Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

“Mother!” she says, looking very round in the stomach. She hugs and kisses Sadie, who starts bawling. Five minutes later, when they’re out of the clinch, Lorinda turns to me, a little nervous.

You can say a lot of things about me, but basically I’m a warm person, and we’re about to be guests in this house, even if she is a stranger to me. I shake her hand.

“Is he home, or is he out in the back yard, growing new leaves?”

Her face (or what I can see of it through the climate adapter) crumbles a little at the chin line, but she straightens it out and puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Mor had to go out, Daddy—something important came up—but he should be back in an hour or so. Come on, let’s go inside.”

Actually there’s nothing too crazy about the house, or even interesting. It has walls, a floor and a roof, I’m glad to see, even a few relaxer chairs, and after the trip we just had, I sit down and relax. I notice my daughter is having a little trouble looking me straight in the face, which is only as it should be, and it isn’t long before she and Sadie are discussing pregnancy, gravitational exercise, labor, hospitals, formulas and sleep-taught toilet training. When I’m starting to feel that I’m getting overeducated, I decide to go into the kitchen and make myself a bite to eat. I could have asked them for a little something but I don’t want to interfere with their first conversation. Sadie has all engines going and is interrupting four times a sentence, which is exactly the kind of game they always had back home—my daughter’s goal is to say one complete thought out loud. If Sadie doesn’t spring back with a non sequitur, Lorinda wins that round. A full-fledged knockout with Sadie still champion is when my daughter can’t get a sentence in for a week. Sometimes I can understand why she went to Mars.

Anyway, while they’re at the height of their simultaneous monologues, I go quietly off to the kitchen to see what I can dig up. (Ripe parts of Mor, wrapped in plastic? Does he really regenerate, I wonder. Does Lorinda fully understand how he works, or one day will she make an asparagus omelet out of one of his appendages, only to learn that’s the part that doesn’t grow back? “Oh, I’m so sorry” she says. “Can you ever forgive me?”)

The refrigerator, though obsolete on Earth, is well stocked—fruits of a sort, steaks, it seems, small chickentype things that might be stunted pigeons. There’s a bowl of a brownish, creamy mess—I can’t even bring myself to smell it. Who’s hungry, anyway. I think. The rurpbling in my stomach is the symptom of a father’s love turning sour.

I wander into the bedroom. There’s a large portrait of Mor hanging on the wall—or maybe his ancestor. Is it true that instead of hearts, Martians have a large avocado pit? There’s a rumor on Earth that when Martians get old they start to turn brown at the edges, like lettuce.

There’s an object on the floor and I bend down and pick it up. A piece of material—at home I would have thought it was a man’s handkerchief. Maybe it is a handkerchief. Maybe they have colds like us. They catch a germ, the sap rises to combat the infection, and they have to blow their stamens. I open up a drawer to put the piece of material in (I like to be neat), but when I close it, something gets stuck. Another thing I can’t recognize. It’s small, round and either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it. It’s made of something black and shiny. A cloth bowl? What would a vegetable be doing with a cloth bowl? Some questions are too deep for me, but what I don’t know I eventually find out—and not by asking, either.

I go back to the living room.

“Did you find anything to eat?” Lorinda asks. “Or would you like me to fix—”

“Don’t even get up,” Sadie says quickly. “I can find my way around any kitchen, I don’t care whose.”

“I’m not hungry. It was a terrible trip. I thought I’d never wake up from it in one piece. By the way, I heard a good riddle on the ship. What’s round and black, either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it, and made out of a shiny material?”

Lorinda blushed. “A skullcap? But that’s not funny.”

“So who needs funny? Riddles have to be a laugh a minute all of a sudden? You think Oedipus giggled all the way home from seeing the Sphinx?”

“Look, Daddy, I think there’s something I should tell you.”

“I think there are all sorts of things you should tell __ _ j» me.

“No, I mean about Mor.”

“Who do you think I mean, the grocery boy? You elope with a cucumber from outer space and you want I should be satisfied because he’s human in all the important ways? What’s important—that he sneezes and hiccups? If you tell me he snores, I should be ecstatic? Maybe he sneezes when he’s happy and hiccups when he’s making love and snores because it helps him think better. Does that make him human?”

“Daddy, please”

“Okay, not another word.” Actually I’m starting to feel quite guilty. What if she has a miscarriage right on the spot? A man like me doesn’t blithely torture a pregnant woman, even if she does happen to be his daughter. “What’s so important it can’t wait till later?”

“Nothing, I guess. Would you like some chopped liver? I just made some fresh.”

“What?”

“Chopped liver—you know, chopped liver.”

Oh yes, the ugly mess in the refrigerator. “You made it, that stuff in the bowl?”

“Sure. Daddy, there’s something I really have to tell you.”

She never does get to tell me, though, because her husband walks in, bold as brass.

I won’t even begin to tell you what he looks like. Let me just say he’s a good dream cooked up by Mary Shelley. I won’t go into it, but if it gives you a small idea, I’ll say that his head is shaped like an acorn on top of a stalk of broccoli. Enormous blue eyes, green skin and no hair at all except for a small blue round area on top of his head. His ears are adorable. Remember Dumbo the Elephant? Only a little smaller—I never exaggerate, even for effect. And he looks boneless, like a filet.

My wife, God bless her, I don’t have to worry about; she’s a gem in a crisis. One look at her son-in-law and she faints dead away. If I didn’t know her better, if I wasn’t absolutely certain that her simple mind contained no guile, I would have sworn she did it on purpose, to give everybody something to fuss about. Before we know what’s happening, we’re all in a tight, frantic conversation about what’s the best way to bring her around. But while my daughter and her husband are in the bathroom looking for some deadly chemical, Sadie opens both eyes at once and stares up at me from the floor.

“What did I miss?”

“You didn’t miss anything—you were only unconscious for fifteen seconds. It was a cat nap, not a coma.”

“Say hello. Hector. Say hello to him or so help me I’ll close my eyes for good.”

“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Trumbnick,” he says. I’m grateful that he’s sparing me the humiliation of making the first gesture, but I pretend I don’t see the stalk he’s holding out.

“Smutual,” I say.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Smutual. How are you? You look better than your pictures.” He does, too. Even though his skin is green, it looks like the real thing up close. But his top lip sort of vibrates when he talks, and I can hardly bear to look at him except sideways.

“I hear you had some business this afternoon. My daughter never did tell me what your line is, uh, Morton.”

“Daddy, his name is Mor. Why don’t you call him Mor?”

“Because I prefer Morton. When we know each other better I’ll call him something less formal. Don’t rush me, Lorinda; I’m still getting adjusted to the chopped liver.”