COSMIC CASANOVA

THIS TIME t was five weeks out from Base Planet before the symptoms

became acute. On the last trip it had taken only a month; I was not

certain whether the difference was due to advancing age or to something

the dietitians had put into my food capsules. Or it could merely have

been that I was busier; the arm of the galaxy I was scouting was

heavily populated, with stars only a couple of light-years apart, so I

had little time to brood over the girls I'd left behind me. As soon as

one star had been classified, and the automatic search for planets had

been completed, it was time to head for the next sun. And when, as

happened in about one case out of ten, planets did turn up, I'd be

furiously busy for several days seeing that Max, the ship's electronic

computer, got all the information down on his tapes.

Now, however, I was through this densely packed region of space, and it

sometimes took as much as three days to get from sun to sun. That was

time enough for Sex to come tiptoeing aboard the ship, and for the

memories of my last leave to make the months ahead look very empty

indeed.

Perhaps I had overdone it, back on Diadne V, while my ship was being

reprovisionedand I was supposed to be resting between missions. But a

survey scout spends eighty percent of his time alone in space, and

human nature being what it is, he must be expected to make up for lost

time. I had not merely done that; I'd built up considerable credit for

the future though not, it seemed, enough to last me through this

trip.

Pirst, I recalled wistfully, there had been Helene. She was blonde,

cuddly, and compliant, though rather unimaginative. We had a fine time

together until her husband came back from his mission; he was extremely

decent about it but pointed out, reasonably enough, that Helene would

now have very little time for other engagements. Fortunately, I had

already made contact with Iris, so the hiatus was negligible.

Now Iris was really something. Even now, it makes me squirm to think

of her. When that affair broke up for the simple reason that a man has

to get a little sleep sometime I swore off women for a whole week. Then

I came across a touching poem by an old Earth writer named John Donne

he's worth looking up, if you can read Primitive English which reminded

me that time lost could never be regained.

How true, I thought, so I put on my spaceman's uniform and wandered

down to the beach of Diadne V's only sea. There was need to walk no

more than a few hundred meters before I'd spotted a dozen

possibilities, brushed off several volunteers, and signed up Natalie.

That worked out pretty well at first, until Natalie started objecting

to Ruth (or was it Kayo.

I can't stand girls who think they own a man, so I blasted off after a

rather difficult scene that was quite expensive in crockery. This left

me at loose ends for a couple of days; then Cynthia came to the rescue

and but by now you'll have gotten the general idea, so I won't bore you

with details.

These, then, were the fond memories I started to work back through

while one star dwindled behind me and the next flared up ahead. On

this trip I'd deliberately left my pin-ups behind, having decided that

they only made matters worse. This was a mistake; being quite a good

artist in a rather specialized way, I started to draw my own, and it

wasn't long before I had a collection it would be hard to match on any

respectable planet.

I would hate you to think that this preoccupation affected my

efficiency as a unit of the Galactic Survey. It was only on the long,

dull runs between the stars, when I had no one to talk to but the

computer, that I found my glands getting the better of me. Max, my

electronic colleague, was good enough company in the ordinary course of

events, but there are some things that a machine can't be expected to

understand. I often hurt his feelings when I was in one of my

irritable moods and lost my temper for no apparent reason.

"What's the matter, Joe?" Max would say plaintively.

"Surely you're not mad at me because I beat you at chess again?

Remember, I warned you I would."

"Oh, go to help" snarl back and then I'd have an anxious five minutes

while I straightened things out with the rather literal-minded

Navigation Robot.

Two months out from Base, with thirty suns and four solar systems

logged, something happened that wiped all my personal problems from my

mind.

The long-range monitor began to beep; a faint signal was coming from

somewhere in the section of space ahead of me. I got the most accurate

bearing that I could; the transmission was unmodulated, very narrow

band clearly a beacon of some kind. Yet no ship of ours, to the best

of my knowledge, had ever entered this remote neck of the universe; I

was supposed to be scouting completely unexplored territory.

