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“Good,” Reuven said; he hadn’t liked mathematics that much himself. “Will you still have it next week, when they show you something new?”
“Of course we will,” Esther declared, and Judith nodded confidently. He started to laugh at them, then caught himself. All at once, he understood why his father had trouble taking his cocksure certainty seriously.
As Einstein had been, the Race was convinced nothing could travel faster than light. The crew of the Lewis and Clark, though, had discovered something that did: rumor. And so, having caught the news from someone who knew someone who knew a radio operator, Glen Johnson felt no hesitation in asking Mickey Flynn, “Do you think it’s true?”
“Oh, probably,” the number-two pilot answered. “But I’d have a better notion if I knew what we were talking about.”
“That the Germans have sent Hermann Goring out this way,” Johnson said.
“Last I heard, he was dead,” Flynn remarked.
If he didn’t have the deadest pan on the ship, Johnson was damned if he knew who did. He restrained himself from any of several obvious comments, and contented himself with saying, “No, the spaceship.”
“Oh, the spaceship,” Flynn said in artfully sudden enlightenment. “No, I hadn’t heard that. I hadn’t heard that it’s not heading for this stretch of the asteroid belt, either, so you’d better tell me that, too.”
Johnson snorted. That propelled him ever so slowly away from Flynn as they hung weightless just outside the control room. “I didn’t think they could get it moving so soon,” he said, reaching for a handhold.
“Life is full of surprises,” Flynn said. “So is Look, but Life has more of them in color.”
“You’re impossible,” Johnson said. Flynn regally inclined his head, acknowledging the compliment. Johnson went on, “What do you think it means that they pushed their schedule so hard? Do you think they think the hammer’s going to drop back home, and they’re sending the ship out so they don’t have all their eggs in one basket?”
Maybe the number-two pilot considered launching another joke. Johnson couldn’t tell, not with his poker face. If Flynn was considering it, he didn’t do it. Some things were too big to joke about. After a few seconds, Flynn said, “If they do think that way, they’re fools. The Lizards can go after them out here, too.”
“Sure they can,” Johnson agreed. “But we have defenses. The Nazis’ll have ’em, too. They might even have better ones than ours-the bastards are awfully damn good with rockets.”
Flynn nodded. “Okay, say they’re twice as good as we are at knocking down whatever the Race sends after ’em. How often are you taking out the Lizards’ missiles in our drills?”
“A little more than half the time.”
“Sounds about right.” Flynn nodded again. “Suppose they’re getting eighty percent, then. I don’t think they can do that well myself, but suppose. Now suppose the Lizards send ten pursuit missiles after them. How many are the Aryan supermen likely to stop?” He looked around, as if at an imaginary audience. “Come on, come on, don’t everybody speak up at once. Did I make the statistics too hard?”
Fighting back laughter, Johnson said, “Odds are they’ll knock down eight.”
“That’s true. Which leaves how many likely to get through?” Mickey Flynn held up two fingers, giving a broad hint. Before Johnson could suggest what he might do with those fingers, he went on, “And how many of those missiles need to get through to give everybody an unhappy afternoon?” Johnson wondered if he’d fold down his index finger to give the answer, but he decorously lowered his middle finger instead, getting the message across by implication rather than overtly.
“And even if they knock down all ten-” Johnson began.
“Chances of that are a little better than ten percent, on the assumptions we’re using,” Flynn broke in.
“If you say so. Remind me not to shoot craps with you, if we ever get somewhere we can shoot craps.” Johnson tried to remember where he’d been going. “Oh, yeah. Even if the Germans knockdown all ten, the Lizards have a lot more than ten to send after ’em. And they only have to screw up once. They don’t get a second chance.”
“That’s about the size of it, I’d say. The Germans can run, but it’ll be a long time before they can hide.” Flynn paused meditatively, then added, “And the Germans are liable to be looking over their shoulders all the way out here, anyhow. We took the Race by surprise. They had to be pretty sure of what the master race was up to.”
