“Anyhow, he’s eating it,” I observed, looking at the Earthman.
We watched him to see what you were supposed to do. The food was hot and consisted of pieces of protein floating in a thick liquid. By the side were additional slabs of some fluffy stuff that in texture was a little like some of the protein slabs we were used to. He was picking up the solid pieces out of the bowl with his fingers and mopping up the liquid with the fluffy slabs.
So we ate, and in seconds were absolutely absorbed. The villagers could have walked in and slaughtered us all there and then without us even noticing. The flavours, though so strange, were so intense and penetrating, the feel of the food as it went down so utterly delicious, that it seemed to me it was better than anything I had ever known. Even better than sex. That first meal on Earth is something I’ll remember all my life.
I learned afterwards that I was right — most Earth food did have to be processed. But the processing was fairly simple. The meal we ate consisted of plant and animal matter heated in water with various kinds of flavouring until its constituency changed by chemical action. That was the trick we would never have guessed.
When he had finished Bec leaned back, patting his stomach. “If we wanted we could go back to Killibol right now,” he said, grinning. “We’ve already got a new racket. People would sell their mothers for food like this.”
We stayed for quite a time in the village. It was called Hesha. Life there was easy and pleasant — eventually even their females got to look good to us, after we had acclimatised ourselves to our surroundings.
Bec sewed the village up with his usual efficiency. He made a small fortress of our headquarters, unbolting a couple of Jains from the sloop and positioning them at the front and the back of the house. Then he put the sloop back up on the hill overlooking the village where it commanded everything and in addition provided a good look-out for anyone else who might be arriving. I’d been real glad not to have to live in the sloop any more — it fairly stank of us by now — but Bec instituted a roster by which I and Reeth alternated with Grale and Hassmann, spending two days in the sloop and two days down below. It wasn’t too bad, though.
Meantime Bec wanted to find out everything. He made us all learn the local language — even Grale, who at first exploded at the suggestion with the words, “Let the klugs learn Klittmann!” Within a few months we all had a working knowledge. Bec and Harmen were experts.
The green people called their country Rheatt. The village Hesha lay a fair way out from their main centres of population, and in time it became evident that no one would be arriving to relieve them from our occupation. They didn’t exactly welcome our presence, of course, but they were much less against it than you might have imagined: because they feared their other enemy, the enemy for whom we had been mistaken, much more.
Rheatt was being invaded by Merame, the planet in the sky. Harmen had other names for it: Moon, Luna, and Selena. It orbited Earth at a distance of about eighty thousand miles, and the nation living there had spaceships which could make the journey quite easily. According to Harmen’s books it should have been much further away, more like a quarter of a million miles. Obviously it had spiralled in closer during Earth’s intervening history, by means either natural or artificial. I was interested to hear this idea of travel between worlds in space. I had once heard a vague story that at the time of the migrations to Killibol there was also communication with other worlds by means of giant missiles from Earth, but nobody on Killibol was much interested in space travel. For one thing, Killibol’s sun had no other planets and so there was nowhere to go,
The people of Hesha waited in fear and trembling for the day when the Meramites would descend on them. The Meramites, they informed us, were a cruel and cold people without any sense of beauty. Becmath, on the contrary, was in high spirits when he heard of the invasion.
“There’ll be confusion,” he told me. “Maybe we can carve out a territory for ourselves.”
But he made no move, although from everything we had seen we could have accounted well for ourselves in a fight. Earth weapons didn’t seem to have the same weight as ours. The guns that had been used against us were long, slender tubes that fired darts. Once launched, the darts gained additional range from a tiny rocket charge. They could be lethal, but the weapon was a toy compared with our stuff.
I had to admit that Bec’s analysis had been right: the inhabitants of Earth were of a softer, less sharp variety than those of Killibol. These people from Merame, however, were still an unknown quantity.
There were other nations, other intelligent species, maybe, elsewhere on Earth. But they were a long way off. Bec said we would stay here.
“We’ve found the load,” he would say to me. “Now we’ve got to find the fulcrum.”
In Klittmann the fulcrum meant two things: Protection (another word for direct intimidation) and the Squeeze (which meant you put your heel down on the only supply pipe of a much-needed commodity). Our taking over the village was the first kind, but we were too small to do that on a large scale. It had to be the second kind — or something new.
Naturally we didn’t think it out that clearly at that time: our ideas were vague and unformed. The truth was that Bec was trying to get up the nerve to move out, to take the chance on hitting something bigger — teaming up with the invaders from the Moon, maybe. As it happened we did well to stay: because our fulcrum appeared from an unexpected, but logical, source.
I knew that Tone the Taker didn’t have much pop left and I was waiting to see him finally go crazy, start screaming and kill himself with convulsions. Eventually he wasn’t around for a while and I figured he must have crawled away to die. Not that I cared, and I was glad I didn’t have to watch the spectacle, because I’d seen a pop addict get it before. It isn’t pretty.
But suddenly Tone turned up again. “Hello, Tone,” Bec said, surprised. “Where you been?”
“Living with the green people,” Tone said, shrugging aimlessly. “Bec, I need a favour.”
“Oh, what’s that?” We both looked at Tone curiously. By now he should have been dead. Instead, he looked better than he had any right to.
His face was tanned by the sunlight, of course. All our faces were. He was twitching, but not one half as much as he should have been. Correction: he shouldn’t have been twitching at all. He should have been a corpse. Had the green people given him something, I wondered?
It seemed that they had. They used some kind of drug and Tone had found out about it with that famous nose of his. It eased his craving and kept the withdrawal symptoms at bay.
“Tell me about this stuff,” Bec said, pointing Tone into a chair. “How do you take it?”
“It comes in a sort of a pad, like floss. It’s soaked in it. You hold it over your nostrils and breathe in the fumes.”
“You get some sort of charge out of it?”
“They do. It heightens their sensitivity. That’s why they’re so artistic. So gentle. It helps them see things a different way. But me —” he shrugged again — “it just takes away some of the pain.”
“Sounds interesting. What do they call it?”
“In their language it means Blue Space. But it isn’t blue, it’s pink. They call it that because it gives them a feeling of endless blue space. that’s what they say.”
“Is it addictive, this stuff?” Bec’s questions were pressing to an inexorable conclusion.
Tone nodded.
“And how many of the people here are addicted?”
“They all take it. Everybody in Rheatt.”
“Everybody? In the whole country?”