by John Boyd
“It’s not my intelligence,” she said, “but the techniques of concentration I’ve learned.”
He could not accept her demurral fully, although he realized she was not a superbeing. On the drive to the Navy base she grew edgy with apprehensions, which she evinced, in purely human terms,—she sat on the edge of the seat, grew silent, moved her hands around, and finally got snappish. She wore Matilda’s jeans, loafers, and denim shirt with her own shoulder bag, which contained a few dollars and change. Some instinct for caution had made Breedlove insist that she leave the pink container in his custody.
Soon it would no longer be his responsibility to convince anyone that Kyra belonged to a species alien to earth—the medical examiners would prove that—but he would have to make the preliminary announcements to the authorities, and he was concerned about first reactions to Kyra. So far they had ranged from polite befuddlement to semihysteria, but he had counted on Kyra to help soften the shock of her strangeness, and now she herself was upset.
She had landed on earth with the attitude of a motorist pulling into a filling station, figuring to fuel up and be on her way, but the man at the pump had referred her to a credit manager in the office, and now she was being led to a washroom where she would be stripped, pummeled, and probed. And stuck. He had forgotten to warn her about the needles.
“They’ll stick you with a needle to get a blood sample,” he said, “but it’s not painful.”
“If it’s not painful, why are you warning me?”
He shook his head resignedly. “You’re just too logical for a female, on earth or anywhere else.”
“My, how superior we feel this morning,” she snapped. “Our hubristic masculinity is breaking out all over.”
At the gate he was directed to the sick bay, and his tension grew as they walked from the parking lot toward the entrance. Navy doctors would handle the quarantine procedures. The Navy was under the Department of Defense, which had more clout than Interior and Justice combined. The wolves of Defense would come howling down on Kyra for one reason—her brain held secrets undreamed of by earth’s military scientists.
Kyra could be declared a top-secret archive, and he had no security rating. His stride faltered, and Kyra took his arm, saying, “Steady, Breedlove, I’m the one that’s getting the needle.”
“I was thinking more of hooks. When Defense gets you, it might want all of you, and I’ve got to find some hook to hang onto you with. Listen, keep your timid, frightened manner and let me do the talking. When you see me push, you pull.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. I’ll play it by ear.”
“You’ll think of something. You’re resourceful, for a man.”
The Navy clinic was housed in two long, gray, one-story frame buildings that bisected each other at right angles. Ushering Kyra into the lobby, Breedlove whiffed the miasma of disinfectants, antiseptics, anaesthesia, urea, and human misery from a corridor that seemed to dwindle interminably into the distance. At the reception desk he started to introduce himself, but the nurse on duty, seeing his uniform, said, “You’re Ranger Breedlove with Mr. Kelly’s patient. Won’t you be seated? Chief Pharmacist Pilsudski will be with you in a moment.”
The receptionist cast no covert glances at Kyra as she seated herself beside Breedlove on a bench against the wall, and the nurse’s lack of curiosity indicated to him that Kelly had not prepared anyone in the clinic for Kyra’s strangeness. He hoped Chief Pilsudski proved emotionally stable, for the chief would be the first to know.
Breedlove was answering Kyra’s question about the nurse’s uniform when a door opening down the hall drew his attention to a woman who emerged. She wore a Navy uniform, with a skirt short enough to reveal well-muscled but shapely legs that matched her stocky torso, and he deduced from her straight-line approach toward them that she was Chief Pilsudski.
About forty, her broad, Slavic face seemed to be formed for smiling, and she exuded an air of maternal warmth, strength, and serenity. Her sandy hair, tinged with beginning gray, gave her a look of distinction. Though cool and appraising, her gray eyes were friendly. Breedlove guessed she had been put in charge of admissions because of her ability to calm entering patients and reassure anxious relatives.
“Ranger Breedlove, if you and Miss Lavaslatta will follow me, we’ll have the quarantine forms made out in a jiffy.”
