“I’m hanging on,” Ray said.
“So I’ve heard.” Nyquist sat down on the other side of the writing table. “Of course, you’re barely making a profit, even with that deal you just signed with Vrekle University. It hardly seems worth it, especially with all the trouble you’re causing.”
Ray struggled to sound innocent. “I hope I’m not causing you any problems.”
“Not you, personally,” Nyquist said, and sighed. “But Vrekle itself—their dean has been in contact with several people on Earth. She wants to purchase a rather large assortment of scientific and cybernetic equipment.”
“Is that illegal?” Ray asked.
Nyquist grimaced. “Unfortunately, no. Some rather greedy American corporations have made it impossible for the UN to restrict dangerous exports to Kya. They’re more interested in profits than in avoiding damage to the development of kya society.”
“I don’t see where giving them computers and lab gear will hurt them,” Ray said. “We did all right.”
“We made our own discoveries,” Nyquist countered. “By injecting advanced science and technology into kya society, we could rob them of the need to discover things on their own. They could become parasitical on humanity, atrophying into a world which depends on us to fulfill their needs. You should reconsider what you’re doing to them.”
Ray didn’t respond to that. It was plausible, he admitted—and if he argued, Nyquist might delay his requisition. “I’ll think about that,” he said.
Nyquist took the requisition. “You do that.”
Bagdrag received its name, Ray had learned, because the center of the game was a bag of sand which weighed almost two hundred pounds. The game was played by three teams on a hexagonal field. Three of the sides were home goals, and a team scored one point every time it carried the bag across its scoring line at the field’s edge. The other three sides of the hexagon were shared goals, and two teams could win two points apiece by cooperating to carry the bag across the line between their home goals. When it came to competition, Ray thought, the kya just didn’t get it.
A week after Faber’s enrollment at Vrekle, Ray walked past the school’s bagdrag field on his way to the lecture halls. The field was occupied by three teams, who were busily shoving and snorting as they hauled a weathered gray bag across the grassy field. Ray looked, but he didn’t see Faber among the crouching, hairy figures loping around the field.
Ray checked his notepad. Its compass display pointed him toward one of the lecture halls, where he had been told he would find Elizabeth Sheffield. He went into the tan-colored dome, and blinked against the dim light. Finding Elizabeth might take a while, he reflected; there were at least five hundred kya in the amphitheater.
He changed that estimate at once when he heard her amplified voice. Her scarecrow figure stood on the round stage at the center of the hall, where a holographic projector displayed a two-yard tall bust of Abraham Lincoln. “Unlike the kya and your herd instinct,” Elizabeth was saying in Wideplain, “we humans have something which is best described as a tribal instinct. As herd beings, you kya tend to hold one another in almost equal regard, while giving your nominal leaders a minimum of authority. When you receive an order, the average kya will stop to wonder how obedience to that order will effect everyone else.
“On the other hand, we humans tend to defer to what we call an ‘authority figure.’ ” As Ray took a seat he heard hundreds of pencils scribble down that term. “An authority figure can be a deity, a parent, an athlete, an entertainer, a politician—basically, anyone who is powerful or famous. The average human tends to give unthinking allegiance to such a figure. Sometimes this has benefits, as it gives the leader the cooperation needed to solve otherwise intractable problems. However—” The image of Lincoln winked out, to be replaced by a projection of Adolf Hitler. “—Sometimes they are problems.”
Ray listened to Elizabeth’s lecture for the next hour or so. Most of it sounded vaguely familiar; he hadn’t taken a history course since high school, but he had watched a lot of war movies. The lecture ended and the kya students began to leave the lecture hall. “—Going to have nightmares for a year,” Ray heard one say. “And I thought we had problems,” another gronked on the way to the exit.
Ray went to the stage, where Elizabeth was discussing her lecture with a group of students. “I don’t understand it, either,” she told them. “Killing millions of people in a war makes no sense, not when the purpose of war is supposed to be taking control of the enemy. Sometimes it seems like a ritual display of aggression—‘I can kill more people than you can, so I’m the better leader.’ We’ll discuss that in the next lecture.”
The talk broke up and Elizabeth extracted a cartridge from the projector. “Interesting talk,” Ray said.
“Thanks.” She grinned at him. “Are you thinking of enrolling?”
“No, I’m scared of taking tests,” Ray said. “I just came here to ask you how Faber is doing.”
Elizabeth sighed. “Well, it’s the start of a new semester. He’ll settle down soon enough.”
“Is he a problem?” Ray asked.
“Do I have a comer on the pipestem market?” Elizabeth rubbed her bony chin. “He’s not stupid, but— well, maybe you should talk to him. Let’s go to the dorm.”
They walked out of the lecture hall and crossed the campus. The grounds reminded Ray of some of Earth’s better colleges, with clusters of buildings placed amid expansive lawns and gardens. The main difference, he thought as he looked at one group of students, was that typical human students did not graze on the shrubbery.
Elizabeth noticed his gaze. “It cuts down on the gardening bills,” she said.
“I’ll bet it does,” Ray said. “Speaking of food, how long does it take the embassy to deliver those enzyme pills?”
“No time at all,” Elizabeth said. “Are you having trouble with them?”
Ray nodded. “They tell me that there’s a two-week processing period, followed by a six-week shipping period. And it’s a hundred IMUs a week.”
Elizabeth’s eyebrows went up. “Boy, they must really hate you. Whenever I need some pills, I go to the embassy and they give me a month’s supply for ten IMUs.”
“I see.” Ray thought black thoughts about Nyquist as they walked to the dormitory complex. The ambassador couldn’t run him off the planet, not officially, but he could do his best to inconvenience him.
The dorms were a collection of small buildings placed on a hillside at the edge of the campus. Despite their size Ray knew that each building housed a score of kya students, who lived, dined, studied and slept in a single common room. Given the human need for privacy and spacious rooms, the human dorm stood out by its size. It had been erected a few years ago, and it looked like an apartment building, complete with a swimming pool and an enclosed patio.
“We’re also downwind of the other buildings,” Elizabeth told Ray as they entered the lobby. It was cleaner than he had expected, and he reminded himself that the people here were carefully picked graduate students. They would have outgrown the slovenliness he recalled from his own freshman days. “Most kya don’t mind our scent, but our cooking drives them up the wall.”
“You mean the smell of cooking meat,” Ray said. The kya were strictly herbivorous, and while they had exterminated most of their world’s larger predators they still regarded meat-eating with unease. “I know. I’m renting a house in town. I had to turn vegetarian because the neighbors complained whenever I ate meat.”
Elizabeth nodded. “We had trouble last term when we had a barbecue. The wind shifted and blew the smoke across campus, and five thousand kya were ready to stampede through here.” She looked around the lobby and spotted a young man, who lay sprawled on a couch as he read a kya medical textbook. “Toshio, have you seen Faber anywhere?”