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Shaking his head, Goldfarb got onto his bicycle and pedaled for home as fast as he could. Since everyone else in Belfast had got off at about the same time, that was not very fast. He hated traffic jams. Too many people in motorcars pretended they could not see the plebeians on bicycles. He had to swerve sharply a couple of times to keep from getting hit.
When he did get back to his flat in the married officers’ quarters, he was something a good deal less than his best. Normally patient with his children, he barked at them till they retreated in dismay. He barked at Naomi, too, something he scarcely ever did. She used a privilege denied the children and barked back. That brought him up short.
“Here,” she said with brisk practicality. “Drink this.” This was a couple of jiggers of neat whiskey poured into a glass. “Maybe it will make you decent company again. If it doesn’t, it will put you to sleep.”
“Maybe it will make me beat you,” he said, full of mock ferocity. Had there been the slightest likelihood he would actually do that, the words would never have passed his lips. But, while he might talk too much when he’d had a drop or two too many, he’d never yet turned mean.
“If you’re going to beat me, why don’t you wait till after supper?” Naomi suggested. “That way, I won’t be tempted to pour a pot of boiling potato soup in your lap.” She cocked her head to one side. “Well, not very tempted, anyhow.”
“No, eh?” he said, and knocked back the whiskey. “In that case, I’d better behave myself.”
He behaved himself to the extent of keeping quiet through the soup and through the roast chicken that followed. Then he plopped himself down in front of the televisor to watch the Cologne-Manchester football match. Most of the time, he had no use for the hooligans who came to the stadium to make trouble and to stomp anyone who showed signs of supporting the wrong team. He listened with benign approval as they cursed and booed and hissed the Germans.
“You’d better win,” a leather-lunged heckler bawled, “or it’s the gas chamber for the lot of you!”
Cologne did not win. Neither did they lose. The match ended in a 1–1 tie. Goldfarb scowled as he turned off the set. He wanted, he craved certainties, and the match, like life, offered nothing but ambiguity.
Although the Manchester coach spent several minutes explaining why the tie was really as good as a victory, he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself. Goldfarb was glad when he disappeared and the blandly handsome face of a BBC newsreader filled the screen.
“Another round of public fornication among the Lizards was observed in London today,” he remarked after touching on larger disasters. “Fortunately, in this day and age, there are few horses left to startle, and mere human beings have grown increasingly blase in the face of the Race’s continued randiness. In fashion news-”
Goldfarb snorted. He tremendously admired traditional British restraint, not least because he had so little of it in his own makeup. He’d once thought the Lizards similarly restrained, but ginger and the arrival of females had changed his mind there. With what ginger had done to his own life, he wished the Lizards had never heard of it.
“Finally this evening,” the newsreader went on, “M.P. Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists introduced a bill in Parliament proposing to restrict the legal privileges of certain citizens of the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that the bill appears to have no chance of passage, Sir Oswald said it continued an important statement of principle, and-”
With a curse, Goldfarb got up and turned off the televisor. He stood by it, shaking. Was that fury or fear? Both at once, he judged. It had started here. At last, it had started here.
12
Glen Johnson studied Peregrine ’s radar screen. More than anything else up here, including his bare eyes, it told him what he needed to know. Everything was, or seemed to be, as it should have been. He didn’t know exactly what all the targets he saw were, but he hadn’t known that for some time: all three spacegoing human powers and the Lizards kept right on changing the orbits on their weapons installations.
He sighed. Everyone should have cut that crap out after whoever it was struck at the colonizing fleet. Down on Earth, somebody was laughing himself silly because he’d hit the Lizards a good lick and got away with it.
But that stunt could not work twice. The Lizards had made it very plain they wouldn’t let it work twice. Looking at things out of their eye turrets, Johnson couldn’t blame them. If anyone struck at them now, everyone would regret it. That made all the maneuvering out here seem pointless at best, provocative at worst. It went on even so.
“Stupid,” he muttered under his breath, and stupid it undoubtedly was. That didn’t mean it would stop. Who’d said, Nobody ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American people? He couldn’t recall, but it was true, and not only of Americans.
His low, fast orbit meant he kept passing things traveling in higher, slower paths around the Earth. Several Falcon — class ships were in orbit at any given time, to make sure they kept a close eye on everything that was going on. When Johnson spotted the large target on his radar, he thought for a moment that it was a ship from the colonization fleet. But the orbit was wrong for that. Moreover, by its transponder signal, it didn’t belong to the Lizards at all. As a matter of fact, it was as American as the Peregrine.
He whistled softly and thumbed on his radio. “Peregrine to Space Station. Peregrine to Space Station. Over.”
The signal came back a moment later: “Go ahead, Peregrine. Over.”
“That thing is really going up there, isn’t it?” Johnson had to remember to add, “Over.”
He got laughter back. “Sure is, Peregrine. Any day now, we’re opening up our own supermarket.”
“Damned if I don’t believe you,” he said. “My last flight up, you weren’t anything special at all on my radar. This time, first thing I thought was that you belonged to the colonization fleet.”
That won him more laughter. “Pretty funny, Peregrine. We’ve got a lot we’re going to be doing up here, that’s all, so the place has to get bigger.”
“Roger that,” Johnson answered. “But what do the Lizards think about you? They don’t like anybody coming up here but them.”
“Oh, they don’t worry about us,” the radio operator on the space station said. “We’re a great, big, fat target, and we’re too damn heavy to do much i
n the way of maneuvering. If real trouble starts, you can call us the Sitting Duck.”
“Okay,” Johnson said. He didn’t ask what sort of weapons the space station carried. That was none of his business, and even less the business of whoever might be monitoring this frequency. “Over and out.”
Sitting Duck, eh? he thought, and shook his head. More likely the Sitting Porcupine. If that radioman hadn’t been sandbagging, he was a monkey’s uncle. The USA wouldn’t put anything so big and prominent into space without giving it some way to take care of itself. Even the Lizards weren’t that naive. They’d thought they would be facing knights in shining armor (or rusty armor-he remembered some of the pictures from their probe), but they’d come loaded for bear.
What impressed him most about the space station wasn’t its likely armament but, as he’d told the radio operator, how fast it was growing. An awful lot of launches had to be ferrying men and supplies up there. As far as he was concerned, that sort of spaceflight was bus driver’s work, but there was a lot of bus driver’s work going on to make the station expand so quickly.
He scratched his chin, wondering if he’d be able to finagle a ride up there himself, to see with his own eyes what was going on. After a moment, he nodded. That shouldn’t be hard to arrange.
A Lizard radar station called from the ground to inform him his orbit was satisfactory. “I thank you,” he answered in the language of the Race. The Lizard on the radio had sounded sniffy, as Lizards had a way of doing. If his orbit hadn’t been satisfactory, the Lizard would have been screaming his head off.
Johnson suddenly laughed. “That’s what it is!” he exclaimed, speaking aloud to enjoy the joke more. “There’s thousands of tons of powdered ginger up there, and they’re going to drop it on the Lizards’ heads. Wouldn’t that produce some satisfied customers?”
He knew he was anthropomorphizing. When the Lizards didn’t have it, they didn’t miss it the way people would. But when they were interested, they were a lot more interested than anybody above the age of nineteen could hope to understand.
