I’LL BE WAITING FOR YOU WHEN THE SWIMMING POOL IS EMPTY

Cammerling was a nice Terran boy, which is to say that Ms folks came from Groombridge 34 Nu and surprised him with a Galhonda 990 starcoupe for his traditional Wanderjahr. But Cammerling was one sigma off median in that he not only chose to travel by himself but also to visit the remoter parts of the ephemeris where the hostels were unrated or even nonexistent. Which is how he came to be the first Terran—or certainly the first for a long, long time —to land on the planet of Godolphus Four.

As his port opened, Cammerling’s ears were assailed by a stupendous braying, skirling and clashing which rose from an immense dust-cloud in which gleamed many shining points. When the dust settled a bit Cammerling made out that there was a barbaric festival of some sort in progress.

Two vast masses of men were rushing toward each other on the plain before him. From one side pounded phalanx upon phalanx of individuals clad in leather cuirasses and greaves and bearing obsidian lances decked with streaming hair and what Cammerling took to be dried nuts. Galloping at them from his other side came a stampede of reptiles mounted by persons cased in glittering mail and whirling large spiked yo-yos around their crests. Just behind all these Cammerling saw ranks of archers advancing with fire-headed missiles on their bows, and the whole mass was being urged on by horn-blowers, cymbalists and bull-roarers and standard-bearers staggering under huge pennants realistically resembling entire flayed human hides.

As Cammerling stepped forward for a clearer view, the two hordes fell upon each other in primal fury, and the plain became a vortex of slashing, spearing, gouging, beheading, disemboweling, dismembering and other unmistakably hostile interactions.

“Good grief,” said Cammerling, “can this be an actual, real live war?”

His presence was now noticed by several of the nearer combatants who stopped to stare and were promptly clouted by those beyond. A head flew out of the melee and rolled to Cammerling’s feet, making faces and jetting gore. Without pausing to think he switched on his Omniglot Mark Eight voder and shouted, “STOP THAT!”

“Oh, sorry,” he added, as he heard the sound of obsidian shattering all over the field and noted that numerous persons were rolling on the ground clutching their ears. Tuning the voder down, he recalled his panthropological semester notes and began to scan the armies in close detail, searching for their leaders.

To his gratification he located a group of banner-bearers on a hilltop somewhat behind the fray. In their midst was an armored giant mounted on a tall yellow carnosaur with jeweled fangs and spurs. This colorful individual was leaning back in his saddle to accommodate a hamsized triple phallus from which spouted green smoke, alternately bellowing and shaking his fist at Cammerling and chug-a-lugging from a gem-encrusted skull.

On a similar rise across the way Cammerling observed a gaudy pavilion under which a very fat man reclined upon a gold litter upholstered with feebly squirming naked infants and langourously nibbled tidbits from a poignard while he eyed Cammerling. As Cammerling watched, the fat man wiped the poignard by running it through one of the meatier infants and snapped his jeweled fingers at his aides.

All these barbaric manifestations pained Cammerling, who was a good Terran boy, but at the same time he felt exhilarated by stumbling upon what was undeniably the Real Thing. Disregarding the flaming arrows and other missiles that were now arriving in his vicinity and being deflected by his invisible summer-weight nonabsorptive GE-Bilblas forcefield, he focused the voder to project directly at the two chieftains.

“Greetings,” he said. “I’m Cammerling from Groombridge 34 Nu. How about coming over here where we can interact, if you aren’t too busy?”

After a bit of milling, Cammerling was pleased to see the two personages and their retinues converging upon him, while the crowd nearest him drew back. Unfortunately, the delegations halted at a distance that Cammerling felt was too great for a really meaningful encounter, so he stepped toward them and said winningly, “Look, friends. What you’re doing—you know, it’s—well, don’t take this wrong, but it’s not nice. It’s obsolete, truly it is. I don’t want to insult your cultural identity in any way, but since you’re going off this war buzz sooner or later—I mean, studies prove it… why not stop now?”

Seeing that they were staring at him blankly, he added, “I don’t recall my historical symbolism too clearly, but what I mean, I think, is that you two men should shake hands.”