“If the Lizards were human, I’d stand up and cheer if they whaled the stuffing out of the Nazis, you know what I mean?” Johnson said. “Even though they aren’t, I don’t think my heart would break.”
Flynn pondered that. “The two questions are, how badly do we-people, I mean-get hurt if everything west of Poland goes up in smoke, and how badly can the Germans hurt the Lizards before they go down swinging?”
“Bombs in orbit.” Johnson spoke with authority there; he’d kept an eye on the Nazis and Reds as well as the Lizards. Idly, he wondered how Hans Drucker was doing; he hadn’t been a bad fellow, even if he did have a tendency to paw the air with his hooves and whinny whenever they played Deutschland uber Alles. “Missiles inside the Reich. Submarines in the Mediterranean and prowling off Arabia and Australia, and every one of ’em loaded for bear. Not all the missiles would get through…”
“No. The Race has better defenses, and more of ’em, than we do,” Flynn said. “But building missiles has been the German national sport for a long time.”
“Heh,” Johnson said, though it was anything but funny. “And the Nazis aren’t the sort to stop shooting as long as they’ve got any bullets in the gun, either. They’d just as soon go out in a blaze of glory.”
“I wish I could say I thought you were wrong.” Flynn answered. “Actually, I can say it, but it would sully my reputation for truthfulness. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to earn my paycheck.” He pushed off from his own handhold and glided into the control room.
Gloomily, Johnson went in the opposite direction, into the bowels of the Lewis and Clark. He hated war with the sincerity of a man who’d known it face-to-face. Even if it was a couple of hundred million miles away, even if it wouldn’t directly involve the United States, he still hated it. And a war between the Lizards and the Germans would be big enough and nasty enough that the USA couldn’t possibly be unaffected even if no American soldiers went into battle.
And, if the Lizards decided to get rid of the Hermann Goring, what would they do about the Lewis and Clark? Doing anything would get them into a war with the USA, but would they care if they were already fighting the Reich? In for a penny, in for a pound.
He wished the Lewis and Clark had a bar. He would have liked to go and sit and have a couple of drinks. Things would have looked better after that. So far as he knew, nobody had rigged up a still yet. It was probably only a matter of time. Brigadier General Healey would pitch a fit, but not even he could stop human nature.
“Human nature,” Johnson muttered. If that wasn’t what was pushing the Nazis into trouble, what was? Original sin? Was there any difference?
Human nature reared its head in a different way when Lucy Vegetti came swinging down an intersecting corridor. The Lewis and Clark ’s traffic rules had grown up from those back in the USA. Little octagonal STOP signs were painted on the walls at every corner, to warn people to be alert when crossing. Johnson always paid attention to them; you got going fast enough to hurt somebody when you barreled along without a care in the world-and some people did just that.
Lucy stopped, too. She smiled at Johnson. “Hi, Glen. How are you?” Before he could answer, she took a second look at him and said, “You don’t seem very happy.”
He shrugged. “I’ve been better-sort of wondering whether things would blow up back home.”
“Doesn’t sound good, does it?” she said soberly. “Maybe we’re lucky to be way out here-unless the Lizards decide to clean us up as long as they
’re busy back on Earth. Sooner or later, we’ll spread out too much to make that easy, but-”
“But we haven’t done it yet,” Johnson broke in. “Yeah.” His chuckle was flat and harsh. “Can’t even go out and get drunk. Nothing to do but sit tight and wait and see.”
“I know what you mean.” Lucy hesitated, then said, “When I came up from Earth, I brought along a quart of scotch. If you promise not to be a pig, you can have a sip with me. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.”
Solemnly, Johnson crossed his heart “Hope to die,” he said. He hadn’t brought anything with him when he came up from Earth. Of course, he hadn’t intended to stay aboard the Lewis and Clark, and she had.
