Food, he thought. Steak with mushrooms, escargots, frogs legs . . . which to be tender had to be frozen in advance, which most people did not know, including many otherwise good restaurants.
“Do you know what I want?” he asked the Frolixan. “A glass of ice cold milk. Milk with ice in it. A half-gallon of it. I want to just sit there and drink milk.”
“As you pointed out, Mr. Provoni,” Morgo said, “a man’s real interest is in the immediate and the small. We are on a voyage affecting the lives and hopes of six billion people, and yet when you imagine yourself there, at last, you imagine yourself sitting at a table on which rests a carton of milk.”
“But you see,” Provoni said, “they’re the same way. There is an invasion of Earth by nonterrestrials, and everyone—everyone!—wants merely to continue living. The myth of the seething, inarticulate mass that’s searching for a spokesman, a leader—that would be Cordon. But how many people really care? Maybe even Cordon doesn’t care . . . not terribly. Do you know what the French gentry were afraid of during the Revolution? They were afraid someone would come in and smash their pianos. Their narrow vision . . .” He broke off. “Which even I share,” he said aloud, “to an extent.”
“You’re homesick. It shows up in your dreams; nightly, you walk the paths of Earth’s forests, and rise in majestic elevators to rooftop restaurants and drugbars.”
“Yes, drugbars,” Provoni said. He had run out of all medication long ago, fun and otherwise—including, of course, all the mind-affecting pills. I’ll sit there at a drugbar, he said to himself, and have one capsule, pellet, tablet and span-sule after another. I’ll frost myself into invisibility. I’ll fly like a raven, like a crow; I’ll cackle and chirp my way across the fields of greenhouses, into the sunlight and out of it. In only six more days.
“There is one matter which we have not settled, Mr. Provoni,” the Frolixan said. “Are we to make an initial public appearance, with great pomp and circumstance, or shall we land in some out-of-the-way area where we won’t be seen? And begin operations slowly from there? You could move freely about, if the latter. You could see and enjoy your fields of wheat, your rows of Kansas corn; you could rest, take your pills, and, if you don’t mind my saying it, shave, bathe, get clean clothes; freshen yourself up. Whereas if we drop down in the middle of Times Square—”
“It doesn’t matter whether we land in the middle of Times Square or in a Kansas pasture,” Provoni said. “They’ll be maintaining constant radar alert, looking for us. They may even attack us, or try to attack us, with ships of the line, before we even reach Earth. We can’t be inconspicuous, not with you weighing ninety or so tons. Our retrorockets will light up the sky like Roman candles.”
“They can’t destroy your ship. I am wrapped around it entirely, now.”
“I understand, but they don’t; they may try anyway.” How will I look when I emerge? he asked himself. Grimy, dirty, given to unclean habits . . . but wouldn’t they expect that? Wouldn’t the crowd understand that? Maybe that is exactly the way I should appear.
“Times Square,” he said aloud.
“In the middle of the night.”
“No; even so it would be too crowded.”
“We’ll fire warning bursts with the retrorockets. When they see that we’re landing they’ll retreat.”
“And then a hydrogen warhead shell from a T-40 cannon will blow us to bits.” He felt sardonic and savage.
“Mr. Provoni, remember that I am semi-matter, that I can absorb anything. I will be there, wrapped around your little ship and you, for as long as is necessary.”
“Maybe they’ll go mad when they see me.”
“With enthusiasm?”
“I don’t know. Whatever makes people go mad. Fear of the unknown; it may be that. They may retreat as far from me as is physically possible. They may retreat to Denver, Colorado, bunch up there like scared cats. You’ve never seen a scared cat, have you? I’ve always had cats, tomcats, unaltered, and always my cat is a loser. He’s the one that comes back in shreds. You know how you can tell your cat’s a loser? When he and another tom are about to fight, you go out to rescue yours, and if he’s a winner, he at once jumps the other cat. And if he’s a loser, he damn well lets you pick him up and take him indoors.”
“You will soon see cats again,” Morgo said.
“So will you,” Provoni said.
“Describe a cat for me,” Morgo said. “Let it take shape in your mind. All your recollections and associations with cats.” Thors Provoni thought about cats. It seemed a harmless thing to do as they waited out the six days until they reached Earth.
“Opinionated,” Morgo said at last.
“Me, you mean? On the subject?”
“No, I mean cats. And self-centred.”
Angrily, Provoni said, “A cat is loyal to its master. But it shows it in a subtle way. That’s the whole point, a cat gives himself to no one, and this has been his way for millions of years, and then you manage to knock a chink in his armor, and he rubs against you and sits on your lap and purrs. So, because of his love for you, he breaks the inherent genetic behavior-pattern of two million years. What a victory that is.”
“Assuming the cat is sincere,” Morgo said, “rather than trying to cadge extra food.”
“You think a cat can be a hypocrite?” Provoni asked. “I’ve never heard an insinuation of insincerity directed toward cats. Actually, much of the criticism comes from their brutal honesty; if they don’t like a person then shit, they’re off to someone else.”
“I think,” Morgo said, “when we get to Terra I would like to have a dog.”
“A dog! After my meditation on the nature of cats—after all the wealth of material about dearly-loved cats from my past; I still think of one old tom named Asherbanopol, but we called him Ralf. ‘Asherbanopol’ is Egyptian.”
“Yes,” the Frolixan said. “You still moan deep in your heart for Asherbanopol. But when you die, as in the Mark Twain story—”
“Yeah,” he said morosely. “They’ll all be there, a row of them on each side of the road, waiting for me. An animal refuses to pass into Paradise without its master. They wait year after year.”
“And you fervently believe this.”
“ ‘Believe it?’ I know it’s true; God is alive; that carcass they found in deep space back a few years ago, that wasn’t God. You don’t find God under such circumstances, that’s Medieval thought. Do you know where you find the Holy Spirit? It’s not out in space—hell, it created space. It’s here.” He pointed to his chest. “I—I mean, we—have a portion of the Holy Spirit within us. Look at your decision to come and give us help—you get nothing from it, perhaps injury, or some kind of destruction that the military has but which we haven’t heard about.”
“I receive something from coming to your planet,” Morgo said. “I get to pick up and hold little life forms: cats, a dog, a leaf, a snail, a chipmunk. Do you know—do you understand—that on Frolix 8 all life forms except ourselves were sterilized, hence they long ago disappeared . . . although I’ve seen recordings of them, three dimensional recreations that seem absolutely real. Wired directly to the ruling ganglia of our central nervous systems.”
Fear overcame Thors Provoni.