At these words the fat prince in the palanquin spitted three infants and screamed, “Me touch that lizard-fondling offspring of an untranslated defecation-equivalent diseased female organ? I shall serve his barbecued gonads to condemned thieves!”

And the dragon-chief threw back his head and roared, “Me handle that chromosomally unbalanced caricature of a feces-eating cloaca! parasite? His intestines will be cruppers on my corpse-wagons!”

Now Cammerling could see at once that this was going to be a quite jangled situation to harmonize and as he recalibrated his voder, which had begun to oscillate, he also reminded himself that he must be careful not to show disrespect for these people’s cultural norms. So he said pleasantly, “If I could serve as a resource-person here, I’d like to offer the suggestion that molecular genetics and ethical intuition agree that all men are brothers.”

Hearing which, both chieftains looked at each other with instant and total comprehension. Then they both wheeled around and hurled every weapon in reach at Cammerling, and their retainers followed suit. Amid the shower of missiles, Cammerling perceived that a poignard and a kind of broadaxe had penetrated his summer-weight forcefield, making nasty runs in the lining. He was about to remonstrate with them when two pale-blue blips floated down from the nose of the spaceship behind him and instantly reduced the two princes, the carnosaur, the infants, and most of the entourage to thin vitreous puddles.

“Good heavens,” said Cammerling reproachfully to the ship, “that wasn’t nice either. Why did you?”

The voder print-out came to life and typed in cursive: “Don’t be disturbed, dear boy. Your mother put in a few contingency programs.”

Cammerling made a face and turned to address the assembled armies.

“I’m truly sorry about that. If the seconds in command on both sides want to come over here, I’ll try to see it doesn’t happen again.”

He waited patiently while some confusion died down, and presently two somewhat older and less flamboyant senior types were assisted to come forward and Cammerling repeated and clarified his previous suggestions. The two viziers looked at Cammerling with the whites of their eyes showing, and they looked at his ship, and at the puddles, which were now cooled and streaked with beautiful colors suitable for intaglio work on a rather large scale, and finally at each other. To Cammerling’s intense satisfaction they eventually allowed themselves to be persuaded to a distant brushing of the gloved hands. In his excitement he recalled an historic phrase:

“Your swords shall be converted into plowshares!”

“Madness!” exclaimed both viziers, shrinking back. “Ensorcell our swords into women?”

“A figure of speech,” Cammerling laughed. “Now friends, I do want to emphasize that I didn’t come here to intimidate you people with my superior technology created by the enlightened interplay of free minds in our immense interstellar peace-loving Terran Federation. But don’t you think it would be interesting—just as an experiment, say—if you announced that peace has been declared, like in honor of my visit maybe—” he smiled deprecatingly, “—and told your armies to go, uh, home?”

One of the viziers uttered an inarticulate howl. The other cried wildly, “Is it your will that we be torn to pieces? They have been promised loot!”

This made Cammerling aware that he had overlooked their concern about the emotional tensions which were bound to persist in a situation like this, but luckily he recalled a solution.

“Look, you have to have some kind of zestful popular sport. You know—a thing you play? Like shinny? Or curling? Tug-of-war even? Tournaments? And music! Isn’t that the usual thing? We want to get those horns over here, my ship has Marsony twelve-channel. You’ll love our snacks, too. I’ll help you get organized.”

The hours that followed were somewhat jumbled hi Cammerling’s memory, but he felt it was, overall, quite successful. Some of the native sports turned out to be virtually indistinguishable from the original battle, and he did regret having inadvertently triggered the ship’s vaporizers once or twice. But no one seemed overly upset, and when dawn broke over the plain there were a goodly number of survivors able to accept his good-bye gifts of inertia-free athletic supporters and other trade trinkets.

“That rugger-type thing you play truly has potential,” he told the viziers. “Of course, I’d hope we could substitute an inanimate ball, and perhaps tranks instead of strychnine on the spurs. And the eviscerating part, that’s out. Here, try another Groombridge Jubilee. I want to explain to you sometime about setting up a farm system. Tot Teams. By the way, what was the war about?”

