Polly licked her tongue out unhappily. “Will she come to bed with us?”
“Certainly not,” Sandy said, flushing. “Polly, you are on Earth now, and you must learn Earth ways. Earth people sleep alone, except during amphylaxis.”
“But I don’t like it,” she wailed. “I miss Obie, too!”
That decided him. He knew that what Polly missed, of course, was only warmth and company in the sleeping tangle. Nevertheless, there was nothing she could have said that would have melted Sandy’s heart more. “I think I should keep her company, just for a while,” he told Marguery Darp. “I’ll be back, I think. Probably.”
But the fact of the matter was that he, too, was tired. These long twenty-four-hour Earth days were taking their toll on him, too. In Polly’s stateroom, his arms around her and her arms around him, he found himself relaxing.
He really wanted to go back to Marguery Darp, too. When Polly’s gentle, hiccoughing snores told him she was asleep he tried gently disengaging himself. He didn’t succeed. Polly moaned and reached out, pulling him back . . .
And the next thing he knew he was waking up next to her, and he knew that a good many hours had passed.
As he moved, Polly snorted a huge sigh and rolled over. He detached himself and scuttled out from under just in time to avoid being crushed. Moving as quietly as he could, he stood up, looking around. The stateroom window was still black. He had no idea of the time. He thought for a moment of lying down next to Polly again, soaking in the warmth of her great, muscular torso; but there was, he thought, the possibility that Marguery Darp was still in the blimp’s lounge, waiting for him to return.
It was a silly thought, and of course it was wrong. No one moved in the narrow passageways of the blimp. The lights were all turned down. The lounge was empty.
Sandy sat down on a window seat, gazing out. The sky was dark, but filled with bright stars. The gentle motion of the blimp wasn’t worrying any more; it was almost comforting. Perhaps he was getting his “sea legs,” Sandy thought, and then leaned forward, perplexed. For a moment he thought he saw another constellation of stars, actually below him, a bright cluster of red and white and green lights.
It wasn’t stars. It could only be another blimp, sliding silently along a thousand feet below them, crossing their track from somewhere to somewhere else.
“Sir?”
He turned around guiltily. A sleepy-eyed crew member was peering at him from the doorway. “Would you care for some coffee, sir?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, please,” he said at once. “With a lot of cream and sugar.”
“Right away, sir,” she said, and hesitated. “I can turn the television on for you, if you like. Or there’s music on the ship system—there are headphones at your seat.”
“Maybe later,” he said politely. He wasn’t quite ready to watch Earthly television. He wasn’t even quite ready to talk to Marguery Darp, he decided, even if she had been available, because there was a lot that he needed to think about. The first, and worst, thing, of course, was Obie. He felt the tingle at the back of his nose that warned him that tears were nearby as he thought about Obie. He didn’t try to restrain them. He was, he realized, probably the only person in the universe who would even consider crying over Obie. Certainly no one on this planet would. Just as certainly, no one on the Hakh’hli ship would mourn, though a few members of the ship’s crew might be interested enough to check the name and lineage of HoCheth’ik ti’Koli-kak 5329 against their own, out of curiosity, to see what sort of kin they might have been.
But Obie was dead.
And Obie was not the first. One after another, the people dearest to Sandy went and died on him—his mother, before he was born; MyThara, going voluntarily to feed the titch’hik; and now Oberon, foolishly showing off and paying for his folly. But he wasn’t the only one who had paid! Sandy had to pay, too! He wasn’t merely grieving for Oberon, he realized; he was definitely angry at him.
When the coffee came, Sandy swallowed the first sweet, thick cup fast enough to make his throat burn, then poured another. The sugar relieved the nagging hunger he hadn’t realized he was feeling. It also, for some trivial reason he could not quite identify, elevated his mood—not a lot, maybe, but to a point where the tears were no longer threatening. Partly, he thought, it might have been the fact that “coffee” contained “caffeine” and “caffeine” was called a “stimulant.” Partly it was a kind of interior pride that he was adjusting so well to Earthly foods and drinks. The next time Marguery suggested a “drink,” he decided, he would be a little more adventurous than diluted wine. He had seen Hamilton Boyle drinking what was called a “Scotch on the rocks,” and if Boyle could enjoy it, Sandy could, too.
He thought, remembering what the crew member had said, that there were other Earthly pleasures for him to practice enjoying. He found the headphones for his seat, managed to get them more or less comfortably in place without squeezing his hearing aid too painfully and, after a little experimentation, found a channel of music that seemed to fit his mood. He lay back, listening. His mind began to blank out. Just by turning his head he could gaze at the bright stars above, and the infrequent lights of some small town sliding by on the ground below, while Tschaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony lulled him back to sleep.
He woke up to the faint murmur of his own voice.
He sat up quickly, pulling away the earphones that had twisted around his neck. He saw Hamilton Boyle standing by the lounge’s big television screen, and on the screen Sandy saw that he himself was describing to an unseen interviewer the Questions Game he and his cohort had spent twenty years playing.
“Oh, sorry,” Boyle said. “Did I wake you?”
It was a silly question. The facts spoke for themselves, but Sandy said politely, “That’s all right.”
“I was just trying to get some news on the television,” Boyle apologized. “Lieutenant Darp will be coming along in a minute. We thought you’d like some breakfast.”
“Oh, yes,” Sandy said eagerly. The window beside him was bright with sunlight. Fleecy clouds were below them, and the warmth of the sun felt good on his skin. He stood up and stretched. “I think I would like to see some ‘news’ too,” he observed.
Boyle grinned. He was a handsome man, Sandy thought. It was hard to believe that he was sixty-two years old, but that was what Marguery had told him. He had thick, pale hair, close cropped, and his face was not lined. It was a little sharp featured, Sandy thought critically, and the man smiled a lot more than there seemed to be any reason for. But he appeared to be willing to be friendly. “You’re most of the news yourself today, you know,” he said. “The only other thing that’s interesting is a reentry—one of the big old satellites is about to deorbit, and there’s some chance it will come down where it can do some damage. But we won’t know about that for sure for a couple of days yet.”
“Does that happen often?” Sandy asked, interested.
“Often enough,” Boyle said shortly, snapping the set off. He didn’t seem to want to pursue the matter, so Sandy changed the subject.
“I didn’t know you had cameras in the room yesterday. When I was talking about my life on the ship, I mean.”
Boyle looked at him speculatively. “You don’t mind, do you? Everyone’s so interested in you.”
“Especially you cops,” Sandy pointed out.
Boyle took a moment to respond, but then he said, easily enough, “Yes, I’m a policeman, more or less. It’s my job to protect society.”
“Like Kojak?”
Boyle’s eyes widened. Then he grinned. “I keep forgetting how many old television shows you’ve seen. But, yes, like Kojak. Like any good cop. I need information, and the best place to get it is from someone on the inside.”