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“I have some sympathy, at least in the abstract, for their complaints about the weather. It is warmer here than it is on Tosev 3. What is comfortable for us is less so for them,” Ttomalss said.
“I should say so!” Trir exclaimed. “The air conditioners they brought down from this new ship of theirs chill their rooms until I think I am back at the South Pole, or maybe somewhere beyond it.”
Ttomalss tried to figure out what on Home might be beyond the South Pole. He gave it up as a bad job. Trir didn’t care whether she was logical. Ttomalss said, “You see? You dislike the weather they prefer as much as they dislike ours.”
“But ours is proper and normal.” Trir was not the sort to think that several billion years of separate evolution could produce different choices. She judged everything from the simplest of perspectives: her own.
“As for architecture, they have more variety than we do,” Ttomalss said. “They enjoy change for its own sake.”
“I told you they were barbarians.” As if sure she’d made a decisive point, Trir got up and stormed out of the refectory.
Ttomalss sighed. Trir came closer to the average member of the Race in the street than any other male or female he knew. Her reaction to the Big Uglies wasn’t encouraging. How would the Race react to Tosevite tourists here on Home? Could simple dislike spark trouble where politics didn’t?
The tour guide hurried back into the refectory, as angry as when she’d left it. She pointed a clawed forefinger at Ttomalss. “And the horrible creatures had the nerve to say we were backward! Backward!” she added, and stormed out again.
“Did they?” Ttomalss said, but he was talking to Trir’s retreating tailstump.
His eye turrets swung to the Big Uglies in their specially made chairs. They’d paid no attention to Trir’s outburst. Did that mean they hadn’t understood it or hadn’t heard it? He didn’t think so, not for a moment. It meant they were being diplomatic, which was more than Trir could say. Who was the barbarian, then?
Ttomalss’ head started to ache. He hadn’t wanted that thought right now. Whether he’d wanted it or not, he’d got it.
So the Big Uglies thought Home was backward? Had the Americans from the Admiral Peary presumed to say such a thing, Ttomalss would have been as furious as Trir. The Tosevites from the Commodore Perry… Hadn’t they earned the right? From a Tosevite perspective, Home probably was a backward place. But it had proved it could prosper and stay peaceful for tens of millennia. If the Big Uglies dragged their competing not-empires and empires and the Empire into a string of ruinous wars, what price progress?
The psychologist could see what the price of progress would be: higher than anyone in his right mind wanted to pay.
But, now, he could also see what the price of backwardness was. Having moved forward technologically at such a slow pace over the millennia, the Race was vulnerable to a hard-charging species like the Big Uglies. With hindsight, that was obvious. But no one here had imagined a species like the Big Uglies could exist. We knew ourselves, and we knew the Rabotevs and Hallessi, who are like us in most ways, and we extrapolated that all intelligent species would be similar. That was reasonable. Based on the data we had, it was logical.
And oh, how wrong it was!
He glumly finished his food and left the refectory. No histrionics from him. His swiveling eye turrets noted the Big Uglies turning their heads so their eyes could follow him out. Oh, yes, they’d heard what Trir had to say to him, all right.
Escaping the hotel was a relief, as it often was. He walked down the street toward the public telephone he’d used before. Every time he passed a male or female wearing a fuzzy wig or what the Big Uglies called a T-shirt, he wanted to shout. Members of the Race had taken to imitating Tosevites out of amusement. Would they keep on doing it now that the Tosevites were no longer amusing but powerful?
He thought the Race’s power was the main reason so many Big Uglies on Tosev 3 had shaved their heads and started wearing body paint that showed ranks to which they were not entitled. Would power attract more males and females here now that the situation was reversing? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Monitoring such things would make an interesting experiment-for someone else.
When he got to the phone, he swung his eye turrets in all directions. If that ginger-tasting female and her hoodlum friends were around, he would take himself elsewhere as fast as he could go. He did not see any of them. Feeling safe because he didn’t, he telephoned Pesskrag. Impatience and worry overwhelmed the careful logic of a few days before.
The phone hissed several times in his hearing diaphragm. He was afraid he would have to record a message. But then she answered: “This is Pesskrag. I greet you.”
“And I greet you. This is Ttomalss,” he said.