They followed her down the hall to a door marked ADMISSIONS, and Breedlove was beginning to feel confidence in her. From her name and facial structure, he assumed her antecedents were Eastern European. From her broad, muscular body, he deduced she came from peasant stock, solid, enduring, and imperturbable. And she was a woman. So far women seemed to adjust to the idea of Kyra more easily than men.
“Chief Pilsudski,” he said, “I think I should warn—”
“Just call me Chief, or Anna, if you prefer. Strangers often call me ‘Pilsener,’ and some of the doctors try to get away with ‘Suds.’ My dearly beloved late husband left me with a rather beery name.”
“Chief, I don’t think Mr. Kelly spoke to you in detail about Miss Lavaslatta—
“Oh, we’re aware she’s a very important person. If Miss Lavaslatta’s quarantine has to be extended, she’ll occupy the VIP’s quarters.”
“Extended? How long can quarantines be extended?”
“By law up to forty days, but the law’s rarely observed nowadays, with the new techniques for uncovering diseases.”
She turned to Kyra.
“Your examining physician will be Doctor Condon. His Navy rank is commander. He should have you through quickly.”
“Chief,” Breedlove interjected, “Kyra’s more than a ‘very important person.’ She has no living relatives on earth.”
“Poor dear. An orphan.”
“I’m her guardian in a manner of speaking—”
“Then you’ll have to sign a release deposing that you are her guardian, and she’ll have to witness your signature.”
Pilsudski reached into her desk for another form.
“Of course,” she continued, “you realize it’s a routine legal form which releases the Navy from any liability in a malpractice suit brought against the examining physician. It doesn’t release the physician of responsibility, but there’s very little danger of malpractice in a physical examination.”
She handed the form across the desk to him with her pen. He immediately saw an opportunity to bind Kyra to him with hoops of paper stronger than steel. Once signed, witnessed, and recorded, documents assumed their own inviolability only lengthy court procedures might challenge. He signed and handed the form to Kyra, who signed it. The chief witnessed their signatures, appended her serial number, time-stamped the document, and put it in a manila folder.
“You were saying Kyra has no relatives.”
“Not on earth, Chief Anna. Kyra’s a visitor from the now extinct planet of Kanab. She has come to petition the U.S.A. for enough uranium 235 to power her journey onward into space. For reasons I can’t go into, her quarantine must be expedited. I know this may be hard for you to accept, but I think the proof of what I say will be evident to any doctor.”
“I don’t find it hard to accept at all.” Chief Pilsudski smiled. “I knew Kyra didn’t get those beautiful green eyes anywhere on earth, and with so many stars in the sky it’s incredible to me that we earth folks haven’t been visited before.”
Suddenly a look of dismay clouded her eyes, and Breedlove tensed slightly, but the chief continued in a speculative tone: “Unfortunately my security rating doesn’t clear me for restricted data concerning space exploration. I have a clearance for classified medical intelligence only, so I may be violating Navy regulations by asking Kyra questions.”
“Chief, how could the Navy possibly issue directives about interviewing visitors from space, since it’s never been done before. You’re establishing the precedents, here and now, for others to follow.”
“Of course, you’re right,”
the chief said, still retaining her composure in the face of Kyra’s origins. “There can be no regulations concerning that which never happened. I’ll go right ahead with the forms.”
Again Breedlove observed the steadying effect of routine on the human nervous system. Chief Pilsudski questioned Kyra calmly as she went through the form, skipping only one question, “Proof of Alien’s Birth in Country of Origin?” Kyra signed it; Breedlove, as her guardian, attested to her signature,—and the chief witnessed it. For a moment she sat considering the form, tapping her forehead with her pen.
“I do wish you had brought along a birth certificate, Kyra.” She eyed Kyra’s shoulder bag as if expecting Kyra to rummage through it and come up with a birth certificate. “Don’t you have any evidence of your birth on Kanab?”
Kyra thought for a moment and said, “Yes, Anna, I have.”
