The admiral responded with another crisp salute. “Good morning, Ambassador Dreelig,” he said. “Welcome to Mayport Naval Station. May I introduce my colleagues?”
“In a moment,” said the Ambassador. “First, which of you are John Peters and Kevin Todd?” The two sailors stepped forward. “Ah. Pleasant greetings. You have your belongings? Yes, I see that you do. Please go aboard and, ah, report to Pilot Gell. He will show you what to do.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Peters, and saluted. The Ambassador seemed a bit confused, but raised his left arm again.
“By your leave, sir,” Peters said to the admiral, maintaining protocol.
“Carry on,” the admiral granted, and the sailors slung their seabags up on the wing and climbed the step, using the straps to drag them the few meters to the hatch.
Their first and continuing impression of the Grallt shuttle was that it could have been built in Seattle or Moscow—or Grenoble for that matter; it certainly looked old enough. A section covered with ordinary-looking black nonskid had separated from the—flaps? ailerons?—to form steps up to the waist-high upper surface, and more of the black stuff made a walkway to the entry, which was a curved hatch four meters or so forward of the trailing edge. Inside, seating was two and two across, a little bulkier than Boeing usually supplied, covered in blue plush worn shiny in places, with pale tan padding showing through occasional tears. Two parallel strips of bluish lights extended forward over the aisle, ending at a bulkhead with a closed door. There was nobody visible.
“So where’s this Pilot Gell?” Todd asked.
Peters shrugged. “I reckon he’s up front, where a pilot belongs. My question is, what do we do with the seabags? I’m a little tired of carryin’ the damn thing.”
Another door led aft. Todd tried it: locked. “I guess we hump ‘em a little further.”
“Reckon so.”
Beyond the forward door was a smaller compartment with only eight seats, larger, one on each side. “Officers’ country,” Peters guessed. Another door led to a short corridor, then to four chairs set two and two, upholstered in black, as big as the “officers’” but somehow more businesslike. In front of the first pair was the instrument panel, with the windshield above and big rectangular ports by each of the seats. The panel sloped rather than being vertical like an airplane’s, and was bare of screens and flashing lights, almost bare period. Both were familiar with aircraft instruments, and both found it a bit puzzling that a spaceship—a spaceship, for God’s sake—should have controls that looked not much more complex than those on a ten-meter liberty launch.
An individual, probably “Pilot Gell,” sat in the right front seat, and turned his head at their entry. He had two eyes arranged frontally, sandy-brown head hair parted on the left, and a pair of ears in more or less the regulation position, but that was where the similarities ended. Instead of anything like a nose he had a long cleft, beginning between the eyes and spreading at the bottom into an inverted Y that formed his upper lip, and his jaw was slightly wider and less pointed than the norm for human beings. The ambassador had worn their version of a mustache, two bands of silky hair beginning just below the inside corners of the eyes and extending vertically down to the upper lip; Gell was clean-shaven, which made the two of them easy to distinguish, even by the uninitiated. He was wearing a one-piece garment like a jumpsuit, off-white with splashes of bright reds and yellows in no discernible pattern.
The pilot said something incomprehensible; when the sailors didn’t respond he stood, pushed by them, opened one of the portside doors, and made a choppy gesture, indicating the cabinet. They slung their seabags inside and Gell closed the door, tested the latch by yanking on it, nodded, and pushed by them again. Up close, he had a slight odor, musty and unfamiliar but not unpleasant. He took his seat and indicated the other chairs with a wave.
Peters got the front seat, partly by being senior and partly by pushing. From there the sparseness of the instrument panel was even more remarkable: a couple of dials with white-on-black crosses in the middle and squiggles around the periphery, a couple more that were old-fashioned meters with needles, and half a dozen things an inch in diameter with engraved squiggles above and below, probably push buttons. A rod protruded from a complicated set of concentric fittings below the left-hand dial, ending in an arrowhead fifteen centimeters across and half that thick, with its point embedded in another complex joint. The arrowhead was convenient to Peters’s left hand, but when he started to touch it Gell said something short and definite, and shook his head.
They sat and waited. Outside the front transparency the sky got brighter, an utterly atypical perfectly clear day. There was nothing to do, and it was warm; first Peters, then Todd, peeled off their peacoats and stuffed them in the locker. They took care not to get too close to anything that looked like a control, and Gell busied himself reading meters and making left-handed notes on a pad of paper, occasionally pushing something or grunting.
Todd tapped Peters on the shoulder. “Look here,” he said. “This tab on the arm. Betcha it makes the seat recline, see?”
Peters found a similar control on his own chair-arm. “Gell,” he said softly. When the pilot looked up he said, “OK?” and fingered the tab. Gell nodded vigorously and went back to his business, and Peters pushed the tab, finding that it indeed reclined the chair with a soft electric-motor whine. Further manipulation changed the shape of the seat in other ways, some of them nonsensical until he remembered that it wasn’t built for humans. He twiddled until he found a comfortable position and leaned back. Despite the strangeness of the situation, warmth, idleness, and a long sleepless night did their work.
Peters woke when the ambassador came through the door, pushing it to with force that had been quite unnecessary when they came the same way. The Grallt face was impossible to read, but the ambassador’s body language was tense, shoulders hunched, moving a little too quickly, with short, choppy gestures. He bent over the seatback and chatted with Gell in low tones, then settled into the chair behind the pilot, fumbling with the control toggle until he had it arranged to his satisfaction. “Pleasant greetings,” he said across the aisle, his tone as tense as his body language. “I apologize for the delay. There were discussions.”
“We expected that,” said Peters.
“Ssth.” The hiss had a “t” in it, more like the “th” in “thin” than “sh”. It was unmistakably an irritated sound. “I did not. A simple errand to pick up a pair of people has turned into nearly four utle of fruitless and unnecessary daga. I will be glad to be gone from this system. There may be much profit here, but there is also much… ah, I believe the term is ‘bullshit’. Am I correct?”
Todd sputtered. “Yes, sir,” Peters said, keeping his tone guarded.
“Excellent!” The ambassador seemed to relax a bit. “If I say ‘bullshit’ to some of your people, is it likely to make the discussion shorter?”
Peters cringed. This was crash-and-burn material at his rate and rating. “Yes, sir, it probably will,” he said cautiously.
“Most excellent! I now await with pleasure the next meeting with Mr. Averill. Halfway into his speech, I shall look him in the eye and say ‘Bullshit!’ Do I have the inflection correct?”
“Yeah, fine,” said Peters. “I mean, yes, sir, that’s about right.” Todd was leaning forward, hands clenched in front of his mouth in an attitude reminiscent of prayer. Peters wasn’t fooled; he wondered what the ambassador thought. “He might not be real pleased,” he warned.