“Sure, Captain. ‘Home,’ eh? They’re pretty simple?”
“Happy little morons. Fifteen of them, ranging in age from one month to what looks like a hundred and twenty. All they know is ‘home’ and ‘we wish to see the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation.’ First the old woman said it. Then the next in line—he must be about a hundred—said it. Then a pair of identical twins, fifty-year-old women, said it in chorus. Then the rest of them on down to the month-old baby, and I swear to God he tried to say it. Well, you’re the Haarland Trading Corporation. Go on in.”
..... 2
THEY were all naked. Why not? There’s no weather in a space ship. All of them laughed when Ross and Marconi came in through the lock except the baby, who was nursing at the breast of a handsome woman. Their laughter was what attracted Ross immediately. Cheerful—no meanness in it. The happy yelping of puppies at play with a red rubber bone.
A stab went through him as the pleasure in their simple happiness turned to recollection and recognition. His wife of a decade ago.... Ross studied them with amazement, expecting to find her features in their features, her figure in theirs. And failed. Yet they reminded him inescapably of his miserable year with that half-a-woman, but they were physically no kin of hers. They were just cheerful laughers who he knew were less than human.
The cheerful laughers exposed unblemished teeth in all their mouths, including that of the hundred-and-twenty-year-old matriarch. Why not? If you put calcium and fluorides into a closed system, they stay there.
The old woman stopped laughing at them long enough to say to Marconi, “We wish to see the representative of the Haarland——”
“Yes, I know. I’m the representative of the Haarland Trading Corporation. Welcome to Halsey’s Planet. May I ask what your name is, ma’am?”
“Ma,” she said genially.
“Pleased to meet you, Ma. My name’s Marconi.”