They entered the old man’s spaceship and journeyed five days to a small unnamed planetoid. When they landed, the old man took Toms to the bank of a swift flowing river, where the water ran fiery red, with green diamonds of foam. The trees that grew on the banks of that river were stunted and strange, and colored vermilion. Even the grass was unlike grass, for it was orange and blue.
“How alien!” gasped Toms.
“It is the least human spot I’ve found in this humdrum corner of the galaxy,” Varris explained. “And believe me, I’ve done some looking.”
Toms stared at him, wondering if the old man was out of his mind. But soon he understood what Varris meant.
For months, he had been studying human reactions and human feelings, and surrounding it all was the now suffocating feeling of soft human flesh. He had immersed himself in humanity, studied it, bathed in it, eaten and drunk and dreamed it. It was a relief to be here, where the water ran red and the trees were stunted and strange and vermilion, and the grass was orange and blue, and there was no reminder of Earth.
Toms and Varris separated, for even each other’s humanity was a nuisance. Toms spent his days wandering along the river edge, marveling at the flowers which moaned when he came near them. At night, three wrinkled moons played tag with each other, and the morning sun was different from the yellow sun of Earth.
At the end of a week, refreshed and renewed, Toms and Varris returned to G’cel, the Tyanian city dedicated to the study of love.
Toms was taught the five hundred and six shades of Love Proper, from the first faint possibility to the ultimate feeling, which is so powerful that only five men and one woman have experienced it, and the strongest of them survived less than an hour.
Under the tutelage of a bank of small, interrelated calculators, he studied the intensification of love.
He learned all of the thousand different sensations of which the human body is capable, and how to augment them, and how to intensify them until they become unbearable, and how to make the unbearable bearable, and finally pleasurable, at which point the organism is not far from death.
After that, he was taught some things which have never been put into words and, with luck, never will.
“And that,” Varris said one day, “is everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes, Toms. The heart has no secrets from you. Nor, for that matter, has the soul, or mind, or the viscera. You have mastered the Language of Love. Now return to your young lady.”
“I will!” cried Toms. “At last she will know!”
“Drop me a postcard,” Varris said. “Let me know how you’re getting on.”
“I’ll do that,” Toms promised. Fervently he shook his teacher’s hand and departed for Earth.
At the end of the long trip, Jefferson Toms hurried to Doris’s home. Perspiration beaded his forehead, and his hands were shaking. He was able to classify the feeling as Stage Two Anticipatory Tremors, with mild masochistic overtones. But that didn’t help—this was his first field work, and he was nervous. Had he mastered everything?
He rang the bell.
She opened the door and Toms saw that she was more beautiful than he had remembered, her eyes smoky-gray and misted with tears, her hair the color of a rocket exhaust, her figure slight but sweetly curved. He felt again the lump in his throat and sudden memories of autumn, evening, rain, and candlelight.
“I’m back,” he croaked.
“Oh, Jeff,” she said, very softly. “Oh, Jeff.”
Toms simply stared, unable to say a word.
“It’s been so long, Jeff, and I kept wondering if it was all worth it. Now I know.”
“You—know?”
“Yes, my darling! I waited for you! I’d wait a hundred years, or a thousand! I love you, Jeff!”
She was in his arms.
“Now tell me, Jeff,” she said, “Tell me!”
And Toms looked at her, and felt, and sensed, searched his classifications, selected his modifiers, checked and double-checked. And after much searching, and careful selection, and absolute certainty, and allowing for his present state of mind, and not forgetting to take into account climatic conditions, phases of the Moon, wind speed and direction, Sun spots, and other phenomena which have their due effect upon love, he said:
“My dear, I am rather fond of you.”
“Jeff! Surely you can say more than that! The Language of Love—”
“The Language is damnably precise,” Toms said wretchedly. “I’m sorry, but the phrase ‘I am rather fond of you’ expresses precisely what I feel.”
“Oh, Jeff!”
“Yes,” he mumbled.
“Oh, damn you, Jeff!”
There was, of course, a painful scene and a very painful separation. Toms took to traveling.
He held jobs here and there, working as a riveter at Saturn-Lockheed, a wiper on the Helg-Vinosce Trader, a farmer for a while on a kibbutz on Israel IV. He bummed around the Inner Dalmian System for several years, living mostly on handouts. Then, at Novilocessile, he met a pleasant, brown-haired girl, courted her, and, in due course, married her and set up housekeeping.
Their friends say that the Tomses are tolerably happy, although their home makes most people uncomfortable. It is a pleasant enough place, but the rushing red river nearby makes people edgy. And who can get used to vermilion trees, and orange-and-blue grass, and moaning flowers, and three wrinkled moons playing tag in the alien sky?
Toms likes it, though, and Mrs. Toms is, if nothing else, a flexible young lady.
Toms wrote a letter to his philosophy professor on Earth, saying that he had solved the problem of the demise of the Tyanian race, at least to his own satisfaction. The trouble with scholarly research, he wrote, is the inhibiting effect it has upon action. The Tyanians, he was convinced, had been so preoccupied with the science of love, after a while they just didn’t get around to making any.
And eventually he sent a short postcard to George Varris. He simply said that he was married, having succeeded in finding a girl for whom he felt “quite a substantial liking.”
“Lucky devil,” Varris growled, after reading the card. “‘Vaguely enjoyable’ was the best I could ever find.”
MORNING AFTER
SLOWLY and unwillingly, Piersen recovered consciousness. He lay on his back, eyes tightly closed, trying to postpone the inevitable awakening. But consciousness returned and brought sensation with it. Needles of pain stabbed at his eyeballs, and the base of his skull began to pound like a giant heart. His joints seemed to be on fire, and his stomach was a deep well of nausea.
It was no relief for him to realize that he was suffering from the absolute king and emperor of all hangovers.
Piersen had considerable knowledge of hangovers. He had experienced most of them in his time—the alcohol jitters, the miniscarette depressions, the triple skliti nerve ache. But this hangover felt like a combination and intensification of them all, with heroin withdrawal symptoms thrown in for good measure.
What had he been drinking last night? And where? He tried to remember, but last night, like so many nights in his life, was a featureless blur. He would have to reconstruct it, as usual, piece by piece.
Well, he decided, it was time to do the manly thing. Time to open his eyes, get out of bed, and walk bravely to the medicine chest. A hypo of di-chloral right down the main line ought to bring him around.
Piersen opened his eyes and started to get out of bed. Then he realized that he wasn’t in bed.
He was lying in tall grass, with a glaring white sky overhead and the odor of decaying vegetation in his nostrils.
He groaned and closed his eyes again. This was too much. He must have been really boiled last night, potted, fried, roasted, and done to a turn. Hadn’t even made it home. Apparently he had passed out in Central Park. Now he’d have to hail a flit and hold himself together until he could reach his apartment.