“Yes, that’s right,” Anastasia said. “We do all the work and those useless sons of bitches do nothing but play around all day.”
Anastasia didn’t actually say “sons of bitches” but Simon translated it as such. What she said was something like “farts in a windstorm.”
“We females talk a lot among ourselves during the day,” she said. “But we’d like to talk with our mates, too. After all, they’ve been up in the wild blue yonder, having a great time, seeing all sorts of interesting things. But do you think for one moment that they’ll let us in on what’s going on outside these meadows? No, all they want to do is to be fed and have a quickie and be off to dreamland. When we complain, they tell us that we wouldn’t understand it if they did tell us what they saw and did. So here we are, ground-bound and shut up in these little meadows, working all day, taking care of the children, while they’re roaming around, zooming up and down, having a good old time. It isn’t fair!”
Simon whistled some more sympathy and then went down to the beach to watch the males.
He had found out that the stomachs of the fliers also generated hydrogen. It was this gas which enabled them to float in the air. They carried water as ballast, which they drew up from the ocean through their hollow tentacles. When they wanted altitude quickly, they released the water, and up they went. They were always holding races or gamboling about, playing all sorts of games, tag-the-leader, loop-the-loop, doing Immelmann turns, follow-the-leader, or catch-the-bird. This latter game consisted of chasing a bird until they caught it by sucking it into their jet-holes or forcing it to the ground.
They also liked to scare the herds of animals on the ground by zooming down on them and stampeding them. The male whose herd raised the biggest cloud of dust won this game.
The males had another form of communication than whistling, too. They could emit short or long trails of smoke corresponding to the whistled dots and dashes. With these they could talk to each other at long distances or call in their buddies if they saw something interesting. They never used this skywriting, however, in sight of the females. They took great delight in having a secret of their own. The females knew about this, of course, since the males sometimes boasted about it. This made the females even more discontented.
Simon would not have stayed long on this planet, which he named Giffard after the Frenchman who first successfully controlled a lighter-than-air craft. Simon did not believe that the simple natives had any answers to his questions. But then he talked to Graf, his name for the big male that dominated the herd. Graf said that the males didn’t spend all their time just playing. They often had philosophical discussions, usually in the afternoon when they were resting. They’d float around on the ocean or a lake and discuss the big issues of the universe. Simon, hearing this, decided he’d wait until he knew the language well enough to talk philosophy with the males. A few months after he’d landed, he asked Graf if he would take him to the lake where the males had their bull sessions. Graf said he’d be glad to.
The next day, Graf wrapped a tentacle around Simon and lifted him up. Simon was thrilled but he was also a little scared. He wished that he had flown to the lake in the lifeboat. But he was eager for new experiences, and this was one he wasn’t likely to find on any other world.
Shortly before they got to the lake, Simon took a cigar out of his pocket and lit up. It was a good cigar, made of Outer Mongolian tobacco. Simon was puffing happily some hundreds of feet above a thick yellow forest, the wind moving softly over his face and a big black bird with a red crest flapping along a few feet away from him. All was blue and quiet and content; this was one of the rare moments when God did indeed seem in His heaven and all was well with the world.
As usual, the rare moment did not last long. Graf suddenly started bobbing up and down so violently that Simon began to get airsick. Then he whistled screamingly, and the tentacle around Simon’s waist straightened out. Simon grabbed at it and hung on, shouting wildly at Graf. When he got over his first panic, he whistled at Graf after removing the cigar.
“What’s the matter?”
“What are you doing?” Graf whistled like a steam kettle back at him. “You’re on fire!”
“What?” Simon whistled.
“Let go! Let go! I’ll go up in flames!”
“I’ll fall, you damned fool!”
“Let go!”
Simon looked down. They were now over the lake but about a hundred feet up. Below, the cigar-shaped males were floating in the water. Or they had been, a second before. Suddenly, they rose upward in a body, their ballast squirting out through the hollow tentacles, and then they scattered.
A few seconds later, Simon realized what was going on. He opened his hand, letting the cigar drop. Graf immediately quit his violent oscillations, and a moment later he deposited Simon on the shore of the lake. But his skin was darker than its usual purple, and he stuttered his dots and dashes.
“F-f-f-fire’s th-th-the w-w-w-worst th-th-thing there is! It’s the only th-th-thing we f-f-fear! It w-w-was invented b-b-by th-th-the d-d-devil!”
The Giffardians, it seemed, had religion. Their devil, however, dwelt in the sky, and he propelled himself with a jet of flaming hydrogen. When it came time for the bad Giffardians to be taken off to the hell above the sky, he zoomed in and burned them up with flame from his tail.
The good Giffardians were taken by a zeppelin-shaped angel whose farts were sweet-smelling down into a land below the earth. Their planet was hollow, they claimed, and heaven was inside the hollow.
They had a lot of strange ideas about religion. This didn’t faze Simon, who had heard stranger on Earth.
Simon apologized. He then explained what the thing on fire in his mouth had been.
All the males shuddered and bobbed up and down and one was so terror-stricken that he shot away, unable to control his ejaculations of gas.
“It might be better if you left,” Graf said. “Right now.”
“Oh, I won’t smoke except in the ship from now on,” Simon said. “I promise.”
This quieted the males down somewhat. But they did not really breathe easy until he also said he would put up some NO SMOKING signs.
“That way, if other Earthmen should land here,” Simon said, “they’ll not light up.”
He didn’t tell them that it was doubtful that any people from his native planet would ever come here. Nor did he tell them that there were billions of planets whose people couldn’t read English.
It wasn’t fire that made Simon so dangerous. It was the ideas he innocently dropped while talking to the females. Once, when Anastasia complained about being kept on the ground, Simon said that she ought to take a ride. He realized at once that he shouldn’t have ventured this opinion. But Anastasia wouldn’t let him drop the subject. The next day, she tried to talk her mate, Graf, into taking her up. He refused, but she was so upset that the gruel she fed him became sour. After several days of stomach upset, he gave in.
With Anastasia hanging on to him through the lock in their apex-organs, he lifted. The others stood or floated around and watched this epoch-making flight. Graf carried her up to about two thousand feet, beyond which he was unable to levitate. However, her weight dragged his nose down so that his tail was far higher than his fore part. He was unable to navigate in this fashion and had a hard time getting her back to the meadow. Moreover, his skin had broken out in huge drops of yellowish sweat.
Anastasia, however, was enraptured. The other females insisted that their mates take them for rides. These did so reluctantly and had the same trouble navigating as Graf. The males were too exhausted that night to have sexual intercourse.