One of the viziers was busy shredding his turban, but the other one began to recite the history of the war in a sonorous sing-song, starting with his tenth grandfather’s boyhood. Cammerling set the voder on Semantic Digest and eventually decided that the root of the matter was a chronic shortage of fertile flood-plain from the local river.

“Well, holy nutbutter,” he said. “That’s easy to settle. Just throw a dam across those foothills there and impound the water so everyone will have enough.”

“Dam?” said one vizier. “He who chokes the father of waters,” said the turban-shredder hollowly, “his gonads shall become as small dried berries, and his penis shall be a dry wick. Aye, and all his relatives.”

“Believe me,” said Cammerling, “I have nothing but respect for your cultural orientations. But really, in this one instance—I mean, from an existential viewpoint, although I’m aware that we should do this on a more participatory basis, men—look!”

And he took his ship up and vitrified a couple of miles of foothills; and after the riverbed had overflowed and filled up with mud and dead fish, there was a big lake where none had been before. “Now, there’s your dam,” said Cammerling, “and the water will flow all year enough for everybody, and you can go forth and dig irrigation ditches—I’ll have the ship make a contour map—and the land will blossom.”

And the viziers looked all around and said, “Yes, Lord, I guess we have a dam.” And they went back to their respective peoples.

But Cammerling was a sensitive type of person, and after he thought it all over he went down to the nearest village and said, “Seriously, you people shouldn’t get the idea that I think I’m some sort of god or whatever, and to prove it I’m going to come right in and live amongst you.” He felt confident about this because his whole class had been on the pangalactic immunization program.

And he went down and lived amongst them, and after they got over his diseases, most of them, he was able to share their life style and experience all their amazing cultural practices and perceptions, and especially their religions. And although he knew he shouldn’t do anything to vitiate their ethnic reality, still he was pained in his good Terran heart by certain aspects.

So he called on each of the two viziers, and as diplomatically as possible he explained how deeply he respected their cultural outlooks, and that he wanted to help them along the inevitable evolution of their present religious phase into the more abstract and symbolic plane that it was surely headed for.

“Those big statues,” he said, “I mean, they’re absolutely smasho. Major works of art. Coming generations will stand in awe. But you’ve got to protect them. I mean, those caves, and the drip-drip. Oh, what a good light man could do! And you know, burning babies in them is corrosive, incense would be much safer. How would.this play: one religio-cultural center for both your nations, where all the people could participate? And while we’re on it, you know this dropping babies down the wells to bring rain has to be a joke. I mean, existentially, that’s why you all have squitters.”

And so he went about and opened up different lines of thought for them as unobtrusively as he knew how, and when he detected signs of tension he eased off at once—for example, on his project of persuading the men to do some of the plowing. He himself laid the first stones for the Culture Center, and waited patiently for the idea to take. And presently he felt rewarded when the two head priests actually came together to see him. One was wearing a white-and-black death’s head twice as tall as he was, and the other was wreathed in ceremonial snakes. After the greetings were over, it turned out that they had come to ask a favor.

“Delighted,” he said, and he was. They explained that every year about this time a fiendish man-eating monster ravaged the villages in the hills, and they were as straws before it. But he would undoubtedly be able to dispatch it with one hand.

So Cammerling gladly agreed to take care of the matter, and he set off next morning feeling that he had truly been accepted at last. And since they had stressed the negligible oifficulty of the task—for him—he went on foot, carrying with him only a light lunch, his Galactic Cub Scout kit and a target laser his aunt had given him when he left. And the high priests went back to their peoples rubbing their hands and pausing only to urinate on the stones of the Culture Center. And there was a great deal of smoke around the caves where the idols brooded.

Cammerling noticed some consternation when, two mornings later, he came whistling down the hill-trail, but he put it down to the fact that behind him crawled an enormous shabby saurian with one leg in a plastiseal and a tranquilizing collar on his neck. Cammerling explained that the creature’s vile habits had their origin in impacted tusks, and treated everybody to a practical demonstration of orthodontistry from the ship’s Xeno-aid. After that he spent several lunch hours training the beast to serve as a watch-dragon for his ship, which had sustained a few attacks of high-spirited vandalism. And the Culture Center suddenly began to shape up.

