MAMMA COME HOME

The day Papa came home was the day my mama came home to me. That’s the way I look at Earth’s first alien contact. We may have changed some of our ideas about what’s human, but one thing hasn’t changed; the big history-tape events are still just background for the real I-Me-You drama. Not true? So, wasn’t the U.S.-Sino-Soviet pact signed the week your daughter got married?

Anyway, there they were, sitting on Luna. Although it’s not generally known, there’d been a flap about a moving source around Pluto the year before. That’s when C.I.A. decided that outer space fell under the category of foreign territory in its job description—at least to the extent of not leaving the Joint Chiefs in total control of contact possible with the galaxy. So our little shop shared some of the electronic excitement. The Russians helped, they’re the acknowledged champs at heaving up the tonnage, but we still have the communications lead—we try harder. The British and the Aussies try too, but we keep hiring their best men.

That first signal faded to nothing—until one fine April, evening all our communications went bust and the full moon rose with this big alien hull parked on the Lunar Alps. Sat there for three days, glowing bluishly in any six-power lens—if you could buy one. And you’ll recall, we had no manned moon-station then. After peace broke out nobody wanted to spend cash on vacuum and rocks. The shape our space program was in, we couldn’t have hit them with a paper-clip in less than three months.

On A-Day plus one I spotted Tillie at the watercooler.

To do so I had to see through two doors and Mrs. Peabody, my secretary, but I’d got pretty good at this. I wandered out casually and said:

“How’s George doing?”

She gave me a one-eyed scowl through her droopy wing of hair, finished her water and scowled again to make sure she wasn’t smiling.

“He came back after midnight. He’s had six peanut-butter sandwiches. I think he’s getting it.”

There are people who’ll tell you Tillie is an old bag of bones in a seersucker suit. For sure she had bones, and she’s no girl. But if you look twice it can get a little hard to notice other people in the room. I’d done the double take about three years back.

“Meet me at lunch and I’ll show you something.”

She nodded moodily and lounged off. I watched the white knife-scar ripple elegantly on her tanned legs and went back through my office, fighting off the urge to push Mrs. Peabody’s smile into her Living Bra.

Our office is a little hard to explain. Everybody knows C.I.A. is out in that big building at Langley, but the fact is that even when they built it there it fit about as well as a beagle-house fits a Great Dane. They go most of the Dane in somehow, but we’re one of the paws and tails that got left out. Strictly a support facility—James Bond would sneer at us. We operate as a small advertising agency in a refined section of D.C. which happens to be close to a heavy land cable and the Naval Observatory gadgets. Our girls actually do some ads for other government agencies—something about Smoky Bear and Larry Litterbug is all over the first floor. We really aren’t a big secret thing—not a Biretta or a cyanide ampoule in the place and you can get into our sub-basement anytime you produce front and profile X-rays of both your grandmothers.

What’s there? Oh, a few linguists and cold war leftovers like me. A computer N.S.A. spilled coffee into. And George. George is our pocket genius. It is generally believed he got his start making skin flicks for yaks in Outer Mongolia. He lives on peanut butter and Tillie works for him.

So when the aliens started transmitting at us, George was among the facilities. Langley called on to help decipher. And also me, in a small, passive way—I look at interesting photography when the big shop wants a side opinion. Because of my past as a concocter of fake evidence in the bad old days. Hate that word, fake. Mine is still being used by historians.

Come lunchtime I went looking for Tillie at Rapa’s, our local lifeline. Since Big Brother at Langley found that our boys and girls were going to Rapa’s instead of eating G.S.A, boiled cardboard, Rapa’s old cashier has been replaced by a virgin with straight seams and a camera in each, ah, eyeball. But the chow is still good.

Tillie was leaning back relaxed, a dreamy double-curve smile on her long mouth. She heard me and wiped it off. The relaxation was a fraud; I saw her hand go over some shredded matches.

She smiled again, like someone had offered her fifty cents for her right arm. But she was okay. I knew her, this was one of her good days. We ordered veal and pasta, friendly.

“Take a look,” I invited. “We finally synched in with their beam for a few frames.”

The photo showed one side foggy, the rest pretty clear. Tillie goggled.

“It’s—it’s—”

“Yeah, it’s beautiful. She’s beautiful. And the dead spit of you, my girl.”

“But Max! Are you sure?” Her using my name was a good sign.

“Absolute. We saw her move. This, kid, is The Alien. We’ve even had every big cine collection in the world checking. It’s not any sort of retransmission. See that script on her helmet and that background panel? T’ain’t nobody’s. No doubt where the send is from, either. That ship up there is full of people-type people. At least, women... What’s George got?”

“You’ll see the co-copy,” she said absently, grooving on the photo. “He worked out about two hundred words in clear. It’s weird. They want to land—and something about Mother. Like, Mother is back, or is home. George says ‘Mother’ is the best he can do.”

“If that’s Mother, oh my. Here’s your pasta.”

They landed a week later, after considerable international wrangling. At Mexico City, as everyone knows. In a small VTO affair. Thanks to George’s connections—in the literal sense—we had it on closed circuit right over the crowd of world dignitaries and four million real people.

