Cities in Flight

The first two stories came close to convincing him that he was being overcautious. At the very least it seemed plain, both from the terms in which the game had been described and the stories as they were told, that the Hevians as a race had little talent for fiction. The third player, however, a girl of about nine who obviously had been bursting with impatience for her turn to come around, stunned him completely. The moment she was called upon, she began:

“This morning I saw a letter, and the address on it was Four. The letter had feet, and the feet had shoes on them. It was delivered by missile, but it walked all the way. Though it is Four for four, it’s triple treble trouble,” she wound up triumphantly.

There was a short, embarrassed silence.

“That doesn’t sound like a lie at all,” Estelle said to Web, relapsing into her own language. “It sounds more like a riddle.”

“That was not fair,” the Hevian leader was telling the nine-year-old at the same time in a stern voice. “We hadn’t explained the rules of the coup.” He turned to Web and Estelle. “Another part of the game is to try to tell a story which is entirely true, but sounds like a lie. In the coup, the jury penalizes you for lying if it can catch you. If you aren’t caught, you have told a perfect truth, which wins the round even over a perfect lie. But it was unfair of Pyla to try for a coup before we’d explained it to you.”

“I challenge once,” Web said gravely. “Is really this morning was? If, then we had had knowed; but we haven’t.”

“This morning,” Pyla insisted, determinedly defending her coup in the face of the group’s obvious disapproval. “You weren’t there then. I saw you leave.”

“How do you know about all these?” Web said.

“I hung around,” the girl said. Abruptly, she giggled. “And I heard you two talking, too, behind the hill.”

Since the whole of her answer was offered in a fluent, though heavily accented Okie bêche-de-mer, there were obviously no further questions to be asked.

Web was feeling just barely civil toward females, but he offered Pyla his politest smile. “In that case,” he said formally, “you win. We thank you from our heartmost bottom. This is good news.”

He never did quite make up his mind whether his imperfect knowledge of Hevian made this polite speech come out as “Pullup hellup yiz are ninety” or “Why do I am alook alike a poss of porter-pease?”, or whether he managed to say exactly what he thought he was saying, but to his great astonishment, Pyla burst into tears.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she wailed. “That would have been my very first coup. And you beat me, you beat me.”

The jury was already in a huddle. A few moments later Silvador, the leader, stroked Pyla gently on the temples and said, “Hush now. On the contrary, our Web-friend must be penalized for lying.”

His eyes twinkling, he offered Estelle his arm, and she came to her feet in one sinuous unravelling of the knot she had tied herself into during the lying game.

“The penalty must include our Estelle-friend too,” he added portentously. “You must both come with us, directly to the city, and be—” he struck an executioner’s pose—”put to sleep for a while.”

“No,” Web said. “We have to go.” He clambered stiffly to his feet.

“Please,” Silvador said. “We don’t really mean to punish. You wanted to sleep-learn. We can take you to the sleep-learner. Is that not what you asked this morning? Pyla has two hours coming to her this afternoon. We were going to give it to you; you could learn Hevian and talk to us!”

“But how did we lie?” Estelle said, her eyes dancing.

“Web said it was good news,” Silvador said solemnly, “that his Dee-friend was already here. He told a flat lie about an accomplished fact; that costs 50 points.”

The two New Earth children looked at each other. “Oh, algae and gravity,” Web said suddenly. “Let’s go do it. We’ll see Dee soon enough.”

Dee blew her top.

“What on Earth were you thinking of, John?” she demanded. “How do you know what they teach in hypnopaedia here? How could you let children run around a strange planet without knowing what these savages might do to them?”

“They didn’t do anything to us—” Web said.

“They’re not savages—” Amalfi said.

“I know what they are. I was here the first time, when you were. And I think it’s criminally irresponsible to let savages tamper with a child’s mind. Or any civilized mind.”