He grinned and gave a good answer. "I'm glad."
"And I'm going to help you people!" I-threw my arms around him—nice hard warm male skin over nice hard strong male bones— but he didn't exactly respond. He looked as though he thought, but wasn't sure, that his message beeper had gone off.
When I am naked and put my arms around a naked man I expect more of his attention than that, no matter how many times we have been making it. I was feeling really good, and it was a downer to suspect that Toby didn't seem to be. "What is it, love? What they say, Omnes triste post coito or something like that?"
He looked at me as though I had suddenly begun speaking Greek, but of course it wasn't. "That's Latin," I explained, "meaning all men seem to get gloomy after making love, only if that's what it is how come you never showed any signs of it before?"
"Oh, no," he said, stirring himself. "I was just thinking about— something. Say! Aren't you getting hungry?"
Well, of course I was, once he mentioned it, but it didn't answer my question. It did change the subject, because we certainly couldn't go out to eat the way we were.
You hear a lot about how long men have to wait for their lady friends to get dressed. It wasn't like that with us. I was out of the shower and into a dress and sandals and perched on Toby's nice, solid window ledge, watching nice, solid Toby lace his boots, in about seven minutes. He was slower. He had to buckle his belt with the big Puget medallion, and load it up with his beeper and his handcuffs and his flashlight, and then he had to call in on the beeper to say he was back on duty. I just sat there admiring him, and working up an appetite. "Don't you have to blow-dry your hair or something?" he asked, while he was checking the cartridges in his gun.
"Not with hair like mine. Do you ever shoot that thing?" I asked, because guns make me feel as though I'd eaten tuna salad that had been in the fridge a day too long.
He grinned. "Not usually, not counting snakes and now and then a wolf, up in the hills. What do you want to eat?"
"Seafood!"
"What else?" he sighed, and took my arm as we went out the door. Of course, the fruits of the sea were old stuff to Toby because he'd been eating them all his life. Not me. We had had five meals together, and had them in five different fish restaurants. I had scored sand dabs, crabmeat cakes, abalone, poached salmon, and that thing they call dolphin, although it isn't, and I was ready to run right down the menu, one by one, to make up for twenty-some years of eating nothing that didn't come out of the garden patch. Even the kids had taken to Earth food, especially seafood; when we took Jeron along the night before he'd ventured oyster stew, and loved it until he found a whole oyster in his mouth. I didn't blame him for that. I'd finished his plate for him, and all that that did for me was make me want some oysters of my own. So when we got to the new place Toby had picked out, nice ramshackle frame building looking right out over the bay, I ordered them fried, and a shrimp cocktail to start with, and when Toby ordered a beer I virtuously declined. I hadn't even cracked a malt- nut in forty-eight hours. Didn't need it. I was intoxicated enough just with being where I was and thinking about all the great things we were going to do for these poor people in Puget—and with Toby. I explained all this while he worked on his beer. That took us through the shrimp and well into the fried oysters and home-fries. And there it was again. He wasn't lighting up with joy. He was just nodding, and staring out over the bay at the sailboats and the big lumber vessel and the wreck of the Japanese cruiser across the water, and it was enough to make a girl wonder if her deodorant had failed to work.
So the first oyster was a delight, crisp outside and gummy and sinewy inside, with that marvelous iodine Pacific taste; and the second very good, and the third nice enough, but by the time I got to the fifth the salt had lost its savor. I put down my fork. "Toby?" I said.
He turned to look at me. "Yeah?"
I said, feeling my way, "Listen, love, I'm not talking about getting married, or anything like that. I mean, I'm not claiming any kind of rights."
He had a forkful of crab Louis halfway to his mouth, and he stopped there. "Ah, no, Eve," he said. "It's not that."
"Then it is something, right? What?"
He put the crabmeat in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. An ox could have finished a mouthful of hay before he got that mouthful pulpy enough to suit him. "I was thinking about all you people staying here to, what you said, help us."
"Right!" I cried. "You've had a tough time, and we want to make up for it! We're going to show you ways to live you never even dreamed of—not just the vegetable womb and the other presents we brought—although you wouldn't be drinking that stuff out of a bottle if you'd ever tasted a malt-nut! No. A whole new life-style, Toby dear. We've had twenty-five years to work it out, and we've got a lot to teach you—"
I stopped, because his beeper had beeped. He spoke into it, put the plug in his ear, listened a moment, and then frowned. He put it away and glanced at me. "You finished with that?" he asked.
"What's the matter?"
He rubbed two fingers across his lips. "Your friendly ghost is the matter," he said. "He's at the ship, and so is everybody else. And they're not alone. There's something pretty funny going on."
Now, the term "pretty funny" could easily be applied to almost anything involving us. I admit that. It's all a matter of perspective. If you grow up with a cross-eyed kid sister you get used to her, but you know that strangers are going to look at her in a different way. So it was with our little family. Sassy Jeron, flabby me, weird littler kids— but the prize for funniness had to belong to Will Becklund.
However, there was something funny in a different way, and that was that Toby had known that Uncle Ghost existed. We'd been having fun about that, all of us, dodging questions in Washington and letting the President and Darien and all the others wonder if their eyes had played tricks on them; but Toby had not been fooled. And I didn't know why not. In his bright red little gas-burner, cruising along the bay front to the beach where the golden ship nestled on the shore, I tried to figure out how that, was. I didn't succeed, and then we were there.
There was a crowd of Pugets surrounding a smaller crowd that was all the rest of us from Alpha-Aleph, just in front of the ship. People who have never seen Willis Becklund have many varying reactions. The Pugets had them all, but mostly what they had was narrowed eyes and closed-in expressions. Not me. My jaw dropped. Because there really was someone else. Someone no more than four feet tall, with a great hooked nose and blubbery lips. When it moved its nearly transparent head around to stare at the staring crowd I could not fail to recognize it. Although it looked like a baggy-pants burlesque version of a Jewish comic, I knew who it was. Had been. Was again. Whatever! It was none other than Dieter, or anyway the ghost of Dieter, the dreadful von Knefhausen.
"My God," I said, hopping out of Toby's three-wheeler and almost falling because I wasn't looking at what I was doing. When Toby came around the car I grabbed his hand to steady myself and tugged him through the crowd of silent Pugets.
Dieter and Will and the kids turned to me at once, all excited and kind of glowing, and, oh, what a clatter of words and clash of tongues! We were talking so fast that it was almost quick-speech, and, of course, everybody was talking at once.
Twenty-plus years with our little extrusion of the human race had trained me to certain expectations. One of them was that whatever I wanted to do, the next person I talked to would want to do something else; whatever I thought or felt, most of the rest of our bunch would disagree. With me; with each other. But not this time! The least-mean- square measure of difference was almost undetectable, because all our great minds had run in the same channels. Jeron had been brainwashing the younger kids, who were wild to try altruism and beneficence now that they'd heard of it; Will had roamed the Earth all by himself until he came out of the wilderness with the same idea. And with this curiously malformed version of Dieter von Knefhausen. I couldn't help it; I had to ask. "Why'd you bring this funny-looking ghost, and why—"