Free The Glass of Dyskornis by Randall Garrett Page A

Wall.
    The differences were acceptable. It was the similarities that caused me problems. I could tell by the movement of light across the cloud cover at night that this world had only one moon. There were human-like creatures and cat-like creatures, birds and insects and apes—all not quite the same as I had known them. How was it possible that such similar inhabitants had evolved on two different worlds?
    I couldn’t tell for sure without standing a human next to a Gandalaran, but I thought these people were about the same size as humans—perhaps a little shorter, on the average. Mostly, that judgment was based on the comparative size of the sha’um. Their musculature was thicker and more dense than that of the tiger, which the sha’um resembled in shape. That fitted in with what I knew of the square-cube law, that the mass of a thing increases cubically as the size is squared. The bigger the cat, the more need for muscle.
    There was a further coincidence in the time-keeping methods of my two worlds. The Gandalaran year had three hundred and sixty-five days; it was composed of thirteen “moons” and a “year day”—which Raithskar celebrated as Commemoration Day. I would have regarded that as tentative proof that I was, indeed, still on Earth—except for the existence of inner awareness.
    I
knew
how long a day was, but there was no way to measure it against Ricardo’s subjective standards. The days and nights might be fifteen Earth hours long, or only three. How could I tell? And regarding this world’s single moon—I had never seen it. The cloud cover had broken only once at night. I had seen a sky with no familiar constellations, but I hadn’t seen the moon. Markasset didn’t know what the phases of his moon looked like.
    Gandalarans did have a concept of objects in the sky which gave off light, but their actual words for “sun” and “moon” meant “daylight” and “nightlight.” I had developed the habit of translating automatically into my own, more familiar, terms.
    I had begun doing that for distances, as well. Thanasset’s map had shown distances in “days”—a day was the distance a man could walk in one day, allowing adequate time for food and rest. I computed a day to be twelve hours of walking at an average of two and a half miles per hour, or thirty miles.
    I suppose it would have been easier, in the long run, if I had just learned to use Markasset’s terminology. But Ricardo Carillo, a reasonably intelligent man who had learned to speak several languages with great fluency, had readied age of sixty, using the same set of measurements all his Through my frequent trips to Europe for conferences, and a conversion campaign in the United States, I had learned to live with metric measurements—but I had always needed to
think
about them in the terms of the English system. Markasset’s memory was with me now, but Ricardo was doing most of the thinking.
    What I thought, when I got that glass of barut close enough to drink, was:
I can still drink this, and suffer the consequences. But why should I?
    I put the glass down, shaking my head, and Bareff poured it back into the glass pitcher and put the stopper in. “Yeah, I’ve had enough, too,’ he said.
    We played mondea for another hour or so, then I said good night and went to my own room, which was located in the same barracks. Dharak had wanted me to stay at his house, but I had refused as gently as possible, saying that I wasn’t officially the Captain until after the ceremony. I wanted to be part of the group for a while.
    I discovered that I
liked
being part of the group. As the day approached when I would be named Captain, my resistance began to increase again.
    It had all sounded so simple when I had talked with Dharak. Take a title. Don’t do anything with it. Whatever I was moved by “fate” to do, even if turned out to be doing nothing, that would be the right thing to do.
    There had to be a catch. I knew it couldn’t have