Пол Андерсон - Orbit 1

She leaned forward in her intensity. “Do you know what that means? Potato-people! And not only Mager, the retired puzzler. You, me — most of the working citizenry of Earth, and all of the people who simply aren’t lucky enough to be permitted to work. We’ve all been cut down to live potato-lives in a safe little vegetable garden.” She made a kind of grumbling noise in her throat, closed her eyes again in sheer weariness, and incontinently fell asleep while he watched.

Why, she was a worse malcontent now than she had been at school. She had always been willing to replace the known with the unknown, and unwilling, or unable, to cooperate for peace and immediate quiet.

Wystan gratefully accepted a picnic supper that was passed up to him about seven o’clock. The mere word picnic passing through his mind made him feel combative again, it was so peaceful — and somehow also he felt equally protective and guilty. He itched to open the argument again. He really wanted to argue the question of worldwide peace versus human striving, with its inevitable concomitants of chicanery and violence, he discovered. But perhaps with somebody more rewarding to talk to than Agnes?

He sensed and then saw a sudden turmoil at the back of the hall. The runner had returned and the word was that Harms would arrive for parley at 1300 hours the next day.

Wystan felt relief flood through him, as if he had solved the whole problem. He nodded cordially to the Leloc leader whose muzzle had lifted with a softly inquiring tilt toward the new arrival. Simultaneously, Wystan realized that the last thing in the world he wanted to see was those two uncomprehending stubborn beings confronting each other. Luckily, there was some time left before that would be necessary.

Wystan looked around for Mager, and discovered him curled up on the floor confidingly close to the Leloc leader’s enormous feet. Agnes was still napping, too. Wystan examined his conscience, which assured him that it was always the wisest course to let sleeping agents lie. He smiled again; the situation was under control, and nothing whatsoever needed facing right at that moment.

Murkily, it seemed to him that he was bypassing more and more decisions. He wondered if the quite pleasant smell that now permeated the air, a veritable sleepy-smell, were the result of a room full of fatigued people. Fatigued aliens, he corrected himself. Tired people do not smell particularly good, do they, he asked himself? But this was definitely a lethe smell, a sleeping spell. .

His euphoria was subsiding while his relief that Harms was willing to parley was great. His inability to cope with either the military mind or the blank wall of alien attitudes was more than he could face. Intuition would have told him, if he had been aware enough to intuit, that there was indeed a new scent in the air, because the Leloc leader wanted the little interpreter to have his rest uninterrupted.

Wystan Godwin’s next masterly step in the taking-over process was to drift quietly off to sleep.

He woke hours later with a great sense of urgency and the desolate knowledge that there was nothing he, personally, could do — except his belated homework.

How much time was there left before Harms’ arrival? About eight hours, he determined — time enough to get in a good two days’ work, if he could resist the Leloc lullaby technique that long. His nap made him feel sheepish, and yet everybody around him had been working on those terms and for a much longer time, studying until they passed out and sleeping in situ.

Mager was back at his task of trying to come to an understanding with the Leloc leader. And, by now, their flat refusal to lift ship was being acted out dramatically by the entire alien population. It made Wystan twitch, surveying that hall full of seeming statues.

Leloc discipline had not relaxed even a trifle. When anyone stood, the leader of the Leloc stood. It was understandable why the Leloc virtually never had to leave the conference room, but it was dull watching them bob up and down every time a human being retired, however briefly.

Wystan’s growing discomfort brought him back again to the Liaison packet. He found he was very curious about the colonists, although he could neither organize nor apply much of the information for lack of the other side of the picture: How long was a Leloc year? Did they ever move faster than a dignified walk? What did they really eat — grass, grains?

For that matter, all of the information about the Earthly kangaroo was news to him, still, and he decided to review it.

…According to Huxley, tree kangaroos were so imperfectly adapted to arboreal life that it was impossible to imagine them able to survive in the tropical forests of Malaya or the Amazon. .

In the later Mesozoic Age the marsupialia were apparently scattered all over the land area of that time, their remains having been discovered in many parts of both hemispheres, but even previous to the Eocene they were no longer to be found north of the equator.

Huxley further states that in general the Australian marsupials seem unable to compete successfully with introduced species from other regions of the world. At that time kangaroos roamed Australia in great numbers, but (again according to Huxley) “in an evolutionary sense had not adapted to their environment with greatest possible efficiency had natural selection been more vigorously at work…”

. . Island populations tend to have aberrant characteristics. Genetic drift…

A hunter of the kangaroo for profit said, “Inch for inch, and ounce for ounce, they provided perhaps the toughest of all animal skins. . [and yet] soft, light, pliable, and, with no sweat glands, it had a quality few other skins reached. . Funny how there are more moffs [hermaphroditic specimens] among kangaroos than any other animal. ..”

. . inability to reason. A tendency to accept something strange within minutes of noticing it — leading to insufficient fear of man, for instance. A tendency, on the other hand, to panic and (on the part of does) to make insufficient allowance for a full pouch in attempting to run or leap an obstacle. . Subject to instestinal worms, lice, much damage from all kinds of parasites and pests.

Buck teeth enable the kangaroos to eat new shoots of grass before they have more than broken the earth — so that they can strip an area and leave themselves with no forage, an area that can serve as pasture for an equal number of sheep with no need for the latter to range farther.

. . Family Macropodidae. . great development of hinder parts and leaping powers. . peculiar method of reproduction…

[Godwin’s flagging attention revived.]

The internal organs of reproduction are double, the two oviducts not uniting into a single uterus or vagina, although the separation of the two parts is often imperfect. The testes of the male are suspended in a scrotum in front of the penis, the glans of which is often double.

[“By George!” said Godwin.]

Marsupialia have developed into a great variety of forms and present a most curious parallel to the diversities observable among the higher and more widely diffused mammalia. Some have large size, go in herds and occupy grassy plains; others are smaller, more agile, and confined to mountainous districts. Others are still smaller, burrow and feed upon roots or resemble little terrestrial rodents in appearance and habits; while many forms dwell altogether in trees and often simulate squirrels of various kinds. In another direction… a variety of predatory marsupialia, whose needs have developed bodies, teeth and powers resembling those of wolves and bears, and which are wholly flesh-eaters. There is, in fact, hardly a group of mammals which does not find a counterpart among the marsupialia — even the moles and shrews.