She stood to unbutton her shirt and jeans. Thinking she intended to flash the true green of her hair, Breedlove averted his eyes and heard Kyra say, “Look, Anna. No bellybutton.”
“This is most curious,” the chief said. “You have no navel but you have breasts, so you must be a mammal, but what happened to your umbilicus?”
The chief had asked herself the question, and her eyes groped for an answer, rolling around for a moment until the whites were visible in odd places. Slowly she rose and leaned over the desk toward Kyra, asking in a sharp, accusatory tone, “Kyra, where is your bellybutton?”
“I have none, Anna.” Kyra’s voice assumed its fluting, soothing tone.
Chief Anna Pilsudski was beyond being soothed. A harpy was emerging from the woman of distinction, but the wild words that poured from her were not directed solely or even mainly to Kyra. They were breast-beating imprecations against a malevolent fate.
“What’s a mammal without an umbilicus? Only kangaroos have teats without bellybuttons. What are you, a wallaby? If you’re a marsupial, where’s your pouch? You’ve got to be from Australia. All strange things come out of Australia: koalas, platypuses, Evonne Goolagong, wombats, dingos, and the flat-faced swagman I married the first time. Don’t you deny it, young lady. You’re a dinko from the Outback!”
She scooped the forms from her desk, clutched them to her bosom, and plunged head first through the swinging doors marked PRIVATE, screaming, “Doooctor!”
“Well, this should forewarn Doctor Condon that you’re a very unusual person,” Breedlove said to Kyra.
“Breedlove, I’ve always known I was an unusual person, but it never frightened me before.” Tears were forming in her eyes. “What’s a dinko from the Outback?”
“I’ve never heard the expression before.”
He could sympathize with Kyra, so tiny and appealing, who had come so far to suffer these indignities, but he reserved a portion of his compassion for the quivering chief pharmacist, who had hurled herself through the swinging door. Anna Pilsudski had conducted herself in the highest traditions of the Navy up to the very threshold of credulity, and she might have carried on had it not been for the happenstance that her first husband was a flat-faced swagman from the Outback.
After an interminable two minutes the doors swung outward and a tall man in a smock, with coarse salt-and-pepper hair and the cragged features of an Abraham Lincoln, shouldered his way into the office, reading the forms Anna had completed with an abstract and faintly skeptical air. Glancing at Breedlove and Kyra, he smiled the confident smile of a man in control of the situation, laid the papers on the desk, and came to stand beside Kyra. He cupped her chin in his palm and looked down into her eyes. When he spoke his voice was low, friendly, and reassuring.
“So, this is the unnaveled young lady who reduces our Suds to foam and gives to airy nothing the name of Kanab. The Girl with the fade Green Eyes. Welcome to earth, Kyra Lavaslatta.”
He took his hand from Kyra’s chin and extended it in greeting to Breedlove. “And you’re her guardian.”
“Yes, I’m Breedlove. If it’s possible I’d like to wait while you examine her. I’m driving her.”
Condon turned back to the desk and picked up the papers, looking at them now without skepticism.
“If half what Pilsudski has written is true, she may have to remain here overnight. We’ll fake very good care of her. I wouldn’t advise you to wait. You can telephone her around 1700, and if she’s staying overnight the operator will give you her extension.”
Breedlove nodded and turned to Kyra. “I’ll leave, then. You can call me if you’re released early, and I can get down within half an hour. Go with the doctor now and be brave.”
He felt no irony in telling the being who had dared the perils of space to be brave, for she was frightened. As she stood to go, she reached out and took his hand and squeezed it in a gesture of sadness and regret. She took her bag and moved toward the swinging doors Condon held open for her. As she entered she cast a wistful look toward Breedlove before the doors swung shut behind her.
He returned to loneliness at the motel. Telling the desk clerk he was expecting a call, he sat in the lobby and penned a report to Peterson and a letter to his family. In the letter he described his sadness over having to tell her goodbye with such graphic power that it occurred to him that he might objectify his emotions, and in a measure purge them, by writing a poem to Kyra in language simple enough to match her budding literary skills but poignant enough to capture his feelings. Besides, it was something to do.
