I spent the time in my own suite in the south wing of our house. Mostly, I just sat. No one bothered me except the servants necessary to eating, dressing, sleeping, and they were all but mute about it. My psychiatrist called once, but I sent word that I didn't need any today. I called none of my regular friends and did not answer their messages.
I did send to the Library of Science in Washington for the original science survey report on Capella IV. It told me little, but allowed me to surmise some things. Apparently the original scientists were singularly uncurious about the octopoids, perhaps because they didn't have five years to hang around and wait for one to blink an eye, as Johnny had. As always, they were overworked and understaffed, they did their quick survey and rushed on to some new planet job. If one hoped that someday somebody might go back and take another look at the octopoids I found no burning yearning for it in the dry reports.
As far as they went, their surmise was accurate. Some millions, many millions of years ago, the planet had lost the last of its ocean water. Apparently, as they failed to adapt to the increasing salinity of the little left, one by one the original life forms died out. Something in the octopoid metabolism (or mentality?) allowed them to survive, to become land instead of water animals. Something in their metabolism (or mentality?) allowed them to subsist on the air and sunlight. (Really now? Did they even need these?) That was as far as the reports went.
They did not draw the picture of highly developed mentalities who lay there for millions of years and thought about the nature of being. Such things as how mental manipulation of force fields can provide each of them with a cigarette lighter that burns without any fluid in it and any oxygen around its wick, or such things as mother hubbards which had caught their fancy, or perhaps gave them some kind of sensual kick caused by heat filtering through red cloth.
But mostly I just sat.
I went to see Aunt Mattie when she came back from the convention, of course. She had the west wing where her sitting room looked out upon her flora collection—and the gardeners who were supposed to keep busy. Our greeting was fond, but brief. She did look at me rather quizzically, rather shrewdly, but she made no comment. She did not return my visit.
This was not unusual. She never visited my suite. When I was twenty-one she took me into the south wing and said, "Choose your own suite, Hapland. You are a man now, and I understand about young men." If she had in mind what I thought she had it was a mighty big concession to reality, although, of course, she was five years late in coming around to it.
This older generation—so wise, so naive. She probably resolutely refrained from imagining far worse things than really went on.
About two weeks after she'd come back from the convention, a month since we returned from Capella IV, there was an interruption, an excited one. For once in his life the butler forgot to touch my door with feather fingertips and cough discreetly. Instead he knocked two sharp raps, and opened the door without invitation.
"Come quickly, Master Hapland," he chittered urgently. "There are creatures on our private landing field."