“Only one?” Obie cried. “To go to Earth?”
“Only one,” MyThara said adamantly. “The retht are for nethethary thupplieth and food—after all, you mutht take rationth for three weekth with you, you know.”
“Why just three weeks?” Helen asked, licking her tongue out irritably.
“Becauthe that ith what the Major Theniorth ordered, Helena. Now, Lythander, come with me. It’th time to try on your new garmenth!”
Come back in three weeks? But why did they have to come back in three weeks? As Sandy tagged rebelliously along after MyThara he thought, all right, maybe some of them would return to the ship in three weeks, but not necessarily all of them . . .
MyThara left him at the cohort quarters while she went to get his Earth outfit. At her orders he stripped, putting his everyday suit into the locker—
And in the middle of doing it he began to tremble.
The fact that he was going to leave the ship had not really worked its way into the part of his mind that felt panic before, but now it was making up for lost time.
He glanced around the cohort chamber, shuddering. He was going to leave the ship. But such a thing had never happened! No one ever “left” the ship—they died, true, and were minced and devoured by the titch‘hik, but there was no other way that any person of all the persons he had known in all his life could ever cease to be in the ship. Outside the ship was space.
By the time MyThara arrived, her stubby arms laden with two baskets filled with articles of clothing, Sandy was sitting woebegone on the floor by his locker, his eyes squinted shut, his face drawn. “Now, Lythander!” she cried sharply. “What ith it? Are you ill?”
“I have to leave the ship,” he told her miserably.
“Well, of courthe you do. That’th what you have been trained for all your life.”
“But I’m afraid, MyThara-tok. I don’t want to leave you.”
She hesitated, then gently gripped his arm with one tough, hard hand. He could feel the “helper” spur digging into his flesh—reassuring rather than painful. “You will have a whole new life,” she told him. “Now, pleathe, try thethe on. I want to thee how beautiful my Lythander will look on Earth!”
Slowly he began to obey. MyThara insisted he dress from the skin out, so first he pulled on the white, thin, one-piece garment she called “underwear,” and the “sox”—long black tubes of material, closed at one end. The shirt was a pastel pink, the trousers dark blue, the vest red, the jacket brown, and the shoes black.
“It’th beautiful,” she told him.
“It’s very hot,” he complained.
“But that ith becauthe it’th very cold where you’re going, Lythander,” she said severely. “That ith why you have thethe other thingth, which you mutht altho try on.” And she pulled out of the second basket a second pair of trousers, much thicker and pegged at the ankles, and heavy overshoes that went right over the soft dancing pumps, and a jacket with a hood that weighed more than all the other clothes combined. By the time they were all on Lysander was sweating.
“You look very handthome,” MyThara said sadly.
“I feel like a boiled tuber,” he growled.
“All right, you can take them off.” She folded each garment neatly as he removed them. “Did you know that they’ve thtarted the perokthide plant?” she asked.
“Oh, really?” Lysander considered that fact. Landing rockets were the only Hakh’hli devices fueled with hydrogen peroxide and alcohol. So the peroxide factory sat idle for decades at a time, sometimes a century or more—there was no need for chemical rocket fuel in the long journeys between stars. Feeling better, he tried a smile. It didn’t quite come off, because there was something in her tone that puzzled him. “Aren’t you happy for me?” he demanded. “I’d think you’d be proud to see me go to Earth!”
“But I won’t, Lythander,” she lisped sorrowfully. “I won’t thee you again at all. I’m to have my phythical tomorrow and, you thee, Lythander, I won’t path.”
And on the day when at last the interstellar ship was at its proper point in its orbit around the Earth and the lander was poised to go, what MyThara said was true. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere anymore. She hadn’t passed the termination examination.
There wasn’t any ceremony about their departure. There wasn’t even anyone to see them off, except for ChinTekki-tho, floating nervously around in the micro-gravity of the ship with its main engines off for the first time in decades. “There are clouds in your landing region,” he announced to the cohort as they prepared to board. “That is good. It means that you will be able to land without being seen.”
“What are ‘clouds,’ ChinTekki-tho?” Obie asked nervously, and was rewarded with a pinch from Polly.
“Clouds are good,” she told him. “Don’t be a wimp like Sandy!”
ChinTekki-tho was looking at Sandy, who was standing by himself, holding his parka and boots, his face damp with tears. “And what is the matter with Lysander?” he asked.
“It’s MyThara. She’s dead,” Polly said.
“Of course she’s dead; she failed her examination. But what is there in that for him to think funny?”
“He doesn’t think it’s funny, ChinTekki-tho,” Obie explained. “He’s a human being, you know. He’s crying. That’s what they do when they’re sad.”
“But what is there in a worn-out Hakh’hli being terminated to make him sad? Oh, Lysander,” ChinTekki-tho said sorrowfully. “At this late time I am beginning to wonder if we have trained you properly, after all. But it’s too late to worry about that. Get in, all of you. You launch in one-twelfth of a twelfth-day.”
Chapter 7
The great interstellar ship is at rest now—or at least so it seems to everyone inside. Actually, of course, it is in orbit around the planet Earth, combining its orbital velocity around the Earth with the Earth’s own orbit around its Sun—and with the Sun’s motion within its galaxy, and the galaxy’s own steady fall toward the Great Attractor; its motion relative to some stationary reference point would look like a corkscrew—if there were any stationary reference point anywhere to compare it with. But the effect inside is as though it had stopped. The engines have stopped. The thrust has stopped. The 1.4-G acceleration (or “gravity”) that everyone on the ship has felt for all of their lives is gone, and Hakh’hli people and things float. So any motion is magnified. Even the tiny thrust of the magnetic grapples as they hurl the landing craft away from the great ship becomes a barely perceptible quiver. All 22,000 Hakh’hli aboard feel it, and all of them cheer; Earth is the best planet they have found in 3000 years of wandering, and now it is almost theirs.
Because there was a lot of velocity to swap around—solar-ecliptic orbit to change to planet-polar, forward speed to kill—the landing craft’s thrusters were going all the way. Thirty seconds after it was flung free of the big mother ship Sandy began to vomit. He couldn’t help it. He had never experienced motion sickness before—had never, really, experienced motion, at least not in a confined space.
The six Hakh’hli, with a different arrangement of the inner ear, didn’t suffer from mal de mer. That didn’t help them. It came to the same thing in the long run, because the violent jolting of atmospheric entry threw their bodies around faster than their stomachs could keep up.