In spite of all their efforts at drawing in the eetie colonists, most of the crowd was human. (If crowd wasn’t too strong a term for the fifteen or twenty people wandering among the two dozen booths; but, as Matya de Mir pointed out when she relieved him for a ten-minute pee break, it was early yet and a lot of people were still at work.) Just after the opening there had been a considerable but brief invasion of Petty-Primes, four or five of their Designated Mothers shepherding what Giyt supposed to be every young one in the Petty-Prime colony. (Which was a lot. Petty-Primes had a very long childhood, which meant that by the time they reached sexual maturity they were fully educated and ready to be adult citizens.) But the Petty-Prime kits hadn’t stayed long. They weren’t allowed to eat anything the Taste of Tupelo offered. Worse, all the rides were too big, and all the games of chance too hard, for Petty-Prime children. The other eetie communities were represented mostly by two or three pairs of Slugs that were cruising silently around in their damp-conditioned carts, never stopping at any of the booths, but not leaving, either.
Giyt’s own job was running what they called the coconut shy. It had hard rubber balls instead of coconuts, with an inviting pyramid of dolls and gadgets at the back of the booth for anyone who could knock one down. That did not often happen. The game was fixed. Each ball had a tiny cupro-nickel core, and Chief Tschopp had privately showed Giyt the button under the counter that would activate a continuously varying magnetic field between the contestant and the prizes. Not even the inhumanly skilled Delts could win unless Giyt let them. He didn’t. As a result he had few customers at his booth; next to the wheel of fortune, across the way from the kitchen where Lupe and Rina, among others, were frying potatoes and chicken parts in a huge caldron of fat. Giyt kept looking across at them with concern. It was hot enough where he was; it had to be a lot worse next to the fryer, especially for two pregnant women.
A female voice interrupted his dark thoughts. It turned out to belong to Mariam Vardersehn, his predecessor as mayor of the human colony. “Morning, Giyt,” she said, not sounding particularly friendly. “You want to turn off the magnet so I can try to get that Kewpie doll?”
He looked cautiously around, then did as she asked. All the same, she missed with the first three balls, fared even worse with the next three. That was enough. “The twins aren’t big enough for dolls yet anyway,” she said. “How are you liking being mayor?”
“So far, so good. I guess you don’t miss it, though.”
She gave him a look, then sighed. “Actually,” she said, “it was better than changing diapers in this heat.”
Her tone made Giyt give her a closer look. “You almost sound as though you’d like to have the job back.”
“What does it matter what I’d like?” she asked moodily. “Only, if you ever make up your mind to quit, be sure to let me know.”
So Giyt had something else to think about. As far as he could see, there was no way for Mariam Vardersehn to undo the election that had given him the mayoralty. Unless, of course, he were to resign, but he had no intention of that, if only because he didn’t particularly like the woman. For that matter, in some moods he didn’t even particularly like the job. But the fact that she seemed to want it back made it just that little bit more attractive to him.
Which; Giyt told himself with amusement, was pretty stupid, and when Hoak Hagbarth came by he was smiling at himself.
Hagbarth winked at Giyt, paid for three balls, missed with each of them, and grinned back at him. “You look happy. Business that good?” he asked.
Giyt, who had no way of knowing how business was supposed to be, shrugged. “I thought there’d be more people, after all the publicity we did. Did you see me on the other-race news broadcasts?”
Hagbarth looked startled. “How can you see the other-race broadcasts? They use their own systems.” Then Giyt had to explain that, out of curiosity—he didn’t say for the sake of giving his wife pleasure—he had spent some hard hours figuring out how to convert their standards to the ones the human colonists used. “Hey,” Hagbarth said admiringly, “that’s great. Show me how you did it sometime, will you?”
“Sure.”
“I mean really,” Hagbarth persisted. “You know you’ve got a lot of tricks up your sleeve that you say you’re going to show me, but I’m still waiting.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry don’t cut it, Evesham. You know what we’ve got here, don’t you? Just a handful of human beings among”—he looked around and lowered his voice—“all these freaks. We have to stick together. So any way we can help each other out, we have to do it, right? Or the freaks will win. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Giyt nodded.
“I knew I could count on you,” Hagbarth said, reaching across the counter to pat Giyt’s arm. “We’re all patriots here, aren’t we? We just have to work at it a little harder than we would back home, that’s all.”
XIII
The provenance of the extraterrestrial race called “Kalkaboos” is unknown. From other evidence certain facts about it can be deduced. Their native planet’s atmosphere appears to have been richer in oxygen than either Earth’s or Tupelo’s, though the difference is not normally enough to handicap the Kalkaboos in their life on Tupelo, Their planet’s sun is almost certainly brighter than Earth’s, particularly in the extreme ultraviolet frequencies, but it has never been identified.
The Kalkaboos were the third sentient race to arrive on Tupelo, considerably later than the Centaurians and the Slugs. When the Kalkaboos appeared, they presented a problem for the prior colonists. They had only two options: to resist the new arrivals or to permit them to join. Since resistance would almost certainly involve combat—and since both the Centaurians and the Slugs feared that such a conflict might easily escalate to involve themselves—they decided the lesser evil was to let the Kalkaboos remain, subject to their adhering to the terms of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace. After a short transition period the Kalkaboos, too, were granted a seat on the planet’s Joint Governance Commission.
When Tupelo’s long, long evening began, the crowds at the fair picked up. Most of the human population put in an appearance for at least a half an hour or so—had little enough choice about it, really, because nearly all of them were relatives or neighbors of a fireman. A scattering of the other races appeared too. Giyt kept feeding balls to a whole Delt family—Papa, Mama, four half-grown young—as they doggedly did their best to knock off a cuckoo clock or a stuffed panda. Even with the magnets working against them they came close—came closer still when Giyt belatedly realized who the male was. “You haven’t recognize?” the Delt asked aggrievedly. “I am he who have been you pilot voyaging to Energy Island, God’s sake; we have good talk about you famous Earth-human liar Kepigay. How can you have forget?”
“Sorry,” Giyt said. He started to reach out to shake hands with the Delt, then thought better of it; he didn’t want any of that fetid Delt aroma coming off on him. Instead he surreptitiously switched off the magnetic field. After that it required only four shots from the female to collect three prizes.