Once he glanced up at her before he finally slept. He noticed that her eyes were a deep, strange blue. Like the mad wild faraway skies of Old Earth itself.
He slept, and in his sleep he knew that he was being carried.
The hands which carried him felt friendly, though, and he curled himself back into deep, deeper dreamless sleep.
FOE MONEY SAD MONEY
When Rod finally awakened, it was to feel his shoulder tightly bound and his arm throbbing. He had fought waking up because the pain had increased as his mind moved toward consciousness, but the pain and the murmur of voices caused him to come all the way to the hard bright surface of consciousness.
The murmur of voices?
There was no place on all Old North Australia where voices murmured. People sat around and spieked to each other and hiered the answers without the clatter of vocal cords. Telepathy made for brilliant and quick conversation, the participants darting their thoughts this way and that, soaring with their shields so as to produce the effect of a confidential whisper.
But here there were voices. Voices. Many voices. Not possible.
And the smell was wrong. The air was wet — luxuriously, extravagantly wet, like a miser trying to catch a rainstorm in his cabin!
It was almost, like the van of the Garden of Death.
Just as he woke, he recognized Lavinia singing an odd little song. It was one which Rod knew, because it had a sharp catchy, poignant little melody to it which sounded like nothing on this world. She was singing, and it sounded like one of the weird sadnesses which his people had brought from their horrible group experience on the abandoned planet of Paradise VII:
His eyes opened and it was indeed Lavinia whom he saw at the edge of vision. This was no house. It was a box, a hospital, a prison, a ship, a cave or a fort. The furnishings were machined and luxurious. The light was artificial and almost the color of peaches. A strange hum in the background sounded like alien engines dispensing power for purposes which Norstrilian law never permitted to private persons. The Lord Redlady leaned over Rod; the fantastic man broke into song himself, chanting—
When he saw the obvious signs of Rod’s perplexity, he burst into a laugh,
“That’s the oldest song you ever heard, my boy. It’s prespace and it used to be called ‘general quarters’ when ships like big iron houses floated on the waters of Earth and fought each other. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”
“Water,” said Rod, “please give me water. Why are you talking?”
“Water!” cried the Lord Redlady to someone behind him. His sharp thin face was alight with excitement as he turned back to Rod, “And were talking because I have my buzzer on. If people want to talk to each other, they jolly well better use their voices in this ship.”
“Ship?” said Rod, reaching for the mug of cold, cold water which a hand had reached out to him.
“This is my ship, Mister and Owner Rod McBan to the hundred and fifty-first! An Earth ship. I pulled it out of orbit and grounded it with the permission of the Commonwealth. They don’t know you’re on it, yet. They can’t find out right now because my Humanoid-robot Brainwave Dephasing Device is on. Nobody can think in or out through that, and anybody who tries telepathy on this boat is going to get himself a headache here.”
“Why you?” said Rod. “What for?”
“In due time,” said the Lord Redlady. “Let me introduce you first. You know these people.” He waved at a group.
Lavinia sat with his hands, Bill and Hopper, with its workwoman Eleanor, with his Aunt Doris. They looked odd, sitting on the low, soft, luxurious Earth furniture. They were all sipping some Earth drink of a color which Rod had never seen before. Their expressions were diverse: Bill looked truculent, Hopper looked greedy, Aunt Doris looked utterly embarrassed, and Lavinia looked as though she were enjoying herself.
“And then here…” said the Lord Redlady.
The man he pointed to might not have been a man. He was the Norstrilian type all right, but he was a giant, of the kind which were always killed in the Garden of Death.
“At your service,” said the giant, who was almost three meters tall and who had to watch his head, lest it hit the ceiling, “I am Donald Dumfrie Hordern Anthony Garwood Gaines Wentworth to the fourteenth generation, Mister and Owner McBan. A military surgeon, at your service, sir!”
“But this is private. Surgeons aren’t allowed to work for anybody but government.”
“I am on loan to the Earth Government,” said Wentworth, the giant, his face in a broad grin.
“And I,” said the Lord Redlady, “am both the Instrumentality and the Earth Government for diplomatic purposes. I borrowed him. He’s under Earth rules. You will be well in two or three hours.”
The doctor, Wentworth, looked at his hand as though he saw a chronograph there:
“Two hours and seventeen minutes more.”
“Let it be,” said the Lord Redlady, “here’s our last guest.”
A short, angry man stood up and came over. He glared out at Rod and held forth an angry hand.
“John Fisher to the hundredth. You know me.”
“Do I?” said Rod, not impolitely. He was just dazed.
“Station of the Good Fresh Joey,” said Fisher.
“I haven’t been there,” said Rod, “but I’ve heard of it.”
“You needn’t have,” snapped the angry Fisher. “I met you at your grandfather’s.”
“Oh, yes, Mister and Owner Fisher,” said Rod, not really remembering anything at all, but wondering why the short, red-faced man was so angry with him.
“You don’t know who I am?” said Fisher. “I handle the books and the credits for the government.”
“Wonderful work,” said Rod. “I’m sure it’s complicated. Could I have something to eat?”
The Lord Redlady interrupted: “Would you like French pheasant with Chinesian sauce steeped in the thieves’ wine from Viola Siderea? It would only cost you six thousand tons of refined gold, orbited near Earth, if I ordered it sent to you by special courier.”
For some inexplicable reason the entire room howled with laughter. The men put their glasses down so as not to spill them. Hopper seized the opportunity to refill his own glass. Aunt Doris looked hilarious and secretly proud, as though she herself had laid a diamond egg or done some equal marvel. Only Lavinia, though laughing, managed to look sympathetically at Rod to make sure that he did not feel mocked. The Lord Redlady laughed as loudly as the rest and even the short, angry John Fisher allowed himself a wan smile, while holding out his hand for a refill on his drink. An animal, a little one which looked very much like an extremely small person, lifted up the bottle and filled his glass for him; Rod suspected that it was a “monkey” from Old Old Earth, from the stories he had heard.
Rod didn’t even say, “What’s the joke?” though he realized plainly that he was himself in the middle of it. He just smiled weakly back at them, feeling the hunger grow within him.
“My robot is cooking you an Earth dish. French toast with maple syrup. You could live ten thousand years on this planet and never get it. Rod, don’t you know why we’re laughing? Don’t you know what you’ve done?”