Down to Earth (18 page)

“We’ve been in business for a while, too,” Johnson observed. “I can’t believe how fast we got here.”

“Just a couple of months.” Stone sounded as complacent as if he’d got out behind the
Lewis and Clark
and pushed. “You have to remember, Glen old boy”—he put on a British accent too fruity to be real—“this isn’t one of those old-fashioned
rocket
ships. They’re as out of date as buggy whips, don’t you know.”

“And we could have been a little faster, too, if we hadn’t swung wide to keep from coming too close to the sun.” Johnson shook his head in slow wonder. “I wouldn’t have believed how quick we could get here if I hadn’t done the math—well, had the math done for me, anyhow.”

“And if we hadn’t been hanging around here in orbit for the past three and a half months,” Stone added. “Except we’re not really hanging around. We’re going exploring. That’s what it’s all about.”

“Finding that big chunk of ice only a few hundred miles away was a lucky break,” Johnson remarked.

“That’s not a chunk of ice—it’s an asteroid,” Walter Stone said. “And it was only part luck. There are lots of chunks of—uh, icy asteroids floating around here. The first exploration team saw that. No reason why one of ’em shouldn’t be someplace where we can get at it.”

Lieutenant Colonel Mickey Flynn, a large, solidly built fellow who let nothing faze him, floated into the control room. “I’m here a couple of minutes early out of the goodness of my heart,” the
Lewis and Clark
’s second pilot said, “so you poor peasants can get an early start on supper. I expect nothing in return, mind you. Worship isn’t necessary. Even simple adoration seems excessive.”

“You’re what seems excessive,” Stone said with a snort. Being senior to Flynn, he could sass him with, if not impunity, at least something close. “And why should we trust anybody who’s named after a knockout drop?”

“That’s Finn, my cousin,” Flynn said in dignified tones. “Sassenachs, the both of you. And Sassenachs wasting their time getting out of here by giving a hard time to a son of Erin who never did ’em any harm.”

Johnson undid his harness. “I’ll go to supper,” he said, unsnapping his safety belt. Now that the
Lewis and Clark was
in orbit around Ceres, he didn’t even have .01g to hold him in his seat. He pushed off, grabbed the nearest handhold, and then swung onto the next. Still snorting, Stone followed him.

Because of the banter they’d traded with their relief, the mess hall was already crowded when they got to it. Then the banter started up again. A woman called, “If you’re here, who’s flying the damn ship?”

“Nobody,” Johnson shot back. “And if you don’t believe me, go ask Flynn. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

“No, he’d say that was going on during the shift before his,” somebody else returned. Walter Stone said something pungent. Johnson mimed being wounded. In spite of that, he was grinning. When he first involuntarily came aboard the
Lewis and Clark,
people wouldn’t give him the time of day. They treated him like a spy. A lot of people had thought he was a spy.

Now he was one of the crew. He might not have helped build the spaceship, but he’d helped fly her. And even if he was a spy, he couldn’t very well telephone whoever he was spying for, not from a quarter of a billion miles away he couldn’t. What he could do, better than Stone or Flynn or anybody else, was fly the little hydrogen-burning rockets the
Lewis and Clark
used to explore the asteroids in Ceres’ neighborhood. They weren’t just like
Peregrine,
the upper stage he’d flown countless times in Earth orbit, but they weren’t very far removed, either. He understood them, the way his grandfather had understood horses.

He didn’t fully understand the dynamics of chow lines in weightlessness, not yet. At last, though, he drifted up in front of the assistant dietitian, who gave him chicken and potatoes that had been frozen and dried out and were now reconstituted with water. They tasted like ghosts of their former selves.

With them, he got a squeeze bulb full of water and a lidded plastic cup full of pills: vitamins and calcium supplements and God only knew what all else. “I think we carry more of these than we do of reaction mass,” he said, shaking the pills.

The assistant dietitian gave him a dirty look. “What if we do?” she said. “If we get here but can’t finish the mission because we’re malnourished, what’s the point of coming at all?”

“Well, you’ve got me there,” Glen said, and drifted away. There weren’t any tables or chairs—they were no good in weightlessness, or even in .01g. Instead, he snagged a handhold and started gossiping with some people who looked interesting—which was to say, at least in part, some people who were female.

