Homeward Bound (19 page)

Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “By the spirits of Emperors past, it is a truth. During the fighting, Straha saw how genuinely dangerous the Big Uglies were, and wanted to use radical measures against them. I, in my infinite wisdom, decided this was inappropriate—and so we did not completely defeat them. Now I am the one who sees the danger, and no one here on Home or on Tosev 3 appears willing to turn an eye turret in its direction.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, you are not the only one who sees it,” Ttomalss said. “Looking at the reports coming from Tosev 3, what strikes me is their ever more
frightened
tone.”

“Another truth,” Atvar said. “All the more reason for us to eliminate the menace, would you not agree? I have had an audience with the Emperor. Even he realizes we have to find some way to deal with the Big Uglies.”

“Some years ago, I think, annihilating the Big Uglies might well have been the appropriate thing to do,” Ttomalss replied. Atvar hissed angrily. He liked hearing disagreement no better than he ever had. Ttomalss said, “Listen to me, if you please.”

“Go on.” Atvar did not sound like a male who was going to listen patiently and give a reasoned judgment on what he heard. He sounded much more as if he intended to tear Ttomalss limb from limb.

All the same, the psychologist continued, “Unless I am altogether mistaken in my reading of the reports from Tosev 3, I think one reason Reffet and Kirel hesitate to apply your strategy is that they fear it will not work, and it will provoke the independent Tosevites.”

“What do you mean, it will not work?” Atvar demanded. “If we smash the not-empires, they will stay smashed. The Empire will no longer have to worry about them—and a good thing, too.”

“It might well be a good thing, if we could be sure of doing it,” Ttomalss said. “By the latest reports from Tosev 3, though, the Big Uglies are now ahead of us technologically in many areas, ahead of us to the point where Reffet and Kirel are close to despair. We are not innovators, not in the same way the Tosevites are. And we have only a small scientific community on Tosev 3 in any case. It is a colonial world. The center of the Empire is still Home. At the moment, unless I am badly mistaken, the Big Uglies could beat back any attack we might try. Whether we could do the same if they attacked us is a different question, and likely one with a different answer.”

“Has it come to that so soon?” Atvar said. “I would have believed we had more time.”

“I am not certain, but I think it has,” Ttomalss said. “I am also not certain the Big Uglies fully realize their superiority. If they were to defeat an attack from the Race . . .”

“They would become sure of something they now only suspect? Is that what you are saying?”

Ttomalss paused till a female wearing blue false hair between her eye turrets got too far away to hear. Then, unhappily, he used the affirmative gesture and said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I am afraid it is. If not, then I am misreading the reports beamed here from Tosev 3.”

“I have been reading those same reports,” Atvar said. “I did not have that impression. And yet . . .” He paused, then strode out ahead of Ttomalss, his tailstump twitching in agitation. The psychologist hurried to catch up with him. Atvar swung one eye turret back toward Ttomalss. With obvious reluctance, the fleetlord slowed. When Ttomalss came up beside him once more, he asked, “Have you also been reading translations of the reports the American Big Uglies have sent this way for the benefit of their starship and its crew?”

“I have seen some of those translations,” Ttomalss said cautiously. “I do not know how reliable they are.”

“Well, that is always a concern,” the fleetlord admitted. “We have sent back an enormous amount of data on Tosev 3, including video and audio. But none of the so-called experts here has ever seen a real live Big Ugly before now except possibly Kassquit, the irony being that she speaks only the language of the Race.”

“Kassquit is . . . what she is. I often marvel that she has as much stability as she does,” Ttomalss said. “Hoping for more would no doubt be excessive. But I am sorry. You were saying?”

“I was saying that, having read the translations, I was struck by how confident the American Big Uglies seem,” Atvar said. “They appear to respect the Race’s power on Tosev 3—as who not utterly addled would not?—but they do not appear to be in the least afraid of it.” His tailstump trembled some more. “This may support your view.”

“Are any officials who have never been to Tosev 3 aware of these concerns?” Ttomalss asked. “The ones pertaining to conditions on the planet, I mean, not those involving the American Big Uglies here.”