The airlock opened on a worldwide hush, and Mother came out. One—and then another—and a third. Last one out fiddled with something on her wrist, and the lock closed. We found out later she was the navigator.

There they stood on their ramp, three magnificent earth-type young females in space-opera uniforms. Helmets on the backs of their heads and double-curve grins on their long mouths. The leader was older and had more glitter on her crest. She swung back her droopy wing of hair, breathed twice, wrinkled her nose and paced down the ramp to meet the U.N. President.

Then we got it. The U.N. President that year was an Ethiopian about six feet five. The top of his head came just to the buckle on her crossbelt.

I guess the world wide hush quivered—it certainly did in George’s projection room.

“About eight-foot-three for the captain,” I said.

“Assuming the top of the head is normal,” George chirped. That’s what we love him for.

In the dimness I saw a funny look on Tillie’s face. Several girls were suppressing themselves, and Mrs. Peabody seemed to feel an egg hatching in her uplift. The men looked like me—tense. Right then I would have settled for green octopusses instead of those three good-looking girls.

The captain stepped back from President Enkaladugunu and said something in a warm contralto, and somehow we all relaxed. She seemed wholesome, if you can imagine a mix of Garbo and Moshe Dayan. The other two officers were clearly very young, and—well, I told you, they could have been Tillie’s sisters except for size.

George got that; I saw his eyes going between Tillie and the screen.

To his disgust, all the talking was being done by our people. The three visitors stood it well, occasionally giving brief, melodious responses. They looked mightily relaxed, and also somewhat puzzled. The two young J.O.’s were scanning hard at the crowd and twice I saw one nudge the other.

Mercifully a Soviet-U.S.-Indian power play choked off the oratory and got the party adjourned to Mexico’s Guest Palace—or rather, to an unscheduled pause around the pool while beds were being lashed together and sofas substituted for chairs. Our circuit went soft. George shut himself up with his tapes of the aliens’ few remarks, and I coped with a flock of calls about our observing devices, which got buggered up in the furniture-moving orgy.

Two days later the party was. moved to the Popo-Hilton with the swimming pool as their private bath. Every country on earth—even the Vatican—sent visiting delegations. George was going through fits. He was bound and determined to be the expert on Mother’s language by remote control. I had an in with the Mexicali bureau and we did pretty well until about twenty other outfits got into the act and the electronic feedback put us all in the hash.

“Funny thing, Max,” said George at morning staff. “They keep asking—I can only interpret as, ‘Where are the women?’ ”

“You mean, like women officials? Women in power jobs?”

“Simpler, I think. Perhaps big women, like themselves. But I get a connotation of grown-up, women, adults. I need more of their talk among themselves, Max.”

“We’re trying, believe it. They keep flushing all the cans and laughing like maniacs. I don’t know if it’s our plumbing or our snoops that amuse them. Did you hear about Tuesday?”

Tuesday my shivers had come back. For half an hour every recording device out to a half-mile perimeter went dead for forty minutes, and nothing else was affected.

Another department was getting shivery too. Harry from R & D called me to see if we could get a better look at that charm bracelet the navigator had closed the ship with.

“We can’t get so much as a gamma particle into that damn boat,” he told me. “Touch it—smooth as glass. Try to move it, blowtorch it—nothing. It just sits there. We need that control, Max.”

“She wears it taking a bath, Harry. No emissions we can read.”

“I know what I’d do,” he grunted. “Those cream-heads up there are in a daze.”

A daze it was. The world at large loved them. They were now on grand tour, being plied with entertainment, scenic wonders and technology. The big girls ate it up—figuratively and literally. Balloon glasses of aquavit went down especially well from breakfast on, and they were glowingly complimentary about everything from Sun Valley to the Great Barrier Reef with stopovers at every atomic and space installation. Captain Garbo-Dayan really unbent on the Cote d’Azur, and the two J.O.’s had lost their puzzled looks. In fact, they were doing a good deal of what would have looked like leering if they didn’t have such wholesome smiles.

“What the hell?” I asked George.

“They think we’re cute,” he said, enjoying himself. Did I tell you George was a tiny little man? That figures, with Tillie working for him. He loved to see us big men squinting up at the Girls from Capella, as the world now called them.

They were from a system near Capella, they explained in delightful fragments of various Earth languages. Their low voices really had charm. Why had they come? Well, they were a tramp freighter, actually, taking a load of ore back to Capella. They had dropped by to clear up an old-chart notation about our system. What was their home like? Oh, much like ours. Lots of commerce, trade. Wars? Not for centuries. Shocking idea!

What the world wanted to know most, of course, was where were their men? Were they alone?

This evoked merry laughter. Of course they had men, to care for the ship. They showed us on a video broadcast from Luna. There were indeed men, handsome types with muscles. The chap who did most of the transmission looked like my idea of Leif Ericsson. There was no doubt, however, that Captain Garbo-Dayan—or Captain Lyampka, as we learned to call her—was in charge. Well, we had female Soviet freighter captains, too.

