Fantastic Stories Presents the Fantastic Universe Super Pack. Roger Dee
just outside of town, near the Academy. It wasn’t a hotel; it was a motel, which I didn’t know about at that time, but he said I’d be better off there. A lot of what he said went right over my head at the time; later I realized what he meant about “a nice respectable couple” running the place. I found out later on, too, that he called them up to ask them to keep an eye on me; he thought I was a nice girl, but he was worried about my being alone there.
By this time, I was getting hungry, but I thought I’d better go and arrange about a place to stay first. I found the motel without much trouble, and went in and registered; I knew how to do that, at least—I’d seen it plenty of times. They gave me a key, and the man who ran the place asked me did I want any help with my bags.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, thanks. I haven’t got much.”
I’d forgotten all about that, and they’d never thought about it either! These people always have a lot of different clothes, not just one set, and you’re supposed to have a suitcase full of things when you go to stay anyplace. I said I was hungry anyway, and wanted to go get something to eat, and do a couple of other things—I didn’t say what—before I got settled. So the woman walked over with me, and showed me which cabin it was, and asked was everything all right?
It looked all right to me. The room had a big bed in it, with sheets and a blanket and pillows and a bedspread, just like the ones I’d seen on television. And there was a chest of drawers, and a table with more small drawers in it, and two chairs and a mirror and one door that went into a closet and one that led to the bathroom. The fixtures in there were a little different from the ones they’d made for me to practice in, but functionally they seemed about the same.
I didn’t look for any difficulty with anything there except the bed, and that wasn’t her fault, so I assured her everything was just fine, and let her show me how to operate the gas-burner that was set in the wall for heat. Then we went out, and she very carefully locked the door, and handed me the key.
“You better keep that door locked,” she said, just a little sharply. “You never know . . . .”
I wanted to ask her what you never know, but had the impression that it was something everybody was supposed to know, so I just nodded and agreed instead.
“You want to get some lunch,” she said then, “there’s a place down the road isn’t too bad. Clean, anyhow, and they don’t cater too much to those . . . well, it’s clean.” She pointed the way; you could see the sign from where we were standing. I thanked her, and started the car, and decided I might as well go there as anyplace else, especially since I could see she was watching to find out whether I did or not.
*
These people are all too big. Or almost all of them. But the man behind the counter at the diner was enormous. He was tall and fat with a beefy red face and large open pores and a fleshy mound of a nose. I didn’t like to look at him, and when he talked, he boomed so loud I could hardly understand him. On top of all that, the smell in that place was awful: not quite as bad as the drugstore, but some ways similar to it. I kept my eyes on the menu, which was full of unfamiliar words, and tried to remember that I was hungry.
The man was shouting at me—or it was more like growling, I guess—and I couldn’t make out the words at first. He said it again, and I sorted out syllables and matched them with the words on the card, and then I got it:
“Goulash is nice today, miss . . . .”
I didn’t know what goulash was, and the state my stomach was in, with the smells, I decided I’d better play safe, and ordered a glass of milk, and some vegetable soup.
The milk had a strange taste to it. Not bad—just different. But of course, this came from cows. That was all right. But the vegetable soup...!
It was quite literally putrid, made as near as I could figure out from dead animal juices, in which vegetables had been soaked and cooked till any trace of flavor or nourishment was entirely removed. I took one taste of that, and then I realized what the really nauseating part of the odor was, in the diner and the drugstore both. It was rotten meat, dead for some time, and then heated in preparation for eating.
The crackers that came with the soup were good; they had a nice salty tang. I ordered more of those, with another glass of milk, and sat back sipping slowly, trying to adjust to that smell, now that I realized I’d probably find it anywhere I could find food.
After a while, I got my insides enough in order so that I could look around a little and see the place, and the other people in it. That was when I turned around and saw Larry sitting next to me.
He was beautiful. He is beautiful. I know that’s not what you’re supposed to say about a man, and he wouldn’t like it, but I can only say what I see, and of course that’s partly a matter of my own training and my own feelings about myself.
At home on the ship, I always wanted to cut off my hair, because it was so black, and my skin was so white, and they didn’t go together. But they wouldn’t let me; they liked it that way, I guess, but I didn’t. No child wants to feel like a freak, and nobody else had hair like that, or dead-white colorless skin, either.
Then, when I went down there, and saw all the humans, I was still a freak because I was so small.
Larry’s small, too. Almost as small as I am. And he’s all one color. He has hair, of course, but it’s so light, and his skin is so dark (both from the sun, I found out), that he looks just about the same lovely golden color all over. Or at least as much of him as showed when I saw him that time, in the diner.
He was beautiful, and he was my size, and he didn’t have ugly rough skin or big heavy hands. I stared at him, and I felt like grabbing on to him to make sure he didn’t get away.
After a while I realized my mouth was half-open, and I was still holding a cracker, and I remembered that this was very bad manners. I put the cracker down and closed my mouth. He smiled. I didn’t know if he was laughing at the odd way I was acting, or just being friendly, but I smiled back anyhow.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, hello. How do you do, and I’m sorry if I startled you. I shouldn’t have been staring.”
“You,” I said, and meant to finish, You were staring? But he went right on talking, so that I couldn’t finish.
“I don’t know what else you can expect, if you go around looking like that,” he said.
“I’m sorry . . . .” I started again.
“And you should be,” he said sternly. “Anybody who walks into a place like this in the middle of a day like this looking the way you do has got to expect to get stared at a little.”
The thing is, I wasn’t used to the language; not used enough. I could communicate all right, and even understand some jokes, and I knew the spoken language, not some formal unusable version, because I learned it mostly watching those shows on the television screen. But I got confused this time, because “looking” means two different things, active and passive, and I was thinking about how I’d been looking at him, and . . . .
That was my lucky day. I didn’t want him to be angry at me, and the way I saw it, he was perfectly justified in scolding me, which is what I thought he was doing. But Iknew he wasn’t really angry; I’d have felt it if he was. So I said, “You’re right. It was very rude of me, and I don’t blame you for being annoyed. I won’t do it any more.”
He started laughing, and this time I knew it was friendly. Like I said, that was my lucky day; he thought I was being witty. And, from what he’s told me since, I guess he realized then that I felt friendly too, because before that he’d just been bluffing it out, not knowing how to get to know me, and afraid I’d be sore at him, just for talking to me!
Which goes to show that sometimes you’re better off not being too familiar with the local customs.
*
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