“What show?”
“Moreri is throwing a feast for us tonight,” Maarten said. “Very big, very important feast. a final gesture of good will and all that.” Although his tone was casual, there was a gleam of deep satisfaction in his eyes.
Croswell’s reaction was more immediate. “Then we’ve made it! The contact is successful!”
Behind him, two natives shook at the loudness of his voice and tottered feebly away.
“We’ve made it,” Maarten whispered, “if we watch our step. They’re a fine, understanding people—but we do seem to grate on them a bit.”
By evening, Maarten and Croswell had completed a chemical examination of the Durellan foods and found nothing harmful to humans. They took several more pink tablets, changed coveralls and sandals, bathed again in the degermifier, and proceeded to the feast.
The first course was an orange-green vegetable that tasted like squash. Then Chief Moreri gave a short talk on the importance of intercultural relations. They were served a dish resembling rabbit and Croswell was called upon to give a speech.
“Remember,” Maarten whispered, “whisper!”
Croswell stood up and began to speak. Keeping his voice down and his face blank, he began to enumerate the many similarities between Earth and Durell, depending mainly on gestures to convey his message.
Chedka translated. Maarten nodded his approval. The chief nodded. The feasters nodded.
Croswell made his last points and sat down. Maarten clapped him on the shoulder. “Well done, Ed. You’ve got a natural gift for—what’s wrong?”
Croswell had a startled and incredulous look on his face. “Look!”
Maarten turned. The chief and the feasters, their eyes open and staring, were still nodding.
“Chedka!” Maarten whispered. “Speak to them!”
The Eborian asked the chief a question. There was no response. The chief continued his rhythmic nodding.
“Those gestures,” Maarten said. “You must have hypnotized them!” He scratched his head, then coughed once, loudly. The Durellans stopped nodding, blinked their eyes and began to talk rapidly and nervously among themselves.
“They say you’ve got some strong powers,” Chedka translated at random. “They say that aliens are pretty queer people and doubt if they can be trusted.”
“What does the chief say?” Maarten asked.
“The chief believes you’re all right. He is telling them that you meant no harm.”
“Good enough. Let’s stop while we’re ahead.”
He stood up, followed by Croswell and Chedka.
“We are leaving now,” he told the chief in a whisper, “but we beg permission for others of our kind to visit you. Forgive the mistakes we have made; they were due only to ignorance of your ways.”
Chedka translated, and Maarten went on whispering, his face expressionless, his hands at his sides. He spoke of the oneness of the Galaxy, the joys of cooperation, peace, the exchange of goods and art, and the essential solidarity of all human life.
Moreri, though still a little dazed from the hypnotic experience, answered that the Earthmen would always be welcome.
Impulsively, Croswell held out his hand. The chief looked at it for a moment, puzzled, then took it, obviously wondering what to do with it and why.
He gasped in agony and pulled his hand back. They could see deep burns blotched red against his skin.
“What could have—”
“Perspiration!” Maarten said. “It’s an acid. Must have an almost instantaneous effect upon their particular makeup. Let’s get out of here.”
The natives were milling together and they had picked up some stones and pieces of wood. The chief, although still in pain, was arguing with them, but the Earthmen didn’t wait to hear the results of the discussion. They retreated to their ship, as fast as Maarten could hobble with the help of his cane.
The forest was dark behind them and filled with suspicious movements. Out of breath, they arrived at the spaceship. Croswell, in the lead, sprawled over a tangle of grass and fell headfirst against the port with a resounding clang.
“Damn!” he howled in pain.
The ground rumbled beneath them, began to tremble and slide away.
“Into the ship!” Maarten ordered.
They managed to take off before the ground gave way completely.
“It must have been sympathetic vibration again,” Croswell said, several hours later, when the ship was in space. “But of all the luck—to be perched on a rock fault!”
Maarten sighed and shook his head. “I really don’t know what to do. I’d like to go back, explain to them but—”
“We’ve outlived our welcome,” Croswell said.
“Apparently. Blunders, nothing but blunders. We started out badly, and everything we did made it worse.”
“It is not what you do,” Chedka explained in the most sympathetic voice they had ever heard him use. “It’s not your fault. It’s what you are.”
Maarten considered that for a moment. “Yes, you’re right. Our voices shatter their land, our expressions disgust them, our gestures hypnotize them, our breath asphyxiates them, our perspiration burns them. Oh, Lord!”
“Lord, Lord,” Croswell agreed glumly. “We’re living chemical factories—only turning out poison gas and corrosives exclusively.”
“But that is not all you are,” Chedka said. “Look.”
He held up Maarten’s walking stick. Along the upper part, where Maarten had handled it, long-dormant buds had burst into pink and white flowers, and their scent filled the cabin.
“You see?” Chedka said. “You are this, also.”
“That stick was dead,” Croswell mused. “Some oil in our skin, I imagine.”
Maarten shuddered. “Do you suppose that all the carvings we touched—the huts—the temple—”
“I should think so,” Croswell said.
Maarten closed his eyes and visualized it, the sudden bursting into bloom of the dead, dried wood.
“I think they’ll understand,” he said, trying very hard to believe himself. “It’s a pretty symbol and they’re quite an understanding people. I think they’ll approve of—well, at least some of the things we are.”
CAN YOU FEEL ANYTHING WHEN I DO THIS?
It was a middle-class apartment in Forest Hills with all the standard stuff: slash-pine couch by Lady Yogina, strobe reading light over a big Uneasy Chair designed by Sri Somethingorother, bounce-sound projector playing Bloodstream Patterns by Drs. Molidoff and Yuli. There was also the usual microbiotic-food console, set now at Fat Black Andy’s Soul-Food Composition Number Three—hog’s jowls and black-eyed peas. And there was a Murphy Bed of Nails, the Beautyrest Expert Ascetic model with 2000 chrome-plated self-sharpening number-four nails. In a sentence, the whole place was furnished in a pathetic attempt at last year’s moderne-spirituel fashion.
Inside this apartment, all alone and aching of anomie, was a semi-young housewife, Melisande Durr, who had just stepped out of the voluptuarium, the largest room in the home, with its king-size commode and its sadly ironic bronze lingam and yoni on the wall.
She was a pretty girl, with really good legs, sweet hips, pretty stand-up breasts, long soft shiny hair, delicate little face. Nice, very nice. A girl that any man would like to lock onto. Once. Maybe even twice. But definitely not as a regular thing.
Why not? Well, to give a recent example:
“Hey, Sandy, honey, was anything wrong?”
“No, Frank, it was marvelous; what made you think anything was wrong?”
“Well, I guess it was the way you were staring up with a funny look on your face, almost frowning...”
“Was I really? Oh, yes, I remember; I was trying to decide whether to buy one of those cute trompe-l’oeil things that they just got in at Saks, to put on the ceiling.”