For over an hour he tried to write her the poem, but the words he found were too heavy-footed to bear such delicate freight and the meter was atrocious. Still, the idea was too good to let drop. In his frustration he decided on an expediency. Coming from an alien culture, Kyra would not be able to recognize a plagiarized source, and an appropriate, pirated poem—he had just the poem he could quote from memory—would give her a relic to take with her to the stars. Thousands of years from now, earth time, on some far-distant planet, she might gather her grandchildren around her to read to them, in his own English tongue, the tribute a long-dead earth man once penned to her beauty.
The image was so compelling Breedlove decided to use the motel’s stationery as a curio to enchant her grandchildren further, and he wrote beneath the motel’s letterhead the title he had chosen for Kyra’s poem, “To One in Quarantine.”
Thou wast all that to me, Kyra,
For which my soul did pine—
A green island in the Sound, Kyra,
Mount Rainier and a shrine,
All intermingled with fairy fruits and flowers.
And all the flowers were mine.
Now all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy green eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams—
In what sidereal dances,
By what galactic streams?
He looked upon his handiwork and was pleased; Kyra did not know Edgar Allan Poe from little green apples.
By 1:15 p.m. (1315 Kyra’s time) he was dawdling over coffee in the dining room when a voice page sent him quickly to the telephone—but the caller was Kelly.
“I’ve been euchred out of a lunch date with Kyra. The Navy has taken over. Condon called Houston to fly in a NASA expert in space medicine, and he won’t be in until tomorrow.”
“How did you learn this?”
“Immigration’s got informants over there, and quarantine is supposed to be my operation. By the way, would you get the Lincoln back to the car pool on the double.”
“I’ll bring it as soon as I get a call from Kyra.”
“Forget it. They’re holding her incommunicado.”
A disturbed Breedlove hung up, then did what any concerned friend of a patient would have done: he called the patient’s doctor. He had only a brief wait before Condon answered.
“Doctor, I’m inquiring about Kyra.”
“She’s doing as well as can be expected.”
“I’m concerned about her time of release. I have to be away for a couple of hours, b
ut I don’t want to be out when she calls.”
“You’ll have time to drive to Vancouver.”
“Would I be able to speak to her now for a moment?”
“No. She’s busy. Call her back after five.”
Condon hung up. His words substantiated Kelly generally, but it remained to be seen if Kyra was being held incommunicado. If the Department of Defense tried to keep her from communicating with her guardian, a whole new ball game would begin. Defense’s only argument for holding her would be for reasons of national security, and that argument had become suspect in the eyes of the public. With his photographs of Kyra, his letter of authorization, and his eyewitness’s account of her arrival on earth, he possessed the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. The newspapers would love the story.
Breedlove returned Kelly’s car to the pool, walked down the street to a rental agency, and rented a less pretentious vehicle. He drove back to the motel and at 5:05 called the operator at the clinic. She gave him the private number of the VIP suite and he dialed the number. A recording of a woman’s voice answered. “We are sorry, but this number is temporarily disconnected.”
He could not argue with a recording, but he feared the number had not been temporarily disconnected, that Kyra was vanishing into the vast anonymity of the Department of Defense. He next called Peterson at Selkirk. Within the Department of Interior, chief rangers held positions analogous to those of ship captains in shipping firms. They were not of the hierarchy, but they were deferred to as the men who got the work done. Peterson listened as Breedlove described the situation. His answer was temporizing, soothing, encouraging.
“Frankly, Tom, I think you’re getting emotionally involved. Blackmailing Defense is an irrational move. Maybe the telephone is out of order. I’ll call Washington in the morning. There are a few legalities in our favor. Sit tight and I’ll call you back at nine tomorrow.”
“Sitting tight” was easier advised than performed. At 6:30 Breedlove called Kyra’s number and the recording answered. From 7:30 until 9:30 he called at quarter-hour intervals, and the recording continued to answer.
