“Looks good,” she agreed. “Well, Cap’n Ahab, you ready to go after the great white Moby Maud?”
“You better knock that off,” Arthur warned as he shrugged off the harness and stood up. “She’s a Protected Lifestyle Minority.”
Side by side they looked to be very nearly the same height, but dressed for different purposes and destinations. His short gray hair and official Expedition uniform of a conservatively cut brown jumpsuit, complete with military specification pen pocket and multipocketed black vest, was neatly starched and pressed; it made him look like a professor of SWAT Science. She, on the other hand, wore a low-cut purple silk blouse, faded patched jeans, and battered cowboy boots. She did wear the official vest, but hers was covered with a collection of buttons, pins, and gag medals.
She put on a look of mock chastisement. “Sorry pod-ner. I can’t cetacean cheap shots if they’re only going to make you blubber.”
He gave her a pained look, then shook his head ruefully. “Why did I ever let you marry us?” They started toward the front door of the house, which acted as an airlock.
“Tax purposes?” she suggested.
“You’re taxing, and there seems to be no rebate in sight. I wish I knew how I managed to overlook all the proof that insanity runs in your family.”
“I’m an orphan, remember?”
“Uh-huh. There are times I think you also want to be a divorcee.”
She slipped an arm around his waist and squeezed. “You’d miss me if I was gone, Mr. Science.”
“You’re darn lucky I’m not an experimentalist.”
Arthur and Claire had been married for four years. Their jobs had initially thrust them together, many of their colleagues wondered what kept them together, and their union could be regarded as just one more largely inexplicable Whugg artifact.
The institution they were part of was also based on a marriage of convenience, namely the odd partnership between Humans and Whuggs.
The two races were little alike. Whuggs were smart. So smart that expecting humans to gauge their intelligence was rather like asking squirrels to administer and interpret an IQ test for a Hawking or Einstein. Moreover, Whuggs were insatiably curious; their fundamental urge was to know more. An old Earth aphorism stated that, “As grows the circle of light, so grows the circle of darkness.” Whuggs knew that one, and it drove them crazy.
The great Whugg character flaw was their absolute and unwavering refusal to travel—or even budge from the spot where they were acroama-triculated. Since they were one of the very few non-plant biologic entities with taproots, this was hardly surprising. The Whuggan fear of uprooting makes the human fear of death look like the mildest anxiety over a developing zit. Factor in the fact that adult Whuggs are the size of shopping malls—parking included—and you had a bunch of serious homebodies on your hands.
Whuggs were plenty smart enough to acknowledge their own shortcomings and seek a rational way around them—something many considered to be their most inhuman quality. A concerted effort of enough sheer brainpower to beat God at Scrabble allowed them to create a modest transient hitch in the space/time continuum’s gitalong which they used as a probe to seek out a race to act as the questing organs of their curiosity.
Humanity, whatever its other shortcomings, was not Hobson’s choice in this selection process. Life is three notches past ubiquitous in the Universe. Come to find out the trick was not creating life, but keeping the damn squirmy stuff from infesting and messing up every nice clean and tidy planet and moon capable of supporting it.
Several candidates were considered and rejected before the Whuggs snuck a cautious look at Earth. There they found a reasonably bright race that routinely produced creatures perfectly willing to pack their bags and go knocking about various star systems, sticking their noses into things for the pure hell of it. They even had a literature of sorts dedicated to that proposition, even though they hadn’t been back to their own Moon in almost fifty years. While it was true that they had several nasty habits and quite unpleasant tendencies, in their favor was the fact that humans were nearly as curious as the Whuggs themselves.
Contact was initiated, first through the hitch, then more widely and easily through the Whuggs’s organoform and omnipresent version of the computer. Negotiations went well, and the Whuggs soon found themselves experiencing the warm pleasure a dog owner feels when he gives his pet a new squeaky toy upon mentioning that their new space buddies would of course be shown how to build such primitive but useful devices as matter transmitters and transmuters, time-to-energy converters, zero-loss recyclers, reactionless and faster-than-light drives, stasis-field generators, and gravity twisters.
Sound like a good deal? the Whuggs asked hopefully. For all their intelligence they were rank innocents in the bargaining business; the kind that would have paid full retail and taken the service contract.
You bet! humans answered, knowing a damn good deal when they heard one.
Of course there were adjustments to be made. Humans had to get over a few preconceptions before they embarked on this great adventure. For instance, no great gleaming Spaceships were to be constructed for the purpose of exploration; Whuggs found that idea utterly adorable but wholly impractical. They were into, as an old hot-rodders’ phrase put it, Run what you brung.
Although those riding on it called the huge craft which had carried their expedition to this star system a mothership, it was actually the former Danforth Quayle Preparatory School, golf course and squash courts included, sfhered up and turned into an interstellar craft capable of running .35 light-year per hour flat out with no inconvenient time dilation to wreck everybody’s schedules. The over sixty smaller exploratory craft it carried along were a motley assortment of cheesy modular homes, house-trailers, RVs, and a decommissioned diesel submarine, all sfhere-shielded, gravity-fueled, and capable of about a quarter AU per hour.
The bureaucratic and diplomatic name for this venture was the Whugg/Humanity Noemic Traveling University. But the ten thousand-odd scientists and researchers from a hundred different disciplines and institutions who became part of it mostly used the nickname bestowed by one of its founders: Why Not U.
So, for that matter, did the Whuggs.
“Any major life forms nearby?” Claire asked, the moderately aggressive way she was carrying her stun rifle suggesting that she hoped the answer was yes.
“Not at the moment.” He glanced back over his shoulder, eyeing her weapon mistrustfully. “Is that thing on safety?”
She looked hurt. “Have I ever accidentally shot you before?”
“No, but there was that time you shot me on purpose. Once was plenty, thank you very much.”
“Shooting you saved your tenured buns, remember? That swamp-dwelling whatchamacallit—”
“Derosian bogmaster,” he supplied, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. The Pitstop lowlands were every bit as hot and steamy as Earth’s tropics. He glanced up at the small hot sun, wondering if he should have worn a hat. Five minutes was all it took to turn his fair skin the color of a boiled lobster.