Squat, basin-shaped helmets were the crews’ only item of common attire. Apart from these, they plumbed the depths of sartorial iniquity. The man with the plus fours, who had gained the pump in one bold leap, was whirled out standing between a fat firefighter wearing a rainbow-hued cummerbund and a thin one sporting a canary yellow kilt. A latecomer decorated with earrings shaped like little bells hotly pursued the pump, snatched at its tailboard, missed, disconsolately watched the outfit disappear from sight. He mooched back, swinging his helmet in one hand.
“Just my lousy luck,” he informed the gaping Harrison. “The sweetest call of the year. A big brewery. The sooner they get there the bigger the obs they’ll plant on it.” He licked his lips at the thought, sat on a coil of canvas hose. “Oh, well, maybe it’s all for the good of my health.”
“Tell me something,” Harrison insisted. “How do you get a living?”
“There’s a heck of a question. You can see for yourself. I’m on the fire squad.”
“I know. What I mean is, who pays you?”
“Pays me?”
“Gives you money for all this.”
“You talk kind of peculiar. What is money?”
Harrison rubbed his cranium to assist the circulation of blood through the brain. What is money? Yeouw. He tried another angle. “Supposing your wife needs a new coat, how does she get it?”
“Goes to a store saddled with fire-obs, of course. She kills one or two for them.”’
“But what if no clothing store has had a fire?”
“You’re pretty ignorant, brother. Where in this world do you come from?” His ear bells swung as he studied the other a moment, then went on, “Almost all stores have fire-obs. If they’ve any sense, they allocate so many per month by way of insurance. They look ahead, just in case, see? They plant obs on us, in a way, so that when we rush to the rescue we’ve got to kill off a dollop of theirs before we can plant any new ones of our own. That stops us overdoing it and making hogs of ourselves. Sort of cuts down the stores’ liabilities. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe, but—”
“I get it now,” interrupted the other, narrowing his eyes. “You’re from that spaceship. You’re an Antigand.”
“I’m a Terran,” said Harrison with suitable dignity. “What’s more, all the folk who originally settled this planet were Terrans.”
“You trying to teach me history?” He gave a harsh laugh. “You’re wrong. There was a five per cent strain of Martian.”
“Even the Martians are descended from Terran settlers,” riposted Harrison.
“So what? That was a devil of a long time back. Things change, in case you haven’t heard. We’ve no Terrans or Martians on this world—except for your crowd which has come in unasked. We’re all Gands here. And you nosey pokes are Antigands.”
“We aren’t anti-anything that I know of. Where did you get that idea?”
“Myob!” said the other, suddenly determined to refuse further agreement. He tossed his helmet to one side, spat on the floor.
“Huh?”
“You heard me. Go trundle your scooter.”
Harrison gave up and did just that. He pedaled gloomily back to the ship.
His Excellency pinned him with an authoritative optic. “So you’re back at last, mister. How many are coming and at what time?”
“None, sir,” said Harrison, feeling kind of feeble.
“None?” August eyebrows rose up. “Do you mean that they have refused my invitation?”
“No, sir.”
The ambassador waited a moment, then said, “Come out with it, mister. Don’t stand there gawking as if your push-and-puff contraption has just given birth to a roller skate. You say they haven’t refused my invitation—but nobody is coming. What am I to make of that?”
“I didn’t ask anyone.”
“So you didn’t ask!” Turning, he said to Grayder, Shelton and the others, “He didn’t ask!” His attention came back to Harrison. “You forgot all about it, I presume? Intoxicated by liberty and the power of man over machine, you flashed around the town at nothing less than eighteen miles per hour, creating consternation among the citizenry, tossing their traffic laws into the ash can, putting persons in peril of their lives, not even troubling to ring your bell or—”
“I haven’t got a bell, sir,” denied Harrison, inwardly resenting this list of enormities. “I have a whistle operated by rotation of the rear wheel.”
“There!” said the ambassador, like one abandoning all hope. He sat down, smacked his forehead several times. “Somebody’s going to get a bubble-pipe.” He pointed a tragic finger. “And got a whistle.”
“I designed it myself, sir,” Harrison told him, very informatively.
“I’m sure you did. I can imagine it. I would expect it of you.” The ambassador got a fresh grip on himself. “Look, mister, tell me something in strict confidence, just between you and me.” He leaned forward, put the question in a whisper that ricocheted seven times around the room. “ Why didn’t you ask anyone?”
“Couldn’t find anyone to ask, sir. I did my level best but they didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Or they pretended they didn’t.”
“Humph!” His Excellency glanced out of the nearest port, consulted his wrist watch. “The light is fading already. Night will be upon us pretty soon. It’s getting too late for further action.” An annoyed grunt. “Another day gone to pot. Two days here and we’re still fiddling around.” His eye was jaundiced as it rested on Harrison. “All right mister, we’re wasting time anyway so we might as well hear your story in full. Tell us what happened in complete detail. That way, we may be able to dig some sense out of it.”
Harrison told it finishing, “It seemed to me, sir, that I could go on for weeks trying to argue it out with people whose brains are oriented east-west while mine points north-south. You can talk with them from now to doomsday, even get real friendly and enjoy the conversation—without either side knowing what the other is jawing about.”
“So it seems,” commented the ambassador, dryly. He turned to Captain Grayder. “You’ve been around a lot and seen many new worlds in your time. What do you make of all this twaddle, if anything?”
“A problem in semantics,” said Grayder, who had been compelled by circumstances to study that subject. “One comes across it on almost every world that has been long out of touch, though usually it has not developed far enough to get really tough.” He paused reminiscently. “First guy we met on Basileus said, cordially and in what he fondly imagined was perfect English, ‘Joy you unboot now!’ ”
“Yeah? What did that mean?”
