The bartender shrugged moodily. "Not right here, but over yonder"—he waved toward the distant lights of Papeete, climbing the mountain on the other side of the strait—"there's plenty of them all over Tahiti. I never go there anymore. Would've stayed in Cleveland if I'd wanted to see a bunch of nuts dressing up like freaks and acting like the world was coming to an end. Maybe it is. When I was a boy—"
Jen Babylon didn't want to hear about how things had been when the bartender was a boy. "Are there Kooks where you come from?" he asked the woman.
She glanced briefly at him through her pale eyes, then away. "No."
"There are plenty in Boston," he told her. "It's a new religion. They said that object that was discovered a few years ago—Cuckoo, most people call it—anyway, they think that when it reaches our Galaxy we will all be destroyed. Or reborn, as something bigger than human. Or something . . ." She wasn't paying attention. At least, she wasn't looking at him, although there was something about her that made him sure she was hearing every word. He was receiving mixed signals from her, and it was both irritating and in some way provocative.
More irritating than provocative, on balance; he was still not over the anger left from his unsatisfactory conversation with the desk clerk. Were there any messages for M'sieur Jen Babylon? Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. One had so many messages—but it was obvious the hotel was nearly empty, and there were hardly any signal lights glowing over the room indicators. But couldn't he just look? With great regret, m'sieur, not at this moment, since the press of duties was so formidable. And m'sieur's bags could not be brought just now, but surely within the hour, perhaps. Babylon had stalked out, jangling the key to his cottage. He was certain that there must be messages, if only one from the university to explain why he had been called back so urgently from his field trip.
"Do you want another drink?" the bartender asked. "Looks like you'll be here awhile."
Babylon realized that the staccato drumming that had been nagging at his consciousness was rain, beating down on the moored old copra schooner with the sudden violence of any tropical storm.
"Might as well. How about you?" he added to the girl.
She stood up. "No." She moved toward the door without looking at either of them.
"Miss, where are you going? It's pouring out there," the bartender cried.
She paused in the doorway. "I'm going to Boston in the morning," she said. Babylon and the bartender glanced at each other, then turned together to stare out of the porthole. She strode steadily down the pier, ignoring the downpour, looking neither to left nor right until the rain swallowed her.
It was five drinks later before Babylon was willing to follow her. The rain had diminished, but not stopped. By the time he reached his hut he was soaked and more irritable than ever. The desk clerk did not even answer his call; the vision cube glowed orange and empty, with a taped voice saying brightly in four languages that the guest's call would be returned as soon as possible. Babylon understood them all, and none of them made him happier. He was more certain than ever that the clerk was a Free Polynesia fanatic, with the cold rage toward all Europeans that he had experienced on the outer islands. But knowing that did not suggest anything to do about it. He slept.
He did not sleep well—too many drinks, too much fatigue, too much irritation. At first he was dreaming of his speech laboratory in Old Cambridge, and the dean was snapping at him as he tried to puzzle out an obscure unknown language. His best Pmal translators could offer no clue; his computers rejected all programs as nulls or errata; and he was aware that more than his job, or even his life, depended on the outcome. He woke abruptly, in a sweat of fear, fumbling for his glasses.
It was still raining. He had slept less than an hour, but a cold wet wind was coming in through the slatted blinds. He closed them and climbed back into bed, reassuring himself that it was only a dream.
This time his dreams were more pleasant. A beautiful woman who seemed transparent as glass was leading him through a marvelous drusy cave. All about them were faceted diamonds and opals and rubies set into the rock walls. Not rock; even the walls glimmered and glowed, like a precious metal. The woman did not speak, but he was content to be with her in silence. And then he looked away, and turned back to her, and she was gone. In her place was a cluster of great bright flowers that hung in air, while giant butterflies swam among them. It was hard to tell blossom from butterfly. Both seemed to be speaking to him, too low to understand, in tones like the chiming of a golden bell • . .
He woke up.
There was a chiming, and it came from his stereo cube. The bright orange number 4 danced under a legend that read messages waiting.
He sat up on the edge of the narrow bed, rubbing his eyes as he peered nearsightedly at the stereo. Jen Babylon was one of the very few human beings who wore glasses, rejecting both contacts and surgery, preferring to accept the amused stares of his colleagues and of strangers. And of course the confounded things were never there when he wanted them. He could see, behind the glow of the messages-waiting legend, what looked very much like the fluttery figure of his dream, but its outlines were fuzzed and unreal as the dream itself.
His search for his glasses was not in the least helped by the fact that his head was feeling the drinks he had had the night before, or that it was only five in the morning, more than an hour before he had planned to get up. When at last he found the glasses, next to the bed where they always were, the image snapped into clarity.
It was a butterfly! Or not quite, but something with filmy wings and more eyes than seemed necessary, dancing back and forth in the limited loop of the stored image.
It was a T'Worlie!
Babylon's jaw dropped. There were only a handful of T'Worlie on Earth. One of the oldest and proudest races of the Galaxy, they spent little time on the new member of the Galactic Confederation, the Earth, or its semicivilized peoples. And this one, he saw at once, was not on Earth. The T'Worlie came from a light-gravity planet, far out in the Orion arm. One of the reasons they disliked Earth was that its heavy pull crushed them to the ground; a T'Worlie on Earth had to creep around the surface like a wounded moth, prisoner of a tenfold weight increase that its filmy wings could not support. But this one was flying free.
Bemused, he stared at it for several minutes before it occurred to him that the message itself might answer his questions. "Release message," he ordered the stereo, and at once the repeating loop opened out and the butterfly creature drew itself up and spoke to him, dancing and whispering. It was speaking in its native language, Babylon knew, but the whispery-chirpy T'Worlie speech was not one of the galactic tongues he understood at all. "Translation mode," he commanded, and obediently the stereo interrupted the audio portion of the message to recirculate the message through its built-in Pmal circuits. Out here in the islands one could not expect really sophisticated machinery, but the artificial voice-over was clear enough:
"Communication for Dr. Babylon Jen," it rattled. "Mode urgent. Concur requisition to study unidentified spacecraft. Urge immediate compliance." And the image faded.
Babylon got up and made himself a cup of coffee from the autobar. It was strongly laced with chicory or some other substance, not at all what he was used to in Old Cambridge, but it contained caffeine enough to shock his nervous system awake.
He stood frowning at the lightening sky across the strait. What requisition? What was he being urged to comply with immediately? Above all, what "unidentified spacecraft"? And how much of his uncertainty was due to the inadequacy of the stereo's primitive translation circuits, and how much to the peremptory nature of the T'Worlie?