The helicopter swayed as it lifted to clear a ridge. Then, as it went through a pass, Sandy could see a road below him—no doubt the very road he had failed to find in the stormy night. He could see that the storm had passed this way, for on the flanks of the mountains still more trees were down in windrows.
The flight covered the distance that had taken him six stumbling, zigzag hours in less than five minutes. Sandy was just beginning to wonder whether he would need the bag again when the pilot said, “There it is.”
There it was. The Hakh’hli landing ship. It squatted peacefully on its skids on a gentle grassy slope, its pale landing lights still on though the sun was high.
The lander looked astonishingly small, squatting in its meadow. It even looked pitiful, because the trip and the storm had not been kind to it. The thin foil that took the sting out of the micrometeoroids in orbit was punctured and wrinkled. The netting the Hakh’hli had tried to string over the craft after the landing, to hide it, had been shredded by the winds. The lander looked hard used.
But what caught Sandy’s eye at once was that it was no longer alone. Five other flying machines surrounded it. Human machines. They were helicopters more or less like the little police craft Sandy was riding in, except that most of them were a good deal bigger. And people, human people, were standing about in clusters. Some of them had television cameras pointed at the landing craft, or at each other, or most of all at the Hakh’hli.
All six of the Hakh’hli had come out of the lander. Two of them—they looked like Polly and Bottom—were talking into the television cameras. A couple of others were hunched possessively beside the ladder-stick to the door of the landing craft. And a couple were vigorously, joyfully showing off for the human spectators, leaping, with the extra strength their muscles gave them in the feeble Earth gravity, over each other in the game the Earth children he had seen on kiddy television shows called leapfrog; and froggy the Hakh’hli indeed did look.
As Sandy got out of the helicopter, Tanya came bounding toward him. The two police flinched away. Their hands strayed toward their holstered guns; but they didn’t draw them, and Tanya, weeping an affable tear, cried in Hakh’hli to Sandy, “You have done badly and not at all well, Lysander. Speak cautiously to these Earth creatures until you have learned new orders!”
Startled, Sandy demanded. “What new orders? You speak confusingly and not with any clarity.”
But she didn’t answer in Hakh’hli. She only patted him in playful reproof, and then turned and bounded away again, crying in English, “So follow me, Sandy! We are all being ‘interviewed’ on ‘television’ by these wonderful Earth people!”
Sandy frowned in bewilderment at the two police officers. The male one shrugged. The female one said, “I guess that’s what you ought to do, sir.”
So he tailed after Tanya, looking around.
His spirits began to rise. In daylight the world was more beautiful and more frightening than Sandy had ever imagined. There was so much of it! Never in his life had he been able to look for more than a hundred feet in any direction. Now there were horizons a dozen miles away—with mountains! and rivers! and clouds! and, brighter than he had dreamed, so bright that it hurt his eyes to look at it, the Sun!
The second most startling thing was the sight of Polly, weeping good-naturedly as she squatted on a flat, sun-warmed rock before half a dozen television cameras. She certainly was not obeying the directives of the Major Seniors. She wasn’t making any secret of their presence on Earth. She was, in fact, advertising it! As Sandy approached, the people with the television cameras turned away from Polly to aim their lenses directly at him, and Obie and Helen loped toward him.
“Welcome to Earth!” called Obie—in English.
Helen, in Hakh’hli, added sorrowfully, “Oh, Wimp, you’ve really screwed it up this time.”
Sandy blinked at her. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Speak Hakh’hli!” Polly commanded, leaping off the rock and waddling toward him. “Because of your folly and incompetence everything has to be changed now!”
“My folly?”
“Yes, and incompetence,” Obie put in, looking reproachful. “You failed to carry out your mission properly. They knew at once you were lying and not speaking truth.”
“Well,” Sandy said reasonably, “all right, but I certainly didn’t tell anybody about the big ship, did I?”
“Don’t argue!” Polly ordered. “We have to attend to these people now and without delay! I have been in contact with the ship. The Major Seniors are very displeased with you, Lysander. However, facts are facts, eggs cannot be unlaid, and so we have new orders. We are to speak openly to these people of our purpose here.”
“Speak openly?” asked Sandy, dazed.
“Oh, please behave in Hakh’hli fashion and not any more in that of a hoo’hik than you must, Lysander! Just follow my lead. Smile. Let them welcome you home. And listen attentively to what I say to them!”
Then she turned to the cameras and spoke in English, weeping apologetically. “Please forgive us. We were simply worried about our dear friend, Lysander. Now can we go on with the ‘interview’?”
Neither Sandy nor any of the Hakh’hli had ever been “interviewed” before. But they had seen it done often enough on the old Earth television shows, and Polly was behaving like a talk-show veteran. She pulled Sandy to her side, with her hand firmly and affectionately tucked into the belt at his waist, as she spoke into the cameras. If Sandy had not been so busy staring around at the human machines, the human people, the grass and wildflowers and very rocks of the human world, he would have admired her poise. She spoke clearly and persuasively.
“Yes, we are the Hakh’hli, a race of highly technologically advanced people with a recorded history that goes back some sixteen thousand eight hundred of your years. We have come here to share our wisdom with you. Also to return the human, John William Washington. (We call him Sandy.) He is the son of two of your astronauts, whom our ship rescued when they were stranded in space, due to a war you were having, fifty-six of your years ago. We have brought him up as one of our own. The little story he told your food-animal herders was a harmless little deception. We only wanted him to be able to move freely among you, so that the first shock of his return to his native planet could be as gentle as possible, before the inevitable ‘publicity’ that would accompany the news of his real identity. Also, to be sure, we felt it necessary to be cautious in our first approach, so that we could find out what conditions were like in order to decide how best to make ourselves known to you. We wanted to spare you the worst shocks of encountering a race of truly superior beings.” She blinked affably at the cameras for a moment, and then added, “And now, if you will excuse us, we have to go back in the ship for a while, because it is time for our midday meal. We apologize for this necessity, but because of the excessively long day of your world we can wait no longer. Are you coming, dear Lysander?”
Once the Earth humans had been made to understand that when a Hakh’hli wanted to eat his big meal he wanted it, they hospitably offered to feed them out of their own stocks. Of course, the Hakh’hli rejected that proposal out of hand. They were too hungry to prolong the discussion, and so the entire cohort climbed back up the ladder-stick into the landing craft and closed the door.
As soon as they were inside Sandy burst out in Hakh’hli, “What has happened? Why are plans now different and not the same?”