one to hold the paint sprayer, and two to shake the skyscraper up and down. I heard that one in kindergarten. All the dead wood of my life, all the old jokes, all in one huge house. I couldn’t take it.”
“You are a restless man, Louis Wu. Your sabbaticals—it was you who originated the custom, was it not?”
“I don’t remember where it started. It caught on pretty well. Most of my friends do it now.”
“But not as often as you. Every forty years or thereabouts, you tire of human companionship. Then you leave the worlds of men and strike for the edge of known space. You remain outside known space, all alone in a singleship, until your need for company reasserts itself. You returned from your last sabbatical, your fourth, twenty years ago.
“You are restless, Louis Wu. On each of the worlds of human space, you have lived enough years to be known as a native. Tonight you left your own birthday party. Are you becoming restless again?”
“That would be my problem, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. My problem is one of recruiting only. You would be a good choice as a member of my exploration team. You take risks, but you calculate them first. You are not afraid to be alone with yourself. You are cautious enough and clever enough to be still alive after two hundred years. Because you have not neglected your medical needs, your physique is that of a man of twenty. Lastly, and most important, you seem actually to enjoy the company of aliens.”
“Sure.” Louis knew a few xenophobes, and regarded them as dolts. Life got awfully boring with only humans to talk to.
“But you would not wish to jump blind. Louis Wu, is it not enough that I, a puppeteer, will be with you? What could you possibly fear that I would not fear first? The intelligent caution of my race is proverbial.”
“So it is,” said Louis. In point of fact, he was hooked. Xenophilia and restlessness and curiosity combined: wherever the puppeteer was going, Louis Wu was going too. But he wanted to hear more.
And his bargaining position was excellent. An alien would not live in such a room by choice. This ordinary looking hotel room, this reassuringly normal room from the viewpoint of a man of Earth, must have been furnished especially for recruiting.
“You won’t tell me what it is you intend to explore,” said Louis. “Will you tell me where it is?”
“It is two hundred light years from here in the direction of the Lesser Cloud.”
“But it would take us nearly two years to get there at hyperdrive speeds.”
“No. We have a ship which will travel considerably faster than a conventional hyperdrive craft. It will cover a light year in five-fourths of a minute.”
Louis opened his mouth, but nothing came out. One and a quarter minutes?
“This should not surprise you, Louis Wu. How else could we have sent an agent to the galactic core, to learn of the chain reaction of novae? You should have deduced the existence of such a ship. If my mission is successful, I plan to turn the ship over to my crew, with blueprints with which to build more.
“This ship, then, is your…fee, salary, what have you. You may observe its flight characteristics when we join the puppeteer migration. There you will learn what it is that we propose to explore.”
Join the puppeteer migration…“Count me in,” said Louis Wu. The chance to see an entire sentient species on the move! Huge ships carrying thousands or millions of puppeteers each, whole working ecologies…
“Good.” The puppeteer stood up. “Our crew will number four. We go to choose our third member now.” And he trotted into the transfer booth.
Louis slipped the cryptic holo into his pocket, and followed. In the booth he tried to read the number on the dial; for it would have told him where in the world he was. But the puppeteer dialed too fast, and they were gone.
Louis Wu followed the puppeteer out of the booth and into the dim, luxurious interior of a restaurant. He recognized the place by the black-and-gold decor and the space-wasteful configuration of horseshoe booths. Krushenko’s, in New York.
Incredulous whispers followed in the path of the puppeteer. A human headwaiter, imperturbable as a robot, led them to a table. One of the chairs had been removed at that table and replaced by a big square pillow, which the alien placed between hip and hind hoof as it sat down.
“You were expected,” Louis deduced.
“Yes.