Atvar’s mouth fell open in a laugh. He waggled his lower jaw back and forth, which meant the laugh was sardonic. “Officials here who have never been to Tosev 3 are not aware of anything, Senior Researcher,” he said. “Anything, do you hear me? Why do you suppose they have you and me and even Kassquit negotiating with the wild Big Uglies? They are not competent.”

“At least they know that much,” Ttomalss said. As reassurances went, that one fell remarkably flat.

Colonel Glen Johnson floated in the
Admiral Peary
’s control room, watching Home go round below him. That was an illusion, of course; the starship revolved around the planet, not the reverse. But his habits and his way of thinking were shaped by a language that had reached maturity hundreds of years before anyone who spoke it knew about or even imagined spaceflight.

He shared the control room with Mickey Flynn. “Exciting, isn’t it?” Flynn remarked. He yawned to show just how exciting it was.

“Now that you mention it, no.” Johnson peered out through the coated glass. There might have been nothing between him and the surface of Home. The Lizards’ world had less in the way of cloud cover than Earth, too, so he could see much more of the surface. Grasslands, mountains, forests, seas, and lots and lots of what looked like desert to a merely human eye rolled past. On the night side of the planet, the Race’s cities shone like patches of phosphorescence. He said, “I used to love the view from up high when I was in a plane or a ship in Earth orbit. Hell, I still do. But . . .” He yawned, too.

“I never thought I would know how Moses felt,” Flynn said.

“Moses?” Johnson contemplated his fellow pilot instead of the ever-changing landscape down below. “I hate to tell you this, but you don’t look one goddamn bit Jewish.”

“No, eh? I’m shocked and aggrieved to hear it. But I wasn’t thinking of looks.” Flynn pointed down to Tau Ceti 2. “We’ve brought our people to the Promised Land, but we can’t go into it ourselves.”

“Oh.” Johnson thought that over, then slowly nodded. “Yeah. I’ve had that same thought myself, as a matter of fact, even though it’s been a hell of a long time since I went to Sunday school.” It was a pretty fair comparison, no matter who made it. He wondered how long he’d last under full gravity. Not long—he was sure of that. And he wouldn’t have much fun till the end finally came, either.

Mickey Flynn said, “I wonder if God reaches this far, or if the spirits of Emperors past have a monopoly here.”

“The Lizards are sure their spirits reach to Earth, so God better be paying attention here just to even things out,” Johnson said.

When he was a kid, even when he was a young man, he’d really believed in the things the preacher talked about in Sunday sermons. He wondered where that belief had gone. He didn’t quite know. All he knew was, he didn’t have it any more. Part of him missed it. The rest? The rest didn’t much care. He supposed that, had he cared more, he wouldn’t have lost his belief in the first place.

His gaze went from the ever-unrolling surface of Home to the radar screen. As always, the Lizards had a lot of traffic in orbit around their homeworld. The radar also tracked several suborbital shuttlecraft flights. Those looked a lot like missile launches, so he noticed them whenever they went off. As long as the alarm that said something was aimed at the
Admiral Peary
didn’t go off, though, he didn’t get too excited.

Actually, by comparison with the orbital traffic around Earth, Home was pretty tidy. The Lizards were neat and well organized. They didn’t let satellites that had worn out and gone dead stay in orbit. They cleaned up spent rocket stages, too. And they didn’t have any missile-launching satellites cunningly disguised as spent rocket stages, either. Home wasn’t nearly so well defended as Earth. The Lizards hadn’t seen the need. Why should they have seen it? They were unified and peaceful. No other species had ever paid them a call in its own starships. Till now . . .

“In the circus of life, do you know what we are?” Flynn said out of the blue.

“The clowns?” Johnson suggested.

“You would look charming in a big red rubber nose,” the other pilot said, examining him as if to decide just how charming he would look. Flynn seemed dissatisfied—perhaps not charming enough. After that once-over, he went on with his own train of thought: “No, we are the freaks of the midway. ‘Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see the amazing, astonishing, and altogether unique floating men! They glide! They slide! They sometimes collide! And after one touch— one slight touch—of gravity, they will have died! One thin dime, one tenth part of a dollar, to see these marvels of science perform for
you
!’ ” He pointed straight at Johnson.

“If I had a dime, I’d give it to you,” Johnson said. “I remember the carnival barkers back before the war. Sweet Jesus Christ, that’s more than ninety years ago now. But you sound just like ’em.”

Mickey Flynn looked pained. “‘Talkers.’ The word is ‘talkers,’ ” he said with what seemed exaggerated patience. “Only the marks call them ‘barkers.’ ”

“How do you know that?” Johnson asked. After so long living in each other’s pockets on the
Lewis and Clark,
he thought he’d heard all the other pilot’s stories. Maybe he was wrong. He hoped he was. Good stories were worth their weight in gold.

“Me?” Flynn said. “Simple enough. Until I was three years old, I was a pickled punk, living in a bottle of formaldehyde on a sideshow shelf. It gave me a unique perspective—and very bad breath.”

He spoke with the same straight-faced seriousness he would have used to report the course of a Lizard shuttlecraft. He had no other tone of voice. It left Glen Johnson very little to take hold of. “Anyone ever tell you you were out of your tree?” he asked at last.

“Oh yes. But they’re all mad save me and thee—and I have my doubts about thee,” Flynn said.

“I’ve had my doubts about you—thee—a lot longer than the other way round, I’ll bet,” Johnson said.

“Not likely,” the other pilot replied. “When you came aboard the
Lewis and Clark,
I doubted you would live long enough to doubt me or anything else ever again. I thought Healey would throw you right out the air lock—and keep your spacesuit.”

Since Johnson had wondered about the same thing, he couldn’t very well argue with Mickey Flynn. He did say, “Nobody believes I had electrical problems at just the wrong time.”

“Healey believed you—or he wasn’t quite sure you were lying, anyhow,” Flynn said. “If you hadn’t done such a good job of faking your troubles, he
would
have spaced you, and you can take that to the bank.” He eyed Johnson once more. It made his expression look odd, since they floated more or less at right angles to each other. “Don’t you think you can ’fess up now? It was more than ten light-years and almost seventy years ago.”

Johnson might have confessed to Mickey Flynn. Flynn was right; what he’d done in Earth orbit hardly mattered here in orbit around Home. But Brigadier General Walter Stone chose that moment to come into the control room. Johnson was damned if he would admit anything to the dour senior pilot. He had the feeling that Stone wouldn’t have minded spacing him, either. And so he said, “I told you—I had wiring troubles at the worst possible time, that’s all. There is such a thing as coincidence, you know.”

Stone had no trouble figuring out what the other two pilots were talking about. With a snort, he said, “There is such a thing as bullshit, too, and you’ve got it all over your shoes.”

“Thank you very much—sir.” If Johnson was going to keep up the charade of innocent curiosity, he had to act offended now. “If you will excuse me . . .” He reached for a handhold, found it, and pulled himself from one to another and out of the control room.

Internally, the ship was laid out like a smaller version of the
Lewis and Clark.
Corridors had plenty of handholds by which people could pull themselves along. Intersecting corridors had convex mirrors that covered all approaches. Johnson used them, too. He’d seen some nasty collisions—Mickey Flynn hadn’t been kidding about that—and he didn’t want to be a part of one. You could get going at quite a clip. If you didn’t happen to notice that somebody else was barreling along, too . . .

His cabin was a little larger than the cramped cubicle that had gone by the name in the
Lewis and Clark.
His bunk was nothing more than a foam mattress with straps to keep him from drifting away. In weightlessness, what more did anyone need? A few people had nightmares of falling endlessly, but most did just fine. Johnson was glad he was, for once, part of the majority.

He didn’t feel like sleeping just now, though. He put a
skelkwank
disk into a player and started listening to music.
Skelkwank
light—a coherent beam of uniform frequency—was something humanity hadn’t imagined before the Lizards came. English had borrowed the word from the language of the Race. All sorts of humans had borrowed—stolen— the technology.

Johnson remembered records. He wondered if, back on Earth, even one phonograph survived. Maybe a few stubborn antiquarians would still have them, and museums. Ordinary people? He didn’t think so.

So much of the
Admiral Peary
used pilfered technology. Humanity had had radar before the Lizards came. People were beginning to work on atomic energy. But even there, the Race’s technology was evolved, perfected. Stealing had let humans evade any number of mistakes they would have made on their own.