The Creatures of Man (11 page)

"What you've told me might prove helpful," I said, "and if it is, I'll Admire your wisdom to an extent commensurate with what I receive."

The hermit shrugged. "Forget it, boy. Admiration is of little concern to me. Go with my blessing, young man."

"M-many thanks then, holiness," I stammered, caught a bit off balance by the hermit's indifference to Admires. What a self-sufficient old jack he was!

I returned to my ship. "Where does the Standing Consolidation Commission of the Department of Justice have its office?" I asked.

"On Homeworld Earth," replied the ship.

"That's where we're going, so back to the Milky Way Galaxy," I announced gaily. "I haven't found Profanis, but I have information the Commission will probably Admire to the extent of a thousand or two Units. My 211 Units will soon have plenty of company, ship!"

"Beg pardon, sir, but your balance is now 32 Units," the ship corrected me.

"Huh?
What happened?"

"You experienced a burst of Admiration for the hermit, sir, at the conclusion of your interview with him."

That sly old fraud! He had slicked me!

Even if the Earth system is the universe's biggest tourist hangout, I like to go there now and then.

This time I came in past Saturn, the gas giant with the rings, and slowed the ship long enough to look at it. Saturn's good for that if for nothing else.

Saturn was sticking in my mind as I dropped on toward Homeworld. Frowning, I picked up the Profanis plaper to refresh my thoughts on what I was going to tell those Consolidation guys.

And there was Saturn again!

No . . . It was just the smudged seventh satellite in the drawing of the Profanis system. The smudge did look somewhat like a ring, badly drawn in an ink of lighter density than that used in the original.

Could it mean anything?

I shook my head. Saturn was a planet, not a satellite. And it wasn't the outermost in the system. Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and a couple of unnamed others lay farther out.

But still . . .

I said, "Ship, don't land. Go into orbit around Earth and let me see the sky."

"Yes, sir. What amplification?"

"No amp. Let me see it like it looks."

The ship flickered and went invisible, and I stared about. A crescent Earth was below. Above were the stars, arranged in the familiar nursery constellations.

I picked out the plane of the ecliptic and had no trouble spotting the Moon, Mars, and Saturn.

"Where's Jupiter, ship?"

"Obscured by Earth at the moment, sir."

"Well, what about Uranus?"

"Here, sir." A pointer flashed on, pointing at a blank.

"I don't see it there, ship. Check yourself."

"I'm correct, sir. Uranus is too dim to be visible without magnification, sir."

"Oh. Neptune, too?"

"Yes, sir.

I grimaced. Well, here I go down another false trail, I told myself.

But the point remained that Saturn was the outermost visible object in the Earth system without using light-amp.

"Ship, let's put this in the simplest form," I said. "How many heavenly bodies could a man on Earth see, just with his eyes, that moved against the background stars?"

"Seven, sir. That includes the sun, Earth's satellite Luna, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn."

"Okay, did you notice the ring-like smudge on the seventh satellite?"

"Yes, sir."

"All right. Let's say Profanis is Earth and this drawing was made way, way back, before spaceflight or light-amp was discovered. Then light-amp comes along. Some guy sees Saturn has rings, so he tries to add them to the drawing, making a messy job of it. What do you think?"

"Homeplanet Earth is not the center of the system, sir," the ship responded.

"Well, no, but would an ignorant guy eyeballing from Earth have to see that?" I argued. "He might notice that Mercury and Venus stuck close to the sun, but other than that, the sun's only difference from the other objects would be its brightness. And all the complicated planetary motions would probably snow him, anyway; and he would give up and put them all on neat, circular orbits."

"That is possible, sir. There remains the problem of the name, Profanis."

I paused in thought. What the hermit had said about the world's distance from the starwall came to mind. But maybe there was more to it than that.

"Ship," I said fervently, "if I was stuck on just one planet, Profanis would be about the least impolite name I would call it!"

There was a silence of several seconds. Then the ship said, "The probability is .992 that you have found Profanis, sir."

I just sat there for a while. My feeling of calm and confidence was new to me, and I wanted to savor it, because I didn't figure it would last.

But it did.

I'd promised myself that I'd go to Bwymeall if I ever got a real bundle; so after collecting my 8,000 Units, that's where I went. And who did I run into right away but that twirliest of all twirls, Lumise Nalence.

I grinned at her. "You're Lumise, and I'm Boje Rylsten," I said. "I've been hoping for a chance to get acquainted with you."

"How sweet of you, Boje," she replied, sticking to the formula. "I do so wish I could take the time right now, but . . . Would you wait a moment while I check with my ship and see if my schedule's open?"

"Sure."

She hurried away to check on me. That's part of the ritual, too, as you may not know if you've never done much twirl-chasing. She wanted to see if I could afford her, and if I am the Admiring type. I didn't have a thing to worry about on either score. And, sure enough, Lumise was back immediately, exuding eagerness and come-hither charm. "This is wonderful, Boje! It happens that I'm free for a couple of days!"

"Great!" I said.

"My ship or yours?" she asked.

"Yours. Mine's an uncomfortable old tub that I ought to trade in. Maybe I'm keeping it out of sentimentality."

We walked arm in arm toward her ship, and she gave my hand a squeeze. "I like sentimentality in a man very much, Boje."

It was a terrific two days with Lumise . . . although different from my earlier visits on twirls' ships in some respects. For one thing, I got the impression that Lumise was enjoying it all, not just earning my Admiration.

When I got back aboard my own bucket I said, "Let's go to Greenstable, ship. I want to find out what kind of jobs are available. The old roll must be thin."

"Very well, sir."

"How thin is the roll?"

"Your financial balance is 8,351 Units, sir."

"But . . . Do you mean I came out 300 Units
ahead
on Lumise Nalence?" I asked in astonishment.

"Yes, sir."

I thought it over. "Maybe self-confidence accounts for it?"

"That may be, sir."

Lumise had asked me to come back soon . . . had practically begged me, in fact. Well . . . I would come back, but I didn't want her to think I was just after her Units. Maybe it was time, after all, for me to think about settling down. But first I wanted to line up some interesting work to do.

PERSONAL: DO NOT FACSIM!
Office of Ninth Secretary
Standing Consolidation Commission
Department of Justice
Noram Park, Earth

Mr. and Mrs. Wardin Rylsten
Halebas West 5040-K Sector
Talleysmat, Bark., K.V.

Dear Ward and Gilta,

Your request that I take a hand with young Boje came at an opportune moment. A friend of mine in Historical Philosophy had just produced a drawing, his own brainchild, that seemed an ideal challenge to present your son. Through one of the Department's stringers on Greenstable, I was able to toss it in his lap. The problem was for him to identify Earth from a drawing of the universe as a prehistoric Earthman might have seen it.
Boje will certainly tell you about it the first time he's home; so I won't go into details. Suffice to say he solved the problem, gaining some needed mental maturity in the process. He will, I'm sure, be able to support himself amply hereafter, and make the universe his oyster.

Expenses involved, of slightly more than 8,000 Units, are covered by Admiration Development grants from the Treasury, made available through interdepartmental exchange. So you need not concern yourself about that.

And please don't bother to thank me, because I'm always glad to help old friends. If I have won your Admiration to some small extent, that will be thanks enough.

Best regards always,
Raffor Wisosborg.

 

Romee did not doubt that the men and women from Earth were as fully human as the chimos and chimees of Notcid. But sometimes they did things that struck her as absurd.

And that made dealing with them difficult, and more than a little frightening.

Right now, she had to get the damn-television set fixed, and wasn't sure how to go about it. There was a repair shop at the Trading Center—or the Cultural Exchange Center as it was called by the new set of Earth people running it now. Romee had carried the damn-TV some forty-five miles under her arm, jittery all the way because she didn't know what to expect from the new people.

