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Getting back into space felt good to Glen Johnson. After his run-in with Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay, he’d wondered if his superiors would let him ride Peregrine again. But nobody else at the Kitty Hawk launch site had said boo to him about LeMay’s appalling visit to the BOQ. It was as if the general had delivered his tongue-lashing and then cleared out without mentioning it to anybody, which was possible but not in accord with the usual habits of general officers. Johnson had feared his career would be blighted for good.
His orbit was lower and therefore faster than that of the American space station. Whenever he passed below it, he paid close attention to the radio chatter coming from it. The traffic told him the station was getting yet another new load of surprises, which didn’t surprise him. So many bus drivers were going up there, the Greyhound lines probably had to shut down half their routes.
He couldn’t tell what the supplies were. That didn’t surprise him, either. If he heard exactly what was going on up there, the Lizards and the Germans and the Russians would, too. He didn’t want that. But he did want to know what was going on.
One thing he could tell, both by radar and by spotting scope: whatever those supplies were, the crew aboard the space station wasn’t letting them go to waste. Sometimes he thought it looked bigger than it had on his previous pass each time he caught up with it. It was as big as one of the Lizards’ starships these days, and showed no signs of slowing its growth.
“What the hell are they doing up there?” he asked a universe that did not answer. Construction in vacuum and weightlessness wasn’t easy, but the station kept shifts going around the clock.
He couldn’t ignore everything else in space, much as he would have liked to. During his tour, Peenemunde launched a couple of A-45s and brought the manned upper stages back to Earth quite a bit faster than was their usual practice. Anything out of the ordinary was suspicious, as far as Johnson was concerned-and as far as his superiors were concerned, too, even if they didn’t seem suspicious about what was going on at the American space station.
He tried pumping the Nazi spacemen about what their bosses were up to. That was doctrine. The Germans didn’t tell him doodly-squat, which was doubtless part of their doctrine. They tried pumping him about the U.S. space station, too.
“Dammit, Drucker, I don’t know what’s going on up there,” he told one of his German opposite numbers when the fellow got not just nosy but pushy to boot. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you anyway.”
Drucker laughed. “And you so angry with me got when I told you the same thing. I do not know what we are here with these test launches doing.”
Listening to the Germans, Johnson had discovered, was a matter of staying patient till they got around to the verb. He laughed, too, but sourly. “Yeah, but the difference between us is that I know I’m telling the truth, but I’ve got the nasty feeling you’re lying to me.”
“I speak truth,” Drucker declared, with a burst of static warning that they were drifting out of radio range of each other. “It is you Americans who are liars.” More static gave him the last word in the argument.
“Screw him,” Johnson muttered, and then, “On second thought, no thanks. I didn’t come up here to be Mata Hari.” Spying with his eyes and ears and instruments was one thing. Using his fair white body… Again, his laugh was less than wholehearted. Nobody, Nazi pilot or good old American waitress or secretary or schoolteacher, had shown much interest in his fair white body lately.
He brought the Peregrine down to a good landing-about as smooth as he’d ever managed-at Kitty Hawk and then went through debriefing. He remarked that the Germans were curious about what was going on up at the space station. The major taking notes just nodded and waited for him to say something else. If the fellow knew anything, he wasn’t talking.
After a while, Johnson ran dry about the Germans and Russians and Lizards in space. The first debriefer left. His replacement came in and started grilling the spaceman about the changes the mechanics and technicians had made in Peregrine since his last flight. He had answers and opinions, some of them strong ones, about those modifications.
When they finally let him go, he thought about heading for the bar for a bit of high-proof tension relief. Instead, he went back to the BOQ. He was shaking his head as he did it-Christ, don’t I even have the energy to go buy myself a drink? — but the direction in which he kept walking argued that he didn’t.
He took a shower, then went back to his room and flopped down on the bed. Instead of falling asleep, which he’d thought he would do, he lay there for a bit, then pulled a Hornblower novel out of the GI nightstand by the bed and started to read. Things had been simple back in Hornblower’s day, with only people to worry about.
The telephone on the nightstand rang, making him jump. He didn’t like jumping, especially not when he was just back in full gravity. He picked up the phone and said, “Johnson.”
“Lieutenant Colonel, I’m Major Sam Yeager, calling from Los Angeles,” the voice on the other end of the line said. He sounded as if he was calling from the other end of the country; there weren’t so many hisses and pops on the line as there would have been before the Lizards came, but enough to notice remained.
“What can I do for you, Major?” Johnson asked. Yeager’s name seemed vaguely familiar. After a moment, he placed it: a hotshot expert on the Lizards.
He expected Yeager to ask him about dealing with the Race in space. Instead, the fellow came straight out of left field: “Lieutenant Colonel, if you don’t mind my asking, did you by any chance get your ass chewed by General LeMay not so long ago?”
“How the hell did you know that?” Johnson sat up so suddenly, he knocked the Hornblower novel onto the floor.
Across three thousand miles, Major Yeager chuckled. “Because I’m in the same boat-and I think it’s the Titanic. General LeMay gets ants in his pants when people start asking about the space station, doesn’t he?”
“He sure does. He-” Johnson shut up with a snap. He suddenly realized he had only Yeager’s assurance that he was who and what he said he was. For all he knew, Yeager-or somebody claiming to be Yeager-might be one of LeMay’s spies, trying to catch him in an indiscretion and sink him like a battleship. In a tight voice, he said, “I don’t think I’d better talk about that.”
“I’m not after your scalp, Lieutenant Colonel,” Yeager said. Johnson went right on saying nothing. With a sigh, Yeager went on, “I don’t like this any better than you do. Whatever’s going on up there smells fishy to me. The Lizards have it on their minds, too, and I don’t like that for beans. We could end up in big trouble on account of this.”
That matched perfectly with what Glen Johnson thought: so perfectly that it made him suspicious. He picked his words with care: “Major, I don’t know you. I’m not going to talk about this business with somebody who’s only a voice.”
After a pause, Yeager answered, “Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. The general is convincing, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Johnson said, which might as well have meant, Hell, yes!
Another pause. Then Yeager said, “Okay, sir, you don’t trust me, and you
don’t have any reason to trust me. But I’m going to lay it on the line. The way it looks to me now, whatever the hell we’re doing up there, it’s something real big. It’s something so big, whoever’s in charge-which may be General LeMay and may be whoever his boss is-doesn’t want anybody, and I mean anybody, finding out about it. How does that sound to you?”
Yeager might have been echoing Johnson’s thoughts. But Johnson was damned if he’d admit it. He’d trusted Stella, and that hadn’t got him anything but pain and lawyers’ bills. If he trusted Yeager, he was liable to get his tit in a worse wringer yet. So all he said was, “This is your nickel, Major. I’m still listening.” If by some chance this wasn’t Yeager, or if it was and he was trying to get Johnson in Dutch, maybe he’d end up hanging himself instead.
“You think I’m setting you up, don’t you?” Yeager asked, which couldn’t have been a better echo of what was going on in Glen Johnson’s mind.
“It did occur to me, yeah,” Johnson said dryly.
“I wonder why.” Yeager could be dry, too. That made Johnson more inclined to believe him, not less. Maybe he’d known it would. He went on, “Listen. This isn’t how you keep a secret. The way you do that is to pretend you don’t have one, not to make a big hairy thing out of yourself and go around yelling, ‘I’ve got a secret and I won’t tell you what it is, so you’d better not ask-or else!’ Come on, Lieutenant Colonel. You’re a big boy. Am I right or am I wrong?”
Johnson laughed. He didn’t want to-he knew he was handing Yeager an edge-but he couldn’t help himself. “I tell you what,” he said. “That’s how I’d play it, anyway.”
“Me, too,” Yeager said. “Some of the big shots don’t understand anything but killing a mosquito with a tank, though. All that does is get a secret noticed. You noticed it-”
“Yeah,” Johnson broke in. Again, he couldn’t help himself. If they’d let him go up to the space station, they could have shown him around, kept him from seeing anything he wasn’t supposed to see, and sent him home. Yeager was right. They hadn’t played it smart, not even a little.
