a pad of blue stickers. As he tore one off and held it up to Rodney’s forehead, Rodney wondered where he could get his own tube of that jelly. The bear applied the blue sticker.
“How’s that?” the bear said.
“I can understand you fine,” said Rodney. He wasn’t even surprised. The activities of the past twenty-four hours had prepared him for something just like this. Rodney said, “What language are we speaking?”
The kangaroo said, “This is Mobambi, the interstellar trading language. But I want to introduce my boss. This,” the kangaroo said with a flourish of one hand, “is Grubber Young, owner and operator of the House of Amazement on Hutzenklutz Station—sometimes known as the Planetoid of Amazement. You are aboard his ship, the Ship of Amazement. I am Drum, whom he employs as his finder.”
“I am Rodney Congruent.”
“Rodney?” said Grubber Young. He and Drum shared a worried glance.
“Sure. Rodney, son of Watson and Pennyperfect.”
“Not Watson himself?”
“No. But I had his permission to open those envelopes, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“What a surprise!” Drum said, as if she were really bowled over by the news.
“That’s nothing compared to how surprised I am that you know my father and his address.”
“Nothing to be surprised about,” said Grubber Young. He nodded to Drum. Drum pushed a button, and a ball of lightning fizzed briefly in a niche in the wall. When the lightning went away, Drum took a sheet of paper from the niche. Rodney was convinced that the sheet had not been there before. Drum said, “This is just a copy, of course,” and handed the paper to Rodney.
Half of the paper was taken up with a simple outline drawing of a naked man and a naked woman. The other half of the paper was covered with line after line of squiggles. “What is this?” Rodney said.
“You’ve never seen it before?” Drum said.
“No.”
Drum showed Rodney a thing that looked like a ballpoint pen. When Drum clicked the stem at the top, a cone of light came out of the end where the pen point would have been, and touched the paper. Wherever it touched, it magnified. Drum handed the magnifier to Rodney, and he played it over the squiggles.
Each little bunch of squiggles seemed to be a message of some sort. One said GREETINGS FROM PLANET EARTH. Another said WE’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. A third was a complex mathematical equation followed by the words CAN YOU TOP THIS?
“I don’t understand,” Rodney said.
“Look here,” said Grubber Young, and he aimed the magnifier at a squiggle farther down the page. There, in the same wiggly handwriting as had been on the envelopes, was the name WATSON CONGRUENT and the address of the Congruent home.
“Where did you get this?” Rodney said.
“Off a space probe.”
“A space probe from Earth?”
“So we’ve been led to believe.”
“Believe? By what? By who?”
“Take a look at these,” Grubber Young said as he pointed to some rectangles along the bottom edge of the paper.
Rodney shone the magnifier onto the rectangles and saw that they were photographs of famous places all over the world. There was the Sphinx and the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall of China and a lot more.
Grubber Young pointed at the Statue of Liberty and said, “That was the giveaway. Drum?”
Drum was ready with a postcard. She handed it to Grubber, who handed it to Rodney. On the postcard was a picture of the Statue of Liberty. But the picture was better than a photograph because it was three dimensional, and the clouds moved and Rodney imagined that he could hear the ocean licking against the island where the statue stood. At the bottom, in Mobambi, it said LOCAL FOLK TRANSPORTATION ICON: WOMAN FLAGGING DOWN A BUS. (Photo by Sak Nussemm, of Earth origin).
“I see,” said Rodney. He tried not to laugh. After all, it was possible that archeologists and anthropologists on Earth made mistakes about ancient cultures all the time. Nobody would ever know. “But I still don’t understand how my address got on the side of that probe.”
“It’s your probe,” said Drum, laughing. “You tell us.” Nobody spoke. Rodney could hear air moving through the ship like an endless breath. Somewhere, a relay snapped. Rodney needed to change the subject. He tapped the edge of the postcard on the palm of his other hand and said, “Where do you get postcards like this?”
“From the Starship Club,” said Grubber.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a wonderful organization,” said Drum. “They supply emergency interstellar service, sell insurance, and run a travel agency at cut rates. Grubber has been a member for years. They send us postcards like this all the time.”
“But how did you find the Earth?”
Grubber said, “There are instructions.” He pointed to a complex diagram between the naked man and the naked woman. Rodney shone the magnifier on it and saw that it had spectrum lines defining Earth’s sun by its chemical composition, and all kinds of arrows and circles. Generally, the diagram looked like a map of a freeway interchange.
“You can see the probe leaving the third planet from the Sun,” Drum said.
Rodney nodded, trying not to show his distress. Anybody who’d been awake during eighth-grade science class knew that the third planet from the Sun was Earth. And if they watched old science-fiction movies, they also knew that telling aliens the location of your home planet was generally a bad idea. Rodney couldn’t change the fact that the aliens were here, but he didn’t have to help them. At least not till he knew their intentions. Feeling like some kind of spy, he handed the postcard and the paper and the magnifier back to Drum and said suspiciously, “You figured out the location of the Earth and its sun from this?”
“Well, actually not us alone. The Starship Club helped us read the instructions.” Drum opened her arms wide and cried, “Grubber just wanted to drop in and say hello.”
“Well,” said Grubber with self-importance, “we’re here on business too.”
Rodney folded his arms and said, “What sort of business?”
Grubber held up his hand, and from his utility belt he pulled something that might have been a timepiece. On it, Mobambi numbers changed rapidly. He used more clear jelly to remove Rodney’s blue sticker. “Can you still understand me?” he asked.
Still suspicious, Rodney said, “I understand the words.”
“Can’t ask for better than that.”
Rodney disagreed, but he said, “That blue sticker didn’t take long to work. Is the yellow sticker that fast?”
“Give
