“Hey there, Captain,” I heard a familiar voice say.
“Hello, Captain,” I answered, and we laughed. Then we did something we hadn’t done for a long time. We talked for an hour and a half about the stars.
Joneny closed the book. Sand and desert: meson fields! And “City” was part of the starship’s title. Bright hair: the exhaust from a shuttle boat. Sore feet, eyes black; of course “The Ballad of Beta-2” was from a time much later than that of Hank and Leela, the first captains of the starships. But almost everything, at least in the chorus, made some some sort of sense now. He let the words run through his mind once more, his concentration drifting inward, losing focus upon the dials and screens, even the logbook in his hand:
Then someone said, “Hello.”
Chapter Four
Joneny whirled and nearly tore himself loose from his magnetic couplings with the floor. The book flew from his hand and bounced away.
The boy was holding the edge of a circular doorway with one hand. Now he reached out with his skinny foot and caught the book in his toes. “Here,” he said, giving the book a shove so that it went floating end over end back to Joneny.
Joneny caught it. “Thank you.”
“Any time.” The boy was thin, naked, with luminously white skin. Joneny would have put his age at fourteen or fifteen, except that his hair, fine and pale and long, had receded at the temples like an old man’s, throwing off the whole character of his face. The nose was flat, the lips were thin, and the features were all dominated by immense shell-green eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Just…eh…looking around,” answered Joneny.
“For what?”
“Eh…whatever I can…well, find.” Joneny was surprised and a little put off.
“You found that?” The boy gestured with his foot toward the book.
Joneny nodded cautiously.
“Can you read it?”
Joneny nodded again.
“You must be pretty smart,” the boy grinned. “I can read it too, I bet. Give it here.”
Joneny couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he tossed the diary back. The boy grabbed it with his toes again, opened the cover with his other foot, reached down and turned the first page with his free hand. “This is the Logbook of Gamma-5 City, sole property of Captain Hank Brandt, begun in the year — ”
“All right, all right,” Joneny said. “I believe you.” A thought struck him. “Where did you learn to talk?”
“What do you mean, where?” the boy asked. His green eyes widened in surprise.
“Your accent,” Joneny said. “You’re speaking pretty modern English.” It was a lot more modern than the clipped distortions of the robot speaker that had guided him in.
“I just — ” He paused. “I don’t know where I learned. Just”—he looked around — “here.”
“Where are all the others?” Joneny asked.
The boy let go of the door and began to turn over slowly in the air, the book still in his toes. “Other what?”
“The other people.”
“On the ships,” the boy said. Then he added, “There’re no people on Sigma-9 City or Beta-2 City, though.”
“I know that,” Joneny said, mustering an imitation of patience. “Where are the people on this ship?”
“Mostly in the center section, at the Market, in the Fishstore, in the Mountains, or down in the Poolroom.”
“Will you take me to them?” Joneny asked.
The boy was almost right side up again. “Are you sure you want to go?”
“Well, why not?”
“They won’t like you very much,” the boy said to him. Now he reached with his hand and grabbed back on the rim of the entrance. “They almost killed the last visitors they had. Those stun guns are still pretty powerful.”
“What visitors were those?”
“About ninety years ago some people tried to get in.”
To be sure, thought Joneny, the primary contact from the Federation explorers. Suddenly the boy launched from the ceiling. Joneny ducked back and nearly lost his couplings again. But the boy had aimed to miss him and simply placed the book on the table once more. Tsk went the magnets. The boy grabbed the edge of the desk with one hand and one foot. Those agile, prehensile toes, Joneny saw at close range, were over half the length of his fingers. “Then what are you doing here?” Joneny asked.
“The robot mechano told me you were here. So I came up.”
“Isn’t there anybody older than you around, somebody in charge who can perhaps give me some more information?”
“I don’t think the people in charge are going to help you very much.”
“Well, where are they?”
“I told you, down at the Market and in the Poolroom.” He turned to the wall and switched on a dial. “Here, I’ll show you.”
A gray screen erupted into colors that formed at last into the view of a large chamber. The particular room, Joneny noted, had gravity, though not much. The floor was covered with water that bubbled and lapped in slow-motion waves. Transparent plastic tubes crossed and recrossed the room. Immense bus bars of varying sizes stood in the water, and there was a bank of good-sized waldos along one wall. Through the tubes loped men — or men and women, he couldn’t telclass="underline" their eyes were small and pink, probably half blind. They were bald. Their ear trumpets had grown to their skulls. Round-shouldered, with nubby, nail-less fingers, they paused and groped mechanically at instrument dials and nobs, raising and lowering the rods in and out of the pool below them. Suddenly Joneny remembered the description that the Primary Contact had given of the Star Folk. These people were a lot closer to what had been reported than this green-eyed boy with him. Joneny glanced at the boy’s hands and feet. The nails, though bitten, were perfectly in evidence. The boy also had hair, while these…people were completely naked.
“That one’s in charge.” The boy pointed. As he spoke, the figure on the screen gave one of his companions a blow on the back of the head. The companion staggered away, regained his balance, and went off toward an instrument board. “I don’t think he’d be too interested in helping you. That, incidentally, is the Poolroom. I don’t like to go in there.”
Joneny looked at the figures all firmly anchored to the floor, then regarded the boy so adept at free fall. “You get sore feet?”
“You said it.”
“What are they doing?” Joneny asked, turning back to the screen.
“Taking care of one of the temporary reactors. It’s got to be kept underwater. It maintains the spin of that whole section of the ship.”
Like a gyroscope spinning inside a beach ball, reflected Joneny. And an underwater reactor! Just how primitive were these ships anyway? With that many moving parts, it was a wonder they were around at all.
“Why don’t you look like them?” Joneny asked as the boy switched off the screen. He might as well come right out and ask.
“I come from another City,” the boy said.
“Oh,” said Joneny. Apparently, then, this degeneration hadn’t taken place on all the other ships. “Isn’t there anyone around who can help me?”
“Help you do what?”
“Help me get some information.”
“Information about what? You’re not very clear.”
“About a song,” Joneny said. “A song about Beta-2.”
“Which song?” the boy asked. “There’re more songs about that City than all the rest put together.”