But Cammerling was thoughtful. On his mountain trip he couldn’t help noticing that this planet had astonishing potential in other ways. And so, after mulling over, he gathered some of the more enterprising commoners into an informal discussion-group and said, “Friends! I’m keenly aware, as studies have shown, that too-rapid industrialization of an agrarian culture isn’t a too-good idea, and I want your frank comments if you feel I’m pushing. But have you thought about a little light industry?”

And so—well, pretty soon one of the nations had a small metal-siding plant and the other had a high-quality ceramic operation. And although Cammerling was careful to keep hands off local native customs and never to override native initiative, still, by his enthusiasm and participation in their life at the actual village level, he did seem to be having quite a catalytic effect. Certainly there were a great many activities available for everyone, what with laying out the irrigation system and collecting the kaolin and the materials for ore extraction and so on.

And so it came about that one evening, while Cammerling was helping someone invent the spuming jenny, the high viziers of the two nations came together in a secret place.

And one said, “While in no sense renouncing my undying enmity to you and your horde of agrarian defectives whom I intend to exterminate at the earliest possible moment, it’s plain to see that this blasphemous usurper is grinding both our generative organs into skink soup and we ought to get rid of hurt.”

And the other replied that, while he did not wish to convey the impression that he was befouling himself by communicating on equal terms with the irrevocably tainted eaters of offal represented by his present interlocutor, he would be glad to join in any scheme to get this interstellar monkey off their necks. But was he a god?

“God or not,” the first vizier responded, “he appears as a young man, and there are certain well-known ways to quiet such prickmice, more especially if we pool our joint resources for maximal effect.” To which the other assented, and they began to count.

And so a few evenings later, hearing his watch-dragon snirkling hysterically, Cammerling opened his port to behold twelve dainty shapes swathed in brilliant gauzes, but not so well swathed that he failed to glimpse delicate belled toes, eyes, limbs, haunches, waists, lips, nipples, ettriple-cetera, such as he had never before beheld on this planet. Which was not surprising, since he had been gamely rubbing noses with the gamier squaws of the village level.

So he hopped out the door and said eagerly, “Welcome! My goodness! Can I help you?”

And a girl veiled in smoldering silks stepped forward and parted her raiment just enough to dislocate his jaw and said, “I am Lheesha the Bird of Passionate Delight and men have killed each other for my merest touch and I wish to do to your body caresses of which you have never dreamed and which will draw out your soul with unforgettable bliss.” And she showed him her little hands with the breasts of humrningbirds implanted in her tender palms.

And another stepped forward and swirled her vestments so that his eyes popped and melted, and she said, “I am Ixhualca the Burning Whirlpool and I have thirty-two hitherto undiscovered muscles in my thing and I desire to inflame you to madness by means of unbearable pleasure indefinitely prolonged.”

And a third knelt down demurely and whispered, “I am called Mary Jean the Cannibal Queen and I have been forced all my life to take nourishment only by compressing and vellicating my lips and gullet upon a certain shameful device, and mortally wounded princes call for me that they may expire in joy.”

And by this time Cammerling could sense that they were all thinking along the same general lines, and he said, “Well, this is certainly a neighborly gesture, and to tell you the truth I have been feeling kind of tense. Please come in.”

So they trooped in through his doorlock, which had also been programmed by Cammerling’s mother, and on their way in it imperceptibly relieved the girls of various blades, gimlets, potions, amulets, poisoned rings, essences, fangs, stings, garrotes, ground glass, and so on, which had been installed in interesting recesses of their anatomies. But even if the high viziers had known this they would not have been discouraged, because no man had ever enjoyed any two of those girls and lived.