More women had come along in the
Lewis and Clark
than he’d expected when he came aboard: they made up something close to a third of the crew. Very few of them were married to male crew members, either. Come to that, very few of the men were married. Johnson was divorced, Walter Stone a widower, Mickey Flynn a bachelor, and they were pretty typical of the crew.

And military rules about fraternization were a dead letter. The
Lewis and Clark
wasn’t going home again. More people might come out, but nobody here was going back. People had to do the best they could with their lives out here, and to hell with Mrs. Grundy. So far as Johnson knew, nobody’d got pregnant yet, but that wasn’t through lack of effort.

“Hi, Glen,” said the mineralogist, a brunette named Lucy Vegetti. She was on the plump side, but he liked her smile. He liked any woman’s smile these days. She went on, “Have you heard about the latest samples up from Ceres?”

He shook his head. “Nope, sure haven’t. What’s the new news?”

“Plenty of aluminum, plenty of magnesium, plenty of all the light metals,” she said. “All we need is energy, and we can get them out of the rocks.”

“We’ve got energy, by God—we’ve got more energy than you can shake a stick at,” Johnson answered, pointing back toward the engine on its boom at the rear of the
Lewis and Clark.
“Just have to worry about getting it out.” He was also worrying about getting it in, but not to the point where it made him stupid. Any man who lived by himself and didn’t take advantage of the five-finger discount was a damn fool, as far as he was concerned.

One of the ship’s three doctors—everything aboard the
Lewis and Clark
was as redundant as anybody could figure out how to make it—said, “But we can’t build everything we’ll need for the project out of aluminum and magnesium.”

Johnson listened to Miriam Rosen with careful attention. He told himself he would have listened to her the same way even if she weren’t a redhead who wasn’t half bad-looking. Sometimes, for little stretches of time, he even believed it.

Lucy Vegetti said, “No, we can’t build everything, but we can sure build a heck of a lot.” She doubled in brass as an engineer, and was learning more about that part of her business every day. Redundancy again. Johnson was just glad he had one skill anybody aboard found useful. If he hadn’t, he might have gone out the air lock instead of coming along for the ride.

“Can we really do this?” he asked. “Or will we all die of old age out here before it happens?”

For a little while, silence reigned around him. He grimaced. He’d asked the question too bluntly, and stuck his foot in it. People knew they were never going to see Earth again, but they didn’t like to think about that when they didn’t have to. Just when the pause threatened to become really awkward, Dr. Rosen said, “We’ll probably find plenty of things besides old age to die of.”

That produced another silence, but not one aimed at Johnson. He smiled his thanks toward her. She didn’t smile back. He’d got to know she was like that: she spoke the truth as she saw it.

“I think we can do it,” Lucy Vegetti said. “I really do. Oh, we’ll need more help from back home, but we’ll get that. The
Lewis and Clark
showed that we could make constant-boost ships. The next one that comes out will be better. We’ll have a good start on things by then, too. Pretty soon, we’ll be mining a good stretch of the asteroid belt. I think we’ll find most of the metals we need, sooner or later.”

“What about uranium?” Miriam Rosen asked. “Not likely we’ll find much of that here, is it?”

Lucy shook her head. “We’d have to get lucky, I think. The asteroids aren’t as dense as rocks back on Earth, which means there are fewer heavy metals around. But you never can tell.”

Was she looking at Johnson when she said “get lucky”? He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to foul up a chance for later by messing up now. The rules on the
Lewis and Clark
hadn’t fully shaken out yet, but one thing was already clear: the ladies did the choosing. Maybe things would have been different if there’d been two gals for every guy, but there weren’t.

A couple of other male optimists came floating up to join the conversation. Johnson took his squeeze bags and lidded cup now empty of pills back to the assistant dietitian. Nothing got thrown away on the
Lewis and Clark
; everything was cleaned and reused. That included bodily waste water: one more thing the crew preferred not to think about. A spaceship beat even a nuclear-powered submarine as a self-contained environment.