The one thing we couldn’t get exactly was the Capellan men’s relative heights. The scenery on these transmissions was different. It was my private opinion, from juggling some estimates of similar background items, that at least some of their men were earth-normal size, though burly.

The really hot questions about their space drive got gracefully laughed off. How did the ship run? Sorry, they were not technicians. But then they sprang the bombshell. Why not come and see for ourselves? Would we care to send a party up to Luna to look over the ship?

Would we? Would we? How many? Oh, about fifty—fifty men, please. And Tillie.

I forgot to mention about Tillie getting to be their pet. George had sent her to Sun Valley to record some speech samples he absolutely had to have. She was introduced at the pool, looking incredibly like a half-size Capellan. A smash. They loved it. Laughed almost to guffawing. When they found she was a crack linguist they adopted her. George was in ecstasy with hauls of Capellan chatter no one else had, and Tillie seemed to like it too. She was different these days—her eyes shone, and she had a kind of tense, exalted smile. I knew why and it bothered me, but there wasn’t anything I could do.

I cut myself into her report-circuit one day.

“Tillie. It’s dangerous. You don’t know them.”

Safe at two thousand miles, she gave me the bare-faced star.

“They’re dangerous?”

I winced and gave it up.

Tillie at fifteen had caught the full treatment from a street gang. Fought against knives, left for dead—an old story. They’d fixed her up as good as new, except for a few interesting white hairlines in her tan, and a six-inch layer of ice between her and everybody who shaved. It didn’t show, most of the time. She had a nice sincere cover manner and she wore her old suits and played mousy. But it was permanent guerrilla war, inside.

Intelligence had found her, as they often do, a ready-made weapon. She was totally loyal as long as no one touched her. And she’d wear anything or nothing on business. I’d seen photos of Tillie on a job at twenty that you wouldn’t believe. Fantastic—the subtle sick flavor added, too.

She let people touch her, physically I mean, on business. I imagine—I never asked. And I never asked what happened to them afterward, or why the classified medal. It did trouble me a little when I found out her chief case officer was dead—but that was all right, he’d had diabetes for years.

But as for letting a friend touch her—really touch her—I tried it once.

It was in George’s film vault. We were both exhausted after a fifty-hour run of work. She leaned back and smiled, and actually touched my arm. My arm went around her automatically and I started to bend down to her lips. At the last minute I saw her eyes.

Before I got pastured out to Smoky Bear and George, I had worked around a little, and one of the souvenirs indelibly printed on my memory is the look in the eyes of a man who had just realized that I stood between him and the only exit. He waited one heartbeat and then started for the exit through what very nearly became my dead body, in the next few hectic minutes. I saw that look—depthless, limp, inhuman—in Tillie’s eyes. Gently I disengaged my arm and stepped back. She resumed breathing.

I told myself to leave her alone. It’s an old story. Koestler told it, and his girl was younger. The trouble was I liked the woman, and it didn’t help that she really was beautiful under those sack suits. We got close enough a couple of times so we even discussed—briefly—whether anything could be done. Her view was, of course, nada. At least she had the taste not to suggest being friends. Just nada.

After the second of those sessions I sloped off with a couple of mermaids from the Reflecting Pool, who turned out to have strange china doorknobs in their apartment. When the doorknobs got busted I came back to find Mrs. Peabody had put me on sick leave.

“I’m sorry, Max,” Tillie lied.

“De nada,” I told her.

And that was how matters stood when Tillie went off to play with the alien giantesses.

With Tillie next to them, our shop became Miss Government Agency of the moment. The reluctant trickle of collateral data swelled to a flood. We found out, for instance, about the police rumors.

It seemed the big girls wanted exercise, and the first thing they asked for in any city was the park. Since they strolled at eight mph, a foot guard wasn’t practical. The U.N. compromised on a pair of patrol cars bracketing them on the nearest road. This seemed to amuse the Capellans, and every now and then the police radios went dead. The main danger to the big girls was from hypothetical snipers, and nobody could do much about that.

After they went through Berlin the Vapos picked up four men in poor condition in the Tiergarten, and the one who lived said something about the Capellans. The Vapos didn’t take this seriously—all four had vagrancy and drug records—but they bucked it along anyway. Next there was some story from a fruity type in Solsdjk Park near The Hague, and a confused disturbance in Hong Kong when the Girls went through the Botanical Gardens. And three more defunct vagrants in the wilderness preserve outside Melbourne. The Capellans found the bodies and expressed shock. Their men, they said, did not fight among themselves.

Another tidbit was the Great Body Hunt. Try as we had in Mexico we had never got one look at them completely naked. Breasts, yes—standard human type, superior grade. But below the navel we failed. Now we found out that everybody else all along the route was failing too, although they’d pushed the perimeter pretty close. I admired their efforts—you wouldn’t believe what some of our pals had gotten pickups into. But nothing worked. It seemed the Girls liked privacy, and they had some sort of routine snooper-sweep that left blank films and tapes. Once when the Jap I.S. got really tricky they found their gismo with the circuits not only fused but mirror reversed.