When all twelve of them were inside with the door closed it was pretty crowded, but the ones close to Cammerling set to work on him with the hummingbird frottage and the tongueing and the spice-inflamed apertures and the thirty-two new thing-muscles and every kind of indescribably ultimate and exotic stimulation so typical of upper-class feudal debauchery, while those who couldn’t get at him just then indulged in unspeakably erotic and obscene activities, which he was able to observe in close detail. And so they went on all night, finding refreshment not only in Cammerling’s youth and vigor but also in the chance to pick up some cross-cultural technical fertilization, since they were half from one nation and half from the other.

And the morning light shone in upon an expanse of totally intertwined and exhausted bodies. But it had not shone long before a gentle heaving started from below, and Cammerling crawled out.

“Well now,” said Cammerling, “that was truly rewarding.” And since he was a nice Terran boy who had been raised on wholesome Terran orgies, he bounced out the lock of the spaceship and did thirty-two push-ups, one for each muscle. And he poured water on his head and whistled and sang out, “Hey people, when you get yourselves together I’ll show you how to make some pizzas. I have to go help lay out the new sewage-filtration pond; we don’t want to pollute the ecology.”

But the girls straggled out very upset, crying, “Lord, we dare not go back because we have failed in our mission and we will be dispatched with excruciating and bestial tortures.”

So Cammerling told them they could stay with him, and he showed them how to work the stove. And they all settled down happily, except the girl Ixhualca with the whirlpool thing, who said, “W’at ees dees batsheet peetzas?” and stamped back to the executioners.

And Cammerling went out to participate in the filtration project and the water-wheel project and the Voltaic cell project and numerous other projects, becoming more involved than he really felt good about, because he could see he actually had dislocated the native cultural gestalt some. And he got grief from people who couldn’t fulfill themselves workwise because their role was, say, shrinking corpses which there weren’t enough of now, or holding sticks to make the women plow straight when the women were now plowing with lizard-drawn plows that went too fast. And he began to understand what his group vocational computer meant by developing maturity of outlook.

But he learned to cope, like when the metal-workers came to him and said, “Lord, we’ve made this devil-machine for vomiting out this unholy hard stuff. What in the name of the sacred iguana egg do we do with it now?” So he said, “Look, let’s all vote. I vote we make water pipes.” And when the kiln-workers said, “See, O Lord. These fire-bellies which we have constructed give birth to these unbearable tile pots. What use are they?” And he said, “Well, let’s all cycle it around. I’ll throw in the idea that we make ceramic flush toilets.”

And the high priests jeered, “By this you know that the new religion is to put water in one end of the body and take it out the other with maximum effort.”

Meanwhile, all the babies that had not been put down the wells or into the idols continued to pile up and drive everybody into the walls. And one day Cammerling heard strange sounds and opened the door of his ship to find the watch-dragon surrounded by hundreds of roaring infants. So he walked out to look them over and said, “By Gemini, these are cute little papooses.”

So he turned to the eleven houris who were mucking about with strudel dough and said “Here! We have a perfect opportunity to raise a whole generation free from prejudice, fear and hatred. Let us build a schoolhouse, and I want you to teach these kids.”

But the girls exclaimed, “This isn’t our area of specialization, Lord! What can we teach those larvae?”

“Why,” said Cammerling, “everything!” And he went over and switched on his old teach-panel, which was in his ship. “Look: Parsley Place, Dill Drive, Allspice Avenue, Betelnut Boulevard—we can make the Lizard Lane—Mr. Spock’s Logic Book, Karma for Kiddies, Clean Genes— the whole system. We’ll have like a kibbutz; studies show that has its drawbacks, but it’s an optimal form for situations like this.”

And in a very short while they had a kibbutz, and the girls were teaching Walden set theory and creative hygiene. And more and more babies arrived, and more girls too, because it turned out that Ixhualca the Burning Whirlpool had busted out and started a women’s lib movement, and many of her recruits opted to teach babies as an alternative to making ceramic flush toilets.

