He lay upon a floor and he scrambled to his feet. His hand was burned and he felt the pain of it. His clothes were smoldering and he beat them out with his uninjured hand.
A voice said, “I’m sorry, sir. This should not have happened.”
The man was tall, much taller than the Kimonians he had seen before. Nine feet, perhaps. And yet not nine feet, actually. Not anywhere near nine feet. He was no taller, probably, than the taller men of Earth. It was the way he stood that made him seem so tall, the way he stood and looked and the way his voice sounded.
And the first Kimonian, Bishop thought, who had ever shown age. For there was a silvering of the temple hairs and his face was lined, like the faces of hunters or of sailors may be lined from squinting into far distances.
They stood facing one another in a room which, when Bishop looked at it, took his breath away. There was no describing it, no way to describe it—you felt as well as saw it. It was a part of you and a part of the universe and a part of everything you’d ever known or dreamed. It seemed to thrust extensions out into unguessed time and space and it had a sense of life and the touch of comfort and the feel of home.
Yet, when he looked again, he sensed a simplicity that did not square with his first impressions. Basic simplicities that tied in with the simple business of living out one’s life, as if the room and the folks who lived within its walls were somehow integrated, as if the room were trying its best not to be a room, but to be a part of life, so much a part of life that it could pass unnoticed.
“I was against it from the first,” said the Kimonian. “Now I know that I was right. But the children wanted you—”
“The children?”
“Certainly. I am Elaine’s father.”
He didn’t say Elaine, however. He said the other name—the name that Elaine had said no Earthman could pronounce.
“Your hand?” asked the man.
“It’s all right,” said Bishop. “Only burned a little.”
And it was as if he had not spoken, as if he had not said the words—but another man, a man who stood off to one side and spoke the words for him.
He could not have moved if he’d been paid a million.
“This is something,” said the Kimonian, “that must be recompensed. We’ll talk about it later.”
“Please, sir,” said the man who talked for Bishop. “Please, sir, just one thing. Send me to my hotel.”
He felt the swiftness of the other’s understanding—the compassion and the pity.
“Of course,” said the tall man. “With your permission, sir.”
Once there were some children (human children, naturally) who had wanted a dog—a little playful puppy. But their father said they could not have a dog because they would not know how to treat him. But they wanted him so badly and begged their father so that he finally brought them home a dog, a cunning little puppy, a little butterball, with a paunchy belly and four wobbly legs and melting eyes, filled with the innocence of puppyhood.
The children did not treat him as badly as you might have imagined that they would. They were cruel, as all children are. They roughed and tumbled him; they pulled his ears and tail; they teased him. But the pup was full of fun. He liked to play and no matter what they did he came back for more. Because, undoubtedly, he felt very smug in this business of associating with the clever human race, a race so far ahead of dogs in culture and intelligence that there was no comparison at all.
But one day the children went on a picnic and when the day was over they were very tired, and forgetful, as children are very apt to be. so they went off and left the puppy.
That wasn’t a bad thing, really. For children will be forgetful, no matter what you do, and the pup was nothing but a dog.
The cabinet said, “You are very late, sir.”
“Yes,” said Bishop, dully.
“You hurt somewhere, sir. I can sense the hurt.”
“My hand,” said Bishop. “I burned it in a fire.”
A panel popped open in the cabinet.
“Put it in there,” said the cabinet. “I’ll fix it in a jiffy.”
Bishop thrust his hand into the opening. He felt fingerlike appendages going over it, very gentle and soothing.
“It’s not a bad burn, sir,” said the cabinet, “but I imagine it is painful.”
Playthings, Bishop thought.
This hotel is a dollhouse—or a doghouse.
It is a shack, a tacked-together shack like the boys of Earth build out of packing cases and bits of board and paint crude, mystic signs upon.
Compared to that room back there it is no more than a hovel, although come to think of it, a very gaudy hovel.
Fit for humans, good enough for humans, but a hovel just the same.
And we? he thought.
And we?
The pets of children. The puppy dogs of Kimon.
Imported puppy dogs.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the cabinet. “You are not puppy dogs.”
“What’s that?”
“You will pardon me, sir. I should not have spoken out. But I wouldn’t have wanted you to think—”
“If we aren’t pets, what are we?”
“You will excuse me, sir. It was a slip, I quite assure you. I should not have—”
“You never do a thing,” said Bishop bitterly, “without having it all figured out. You or any of them. For you are one of them. You spoke because they wanted you to speak.”
“I can assure you that’s not so.”
“You would deny it, naturally,” said Bishop. “Go ahead and do your job. You haven’t told me all they wanted you to tell me. Go ahead and finish.”
“It’s immaterial to me what you think,” the cabinet told him. “But if you thought of yourselves as playmates…”
“That’s a hot one,” Bishop said.
“Infinitely better,” said the cabinet, “than thinking of yourself as a puppy dog.”
“So that’s what they want me to think.”
“They don’t care,” the cabinet said. “It is all up to you. It was a mere suggestion, sir.”
So, all right, it was a mere suggestion.
So, all right, they were playmates and not pets at all.
The kids of Kimon inviting the dirty, ragged, runny-nosed urchins from across the tracks to play with them.
Better to be an invited kid, perhaps, than an imported dog.
But even so, it was the children of Kimon who had engineered it all—who had set up the rules for those who wished to come to Kimon, who had built the hotel, had operated it and furnished it with the progressively more luxurious and more enticing rooms, who had found the so-called jobs for humans, who had arranged the printing of the credits.
And if that were so, then it meant that not merely the people of Earth, but the government of Earth, had negotiated, or had attempted to negotiate with the children of another race. And that would be the mark of the difference, he thought, the difference between us.
Although, he told himself, that might not be entirely right.
Maybe he had been wrong in thinking, in the first flush of his bitterness, that he was a pet.
Maybe he was a playmate, an adult Earthman downgraded to the status of a child—and a stupid child, at that. Maybe, if he had been wrong on the pet angle, he was wrong in the belief, as well, that it had been the children of Kimon who had arranged the immigration of the Earth folk.
And if it hadn’t been simply a childish matter of asking in some kids from across the tracks, if the adults of Kimon had had a hand in it, what was the setup then? A school project, a certain phase of progressive education? Or a sort of summer camp project, designed to give the deserving, but underprivileged, Earthman a vacation away from the squalor of their native planet? Or simply a safe way in which the children of Kimon might amuse and occupy themselves, be kept from underfoot?