“Ah. Hello, Senior Researcher,” the physicist said. “Let me tell you right out of the eggshell, we have made no dramatic breakthroughs since the last time I talked with you.”
“All right.” Ttomalss might have been hoping for such a breakthrough, but he hadn’t counted on one. He gave himself that much credit, anyhow. Science seldom worked so conveniently. “I hope you have not gone backwards, though.”
“Well, no, or I also hope not,” Pesskrag answered. “We may even have taken one or two tiny steps forward. Once we devise some new experiments, we will have a better notion of whether we have. We have opened a door and entered a new room. So far, it is a dark room. We are trying not to trip over the furniture.”
“The Big Uglies charged all the way through to the other side,” Ttomalss said. “Why can we not do the same?”
“It is less simple than you think,” Pesskrag said. “What we have are only the early hints that appeared in the Tosevite literature. I gather the Big Uglies stopped publishing after that. We have to reconstruct what they did after they stopped giving us hints. No matter how provocative the early experiments, this is not an easy matter. We do not want to waste time going down blind alleys.”
“And so we waste time being thorough,” Ttomalss said.
The physicist let out an angry hiss. “I fear I am wasting time talking to you, Senior Researcher. Good day.” She broke the connection.
As Ttomalss was unhappily walking back to the hotel, a male wearing the body paint of a bus repairer accosted him. “Hello, friend,” the stranger said, so heartily that Ttomalss’ suspicions kindled at once. “Want to buy some ginger?”
“If you do not mind selling to an officer of the police,” Ttomalss answered. The repairmale disappeared in a hurry. Ttomalss wished he were a police officer. He would have been glad to arrest the petty criminal.
Kassquit was standing in the hotel lobby when Ttomalss came in. “I greet you, superior sir,” she said, sketching the posture of respect.
“And I greet you,” he said. “I hope you are feeling well?”
“I am as well as can be expected, anyhow,” Kassquit answered. “This new Tosevite physician says the same thing Dr. Blanchard did-my gravidity seems normal to them, however nasty it is for me.”
“How are you emotionally?” Ttomalss said. “You do seem less distressed at Frank Coffey’s departure than you did when Jonathan Yeager first returned to Tosev 3.”
“I am less distressed,” she said. “Most of the time I am, anyhow. My moods do swing. The wild Big Uglies say this has to do with hormone shifts during gravidity. But I have experience now that I did not have when Jonathan Yeager left me. And Frank Coffey may come back, where Jonathan Yeager entered into that permanent mating contract. So yes, I remain more hopeful than I was then.”
“Good. I am glad to hear it. Whatever you may think, I have done my best to raise you so that you would become a fully independent person,” Ttomalss said. “I know I have made mistakes. I think that is inevitable when raising someone of another species. I am sorry for it,” Ttomalss said.
“Your biggest mistake might have been to try to raise someone of another species at all,” Kassquit said. “I understand why you did it. The wild
Big Uglies did the same thing. No doubt you and they learned a great deal. That still does not make it easy for the individuals who have to go through it.”
When she’d been angry before, she’d said worse things to him-and about him. “I am afraid it is too late to change that now,” Ttomalss said. “For what has happened to you, you have done very well.” Kassquit didn’t quarrel with that, which left him more relieved than he’d thought it would.
The shuttlecraft’s rockets roared. Deceleration shoved up at Karen Yeager. The pilot said, “Final approach now. The rockets are radar-controlled. They fire automatically, and nothing can go wrong… go wrong… go wrong… go wrong…”
On the couch beside Karen‘s, Jonathan grunted. “Funny,” he said. “Funny like a crutch.”
Karen nodded. That took effort. After one-tenth g and weightlessness, she felt heavy as lead weighing more than she normally would. The rockets fell silent. Three soft bumps meant the shuttlecraft’s landing struts had touched the ground. Earth. One Earth gravity. Normal weight. Karen still felt heavy as lead. She said, “I could use that funny crutch right now.”
“You said it,” Sam Yeager agreed from beyond Jonathan.
“Are you all right?” she asked him. He was spry, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t a young man. What was hard on her and Jonathan had to be worse for him.
“I’ll do,” he answered. “We had to twist their arms to get them to let me come back here. I’ll be darned if I’ll give ’em the satisfaction of keeling over the minute I get home.”