Tillie’s penetration evoked a mass howl for anatomical detail. But all she gave us was, “Conception is a voluntary function with them.”

I wondered if anyone else around the office was hearing mice in the woodwork. Was I the only one who knew Tillie was under pressures not listed in standard agent evaluation?

But she was helpful on the big question: How did they come to be so human? There was no doubt they were. Although we hadn’t got pictures, we had enough assorted biological specimens to know they and we were one flesh. Or rather, one DNA. All the Girls themselves would tell us was interpreted as “We are an older race“—big smile.

Tillie got us the details that shook our world. The navigator had too many balloon-glasses one night and told Tillie that Capellans had been here before—long before. Hence the chart notation they’d wanted to check. There was something of interest here besides a nice planet—something the first expedition had left. A colony? The navigator grinned and shut up.

This tidbit really put the strawberries in the fan. Was it possible we were the descendants of these people? Vertigo hit the scientific sector and started a babble of protest. What about Proconsul? What about the australopithecines? What about gorilla blood-types? What about—about—about WHAT? The babble mounted; a few cooler heads pointed out that nobody really knew where CroMagnon came from, and he had apparently interbred with other types. Well, it’s an old story now, but those were dizzy days.

True to human form, I was giving the grand flip-flop of history about two percent of my attention. To begin with, I was busy. We were fighting out a balanced representation of earth scientific specialists with all the other nations who had delegations in the visiting party to Luna. It was to be a spectacular talent show—everything from particle physics, molecular genetics, math theory, eco-systems down to a lad from Chile who combined musical notation analysis, icthyology and cooking. And every one of them handsome and certified heterosexual. And equipped with enough circuitry to—well, assist their unaided powers of observation and report. Even in the general euphoric haze somebody had stayed cool enough to realize the boys just might not get back. Quite a job to do in two weeks.

But that again was background to a purely personal concern. The Monday before the party took off Tillie and the Girls came through D.C. I cornered her in the film vault.

“Will you receive a message in a sanitized container?”

She was picking at a band-aid over a shot-puncture some idiot had given her. (What the hell kind of immunization did the medicos think they had for assignments on the moon?) One eye peeked at me. She knew she was guilty, all right.

“You think your big playmates are just like yourself, only gloriously immune from rape. I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t thinking of going home with them. Right? No, don’t tell me, kid, I know you. But you don’t know them. You think you do, but you don’t. Did you ever meet any American blacks who moved to Kenya? Talk to one some time. And there’s another thing you haven’t thought about—two hundred and fifty thousand miles of hard vacuum. A quarter of a million miles away. The Marines can’t get you out of this one, baby.”

“So?”

“All right. I just want to get it through to you—assuming there is a human being under that silicon—that out here is another human being who’s worried sick about you. Does that get through? At all?”

She gave me a long look as though she were trying to make out a distant rider on a lonesome plain. Then her lashes dropped.

The rest of the day I was busy with our transmitting arrangements from—actually—Timbuctu. The Russians had offered to boost the party up in sections in six weeks, but Captain Lyampka, after a few thoughtful compliments, had waved that off. They would just send down their cargo lighter—no trouble at all, if we would point out a convenient desert to absorb the blast. Hence Timbuctu. The Capellan party was spending two nights in D.C. en route there.

They were lodged in the big hotel complex near our office and adjoining Rock Creek Park. That was how I came to find out what Capellan did in parks.

It was a damn fool thing, to trail them. Actually I just hung around the park input. About two A.M. I was sitting on a bench in the moonlight, telling myself to give it up. I was gritty-eyed tired. When I heard them coming I was too late to take cover. It was the two J.O.’s. Two beautiful girls in the moonlight. Two big girls, coming fast. I stood up.

“Good evening!” I essayed in Capellan.

A ripple of delighted laughter, and they were towering over me.

Feeling idiotic, I got out my cigarillos and offered them around. The first mate took one and sat down on the bench. Her eyes came level with mine.

I clicked my lighter. She laughed and laid the cigarillo down. I made a poor job of lighting mine. There is a primal nightmare lurking deep in in most men, having to do with his essential maleness. With violation thereof. I’d gone through life without getting more than a glimpse of it, but this situation was bringing cold fingers right up into my throat. I essayed a sort of farewell bow. They laughed and bowed back. I had a clear line of exit to right rear. I took a step backward.

A hand like a log fell on my shoulders. The navigator leaned down and said something in a velvety contralto. I didn’t need a translator—I’d seen enough old flicks: “Don’t go ’way, baby, we won’t hurt you.”

My jump was fast, but those mothers were faster. The standing one had my neck in a vise at arm’s length, and when I tried the standard finger-pull she laughed like a deep bell and casually twisted up my arm until things broke. In three places, it turned out later.

The ensuing minutes are what I make a point of not remembering except when I forget not to wake up screaming. My next clear view was from the ground where I was discovering some nasty facts about Capellan physiology through a blaze of pain. (Ever think about being attacked by a musth vacuum cleaner?) My own noise was deafening me, but either I was yelling in two voices or something else was screeching and scrabbling around my head. In a dead place somewhere inside the uproar I associated this with Tillie, which didn’t make sense. Presently there was, bless edly, nothing... and somewhen else, ambulance jolts and smells and needle-jabs.