Swinging out of the galley, Johnson went to the gymnasium. He logged in, strapped himself onto an exercise bicycle, and grimly began pedaling away. That helped keep calcium in his bones. He wondered why he was bothering. If he wasn’t going back to Earth and Earth’s gravity, who cared if his bones were made of calcium or rubber bands?

But orders prescribed at least half an hour of exercise every day. He’d been in the Army too long to think orders had to make sense. They were just there, and they had to be obeyed. On he pedaled, going nowhere.

In his time in Lodz, Mordechai Anielewicz had heard a lot of strange noises coming from alleys. Once, he’d foiled a robbery, though he hadn’t caught the robber: the fellow had leaped over a wall—an Olympic-quality jump—and got away. Once, he’d surprised a couple making love standing up in a doorway. He’d felt like leaping over a wall himself then; Bertha still didn’t know about that.

More often than not, though, noises down alleys meant animal fights: dog-dog, cat-cat, cat-dog. These furious snarls were of that sort, and under most circumstances Mordechai would have paid them no special attention. But, as he walked past the mouth of the alley, some of the noises proved to have a stridency the likes of which he’d never heard before. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he craned his neck to see what the devil was going on.

He was surprised enough to stop in midstride, one foot off the ground, till he noticed and made it come down. The alley was just an alley: cobblestones, weeds pushing up among them, a couple of dead vodka bottles. One of the beasts down it was a cat, sure enough; it was clawing at its foe like a lioness ripping the guts out of a zebra. But that foe . . .

“
Gevalt,
what is that thing?” Mordechai exclaimed, and hurried past a battered trash barrel toward the fight to find out. Whatever it was, he’d never seen anything like it. It was clawing at the cat, too, but it was also biting, and it had a very big mouth full of sharp teeth. Pretty plainly, it was getting the better of the fight, for the cat’s claws and even its needle-sharp canines had trouble piercing its scaly hide.

Anielewicz stooped and grabbed a stick—always handy to have when breaking up a fight between animals—before advancing on the cat and the . . . thing. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps toward the beasts when the cat decided it had had enough. It broke free of the fight and levitated up a wooden fence, leaving only bloodstains behind to prove it had been there.

The other animal was bleeding, too, though not so badly. Now that Mordechai got a good look at it, he saw it was smaller than the cat it had just mauled. It stuck out a long, forked tongue and licked a couple of its worst wounds. It was looking at him, too; while it tended to itself, one turreted eye swung in his direction to make sure he didn’t mean trouble.

Realization smote him. “It must be from the Lizards’world!” he exclaimed: either that, or he was hallucinating. He shook his head; he couldn’t have imagined anything so funny-looking. And he did remember hearing that the colonization fleet had brought along some of the Lizards’ domesticated creatures. He hadn’t expected his first meeting with one to be in an alley, though.

Now that it wasn’t fighting, the Lizardy thing—he didn’t know what else to call it—seemed to relax. When Mordechai didn’t wave the stick or do anything else untoward, the animal turned both eye turrets toward him and let out an absurdly friendly squeak.

He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. Snarls and hisses were one thing. He would have expected noises like those from a small creature that could take on a cat and win. He hadn’t expected the thing to sound like a rubber squeeze toy.

Whatever he thought of the noises the animal made, it didn’t like the ones he made. It streaked past him, nimble as a champion footballer getting past a midfielder who only stepped onto a soccer pitch as a weekend amusement. It was, he thought, even faster and more agile than a cat, though it had shown no signs of being able to climb.

Out on the street, someone exclaimed in surprise: “What was
that
?” “What was what?” somebody else—a woman—said. “I didn’t see anything.”

Anielewicz laughed again as he threw down the stick and walked out of the alley. Some people were always unlucky enough to miss things. He wondered if this lady would ever have another chance to see an animal from another planet.

He also wondered, in a different and more urgent way this time, what an animal from another planet was doing in an alley in Lodz (besides fighting a cat, that is). He hadn’t intended to go by the Bialut Market Square—Bertha was reluctant to let him anywhere near the place, too, after his fiasco with the peasant woman selling eggs—but Bunim’s headquarters looked out onto it. He didn’t suppose the Lizards would mind talking about the animals they’d brought to Earth.