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Walter Stone looked at him. “You’re in a nice, cheerful mood today, aren’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you be, the way things are now?” Glen Johnson returned. “Remember, you spent all the time before we left learning to fly the Lewis and Clark. I spend a lot of my duty time in orbit, watching the Race and the Nazis and the Russians. I know how fast things can go wrong. They almost did a few times.”
“You tried to help make things go wrong, poking your nose in where it didn’t belong,” Stone said.
“And look what it got me,” Johnson said. “I’m stuck for life with people like you.” Before Stone could answer, a bell chimed the hour. Johnson sighed. “And I’m stuck on an exercise bicycle for the next hour.”
“Have fun,” Stone said. “I already did my bit today.”
“Fun,” Johnson said, as if it were a four-letter word. But he didn’t have time to do any more complaining than that, not if he wanted to get to the gym on time. He didn’t give two whoops in hell about getting to the gym on time, but he didn’t want to listen to the lecture he’d get for missing some of his exercise period, either. And so he swung out of the control room and down the halls to the gymnasium. When he got there, he signed the sheet to log in, changed into sweat clothes in the little men’s room off the gym, and then got onto a bike and got to work.
One of the main-engine technicians who’d started exercising before him grinned and said, “You sure you’re really here, sir?”
“I think so, Bob,” Johnson answered, grinning back. “I look like I’m here, don’t I?”
“You never can tell,” Bob said, and they both laughed. The joke was only funny if you looked at it the right way. Not very long before, the Lewis and Clark had gone through its first really juicy scandal. A good many people, including several of high rank, had got in the habit of signing their names on the sheet and then going off and doing something else instead of getting in their work. Brigadier General Healey had not been happy when word of what they were doing finally got to him. And when the commandant wasn’t happy, nobody else was happy, either.
“One thing you’ve got to give Healey,” Bob said: “he’s fair. He came down on everybody, and who didn’t matter.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” Johnson’s considered opinion was that the commandant hated everybody impartially, and that the crew of the Lewis and Clark returned the favor. He realized he wasn’t objective, but he didn’t much care. As far as he was concerned, Healey didn’t rate objectivity.
Johnson’s legs pumped hard as he did his best to keep calcium in his bones. He didn’t want to think about gravity, not any more. The idea of having weight, of moving his muscles against resistance, seemed alien and repugnant. He pedaled on anyhow. When his body was working hard, he could stop thinking about the troubles back on Earth and, indeed, about everything else. Exercise wasn’t as much fun as sex, but it did the job of distraction almost as well.
Thinking about sex made him think about Lucy Vegetti-and thinking about her was certainly more enjoyable than not thinking about anything at all. Trouble was, he couldn’t do anything but think about Lucy right now. She was down on Ceres, helping to set up a habitat there. He missed her. He hoped she missed him. If she didn’t, she could find plenty of guys to take his place.
He wondered if she’d taken her bottle of Cutty down to the surface of the asteroid. A jolt of scotch was almost enough to tempt him into some breaking and entering-almost, but not quite.
And then, before he let himself get more tempted than he should have, the intercom came to noisy life. “Lieutenant Colonel Johnson! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson! Report to the commandant’s office immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson! Report to the-”
“I’m coming,” Johnson muttered. “Keep your shirt on.” The intercom went right on bellowing.
“Lucky son of a gun,” Bob said.
“Going to see the commandant?” Johnson shook his head. “I’d sooner keep exercising.”
He unhooked the belt that tethered him to the bicycle and pushed off toward the nearest handhold. He didn’t bother changing out of his exercise togs. If Healey wanted him immediately, that would be how the commandant got him. And if he was a little sweaty, a little smelly, what better proof he’d been doing his work like a good little boy?
He sailed right past Brigadier General Healey’s adjutant and into the commandant’s office, catching himself on a handhold there. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting.
“Yes.” Healey eyed him. “There are times when you find following orders to the letter more amusing than others, aren’t there, Lieutenant Colonel?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Johnson said with the air of a maiden whose virtue had been questioned.
“Tell me another one,” Healey said. “I shanghaied you, and you’ve been trying to make me sorry ever since. Sometimes you’ve even done it. But not today. This doesn’t bother me, not a bit.”
Johnson shrugged. “That’s the way it goes, sir.” If he was disappointed-and he was, a little-he’d be damned if he’d admit it. “Did you want me for anything else besides seeing how fast I could get here?”
Brigadier General Healey, unlike Mickey Flynn, had the stereotypical Irishman’s fair skin. When he got angry, he turned red. Johnson watched him flush now, and carefully pretended not to notice a thing. Biting off his words one at a time, the commandant said, “As a matter of fact, I did.”
“All right, sir,” Johnson said. “What is it?”
Healey leaned forward across his desk, for all the world as if he were back on Earth. Nobody else aboard the Lewis and Clark was so good at pretending weightlessness didn’t exist. He said, “You’re the one with the orbital patrol experience. If the Germans and the Lizards start slugging it out, which way do you think the Russians are likely to jump?”
That was a real question, all right. Johnson went from insolent to serious in the blink of an eye. “Sir, my best guess is, they sit on their hands. They hate the Nazis, and the Lizards scare the hell out of them. That’d be a war where they hope both sides lose, so they can pick up the pieces. If there are any pieces left to pick up, I mean.”
Healey’s jowls wobbled slightly as he nodded. “Okay. That makes pretty good sense. Matches up pretty well with what I’ve been hearing from back on Earth, too.” As much to himself as to Johnson, he added, “You al
ways like to get things from more than one source if you can.”
You don’t trust anybody, Johnson realized. It’s not just me. You don’t trust the bigwigs who sent you out here, either. “Besides, sir,” he said, “the Russians fly tin cans. That’s compared to what we’ve got and what the Germans have. Compared to what the Lizards have…” He shook his head.
To his surprise, Healey laughed. “What they fly doesn’t matter much, not for this game. They’ve got their missiles aimed at the Lizards-and at the Nazis-and they’ve got their submarines. As long as those work, everything else is gravy.”
Johnson didn’t like to hear what he’d spent his career doing belittled. He could have argued about it; several relevant points occurred to him. Most times, he would have done it. At the moment, he had something more urgent on his mind. “Ask you a question, sir?” When Brigadier General Healey’s bulldog head bobbed up and down, Johnson said, “If the Nazis and the Lizards go at it, sir, will we stay out of it?”
Healey’s eyebrows sprang upward. “We’d damn well better, or this mission will fail. We still need resupply missions from home. We’ll need more people, too, sooner or later.”
“Yes, I understand all that.” Johnson couldn’t very well misunderstand it, not after so much time aboard the Lewis and Clark. “But will we stay out of it if it heats up?”
“I’m hoping it won’t,” the commandant said. “If the Germans were going to jump, they would have jumped by now-that’s what the consensus back home is, anyhow.” He paused and coughed, realizing he hadn’t answered the question Johnson asked. With another cough, he did: “As far as I know, we aren’t going to go to war unless we’re attacked. Will that do?”
“Yes, sir,” Johnson said. “It’ll have to, won’t it?” Brigadier General Healey nodded again.
Vyacheslav Molotov nodded to Paul Schmidt. “Good day,” the Soviet leader said. “Be seated; take tea, if you care to.” He gestured toward the samovar that stood on a table in a corner of his office.
“No thank you, Comrade General Secretary,” the German ambassador said in his good Russian. “I suppose you are curious as to why I asked to see you on such short notice.”