At a later point in daylight George’s face appeared around a mass of tapes and pulleys on my hospital bed.

He told me Tillie had screamed the captain into calling off her J.O.’s before they ruined the kid’s toy. And then she got a call through to George, and he sent the special squad to haul the corpse to the hidey-hole for Classified Mistakes. (I was now very Classified.) While he talked he was setting up a video so we could watch Earth’s scientific delegation embark for Luna.

Through the pulleys I saw them—a terrific-looking group; the cream of Terran expertise, and most of them still looking human in spite of being about thirty percent hardware. They wore the dress uniforms of various armed services—the pair of Danish biologists in naval whites and the Scotch radiation lad in dress kilts were dazzling. Myself, I had most faith in the Israeli gorilla in khaki; I had run into him once in Khartoum when he was taking time off from being a Nobel runner-up in laser technology.

The bands played; the African sun flamed off the gold and polish; the all-girl Capellan freighter crew lined up smartly as our lads marched up the ramp, their heads at Capellan belly-button level. Going into that ship with them was enough miniaturized circuitry to map Luna and do a content analysis on the Congressional Library. At the last minute, a Pakistani got the hiccups, and his teeth transmitted flak all over the screen. Tillie followed the men, and behind her came the captain and her roughnecks, smiling like the gkl next door. I wondered if the navigator was wearing any band-aids. My teeth had had hold of something—while they lasted.

There they went, and there they flaked out, to a man. We next saw them on a transmission from the mother ship. There wasn’t a molecule of metal on them. We found out later they’d dozed off on the trip up, and waked up in the ship clean as babies, with healing scars on their hides. (The Pak had new teeth.) Their Capellan hosts acted as if it were all a big joke and served welcome drinks all around every ten minutes. Some drinks they must have been—I caught a shot of my Israeli hope. He was sitting on the captain’s lap wearing her helmet. Somebody had had the sense to rig a monitor on the satellite relay, so the world at large saw only part of the send. They loved it

“Round one to Mordor,” said George, perched like a hobbit on my bed. He had stopped enjoying the situation.

“When the white man’s ship came to Hawaii and Tahiti,” I croaked through my squashed larynx, “they’d let a herd of vahines on board for the sailors.”

George looked at me curiously. He hadn’t had the chance to meet his nightmare socially, you see, while I was getting friendly with mine, in a grim way.

“If the girls had a machete or two, nobody got mad. They just took ’em away. The technological differential here is about the same, don’t you think, George? We’ve just had our machetes taken away.”

“They left some new diseases, too, when they moved on,” said George slowly. He was with it now.

“If this bunch moves on.”

“They have to sell that ore.”

“—What?” (I’d just caught a glimpse of Tillie on the screen, standing near the Capellan male we had been calling Leif Ericsson. As I had figured, he was about my size.)

“I said they have, to get home to sell their cargo.”

And was he right. The operative word was cargo.

The plot unfolded about a week later when the visiting party was sent back from Luna, along with three new Capellan ratings who were to collect the VTO launch. To my inexpressible relief Tillie came with them.

The cargo lighter dumped Tillie and our deflowered male delegation in North Africa and then took off on a due south paraboloid which put the Capellans down around the hip of the globe.

“Near Kleetmanshoop, South Africa, Woomara says,” George told me. “Doesn’t smell good.” The three states known, among other names, as White Man’s Heaven weren’t speaking to the rest of the world that year. They did not see fit to announce that the Capellans were paying them a private visit.

“Where’s Tillie?”

“Being debriefed at the Veddy Highest Levels. Did you hear the mother ship is unloading its ore?”

“Where would I hear anything?” I wheezed, rattling my pulleys. “Give me that photo!”

You could see it clearly: conical piles and some sort of conveyor running out from the big hulk on Luna.

“At least they don’t have matter transmitters.”

The next piece of the plot came through Tillie. She sat chin on fist, talking tiredly through her hair in the general direction of my kneecaps.

“They estimate they can carry about seven hundred. It’ll take them three days our time to unload, and another week to seal and atmospherize part of the cargo hold. The Bwanas bought the deal right off.”

“What’s the difference to them?” I groaned. “For the poor bloody Bantus the Capellan brand of slavery probably looks like cake.”

That was it, of course. The men of Capella were slaves. And there were relatively few of them. A cargo of exotic human males was worth a good deal more than ore. A hell of a lot more, it seemed. On Terra we once called it “black ivory”.

So much for galactic super-civilization. But that wasn’t all. I had to yell hard for George before he showed, looking gray around the nose.

“A merchant privateer who runs into a rich source of pearls, or slaves, or whatever,” I wheezed, “doesn’t figure to quit after one trip. And he doesn’t want his source to dry up or run away while he’s gone. Or learn to fight back. He wants it to stay sweet, between trips. The good captain was quite interested in the fact that the Russians offered to get up to Luna so quickly. They could expect us to develop a defensive capability before they got back. What do they propose to do about that?”

