Once the door was closed behind him he breathed more easily. Making his way among humanity as a secret agent was a lot more difficult than he had expected.
For that matter, so was going to the toilet. The Earthly garments were just enough different from the ones he had worn all his life on the ship that he had trouble making the necessary adjustments, and then there was the question of the plumbing itself.
It all took time, but Sandy had no objection to that. When he had finally found a way to cause the toilet bowl to empty itself and refill, and had rearranged his clothing, he paused to regard himself in the little oval mirror over the washstand.
He pulled the hearing aid carefully out of his ear, looking it over. It didn’t seem to be harmed. He wiped it as dry as he could on one of the fabric things hanging in the bathroom and reinserted it. His ear was sore, but he couldn’t get along without the aid.
The silence inside the bathroom, however, was a blessing. No one was asking him questions. He didn’t have to be ready to respond to a challenge, because there was nothing to respond to. He wished he could stay right there in that room until everyone went away and, somehow, he could get back to the lander, back to the ship, back to the familiar life that had been his . . .
On the other hand . . .
On the other hand, he was home! It was what his whole life had been aimed toward, and now it was real! Already he had been in the presence of two actual human beings—yes, certainly, there had been some little embarrassments and worries, but they had offered him food, hadn’t they? And that must mean something. Yes, certainly, they looked stranger than he had expected. But they had been kind. It was hard to believe that they were of the race of spoilers who had so sadly damaged the planet that it was a devastated ruin . . .
He stopped there, struck by a thought, and went to look out the bathroom window.
His brow furrowed. From this point, the planet didn’t look all that devastated. Actually, the long meadow behind the house was peaceful and green, and he could see that someone had let the cows from the barn out to graze in it.
It was all quite confusing.
He realized he had been in the bathroom for quite a long time. Reluctantly he patted the hearing aid to make sure it was in place in his ear and turned to the door.
There was a new noise, a mechanical one he had not heard before.
He turned around as a shadow passed over the window, and then he saw a flying machine—a “helicopter”—bob slowly to the ground just a few yards from the house. A couple of people in uniform leaped out of it.
When he came out into the kitchen again they were standing there, talking in low tones to the woman and her son. “Hello, sir,” said one of them.
And the other said, “You’re from the spaceship, aren’t you? The one with the funny-looking frogs? We’ll have to ask you to come along with us.”
Chapter 8
One of the reasons the planet Venus is so hot is that its atmosphere contains vast quantities of carbon dioxide, which traps the heat from the sun. One of the reasons Mars is so cold is that its atmosphere is very thin; there isn’t enough carbon dioxide to do the same thing. The Earth’s air is intermediate between them, but the human race has been changing that. Every time they exhale they breathe carbon dioxide out. Every time they burn fuel to run their engines and heat their homes (which is always) they make more of it. So the Earth gets warmer and the ice melts. (There is a reason why the policewoman laughed when Sandy said his home was in Miami Beach. The only present inhabitants of Miami Beach are jellyfish, crabs, tarpon, and bonefish, because Miami Beach, like most of the low-lying coasts of the world, is underwater.) There is more. Because the atmosphere is a heat engine, the more the air warms the more energy there is to express itself as storms, air-mass movements, scouring winds . . . in short, as hurricanes.
Even the word “hurricane” was unfamiliar to Sandy. It was one of those words you heard on old TV weather broadcasts, but there was nothing like a hurricane on the Hakh’hli ship. But on the way to the police helicopter he saw there was a corner of the cowshed that was bent out of shape, and a tree down in the courtyard, and he remembered the other great trees he had seen uprooted in the storm. And the word “hurricane” came back out of his subconscious.
He would have liked to ask the two police officers about it, but they didn’t seem to want to talk. If they had names, they didn’t tell them to Sandy. They didn’t look much alike, apart from the uniforms. The male one was shorter than the female, and his face was flatter and skin darker; he looked quite a lot like the animal herders. The female was paler and thin, like the picture of Sandy’s mother, though neither as young-looking nor as pretty. (Nor, for that matter, as undressed.) They escorted him, politely enough, to their “helicopter” and sat him down in the right-hand front seat.
Sandy tensed when the female one buckled straps around him. Partly it was that she, a female Earth human, had touched him and his startled glands throbbed. Partly it was because they were binding him like a prisoner! He made himself relax when they assured him the straps were only for his safety when the helicopter took off. Anyway, Sandy had no doubt that if things turned bad he could snap those straps in a moment.
What he would do after he snapped them was another question. The male sat next to him, at the controls; but the female was in the seat right behind, and the metal thing she carried at her side was a “gun.” Sandy’s knowledge of guns was perfect, obtained from any number of recorded Westerns and cop shoot-em-ups. He knew that if anyone fired a gun at anyone else, the target fell over in great and often terminal pain. He also knew from the same sources that a uniformed person with a gun had the right to fire it at any “suspect” and splat his brains out.
Sandy didn’t want his brains splatted out, especially by a human female—not a young one, to be sure, but very probably still capable of breeding. He turned his head as far as he could to smile at her.
She didn’t smile back. She only said, “Please sit straight, sir.” And then she leaned forward so that he felt her breath on the back of his neck. “Did you say your home was in Miami Beach?”
“That’s right,” Sandy said, sticking to the script. “I’ve been traveling—hitchhiking—and I guess I lost my way in the, uh, storm.”
There was a skeptical snort from the woman. “Then where are your gills?” she asked.
Sandy frowned. The woman meant something by that, but what?
“Let it rest, Emmons,” the male police officer ordered. “The captain will sort all this out.” And he did something with feet and fingers, and the slow flut-flut-flut of the rotor overhead picked up speed as the helicopter lurched off the ground.
Then Sandy’s big problem wasn’t solving the puzzling conversation, it was trying to keep from vomiting again.
The helicopter did not shudder and leap as the landing ship had when it was bumping through the atmospheric entry. The helicopter’s motion was slower and more tantalizing. But it was equally bad. Hurriedly the woman behind him pushed an air-sick bag at him. Sandy thought that, barring the tiny morsel he had swallowed at the cow farm, his stomach must be empty. But he surprised himself. He used the bag.
Then, sick or not, he had to look out the window. There were more trees down on the slopes around them, and some of the standing ones looked distinctly unhealthy—bare branches or yellowed leaves, some of them with their branches stripped away and nothing but straight, dead poles remaining. No matter. This was Earth! He thrilled to the recognition of that all-important fact. He was home!