his doubts. For the past few weeks, when he hadn't been in school, in bed, or a few hundred feet deep in water, he'd been spending a lot of his spare

time sitting on a particular rock in the Lunar Carpathians, looking down on the green-blue gem that was Earth from three hundred thousand kilometers

out, and coming back again and again to the question, Are girls another species

The first time the thought had occurred to him, he'd felt embarrassed. He had been in places where members of other species had been present in their

hundreds sometimes in their thousands tentacles and oozy bits and all. None of them had at the time struck him as all that alien; they were, when you

got right down to it, just people. And though their differences from human beings were tremendous, sometimes making them completely incomprehensible,

that still didn't undermine his affection for them. He liked the aliens he met, even when they were weird. Come to think of it, I like them because

they're weird. But Nita, who theoretically was just as human as Kit was, had been pushing the weirdness-andincomprehensibility envelope pretty hard

lately. Her behavior was hard to understand, from someone who was usually so rational

Something dark broke the dazzle of the water about a quarter mile away. Kit cocked an ear and heard a long high whistle, slightly muffled, and after

that first shape a short stumpy barnacle-pocked dorsal fin   came the sleek dark shining shape of the back of a humpback whale, rolling in the water as

she breached and blew. One small eye set way down at the end of the long, long jaw regarded Kit as S'reee slid toward the jetty, back-finning expertly

to keep from coming to grief on the rocks. "Dai stiho, Kit," she whistled and clicked in the Speech. "Sorry I'm late. Traffic..."

Uneasy as he was, Kit had to chuckle. "I know. I can hear it even up here." The main approaches to New York Harbor ran straight through this part of the