She wished the traders (or "exploiters" as the new people wanted them called) were still running the Center. A person could do business with them without so much upsetting uncertainty.

It was some relief to reach the compound, and to find the repair shop where it had always been. In fact, when she went in she recognized the Earthman in charge as the same one who was there two years earlier, when last she had visited the shop.

She lifted the damn-TV set onto the counter.

"Can you fix it?" she asked.

"Sure. I can fix anything," he replied, more understandably than the average Earthman despite his monotone accent.

"How much will it cost?"

"I won't know until I find out what's wrong. Give me your name, honey."

"Romee of West Hill with the Flat Rock on the Brook," she replied.

He shook his head. "That won't do for the record, Romee. The Demography Office has assigned family names. You run over to the office and find out what yours is."

"Oh, that," she gasped nervously, flustered by her mistake. "I already know it. Romee Westbrook."

"OK." The man wrote her name on a ticket which he attached to her damn-TV. "This ought to be ready for you tomorrow, Ro . . . I mean, Miss Westbrook."

"Mrs. Westbrook," she corrected him.

He grinned, and she grinned back. She was glad he was still running the shop. As a leftover from the time of the exploiters, he was fairly easy to understand.

"How come you're still here?" she asked, momentarily emboldened by his grin.

He shrugged. "Because I wasn't important enough to kick out when the new regime took over."

She nodded vaguely, said goodbye, and left the shop. How could a man who could repair something as marvelously intricate as a damn-TV set be unimportant? she wondered.

That was just one more unsolvable puzzle of the Earth people, she concluded. They made big importances out of little things, and no importance out of great dangers and fearful problems.

For instance, they did nothing about the horrors of the jungle lowlands.

And she had to go down to the jungle now. She had to go there to gather the natsacher shoots to sell to the Earth people, to get money to pay the damn-TV repairman, and to buy some chocolate . . . if the new people were still selling chocolate.

In any event, she had to gather natsacher shoots, and the thought intimidated her, almost to the point of making her whimper.

For a while she wandered around inside the compound of the Cultural Exchange Center, peering in shop and office windows at the men and women and chimos and chimees. She realized she was merely killing time, postponing the inevitable. But maybe she would gain courage by looking at other humans, particularly the men and women.

Maybe they looked strange, with their hair concentrated on the tops of their heads, and needlessly long there, and their peculiar stance with legs straight instead of flexed, which made them look taller than they really were. And the males almost as breastless as herself, since the Earth-women not only bore the young but also nursed them . . . an arrangement that struck Romee as so odd that she sometimes wondered if that physical absurdity might account for all the other ridiculous traits of these people.

But the humans from Earth, for all their foibles, had courage. They were brave beyond understanding. Why, she had heard that a loud noise wouldn't even make some of them jump!

She wished she had some of that courage right now.

Slowly she headed for the compound's gate, then turned aside to examine the bulletin board.

A woman was feeding in a new notice as she approached.

"Good morning," Romee said politely. "Is that something new?"

The woman turned and studied her. "Yes. Would you like to hear it?"

"If you please."

Romee hoped the new bulletin would not be another lecture on the evils of chocolate. Those lectures frightened her, and they were constantly popping up on damn-TV these days. Romee knew she was hooked on the stuff, and couldn't give it up. So, to be told over and over that it was taking years off her life was sheer torture. She had made up her mind not to believe the lectures, but she couldn't stay sure they weren't right, no matter how hard she tried.

But it turned out that the new bulletin wasn't a lecture. The woman pressed the button and the board said: "The services of several chimos and chimees are desired for a series of tests on response to environmental stimuli. A modest stipend will be paid to participants. Apply at Exotic Psychology Office, Brown Building."

"Thank you," Romee said to the woman, and headed once more toward the gate. Then she halted and turned. She had never heard of the Exotic Psychology Office before, which suggested it might be very new on Notcid—even newer than the replacers of the exploiters. And being new, it might have a lot of prestige and money, since Earth humans thought highly of new things.

"How much money is a 'modest stipend'?" she asked.