“This may come as a shock to you,” George said slowly, “but you aren’t the only man who’s read history. We weren’t going to tell you because there’s nothing you can do about it in that jungle gym.”

“Go on!”

“Mavrua—that’s the man you called Leif Ericsson—he told me,” put in Tillie. “They plan to turn off the sun a little. As they leave.”

“A solar screen.” George’s voice was gray, too. “They can lay it with their exhaust in a couple of dozen orbits. It doesn’t take much, and it lasts, that is, there’s an irreversible interaction. I don’t understand the physics. Harry gave me the R & D analysis at lunch, but the waiter kept taking the mesons away. The point is, they can screen off enough solar energy to kick us back to the ice age. Without time to prepare we’ll be finished. Snow could start here about June. When it does it won’t quit. Or melt. Most of the big lakes and quite a lot of ocean will go to ice. The survivors will be back in caves. Perfect for their purpose, of course—they literally put us on ice.”

“What the hell is being done?” I squeaked.

“Not counting the people who are running around cackling, there are two general lines. One, hit them with something before they do it. Two, undo it afterwards. And a massive technological research depot is being shipped to Columbia. So far the word has been held pretty close. Bound to leak soon, though.”

“Hit them?” I coughed. “Hit them? The whole U.N. military can’t scratch that VTO that’s sitting in their laps! Even if they could get a warhead on the mother ship, they’re bound to have shielding. Christ, look at the deflectors they use to hold their atomics. And they know the state of our art. Childish! And as for dispersing the screen in time to save anything—”

“What do you think you’re doing? Max?” They were pawing at me.

“Getting out of here.... Godamnit, give me a knife, I can’t untie this bastard! Let go. Nurse! WHERE ARE MY PANTS?”

They finally hauled me over to George’s war room in a kind of mobile mummy-case and saw I got fed all the info and rumors. I kept telling my brain to produce. It kept telling me back Tilt. With the top men of ten nations working on it, what did I imagine I could contribute? When I had been grunting to myself for a couple of hours Tillie and George filed in with a purposeful air.

“In a bad position there is no good move: Bogoljubov. Give over, Max.”

“In a bad position you can always wiggle something,” I rasped. “What about the men, Tiffie?”

“What about them?”

“How do they feel about the plan?”

“Well, they don’t like it.”

“In what way don’t they like it?”

“The established harem favorites don’t like to see new girls brought in,” she recited and quick looked me in the eye.

“Having a good time, baby?” I asked her gently. She looked away.

“Okay. There’s our loose piece. Now, how do we wiggle it at a quarter of a million miles? What about that character Leif—Mavrua?” I mused. “Isn’t he some sort of communications tech?”

“He’s chief commo sergeant,” Tillie said, and added slowly, “he’s alone on duty, sometimes.”

“What’s he like? You were friendly with him?”

“Yes, kind of. He’s—I don’t know—like gay only not.”

I was holding her eye.

“But in this situation your interests coincide?” I probed her hard. The American black who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and an African second, no matter what they did to him in Newark. George had the sense to keep quiet, although I doubt he ever understood.

She swung back her hair, slowly. I could see mad dreams dying in her eyes.

“Yes. They... coincide.”

“Think you can talk to him?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get over to Harry,” George jumped up, he was ahead of the play now. “We’ll see what we can lash up. Ten days, maximum.”

“Call the campus. I can take a meeting. But get me something so I don’t sound like a frog’s ghost.”

The chief we had then was all right. He came to me. Of course we had only the start of a plan, but nobody else had anything, and we had Tillie. He agreed we were nuts and gave us everything we needed. The lateral channels were laid on by 1500; Jodrell Bank was to set us up.

The waning moon came over Greenwich before dawn that week, and we got Tillie through to Mavrua about midnightest. He was alone. It took her about a dozen exchanges to work out agreement in principle. She was good with him. I studied him on the monitors; as Tillie said, queer but not gay. Clean cut, muscular, good grin; gonads okay. Something sapless in the eyes. What in hell could he do?

The chief’s first thought had been, of course, sabotage.

“Stupid,” I husked to George. “Harem slaves don’t blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good.”

“Nor do historical analogies, after a point.”

“Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame. We need a new one. For instance, look at the way the Capellans overturned our psychic scenery, our view of ourselves as integral to this world. Or look at their threat to our male-dominant structure. Bigger, more dominant women who treat our males as sex-slave material. Walking nightmares... notice that ’mare?’ All right—what is the exact relationship between the Capellans and us? Give me that Danish report again.”

The two gorgeous Danes had at least gotten some biological information between orgies, maybe they were more used to them. They confirmed that the Capellans carried sex-linked differences. Capellan males matured to Earth-normal size and sexual features, but the adolescent females went through a secondary development spurt and emerged as the giantesses we had seen. With the specialized characteristics that I had inadvertently become familiar with. And more: some milennia back a mutation started cropping up among the women. Fallout from a war, perhaps? No answer. Whatever the cause, women began failing to develop. In other words, they stayed as earth-type normals, able to reproduce in what the Capellans regarded as immature form.