This, I told myself, is IT my big moment, the payoff for all the lonely

years I'd spent in space. At some unknown distance ahead of me was

another civilisation a race sufficiently advanced to possess

hyper-radio.

I knew exactly what I had to do. As soon as Max had confirmed my

readings and made his analysis, I launched a message carrier back to

Base. If anything happened to me, the Survey would know where and

could guess why. It was some consolation to think that if I didn't

come home on schedule, my friends would-be out here in force to pick up

the pieces.

Soon there was no doubt where the signal was coming from, and I changed

course for the small yellow star that was dead in line with the

beacon.

No one, I told myself, would put out a wave this strong unless they had

space travel themselves, I might be running into a culture as advanced

as my own with all that that implied.

I was still a long way off when I started calling, not very hopefully,

with my own transmitter. To my surprise, there was a prompt reaction.

The continuous wave immediately broke up into a string of pulses,

repeated over and over again.

Even Max couldn't make anything of the message, it probably meant "Who

the heck are you?" which was not a big enough sample for even the most

intelligent of translating machines to get its teeth into.

Hour by hour the signal grew in strength; just to let them know I was

still around and was reading them loud and clear, I occasionally shot

the same message back along the way it had come. And then I had my

second big surprise.

I had expected them whoever or whatever they might be to switch to

speech transmission as soon as I was near enough for good reception.

This was precisely what they did; what I had not expected was that

their voices would be human, the language they spoke an unmistakable

but to me unintelligible brand of English. I could identify about one

word in ten; the others were either quite unknown or else distorted so

badly that I could not recognize them.

When the first words came over the loudspeaker, I guessed the truth.

This was no alien, nonhuman race, but something almost as exciting and

perhaps a good deal safer as far as a solitary scout was concerned. I

had established contact with one of the lost colonies of the First

Empire the pioneers who had set out from Earth in the early days of

interstellar exploration, five thousand years ago. When the empire

collapsed, most of these isolated groups had perished or had sunk back

to barbarism. Here, it seemed, was one that had survived.

I talked back to them in the slowest and simplest English I could

muster, but five thousand years is a long time in the life of any

language and no real communication was possible. They were clearly

excited at the contact pleasurably, as far as I could judge. This is

not always the case; some of the isolated cultures left over from the

First Empire have become violently xenophobia and react almost with

hysteria to the knowledge that they are not alone in space.

Our attempts to communicate were not making much progress, when a new

factor appeared one that changed my outlook abruptly. A woman's voice

started to come from the speaker.

It was the most beautiful voice I'd ever heard, and even without the

lonely weeks in space that lay behind me I think I would have fallen in

love with it at once. Very deep, yet still completely feminine, it had

a warm, caressing quality that seemed to ravish all my senses. I was

so stunned, in fact, that it was several minutes before I realized that

I could understand what my invisible enchantress was saying. She was

speaking English that was almost fifty per cent comprehensible.

To cut a short story shorter, it did not take me very long to learn

that her name was Liala, and that she was the only philologist on her

planet to speciali se in Primitive English. As soon as contact had

been made with my ship, she had been called in to do the translating. 

Luck, it seemed, was very much on my side; the interpreter could so

easily have been some ancient, white-bearded fossil.

As the hours ticked away and her sun grew ever larger in the sky ahead

of me, Liala and I became the best of friends. Because time was short,

I had to operate faster than I'd ever done before. The fact that no

one else could understand exactly what we were saying to each other

insured our privacy.

Indeed, Liala's own knowledge of English was sufficiently imperfect for

me to get away with some outrageous remarks; there's no danger of going

too far with a girl who'll give you the benefit of the doubt by

deciding you couldn't possibly have meant what she thought you said....

Need I say that I felt very, very happy? It looked as if my official

and personal interests were neatly coinciding. There was, however,

just one slight worry. So far, I had not seen Liala. What if she

turned out to be absolutely hideous?

My first chance of settling that important question came six hours from

planet-fall. Now I was near enough to pick up video transmissions, and

it took Max only a few seconds to analyze the incoming signals and

adjust the ship's receiver accordingly. At last I could have my first

close-ups of the approaching planet and of Liala

She was almost as beautiful as her voice. I stared at the screen,

unable to speak, for timeless seconds.

