But he shivered at the prospect. He had been two months and a week and two days absolutely alone in the Khasr ship. At fourteen years old, a human doesn't like to be alone. He had companionship among humans. Mike was his friend. He was older and felt much wiser and he treated Johnny with the consciously superior tolerance of an older brother. But he was a friend, and Johnny had never had a friend before. He'd had only officially appointed playmates and tutors. He yearned over Mike.
When the ground swelled up toward the ship he was tense and his throat ached. He saw the sky change to a lucent blue. He saw the mottled Earth below him take on tints which were not the colors of the vegetation to which he was accustomed. He saw clouds. . . .
He was deathly pale when he walked out of the battleship. He moved rather like a sleepwalker. He saw a blue sky instead of a yellow one, and the grass was green instead of purplish. And it looked right! He'd never dreamed of a world like this. He'd never imagined the smells that greeted his nostrils. He was shaken; he was stunned—and he felt an enormous welcoming in every molecule of the ground beneath him and every touch of air against his cheek. When he heard bird-songs, his throat swelled as if it would lock tight and strangle him. And he hadn't the least idea why. When he tried to ask Mike, humbly, his lips trembled and he couldn't form the words. There were even tears in his eyes and he was bitterly ashamed.
But Mike knew what was the matter. After all, Earth has been the home of human beings for hundreds of thousands of years. Every look and sound and smell of Earth has been part of the human heritage for thousands of generations. The feel of Earth is in the very germ-plasm of humanity. No other place, anywhere, can ever look wholly right to human eyes. So Johnny wasn't the first human being to see Earth for the first time and feel that desperate, overwhelming sensation of belonging which tells interstellar travelers that they have come home.
Mike put his arm gruffly about Johnny's shoulders.
"Everybody feels funny at first," he said curtly. "Hold everything. I've got to leave. You're coming along with me."
He said it casually, but it was a decision of a very high authority indeed, one who'd read all the reports on Johnny and his intended treason, and said, "Poor devil! We've got to do something for him!" So Mike had shore-leave and his family had uneasily agreed to take over Johnny until it was decided what could be done with him.
He didn't think much on the ride to Mike's home. He was dazed. He had trouble breathing. He saw trees. He saw grass. He saw birds flying. He heard the senseless, ineffably sweet sound of whirring insects in a field in sunshine.
When the ground-car stopped, Johnny was an explosive bundle of nerves. The car stopped at a house. It was utterly unlike an eight-sided tower under a yellow sky. It glowed warmly in the sunshine. Mike whooped and jumped out. A big brown animal with shaggy fur and only four legs came bounding frantically to meet him. The animal had a tail which wagged frantically, and he uttered yelps of joy. He and Mike rolled on the ground in a panting, squirming heap because they were glad to be together again. Then the door of the house opened and a woman and a girl came out. Johnny had never seen a woman before. Or a girl.
The girl's hair was red, like Mike's, and her eyes were intensely, tremendously blue. Mike gasped from the ground where he tumbled with the dog:
"That's my sister Pat, and that's my mother, Johnny."
The girl Pat was younger than Mike. Younger than Johnny. But she put out her hand and—he'd been instructed—Johnny accepted it. He was trembling. Like the dog which was glad to see Mike. This girl who smiled at him. . . . Mike's mother smiling at him too . . .
When Mike's mother put her arms around him, Johnny went all to pieces. But people who have been born on other planets often go all to pieces when they first set foot on Earth.
A CERTAIN uneasiness was felt about Johnny, of course. He'd been raised to believe he was a Khasr, and he'd come to Earth to destroy the human race on their behalf. But at Mike's home he was with Mike, who was his friend. And there was Pat, whom Johnny tried to learn to treat with the grandly superior yet kindly manner of Mike himself. But it was not always easy to play a part, however passionately Johnny might want to. He saw the sun set for the first time. He saw sunrise. He saw the stars from Earth's surface, and the full moon floating in the sky. Mike's dog made friends with him—and to someone who'd been raised to think himself a Khasr, that was an overwhelming experience. Johnny couldn't pretend about that. He saw the sea, and flowers blooming. He tried to conceal the effect of all these things upon him. He tried to mimic Mike's blithe irresponsibility. But Mike's sister Pat grinned wickedly at him when he tried to use Mike's own very manner. She seemed to realize that Johnny was having, at fourteen—two years older than herself —all the experiences most people have as babies, when they're practically wasted. She bossed him a little, and he tried to patronize her.
Johnny was very happy, in Mike's house and treated as if he were Mike's brother, even by Mike's sister and his dog.
But there were moments when the unobtrusively watching adults had their doubts. There was the night when Pat came in the room where Johnny sweated to learn a game—and carefully think in terms of fair-play as humans thought of it and not as Khasr grandeur. Pat had a natural-history book in her hand.
"Johnny!" she said firmly, "I just thought! You've never seen spiders. Have you? Like this?"
Johnny looked at the page. There was a picture. Mike's mother glanced casually to see. She tensed a little. The picture was of a Mygale Hentzii—the American tarantula. It was a good-sized picture, magnified. The creature was eight-legged, with furry armor over its limbs. Its expression of implacable ferocity was shudder-inspiring. Johnny looked carefully.
"That looks like Tork," he said steadily. After a moment he added, "He raised me. He was my nurse ... my teacher."
Pat looked blankly. Mike scowled at her. She looked apprehensively at her mother. Johnny noticed. He swung about and looked up.
"I've never been allowed to go back to the ship I came on," he said quietly. "And nobody says anything about the Khasr to me. People have found out what the purpose of my voyage to Earth was and what that ship was supposed to do, haven't they?
Mike's mother drew her breath in sharply. She'd been advised to do what Johnny asked. She said matter-of-factly:
"Yes. They found out."
Johnny said thoughtfully:
"It would have killed everything. Animals. Birds. Dogs. Everything. You and Pat, too. And Mike." Mike's mother nodded.
"I know." She repeated. "They found out."
Johnny turned back to his game. Then he glanced again at the page of the natural-history book—at the tarantula.
"That does look a lot like Tork," he observed. "My move?"
So there was something less than complete satisfaction about Johnny's future as a human being. There was unease.
NEXT day Pat showed Johnny some spiders. Mike went looking for a web of one of the big yellow-banded garden ones, which weave bands of silk in the centers of their snares. But Pat led the way competently to the back of the ground-car shed. She expertly turned over stones and stirred up dried leaves. Then she said:
"There, Johnny! There's a spider!"
Mike's mother was listening. Nobody knew exactly what was going on in Johnny's head, and it might be deplorable. He'd been raised to think he was a Khasr, and while he acted normally, now ...
"That's like the picture," she heard Johnny say. "Sure! He doesn't look like Tork, though. He looks like the lecturer who came to teach me how to act when I pretended to be human."
There was a sudden movement. Mike's mother heard Pat say: