Giyt had seen the great portal before, of course; in fact, he had come through it himself with Rina, because how else could you travel the vast distances from Earth? But he’d never seen it from outside with power on, when it was already wreathed in the golden glow of what he had learned to call the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen field and thus was ready to receive a transmission from Earth. Inside the chamber Giyt could see crates of merchandise ready to ship. He knew what they had to be. At the polar factories the Earth colony had a small production line that turned out various kinds of toys, trinkets, and knickknacks to export to the home planet—nothing very valuable, but, Giyt supposed, every little bit that helped offset the cost of the Tupelo colony was worth having.
The thing that struck Giyt as curious was the number of nonhumans at the terminal. Five of them—and Hagbarth—were seated or slumped at workstations around the terminal. That made sense. As Wili Tschopp had explained, there was this rule requiring all six races to be present whenever the terminal was operational. But there were at least one or two others present of each race, and what could interest them about a purely Earth matter?
He got the answer in a moment. There was a blue-and-white warning flare; then a faint hand-clap of air as the stacked merchandise disappeared; a moment later a gentle puff as the export crates were replaced with others. At once the nonhumans descended on them, opening every crate and peering inside. It looked like a customs search to Giyt, and then recognition clicked in his mind. It was a customs search. The nonhumans were looking for contraband, and they were being damned thorough about it. Wili Tschopp was protesting vigorously, but the eetie representatives were insisting on opening every carton.
Hoak Hagbarth abandoned his post at the controls and, yawning, strolled over to where Giyt stood. Giyt blinked at him. “That doesn’t bother you, what they’re doing to the shipment from Earth?”
“Naw. Those guys are always like that. Look, Wili said you wanted to see me about something.”
“Oh, right.” Giyt was still staring at the commotion before him; a Kalkaboo had opened a crate of chiplets, the microcontrollers that ran most devices, and Wili was profanely urging him to be careful, while the Slug and a Delt were pawing through containers of personal goods meant for various human residents. “It’s this power-rationing thing. The Kalkaboos say—”
Hagbarth sighed. “I heard all about what the Kalkaboos say. Same old crap; don’t sweat it. I’ll cook up some kind of an airy-fairy program for you before the next meeting. Nothing that we need to take seriously, of course.”
“But if the Kalkaboos really need the power—”
Hagbarth chuckled unpleasantly. “Need it? Do you know what they need the power for? They use UV radiation to get high. You see how they go around naked here, with all those little photocells on their skins? Well, they don’t do that on their home planet. They’d be buzzed from the radiation all the time, so there they go covered up totally. When they have a party they take off all their clothes and get smashed from the ultraviolet.”
“Oh,” Giyt said, abashed. But as he turned to leave, Wili Tschopp came toward him, grinning, an opened carton in his hands. “Might as well take this with you, Giyt,” he said. “It’s for your wife. I always said you were one lucky guy.” Giyt looked after him, puzzled, as the man walked away, chuckling. Then he looked into the carton and understood. It was a selection of chains, handcuffs, and a fancily pink-wrapped packet of what the label called “marital aids.” And yes, the whole box was addressed to Mrs. Rina Giyt.
VI
We have established that both the so-called Centaurians and the so-called Slugs come from planets that orbit the star Alpha Centauri, and that the so-called Delts come from the system of the star Delta Pavonis. The provenance of the other two extraterrestrial races remains unknown. They decline to respond to any questions on the subject, nor have our searches turned up any data that would resolve it.
It is a noteworthy fact—it cannot be called a coincidence—that the automatic probes dispatched by the Huntsville Group to both of the above stars have lost contact even before they established circumstellar orbits. Analysis indicates a very high probability that these losses were not due to equipment malfunctions or accident. This leaves only one reasonable explanation.
When Giyt gave Rina the package she was a little irritated, a little amused, and a little bit hurt; too. She stood there with her palmtop in one hand and her shoulder bag in the other, just getting ready to go out, looking both startled and disappointed. “But I didn’t get those things for us, Shammy!” she said. “I wouldn’t try anything like that on you, would I? I know how you feel about them. I ordered them for Lupe.”
“Lupe next door?”
“Do you know any other Lupe? She was afraid that when she gets real pregnant, you know, Matya might not be so interested in her anymore.”
“Oh.” Giyt cast around for something to explain his jumping to a wrong conclusion. “I just didn’t know that women went in for this, ah, this dominatrix kind of thing.”
“Well, they do,” she said firmly. “Anyway, some women do. When I was in the game I had quite a few female clients, you know. It was pretty hard work sometimes, but they were mostly good tippers.” She went back to stowing her gear in the bag, and when she spoke again the subject was clearly changed. “I think I’ll see if Lupe wants to take a run down to the store and see what came in this time. Do you want to come along?”
Giyt didn’t. He said he wished he could, but he had work that he had to do, which was no more than a faint tincture of truth in a solid lie. The main truth was that he did not want to see Lupe just then, because he did not want to find himself speculating on just what it was that she and Matya did in the privacy of their bedroom. Much less on what Rina had had to do, in the old days, to earn those good tips.
The tiny tincture of truth was that he did have a good many things to do, and nowhere near enough time to do them all in.
Giyt had never in his life wished for more hours in a day. He certainly didn’t wish for them here, either, because the long Tupelovian day already possessed nearly ten more hours than the Earth norm. That was one of the problems. The daylight hours were easy enough to deal with, especially because they were quite pleasantly interrupted by the after-lunch siesta. It was the night that was disorienting. You went to sleep in the dark and, because you couldn’t sleep much more than eight hours at a time, no matter how hard you tried, you woke up in the dark, too.
Still, those four or five hours between wakeup and sunrise were precious. People didn’t call each other then, or come to visit. The official workday didn’t begin until the explosion of Kalkaboo firecrackers announced the dawn, and so Giyt had those hours for his own.
He used them for uninterrupted work. For trying to read all the reports that no one bothered to read at commission meetings, and then for trying to catch up on all the things he didn’t know about Tupelo and his new life.
There were enough of those things to use up a good many of those valuable morning hours—things like learning the planet’s geography, identifying the various kinds of work that kept the Earth-human community occupied, trying to figure out the nature of all those bizarre extraterrestrials who had suddenly become his townies. Well, learning everything. All that stuff was in the databanks, of course, but it was still a lot to try to learn in a hurry. And then there was all the new information that kept coming in every day, four times a day, from Lt. Silva Cristl’s news-chat programs on the net.