A few hours later, while he was thinking of voluntarily dying by drowning, he saw something to the northwest. As the day passed, this slowly became larger. Just as the sun slid into the waters, he saw that it was not, as he had hoped, land. It was a submarine or something that looked like a submarine. But it was too far away for him to hope to swim to it.
Dawn found him awake, looking northwest, hoping that the sub had not gone away during the night. No. It had drifted on the same collision course during the night. And it was close enough so he could see that it was a spaceship, not a submarine. On its side were two big Chinese ideograms and underneath them, in Roman letters: Hwang Ho. Since it wasn’t proceeding under power, it must be crewless. It had been sitting on some spaceport field somewhere, and when the rains came, its crew hadn’t been able to take refuge in it. They had probably drowned while roistering in the tavern or in bed with a friend or friends.
Its ports were closed, but it was no problem to open one. There’d be a plate by the port which only had to be depressed to make the port open.
More hours passed. By then Simon saw that the case was not going to bump into the ship. He shoved the heavy wooden coffin to the wall of the case, causing it to tilt and to ship water. Simon’s weight made it lean even more, and Simon went into the sea. Anubis didn’t want to leave the case, but he had no choice. Simon swam to the nearest port and pushed in on the plate. The port sank back and then swung aside. He put the banjo case inside, reached up, grabbed the threshold, and pulled himself in. After hoisting Anubis inside, he stood up shakily and watched the swirl which marked the sinking of the case until the surface was smooth again.
“Just think,” Simon said to Anubis. “If old Merneptah had really been drowned in the Red Sea, and his body had been lost, there would have been no case for him in the museum, and you and I would have drowned several days ago. Kind of makes you wonder if it was destined or we’re just lucky, doesn’t it?”
Simon thought a lot about predeterminism and free will.
Anubis thought mainly about food, unless it was mating season, and so he didn’t even wait for Simon to quit talking. He trotted into the ship, and Simon’s belly, which also could not digest philosophy, urged him to follow the dog. He explored the ship, finding it empty of life, as he’d expected. But it was well stocked with food and drink, and that was all he cared about for the moment. Since he didn’t want to throw up, he forced himself to eat lightly. Anubis resented being fed small portions, but there wasn’t much he could do about it except look reproachful.
“More later,” Simon said. “Much more. And it sure beats eating dried-up old Pharaoh, doesn’t it?”
His next step was to search through the lockers and find clothes that fitted him. Once more, he was clad in a baggy gray sweatshirt, black tight-fitting Levis, and sandals.
When he returned to the room by the still open port the owl was sitting on the back of a chair.
“Who?” it said.
“Not who? Why?” Simon replied.
The question of where the owl had come from was still unsettled, but Simon thought it likely that it had been riding on top of the spaceship. It must be hungry, too, so Simon prepared some egg foo young for it. When he came back to the room with the food, the owl was sitting on a pile of torn-up papers on the seat of the chair. Simon put the plate on the floor before it. It flew down to grab the food, enabling Simon to determine its sex. It—she—had just laid an egg.
Anubis leaped up onto the chair and swallowed the egg. The owl didn’t seem to mind, which made Simon think that the catastrophe had bent its mother instincts out of shape. That was just as well, otherwise the two animals might have gotten off on the wrong foot in their relationship.
Simon decided to name his new pet Athena. Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom, and her symbol was the owl. Owls were supposed to be highly intelligent, though actually they were as dumb as chickens. But Simon was mythology-prone, which was only to be expected from a man who’d named his banjo Orpheus.
He examined the instruments in the control room, since he had heard that even a moron could navigate a spaceship. However, in this case, it had to be a Chinese moron. But if there was a book aboard which could teach him Chinese, he’d figure out how to fly this computerized vessel. He had already made up his mind to leave Earth for good. There was nothing here to hold him.
In later years, during his wanderings, he would often be asked what had happened to his native planet.
“Earth is all washed up,” he would reply. “The game of life there was called off on account of rain.”
The big question at the moment was: who had done this to Earth? Somebody had caused this deluge. It would never have occurred in the normal course of Terrestrial events. Somebody had pushed a button which activated a machine or chemicals which had precipitated one hundred percent of the water in the atmospheric ocean.
Who and why?
Was it the gone-wrong experiment of some mad scientist? Or had some planet whose business was being ruined by Earth triggered off this flood? Or was it simply because Earthmen smelled so badly? Terrestrials had a reputation as the most odoriferous race in the universe. A million planets referred to them as The Stinkers. There was an old Arcturan saying that exemplified this attitude. “Never stand downwind of a shrook or an Earthman.” A shrook was a little beast on Arcturus VI that exuded the combined scents of a skunk, a bombardier beetle, and dog farts with a touch of garbage heap.
Some extraterrestrials claimed that it was the Earthman’s diet, which consisted mainly of hot dogs, potato chips, soft drinks, and beer, even among the Chinese, that caused this offensive odor. But the octopoids of Algol, perhaps the most philosophical of all races, contended that it wasn’t the food that caused the bad smell. Psychology affected physiology. Earthmen stank because their ethics stank.
This reaction had upset Terrestrials, but they’d gone about solving this problem with their usual vicious efficiency. A huge perfume industry, employing millions, had been created, and travelers from Earth had always perfumed themselves just before they disembarked on an alien planet. These were specialized, since the perfume that pleased the Spicans would offend the Vegans. The only planet where perfumes were taboo was Sirius VII. The caninoids there identified each other by sniffing assholes, and so they strictly forbade the use of perfumes. The Earthmen had to go along with this custom, otherwise they’d never get to first base in selling Terrestrial goods. They tried to get around this by sending agents who had no sense of smell, but this didn’t work out. All Sirians looked exactly alike, and they refused to carry nametags. Thus, an Earthman didn’t know whom he was dealing with unless he had a keen nose.
This demand opened a whole new field to specialists who were paid huge bonuses. These had to earn a new degree, Ph.D.A., before they could be hired. Despite the fabulous salaries, there was a big turnover in this field, suicide being the chief cause of resignation. Then a bright young executive in the PR department got the idea of running a search through a computer for a particular type of fetishist. This revealed that there were over five hundred thousand masochists on Earth who liked to torture themselves with offensive odors. Of these, there were fifty thousand who specialized in dog crap. The Sirian Trading Corporation only needed twelve thousand, so suddenly the field became a monopoly of this handful. The doctor of philosophy of anumology was no longer required. Furthermore, since these were eager to work on Sirius, they underbid each other, and the STC was hiring them for slave wages.