy knew, were more inclined toward personal adornment than the men.
On the screen a sudden red streak of fire lanced out from the probe to the Earthly spaceship. A tiny explosion of white and gold erupted from the ship’s surface.
Sandy winced, even though he knew that it wasn’t an attack but only the routine precaution of lasering a little crater on the hull so that the watching Hakh’hli could analyze its composition before they brought it closer to the big ship itself. The glow darkened and died almost as soon as it flared. It left only a tiny pit in the metal.
Then the probe began its cautious circling of the ship again, stem to stern and roundabout. As it shifted views there were, from time to time, quick glimpses of stars, of part of the rusty disk of Mars far below, even a glint of sunlight reflected from the Hakh’hli interstellar ship itself, hovering many miles away. Sandy saw the probe launch its magnetic grapple, the cable snaking behind as it attached itself to the hull of the Earth derelict.
Then the screen went dark.
“That’s all?” Tanya sniffed. “We don’t see the inside of the Earthie ship?”
“Not in this file,” Obie said. “There’s another file, though. I can get it for you if you like, Sandy.”
Sandy shook his head. “Don’t bother,” he said. It wasn’t the bother that he minded, it was having people staring over his shoulder as he watched the recording of the ship being carefully examined and disassembled by suited Hakh’hli. The tape showed the spacesuited figures that were his parents being handled like time-fused bombs. He did not enjoy that. True, it showed nothing of the people inside the spacesuits; it showed them being carefully transported to the Genetics laboratories, where they would be kept quarantined while investigations were made, but once those doors closed the file ended. He did not care to have an audience as he watched that, and anyway the simulator had stopped moving and the door was opening. “Polly’s through,” he announced. “Who’s next?”
But when Polly came out she was in no good mood, and the instructor didn’t help it any. “When you launched from that magnetic grapple you were slow and not at all fast,” he told her. “This is waste of energy, so you must do better and not worse.”
“It was fast enough,” she grumbled. “But if you think I am bad and not sufficiently good, let’s try someone else. Obie! You take next turn and show him what one bad pilot is really like!”
Unfortunately for Obie, he performed almost as badly as Polly said. When he got out of the flight simulator his tail was dragging. “Very bad and not at all good,” the instructor pronounced. “You crashed this ship. You do not at all bring credit to your cohort.” And while Bottom, the next in turn, was getting into the still-warm kneeling seat and buckling himself in, Obie had to stand silently through a lengthy criticism of the way he had failed to deploy his trash deflectors, missed his angle of approach over Earth’s pole, and decelerated too rapidly on landing.
As soon as it was over he growled to Sandy, “Let’s get out of here.”
Sandy had no objection. “Where?”
“Anywhere,” Obie said sulkily. “Listen. We’re outside our quarters, aren’t we?”
“Well, of course we are.”
“So why don’t we do something about it? As long as we’re out we can look around.”
“Look around where?” Sandy asked eagerly, already convinced.
“Anywhere we haven’t been lately,” Obie said, meaning anywhere they weren’t authorized to be going.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to do that,” Sandy said thoughtfully. It wasn’t an objection, just a matter of putting all the evidence on the table, and Obie regarded it as such. He didn’t answer. He just led the way out of the simulator chamber, and they stood for a moment in the corridor, looking around.