Alarmed, the Capellan matriarchate dealt with the problem in a relatively humane way. They rounded up all suspected mutant lines and deported them to remote planets, of which Terra was one. Hence the old chart notation.

Our present visitors had been ore-hunting at nearly maximum range when they decided to check on the semi-mythical colony. No one else ever had.

“What about the Capellan’s own history?”

“Not much. Look at that British quote: ‘We have always been as we are.’ ”

“Isn’t that just what we thought about ourselves—until they landed?”

George’s tired eyelids came open wide.

“Are you thinking what I—”

“We’ve got Tillie. Mavrua probably knows enough to noodle their input indicators. It wouldn’t take much. What is to Tillie as a Capellan is to us?”

“Bobo!” put in Mrs. Peabody, from some ambush.

“Bobo will do nicely,” I went on. “Now we work up the exact scenery—”

“But, Jesus, Max! Talk about forlorn chances—” protested George.

“Any chance beats no chance. Besides, it’s a better chance than you think. Some day I’ll tell you about irrational sex phobias, I’ve had some unique data. Right now we’ve got to get this perfect, that’s all. No slips. You cook it and I’m going to vet every millimeter of every frame. Twice.”

But I didn’t. My fever went up, and they put me back in the cooler. Every now and then Tillie dropped in to tell me things like the ore piles on Luna had quit growing, and the crew was evidently busy air-sealing the hold. How was George doing? Great. Mavrua had transmitted the crucial frames. In my more lucid moments I realized George probably didn’t need any riding—after all, he’d trained on those Mongolian yak parties.

If this were public history I’d give you the big drama of those nine days, the technical problems that got licked, the human foul-ups that squeaked by. Like the twenty-four hours in which the Joint Chiefs were insisting on monitoring the show through a channel that would have generated an echo—their scientists said no, but the President finally trusted ours and killed that. Or the uproar when we found out, about Day Five, that the French had independently come up with a scheme of their own, and were trying to talk privately to Mavrua—at a time when his Capellan chief was around, too. The President had to get the U.N. Secretary and the French Premier’s mother-in-law to hold that.

That let the cat out of the first bag; the high-level push to get in the act began. And there was the persistent intrusion from our own Security side, who wanted to hitch Mavrua up to some kind of interstellar polygraph to check him out. And the discovery at the last minute, of a flaw in our scanning pulse which would have left a fatal trace, so that new equipment had to be assembled and lofted to the satellite relay all one sleepless night. Oh, there was drama, all right. George got quite familiar with the sight of the President pulling on his pants.

Or I could paint you the horror visions now growing in all our minds, of snow that never stopped, of glaciers forming and grinding down from the poles across the world’s arable land. Of eight billion people ultimately trying to jam themselves into the shrinking, foodless equatorial belt. Of how few would survive. A great and dramatic week in world history—during which our hero, in actual fact, was worrying mostly about an uncontrolled staph colony in his cracked pelvis and dreaming of dragging seals home to his igloo off Key West.

“How’re your teeth, baby?” I asked what seemed to be a solid version of Tillie, swimming in the antibiotic fogs. I’d been dreaming that her head had been resting on my arm cast.

“?”

“Teeth. Like for chewing blubber. That’s what Eskimo women do.”

She drew back primly, seeing I was conscious.

“It’s getting out, Max. The wise money is starting to slip south.”

“Best stick with me, baby. I have a complete arctic camping outfit.”

She put her hand on my head then. Nice hand.

“Sex will get you nowhere,” I told her. “In times to come it’s the girls who can chew hides who’ll get the men.”

She blew smoke in my face and left.

On Day Minus Four there was a diversion. The Capellan party who had landed in Africa were now partying around the Pacific on their way to pick up the VTO launch in Mexico. Since Authority was still sitting on all the vital information, the new batch of Girls from Capella were as popular as ever with the public. Behind the scenes there was a hot debate in progress about how they could be used as hostages. To me this was futile—what could we even hope to get?

Meanwhile their launch was sitting unattended at Mexico City, showing no signs of the various cosmic can-openers we had tried. All the united military could do was to englobe it with guard devices and a mob of assorted special troops.

On Day Minus Four the three Girls went fishing off a Hawaiian atoll, in a catamaran. They were inshore of their naval escort. One of them yawned, said something.

At that moment the VTO boat in Mexico went whirr, let out a blast that incinerated a platoon of Marines and took off. A Jap pilot earned his family a pension by crashing it at 90,000 feet with his atomic warheads armed. As far as we could find out, he never even caused a course correction.

The VTO came scorching down on the atoll just as the Girls drifted up to the beach. They sauntered over and were inside before the naval watchdogs got their heads out of their radar hoods. Two minutes later they were out of atmosphere. So much for the great hostage plan.

After this I kept dreaming it was getting colder. On Day Minus Three I thought I saw rhododendron leaves outside my window hanging straight down, which they do at 46 degrees Fahrenheit. Mrs. Peabody had to come over to tell me the ship was still on Luna, and it was 82 outside.

