“Sure. If there are any leftovers, I mean,” Sandy said obligingly. “They’ll probably be coming out in, let’s see—” He consulted his watch and did a fast mental conversion from Hakh’hli time. “—in about forty-seven and a half of your minutes.”
He paused as he heard a racket from the sky. The small, dark woman turned to look and then said to Boyle, “Marguery’s coming in now.”
“Good,” said Hamilton Boyle, not taking his eyes off Sandy. He was a tall, lean man. Although Sandy had no good way of guessing human ages, he was sure that Boyle was one of the least young around the ship. He was a serious man, Sandy was sure, although he smiled frequently. “Mr. Washington,” he said, “we’re going to need to talk to your, ah, friends as soon as we can. That’s a V-tol coming in, and we’re hoping you’ll all allow us to take you to a more comfortable place.”
It bothered Sandy to have two questions clamoring for answers at once. He passed up the “What’s a V-tol?” in favor of, “I don’t know what you mean by more comfortable, Mr. Boyle. We’re pretty comfortable here.” He had to raise his voice as the ship appeared, dashing through the sky toward them, then almost stopping in the air as thrusters and wing flaps rotated to new positions and lowered it gently toward the ground. Its jets screamed. It was not a helicopter; it had wings almost like the spaceship lander they had come in.
The ear-piercing jet roar stopped abruptly. “I meant to a city,” Boyle said persuasively. “There’s nothing here for you, just farmland. We’d like to welcome you properly, in a more civilized place.”
“We’ll have to ask Polly,” Sandy said, but he wasn’t really listening. The V-tol door had opened. A tall female human was coming out of the aircraft, which had the same InterSec legend stenciled on its side. The human female strode toward them with determination, looking Sandy up and down.
“My,” she said admiringly, “you’re a big one, aren’t you?”
“So are you,” whispered Sandy, gazing up at her. She was not nearly as solid or thick around the waist as he, but she was a good head and half taller, as tall as any of the males; and his heart was gone. And that was how Sandy met Marguery Darp.
Chapter 9
The carbon dioxide warmup of the Earth’s air was real enough to be observed through most of the middle part of the twentieth century, but it didn’t really hit its stride until the twenty-first century began. That is when the global annual mean temperature began to register a seven-degree climb over the norm of the last ten or fifteen thousand years. Humans have done lots of other ingenious things to their air. They have scavenged its ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons, burdened it with acid aerosols, even laced it with radionuclides, but it is the warmup that has produced the most interesting effects. The equator hasn’t changed much, temperature-wise. The poles have. Glacial melt-water pours in Nile-sized streams off Antarctica and the Greenland ice cap. Queerly, the temperate parts of the northern hemisphere haven’t done much warming. Their temperatures are either only negligibly higher—like North America—or even actually colder than before, like Europe. Europe suffers greatly from a change in ocean currents. The massive influx of fresh water, which is less dense than the rest of the sea, has stopped the long conveyor belt that brought warm surface water up from the tropics to moderate Europe’s winters. Contrariwise, the Pacific, at the other end of the world-girdling conveyor, is no longer refrigerated by the sea. It hasn’t meant a lot for the land areas of the Pacific, but in Europe it has meant a lot. Madrid and Monte Carlo, for instance, now have the climate once associated with Chicago.
Obie was the first of the cohort to appear at the lander door when stun time was over. Yawning and scratching, he waved down to Sandy. Then he turned around, presenting his stubby tail to the audience, gripped the center rail with hard thumbs and helper-fingers, and slid down, landing with a thump at the bottom. He turned to face them, laughing. “Oh, Sandy,” he cried rapturously. “Isn’t this light gravity wonderful? I feel as if I could jump a mile.”
“Don’t, please,” Sandy ordered, smiling apologetically at his new human friends. He introduced Oberon and Tanya, who had just come out, to the new human arrivals, stumbling over some of their names—Miriam Zuckerman, Dashia Ali, Hamilton Boyle. He didn’t have any trouble remembering the name of Marguery Darp, though. He watched her carefully, trying to gauge what she was thinking from the look on her face. It didn’t tell him much. She was smiling, nodding, and saying a few polite words of welcome to Earth. But he still felt a little embarrassment. The humans were taking such obvious care not to say anything, well, insulting. Of course, it was inevitable that human beings should experience some culture shock. Looking at his mates through human eyes, Sandy understood that four-foot-high, kangaroo-shaped, English-speaking aliens from a spaceship were certainly going to attract attention. Especially when, like Oberon, they were always taking great, joyous leaps in the air.
“Your friend,” Marguery Darp said to Sandy, pointing at Oberon, “is sure a great jumper, isn’t he?”
“Well, it’s a great temptation here,” Sandy told her. He was heroically resisting the temptation to show off his own 1.4-G strength.
“Nevertheless,” put in Tanya, standing back, “he should not make a spectacle of himself in that way.” She waved commandingly to Oberon and, when he leaped back to them with an inquiring look, said in a severe tone, “You are behaving foolishly, Oberon. This Earth human female is disappointed.”
Obie looked hangdog, but Marguery Darp said quickly, “Oh, no, Mr., ah, Oberon! Not at all! I think you jump splendidly. The only thing that I would suggest is—well—don’t you think you should wear a hat? The ozone layer’s still pretty threadbare, this far north.”
Obie stared at her. “Ozone layer? Hat?”
Hamilton Boyle explained smoothly. “Lieutenant Darp is concerned about the ultraviolet radiation in the sunlight, Mr. Oberon. Since the ozone layer was weakened we’ve had a good deal of trouble because of it—skin cancers, crop failures, a hell of a lot of bad sunburn cases. Are you susceptible to sunburn, do you know?”
Obie looked inquiringly at Sandy, who said, “No, he doesn’t know. None of us do. We’ve never been exposed to sunlight before.”
“Then you’ll all need hats,” Marguery Darp said decisively. “And probably some kind of pullover to cover your, ah, arms.”
“Or better still—” Boyle smiled “—we ought to get you all indoors. What about accepting our invitation to come to a city? There’s plenty of room in the V-tol.”
“Go to a city?” Obie squealed.
“I’ll have to ask Polly, of course,” Tanya said. She turned and began to climb back into the lander.
Boyle called after her, “Please say that this is an official invitation from the government of the Yukon Commonwealth, who would like to welcome you all to Earth!” And to Sandy and Oberon, he added, “You’ll like it, I promise. Dawson’s a real city, and I guarantee we can make you comfortable there.”
Marguery was nodding encouragingly. Sandy said, “Oh, I’d like that.”
And Obie said gloomily, “Polly won’t let us.”
But when Polly at last came down from the lander—more decorously than Obie—she was all shrugs and tears of good will. “Of course we accept your invitation to visit your Dawson,” she said. “Our advisor, ChinTekki-tho, asks us to thank you for inviting us. Unfortunately, we cannot all come with you.”