Presently she broke the silence.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Haven't you ever seen a girl before?"

I had to admit that I'd seen two or even three, but never one like her.

It was a great relief to find that her reaction to me was quite

favorable, so it seemed that nothing stood in the way of our future

happiness if we could evade the army of scientists and politicians who

would surround me as soon as I landed. Our hopes of privacy were very

slender; so much so, in fact, that I felt tempted to break one of my

most ironclad rules.

I'd even consider marrying Liala if that was the only way we could

arrange matters. (Yes, that two months in space had really put a

strain on my system....)

Five thousand years of history ten thousand, if you count mine as well

can't be condensed easily into a few hours. But with such a delightful

tutor, I absorbed knowledge fast, and everything I missed, Max got down

in his infallible memory circuits.

Arcady, as their planet was charmingly called, had been at the very

frontier of interstellar colonisation; when the tide of empire had

retreated, it had been left high and dry. In the struggle to survive,

the Arcadians had lost much of their Original scientific knowledge,

including the secret of the Star Drive. They could not escape from

their own solar system, but they had little incentive to do so. Arcady

was a fertile world and the low gravity only a quarter of Earth's had

given the colonists the physical strength they needed to make it live

up to its name. Even allowing for any natural bias on Liala's part, it

sounded a very attractive place.

Arcady's little yellow sun was already showing a visible disk when I

had my brilliant idea. That reception committee had been worrying me,

and I suddenly realized how I could keep it at bay.

The plan would need Liala's co-operation, but by this time that was

assured. If I may say so without sounding too immodest, I have always

had a way with women, and this was not my first courtship by TV.

So the Arcadians learned, about two hours before I was due to land,

that survey scouts were very shy and suspicious creatures. Owing to

previous sad experiences with unfriendly cultures, I politely refused

to walk like a fly into their parlor. As there was only one of me, I

preferred to meet only one of them, in some isolated spot to be

mutually selected. If that meeting went well, I would then fly to the

capital city; if not I'd head back the way I came. I hoped that they

would not think this behavior discourteous, but I

was a lonely traveler a long way from home, and as reasonable people, I

was sure they'd see my point of view.... They did. The choice of the

emissary was obvious, and Liala promptly became a world heroine by

bravely volunteering to meet the monster from space. She'd radio back,

she told her anxious friends, within an hour of coming aboard my ship.

I tried to make it two hours, but she said that might be overdoing it,

and nasty-minded people might start to talk.

The ship was coming down through the Arcadian atmosphere when I

suddenly remembered my compromising pinups, and had to make a rapid

spring-cleaning. (Even so, one rather explicit masterpiece slipped

down behind a chart rack and caused me acute embarrassment when it was

discovered by the maintenance crew months later.) When I got back to

the control room, the vision screen showed the empty, open plain at the

very center of which Liala was waiting for me; in two minutes, I would

hold her in my arms, be able to drink the fragrance of her hair, feel

her body yield in all the right places

I didn't bother to watch the landing, for I could rely on Max to do his

usual flawless job. Instead, I hurried down to the air lock and waited

with what patience I could muster for the opening of the doors that

barred me from Liala.

It seemed an age before Max completed the routine air check and gave

the "Outer Door Opening" signal. I was through the exit before the

metal disk had finished moving, and stood at last on the rich soil of

Arcady.

I remembered that I weighed only forty pounds here, so I moved with

caution despite my eagerness. Yet I'd forgotten, living in my fool's

paradise, what a fractional gravity could do to the human body in the

course of two hundred generations. On a small planet, evolution can do

a lot in five thousand years.

Liala was waiting for me, and she was as lovely as her picture. There

was, however, one trifling matter that the TV screen hadn't told mcI've

never liked big girls, and I like them even less now. If I'd still

wanted to, I suppose I could have embraced Liala. But I'd have looked

like such a fool, standing there on tiptoe with my arms wrapped around

her knees.