Day Minus Two was it. They rolled me over to George’s projection room for the show. We had one of the two slave-screens, the U.N. had the other. The Chief hadn’t wanted that—partly from the risk of detection, but mostly because it was ninety-nine to one the thing would bomb out. But too many nations knew we were trying something.

I was late, due to a flat tire on my motorized coffin. George’s masterpiece was already running when they wedged me through the doors. In the dimness I could make out the Chief up front, with a few cabinet types and the President. The rest seemed to be just two-feather Indians like me. I guess the President wanted to be in his own family when it blew.

The screen show was pretty impressive. A big Capellan hunched over her console, sweat streaming down her face, yelling a low steely contralto into her mike. I couldn’t get the words but I picked up the repetitive cadence. The screen flickered—George had worked authentic interstellar noise into the send—and then it jumped a bit, like an early flick when the ship goes down with Pearl White lashed to a bunk. There were intermittent background crashes, getting louder, and one cut-off screech.

Then the back wall started to quake, and the door went out in a laser flare. Something huge kicked it all the way down, and Bobo came in.

Oh my aunt, he was beautiful. Bobo Updyke, the sweetest monster I’ve known. I heard a chair squeak beside me and there he was, beaming at his image on the screen. They’d fixed him up with love. Nothing crude—just a bit more browridge on what he had, and the terrible great paws very clean. The uniform—Mau-Mau on a solid base of S.S. Schrechlichheit. Somebody had done something artfully inhuman about the eyes, too. For an instant he just stood there. The crashes quit, like held breath.

There’s rape and rape, you know. Most rape has some shred of humanity in it, some acknowledgment of the victim’s existence. That kind most women aren’t really scared of. But there’s another kind. The kind a golem might do, or a torture device. Violation done by a thing to a thing. That’s what they’d put into Bobo and that’s what the Capellan on the screen turned up her face to look at. All sweet Auschwitz.

Did I say Bobo is seven feet two plus his helmet which brushed the ceiling, and Tillie isn’t five feet? It was something to see. He put out one huge hand. (I heard that footage was reshot twenty-two times.) His other hand was coming toward the camera. More background crash. The last you saw between Bobo’s oncoming fingers was her breast ripping naked and more hulking males beyond the open door. Blackness—a broken shriek and a, well, noise. The screen went dead.

Our lights came on. Bobo giggled shyly. People were getting up. I saw Tillie before the crowd covered her. She had some blue gook on her eyelids and her hair was combed. I decided I’d give her a break on the blubber-chewing.

People moved around, but the tension didn’t break. There was nothing to do but wait. In one corner was Harry with a console. Somebody brought in coffee; somebody else brought in a napkin that gurgled into the chiefs dixie cups. There was a little low talk that stopped whenever Harry twitched.

The world knows what happened, of course. They didn’t even stop for their ore. It was 74 minutes later that Harry’s read-outs began to purr softly.

Up on Luna, power was being used to close airlocks, shift busbars. Generators were running up. The great sensitive ears yearning at them from the Bank quivered. At minute 82.5 the dials started to swing. The big ship was moving. It floated off its dock in the Alps, drifted briefly in an expanding orbit, and then Harry’s board went wild as it kicked itself outward. Toward Pluto.

“Roughly one hundred and seventy-nine degrees from the direction of Capella,” said George, as they rolled me out. “If they took Harry’s advice, they’re working their way home via the Magellanic Clouds.”

Next day we got the electronic snow as they went into space drive. To leave us, we may hope, for another couple of millennia.

The official confirmation of their trajectory came on the day they let me try walking. (I told you this was history as I lived it.) I walked out the front door, over a chorus of yowls. Tillie came along to help. We never did refer to precisely what it was that made her able to grip my waist and let me lean on her shoulder. Or why we were suddenly in Magruder’s buying steak and stuff to take to my place. She was distrustful of my claim to own garlic, and insisted on buying fresh. The closest we came—then or ever—to an explanation was over the avocado counter.

“It’s all relative, isn’t it?” she said to the avocados.

“It is indeed,” I replied.

And really, that was it. If the Capellans could bring us the news that we were inferior mutations, somebody could bring them the word that they were inferior mutations. If big, hairy Mamma could come back and surprise her runt relations, a bigger, harrier Papa could appear and surprise Mamma.

—Always provided that you had a half-pint female who could look and talk like a Capellan for seven minutes of tape, and a big buy who could impersonate a walking nightmare, and one disaffected alien to juggle frequencies so a transmission from a nearby planet came through as a send from home base. And a pop genius like George to screen the last stand of the brave Capellan HQ officer, sticking to her mike to warn all ships to save themselves from the horror overwhelming the home planet.

It had been Harry’s touch to add that the invaders had long-range detector sweeps out and ordering all ships to scatter to the ends of the galaxy.

So, all things being potentially relative, everybody including Mrs. Peabody got a medal from bringing Papa home. And my mamma came home with me, although I still don’t know how she is on chewing blubber.