And tune passed—actually quite a few years, although to Cammerling they seemed only weeks because he was a nice Terran boy with a life expectancy of five hundred years and he was only into post-adolescence. And behold, there was a whole generation of marvelous young persons in well-cut tunics riding around on tractors labeled “War Is For Lizards” and “Cook Pizzas Not People,” with the sun shining through their eyes. And they were restoring the land and helping the people and organizing truck-farm cooperatives and music festivals and people’s capitalism and community dance-ins and health clinics. And though a majority of the older people still seemed sort of silent, Cammerling gazed upon the unstoppable flood of babies pouring out of his kibbutzim programmed with middle-Terran values plus pioneering macho and he knew that it was only a matter of time.

And one evening, as he sat watching his sabras setting up a transmitter, practicing karate and laying the foundations for a supermarket, there came a flash in the sky. And a spaceship shrieked in out of nowhere and sat down daintily on the beach. And Cammerling saw it was a supersports model of a style that was unfamiliar to him but obviously very heavy indeed. And he went over to the alabaster lock full of strange stirrings.

And it opened, and there stepped out that indescribable being, a nice Terran girl.

“Well!” said Cammerling. “I must say I haven’t seen a nice Terran girl for some time. Would you like to come in my spaceship and visit?”

She looked at what was visible of Cammerling’s sportster under the passion-flowers and the pizza shells and replied, “Come in mine, hadji, I have low-gee conditioning and a cooler-full of Groombridge Jubilee.”

So he bounced into her ship and she opened her arms and he lunged right at her in the good old Terran way. And after kissing once or twice because he wasn’t used to a quarter gee, he made it.

And afterwards she asked him, “How was it, pookie?”

And he said, “Well, there’s like a muscle or two I could show you about, but I do believe that’s the Real Thing.”

“I know,” she replied fondly. “There’s nothing like a nice Terran girl. And now, Cammerling, it’s time you came home.”

“Who says?” said Cammerling. And she said, “Your mother says.”

“In that case I’ll do it,” said Cammerling. “Things are going pretty smooth here.”

So he opened the door of the spaceship and called to all his friends and followers and all the great young people and anyone else who cared to listen. And they came and stood before him in a loose but jaunty formation expressive of individual creativity blended with empathic sharingness. And he said to them, “All right! I have served you as a humble communication link with Terran interstellar enlightenment, although I hope I haven’t whacked up your native cultural scene too much; still, it’s done now. Now I go back into the sky. Feel free to get in touch with me at any time via my ship’s transmitter if you have any problems. Carry on, Godolphus Four! Farewell.”

And they replied, “Oh great pink friend from the sky, we realize you are not a god and all that; you have taught us freedom from superstition. Nevertheless, bless you. We will carry on. Farewell.”

And so Cammerling went away; and as soon as he took off, all the old hairy chiefs and priests and tribesmen came out and rose up and started joyfully flogging everybody and everything in the name of their sacred Godolphian way of life. But the young people, whom Cammerling had thoughtfully instructed in the use of advanced weapons as well as Ixhualca’s karate, were easily able to handle them. And in no time at all they had the situation totally under control and were able to proceed with energy to fixing up the planet truly nice, all over.

And after many years had passed, a faint message reached Groombridge 34 Nu by sublight, saying:

“Hey, Cammerling! We have fixed up this planet all over truly nice. All is blooming and participatory and ecological. Now what do we do?”

Well, Cammerling was out when this message came, but his secretary got hold of Cammerling’s wife, who passed it to his therapist, and when the therapist thought Cammerling was ready he gave it to him. And Cammerling and the wife and the therapist conferred, and at first nothing much came of it, but finally Cammerling got off by himself and messaged back, saying:

“Suggest you now proceed to develop an FTL drive and offer the option of Terran enlightenment to other planets in your vicinity. Computer program on FTL-drive theory follows by faxblip. Carry on. Love, Cammerling.”

And so many more years passed, and passed, until one day a new, quite strong message came in from Godolphus Four. It said:

“We have built an FTL drive and we have gone forth and communicated Terran interstellar enlightenment to ten thousand three hundred and eighty-four planets That’s ail the planets there are. Their peoples join with us in asking: WHAT DO WE DO NEXT?”

But Cammerling never got that message.

Table of Contents

Start