“Marta,” Muller said, thinking for a moment. Yes. The blue-haired wench with the swivel hips and the sharp heels. “Yes. Tell Marta. It would be nice if she met me when I landed. Woman cubes aren’t all that thrilling.”
Boardman gave him a you-said-a-mouthful-boy kind of laugh. Then he changed gears abruptly and said, “How did it go?”
“Poorly.”
“You made contact, though?”
“I found the Hydrans, yes. They didn’t kill me.”
“Were they hostile?”
“They didn’t kill me.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m alive, Charles.” Muller felt the tic beginning again. “I didn’t learn their language. I can’t tell you if they approved of me. They seemed quite interested. They studied me closely for a long time. They didn’t say a word.”
“What are they, telepaths?”
“I can’t tell you that, Charles.”
Boardman was silent for a while. “What did they do to you, Dick?”
“Nothing.”
“That isn’t so.”
“What you’re seeing is travel fatigue,” Muller said. “I’m in good shape, just a little stretched in the nerve. I want to breathe real air and drink some real beer and taste real meat, and I’d like to have some company in bed, and I’ll be as good as ever. And then maybe I’ll suggest some ways of making contact with the Hydrans.”
“How’s the gain on your broadcast system, Dick?”
“Huh?”
“You’re coming across too loud,” said Boardman.
“Blame it on the relay station. Jesus, Charles. What does the gain on my system have to do with anything?”
“I’m not sure,” Boardman said. “I’m just trying to find out why you’re shouting at me.”
“I’m not shouting,” Muller shouted.
Soon after that they broke contact. Muller had word from the traffic station that they were ready to send a pilot aboard. He got the hatch ready, and let the man in. The pilot was a very blond young man with hawklike features and pale skin. As soon as he unhelmeted he said, “My name is Les Christiansen, Mr. Muller, and I want to tell you that it’s an honor and a privilege for me to be the pilot for the first man to visit an alien race. I hope I’m not breaking security when I say that I’d love to know a little about it while we’re descending. I mean, this is sort of a moment in history, me being the first to see you in person since you’re back, and if it’s not an intrusion I’d be grateful if you’d tell me just some of the—highlights—of your—of—”
“I guess I can tell you a little,” Muller said affably. “First, did you see the cube of the Hydrans? I know it was supposed to be shown, and—”
“You mind if I sit down a second, Mr. Muller?”
“Go ahead. You saw them, then, the tall skinny things with all the arms—”
“I feel very woozy,” said Christiansen. “I don’t know what’s happening.” His face was crimson, suddenly, and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. “I think I must be getting sick. I—you know, this shouldn’t be happening—” The pilot crumpled into a webfoam cradle and huddled there, shivering, covering his head with his hands. Muller, his voice still rusty from the long silences of his mission, hesitated helplessly. Finally he reached down to take the man’s elbow and guide him toward the medic chamber. Christiansen whirled away as if touched by fiery metal. The motion pulled him off balance and sent him into a heap on the cabin floor. He rose to his knees and wriggled until he was as far away from Muller as it was possible to get. In a strangled voice he said, “Where is it?”
“That door here.”
Christiansen rushed for it, sealed himself in, and rattled the door to make sure of it. Muller, astonished, heard retching sounds, and then something that could have been a series of dry sobs. He was about to signal the traffic station that the pilot was sick, when the door opened a little and Christiansen said in a muffled voice, “Would you hand me my helmet, Mr. Muller?”
Muller gave it to him.
“I’m going to have to go back to my station, Mr. Muller.”
“I’m sorry you reacted this way. Christ, I hope I’m not carrying some kind of contagion.”
“I’m not sick. I just feel-lousy.” Christiansen fastened the helmet in place. “I don’t understand. But I want to curl up and cry. Please let me go, Mr. Muller. It-I-that is-it’s terrible. That’s what I feel!” He rushed into the hatch. In bewilderment Muller watched him cross the void to the nearby traffic station.
He got on the radio. “You better not send another pilot over just yet,” Muller told the controller. “Christiansen folded up with instant plague as soon as he took his helmet off. I may be carrying something. Let’s check it out.”
The controller, looking troubled, agreed. He asked Muller to go to his medic chamber, set up the diagnostat, and transmit its report. A little while later the solemn chocolate-hued face of the station’s medical officer appeared on Muller’s screen and said, “This is very odd, Mr. Muller.”
“What is?”
“I’ve run your diagnostat transmission through our machine. No unusual symptoms. I’ve also put Christiansen through the works without learning anything. He feels fine now, he says. He told me that an acute depression hit him the moment he saw you, and it deepened in a hurry to a sort of metabolic paralysis. That is, he felt so gloomy that he could hardly function.”
“Is he prone to these attacks?”
“Never,” the medic replied. “I’d like to check this out myself. May I come over?”
The medic didn’t curl up with the miseries as Christiansen had done. But he didn’t stay long, either, and when he left his face was glossy with tears. He looked as baffled as Muller. When the new pilot appeared twenty minutes later, he kept his suit on as he programmed the ship for planetary descent. Sitting rigidly upright at his controls, his back turned to Muller, he said nothing, scarcely acknowledged Muller’s presence. As required by law, he brought the ship down until its drive system was in the grip of a groundside landing regulator, and took his leave. Muller saw the man’s face, tense, sweat-shiny, tight-lipped. The pilot nodded curtly, and went through the hatch. I must have a very bad smell, Muller thought, if he could smell it through his suit like that.
The landing was routine.
At the starport he cleared Immigration quickly. It took only half an hour for Earth to decide that he was acceptable; and Muller, who had passed through these computer banks hundreds of times before, figured that that was close to the record. He had feared that the giant starport diagnostat would detect whatever malady he carried that his own equipment and the traffic station medic had failed to find; but he passed through the bowels of the machine, letting it bounce sonics off his kidneys, and extract some molecules of his various bodily fluids, and at length he emerged without the ringing of bells and the flashing of warning lights. Approved. He spoke to the Customs machine. Where from, traveler? Where bound? Approved. His papers were in order. A slit in the wall widened into a doorway and he stepped through, to confront another human being for the first time since his landing.
Boardman had come to meet him. Marta was with him. A thick brown robe shot through with dull metal enfolded Boardman; he seemed weighted down with rings, and his brooding eyebrows were thick as dark tropical moss. Marta’s hair was short and sea-green; she had silvered her eyes and gilded the slender column of her throat, so that she looked like some jeweled statuette of herself. Remembering her wet and naked from the crystalline lake, Muller disapproved of these changes. He doubted that they had been made for his benefit. Boardman, he knew, liked his women ornate; it was probable that they had been bedding in his absence. Muller would have been surprised and even a little shaken if they had not.