There remained the problem of cleaning up after them.
And all the time the rumors flew. The President was being entertained by the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, and the head erks. The President said they were going to liberate America right away and everybody was being issued real weapons. The President had decided that there wasn't enough transport for an invasion; consequences of that unknown.
But nobody had actually seen the President.
And the President of the United-States, Pettyman Castor, had on the other hand seen far too much! He was in shock. He was very nearly in fugue, running away within his head from externals too bizarre and scary to deal with.
His "party" was in no better shape than he. Tsoong Delilah spoke only in monosyllables, her face frozen in an expression that mingled dislike and disdain; Feng Miranda babbled uncontrollably. They sat in a triangular chamber filled with flowers (what strange flowers! what sickly sweet or foul-smelling aromas!), and listened, and hardly heard what was said. There was too much of it! They had a whole world's history to hear, and Governor Polly and the "erk" called Jutch would keep on talking and talking so!
It was, to begin with, the worst kind of shock to find that creatures like the erks could talk at all. There was nothing like that on Earth, nothing to prepare them for the dizzying dislocation of being politely welcomed by an animal—or an insect?—no, a thing!—with more legs than it ought to have and a face that sprouted cat's whiskers out of a body like a bug's. Even the human beings (why were they almost all women, for heaven's sake?) were hardly reassuring. They were so grossly large. They towered over even Castor, and the two genetic-Han women together would not have made one of these giantesses.
Worst of all was what they said. For it seemed that here on this place (they called it "World"—what arrogance!) a colony of lost human beings had been for generations breeding like maggots, arming themselves with weapons more terrible than Castor had ever dreamed possible—allying themselves with these outrageous-looking creatures, the erks—readying themselves to invade the Earth at whatever cost in life or destruction!
There had been human beings on World for fifty-eight years, the Real-Americans were told. They came from an interstellar mission, sent off in those last spectacular days of the space adventure just before the missiles flew and ended space adventures for the foreseeable future. The astronauts had known that was possible; tensions had built steadily from the mid-twentieth century until the hour of their launch. All the same, the actual outbreak of nuclear war caught them unawares.
Then they no longer had a future.
By the time the astronaut crew, fifty-five strong, healthy, smart, young (but aging) men and women, realized there was not going to be a good world to return to, it was far too late to turn back.
They went on as ordered, to Van Maanen's Star.
And there was another shock. Two of them. The first shock was to find that none of Van Maanen's pebbly little planets had either air or water; there was no place to land.
The second shock was both better and worse. Better because it meant their lives might yet be lived to the end— a very big plus, for fifty-five men and women who had faced the probability of whirling around a dim, unfriendly sun in a steel coffin, waiting for the last of themselves to die. But worse because what they found were the erks.
"I don't mean the actual erks," said Big Polly graciously, smiling at Jutch and the other creatures chirping and twitching around the table. "They didn't send manned—I guess you'd say 'erked'—probes out. What they sent out was automated exploration ships. Each one of them had a spaceway. And that's what the Original Landers found." She chuckled fondly. "What a surprise that must have been!" she said.
A great surprise indeed, for the erk spaceway had captured the interstellar spacecraft as unceremoniously as Castor and his crew themselves had been snatched away from Earth's solar system—whirled through the dizzying tunnel between real-spaces—thrust into orbit around World—grappled—tugged down to the surface—caught.
Their interstellar voyage ended on World, and they were greeted by the erks.
Language was a problem; the erks had never heard of English, of course. But they had skills developed all through their racial history for learning to speak with new races, for they had done this thing many times before. In a week the Original Landers were able to speak to their hosts, or captors.
To understand what they heard in return took a great deal longer.
At first the Original Landers did not see that there was a difference between smart erks and dumb erks. They looked identical, after all, except that the smart erks usually wore more clothing or ornamentation, and it was generally of more sensible patterns. (But the dumb erks liked to play dress-up too.) This led to some confusions, especially when they were feasted by the smart erks and the dumb erks kept climbing up from their laps to their tables to lap at their food. The natural conclusion the Original Landers came to was simply that erks had terribly bad manners.
The erks were almost as confused about the Yanks. They found that the Yanks came in two distinct generations, with a third generation already swelling the bellies of all the females. The eldest generation comprised the females from the original flight crew, all clustering close to fifty years in age by then. The erks did not know enough to be surprised at finding swelling bellies on post-menopausal women, but they knew enough to see that something was odd. Then there were the twentyish females—so very many more of them than men in that generation—and all of them pregnant, too.
It took some explanation before the Yanks began to understand the erks and the erks the Yanks—a little bit.
For the Yanks, it was all sensible and understandable, once you understood the basic needs. The trip to Van Maanen's Star took thirty-one years Earth time, twenty-nine relativistic—far too long to expect the fifty-five original crew to arrive in dewy-fresh condition. If they had all paired off and started raising families about the time they passed the orbit of Neptune, their kids would have been of a prime age to explore on arrival—if there had been anything to explore.
But nobody wants dozens of squalling, diaper-dirtying kids cluttering up an already cluttered spaceship. Besides, the psychodynamicists predicted an absolutely appalling divorce rate... if they bothered with marriage.
So they didn't. They enjoyed themselves in such varying ways as each conscience (or pair of consciences—or sometimes larger group of consciences) directed. And once each month each of the women clambered up onto the cot with the stirrups and allowed to be teased out of her private plumbing that month's new ovum. And once each month, in strict rotation, one of the men received somewhat higher kinkier gratification than usual so that he might provide a few cc of spermatozoa to make the ova blossom when wanted. The blossoming was all in vitro. That means, it happened in a Pyrex tube. The bloom was allowed to unfold for only eight days, then the tiny almost-fetus was sexed, typed, classified, and dipped into the liquid nitrogen—until the sixth year of the flight.