Long before The Scarlet Pimpernel came to its heart-melting conclusion (the refugees safe, Leslie Howard triumphant, The Girl melting into his arms) the food cart arrived with their one great midday meal.
Sandy hung back from the rush. He had never learned to eat “properly,” and all his friends in the Earth-mission cohort had regretfully concluded that he never would. His diffidence in rushing the food cart proved it, for a proper Hakh’hli didn’t eat. He gobbled.
Sandy’s cohort tore into the midday meal with gusto. They made a lot of noise doing it, too. While Sandy picked daintily at his slab of meat, his friends were snapping great chunks out of the carcass and stuffing lumps of tuber and fists-full of the flavored wafers in after. The long, powerful jaws crunched. The throat muscles gulped and swallowed. Sandy could see successive wads of lightly chewed dinner chasing each other down the throats of his friends. None of the Hakh’hli actually snatched from him the morsels he had cut away for himself, but he didn’t expose them too openly. While they chewed they sucked in great quantities of the broth of the day, a sort of fishy consommé with lumps of wafer material floating in it. They sounded like half a dozen sump pumps going at once.
There was no such thing as dinner-table conversation among the Hakh’hli, nothing more than “Pass the broth bowl now!” and, “Hey, that bit’s mine!” Sandy didn’t even try to talk to them. He just sat patiently, cautiously nibbling at his own meal while he waited for the feeding frenzy to subside. In a few minutes it had. The great gobbets of food hit their respective stomachs. The Hakh’hli circulatory system rushed blood toward the digestive organs to meet the need for action. The chewing faltered and stopped, and one by one the Hakh’hli eyes went vacant, the Hakh’hli limbs went slack, and within five minutes every one of the Hakh’hli in Sandy’s cohort was stretched out unconscious in “stun time.”
Sandy sighed and walked slowly over to the food cart. Amid the wreckage there was still a fair-sized chunk of the hoo’hik meat, nibbled at but undevoured, and several handfuls of the flavored biscuits.
He took what he could carry and wandered over to his personal carrel to finish his meal in peace. Having nothing better to do while his cohort was unconscious and digesting their meal he did what he liked best to do anyway. He watched a film.
The best part of Lysander Washington’s life was also the most important part, because it was watching the old recorded television programs from Earth. He had to do that. Everybody in his cohort did, because that was how they learned Earth language and Earth ways. He also loved it. The way he liked best to do it was to curl up next to Tanya or Helen or even, if she was in a good mood that day, Polly, enjoying the smells of their scales and the warmth of their bodies, at least ten degrees hotter than his own. Together they would watch documentaries and newscasts, because they were instructed to, but when they had free choice it would be “I Love Lucy” and “Friends of Mr. Peepers” and “Leave It to Beaver.” They weren’t good recordings. They had been recorded originally from up to a dozen light-years away; in fact, they were the electronic signatures, picked up by the ship’s always-scanning sensors, that had first alerted the Hakh'hli to the fact that there was intelligent, technological life on some planet of that little G-2 star their telescopes had located.
The old family-style television sitcoms were always fun, but they made Sandy a little wistful. Sometimes he wondered what his life would be like if he had grown up on Earth, with human companions instead of Hakh’hli. Would he have played “baseball”? (Out of the question on the ship. They didn’t have the room. Or the players. Or a mild enough gravity to be able to hit a ball as far as Duke Snyder and Joe Dimaggio did.) Would he have “hung” around with his “pals” at the “malt shop”? (Whatever a “malt” was. None of the TV chefs had ever made one, and the Hakh’hli experts hadn’t been able to decide even if it ought to be sweet or sour.) Would he—maybe—have had a girl?
That was the biggest question in Lysander’s mind. To have a girl! To touch one (the touch was “like fire,” “like an electric shock”—how could those things be pleasant? But it was said they were), even to kiss one (kisses sweeter than wine! Whatever wine was), even to—
Well, to do whatever it was that humans did when they were in sexual phase. Exactly what that was he wasn’t sure. He knew what the Hakh’hli did; he’d watched the other members of his cohort often enough when they were sexual. Did humans do the same? Unfortunately he couldn’t know. If there were porn channels for TV on Earth, the ship’s receivers had never picked one up. It was apparent that human males and females kissed. They did that a lot. They took off each other’s clothes. They got in bed with each other. Sometimes they got under the covers and the covers moved about quite a lot . . . but never once did they throw the covers back to show what made those busy lumps go bump.
Every night Lysander dreamed. Almost all the dreams were the same. They were populated with female humans who knew exactly what to do—and did it. (Though he never could remember, when he woke up, exactly what it was they had done.)
Sooner or later, the Seniors promised, Lysander would be back on Earth, with all its nubile female humans. He couldn’t wait.
Sandy switched off the film he had chosen—it was called Jesus Christ, Superstar, and it was too much of a puzzle to watch alone. From his private locker he took out the photograph of his mother and looked at it. She was so beautiful! Slim, fair, blue-eyed, lovely—
The only thing that troubled Sandy was that although he knew from Earth films that men often carried pictures of their mothers and displayed them in moments of great emotion, he had never in any of those films observed that one of the mothers had been photographed in the nude. That was a puzzle that none of his cohort, or even the Hakh’hli scholars who had spent their lives trying to understand the ways of Earth people like himself, had been able to help him solve. It seemed improper to him. It was more than improper, it was confusing—because when he looked at his mother’s picture, so fair, so bare, so inviting, he had exciting, unbidden thoughts that, he was nearly sure, were not at all appropriate to the situation.
He could not understand why that was.
He was not going to understand it today, either, he decided. His meal finished, he carried the crumbs back to the messy cart and returned to the carrel to get back to work on his poem.