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Stone coughed. “You’re not supposed to be here to start a bull session, you know. You’re supposed to be here to learn how to fly this thing in case Mickey and I both wake up dead one morning.”
“Sir, the only controls that are a whole lot different from ones I’ve used before are the ones for the reactor-and if I have to mess with those, we’re all in a lot of trouble,” Johnson said. The motor sat at the end of a long boom to minimize the risk for the rest of the Lewis and Clark if anything went wrong with it.
“One of the reasons you’re learning is that we’re all liable to be in a lot of trouble,” Stone pointed out. “Face it: you came aboard because you were curious about us, right?” Johnson could hardly argue with that; it was the Gospel truth. Stone waited to see if he’d say something anyhow, then nodded when he didn’t. “Uh-huh. Okay, you aren’t the only one. What if the Lizards send a present after us? What are we going to do about it?”
“Or the Germans,” Johnson said.
Stone shook his head now. “They can’t catch us, not any more. This may not sound like a hot ship-.01g? Wow!” He had a gift for the sardonic. “We tack on a whole four inches to our velocity every second. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? It adds up, though. At the end of a day, we’re going five miles a second faster than we were when that day started. Regular rockets kick a lot harder to start with, but once they’re done kicking, it’s free fall the rest of the way. The Nazis don’t have any constant-boost ships, though I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts they’re working on them now. The Lizards, damn them, do.”
“All right,” Glen Johnson said agreeably. “Suppose they come after us at, say,1g? That’s ten times our acceleration. We can run, we can’t hide, and we can’t even dodge-the Lewis and Clark is about as maneuverable as an elephant on roller skates. So what do we do then? Besides go down in flames, I mean?”
“If we have to, we fight,” Stone answered. “That’s what I was coming to. The fighting controls are right here.” He pointed. “We’ve got machine guns and missiles for close-in defense. None of that stuff is much different than what you used on the Peregrine, so you know what it can do.”
“Nuclear tips on the missiles and all?” Johnson asked.
“That’s right,” the senior pilot said, “except you carried two and we’ve got a couple dozen. And that doesn’t say anything about the mines.” He pointed to another rank of switches.
“Mines, sir?” Johnson raised an eyebrow. “Now you’ve got me: I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“There are five of them, one controlled by each switch here,” Stone explained. “They’re the strongest fusion bombs we can build… and they’re equipped with the most sensitive timers we’ve got. If we know the Lizards are trying to come up our rear ends, we leave them behind, timed to explode right when the enemy ship is closest to them. Maybe we nail it, maybe we don’t, but it’s sure as hell worth a try.”
“Even if we don’t wreck it, we might fry its brains.” Johnson grinned. “I like that. Whoever thought of it has a really sneaky mind.”
“Thank you,” Walter Stone said.
Johnson’s eyebrows jumped. “Was it you?”
Stone grinned at him. “I didn’t say that. I said, ‘Thank you.’ Here, let’s fire up the simulator and see what you do if the Lizards decide to take a whack at us after all.”
The simulator was a far cry from the Link machines on which Johnson had trained before the Lizards came. Like so much human technology, it borrowed-stole, really-wholesale from things the Race knew and people hadn’t back in 1942. The end result was something like a game, something like a God’s-eye view of the real thing, with the Lewis and Clark reduced to a glowing blip on a screen, the hypothetical Lizard pursuit ship another blip, and all the things they might launch at each other angry little sparks of light.
Johnson “lost.” the Lewis and Clark six times in a row before finally managing to save the ship with a perfectly placed mine. By then, sweat soaked his coveralls and slid away from his forehead in large, lazy drops. “Whew!” he said. “Here’s hoping the Lizards don’t decide to come after us, because we’re sure as hell in trouble if they do.”
“Amen,” Stone answered. “You will get better with practice, though-or you’d better get better, anyhow.”
“I can see that,” Johnson said. “First couple of missions I flew, the only thing that kept me from killing myself was fool luck.” He paused, eyeing the man who was training him. “You practice on this thing a lot, don’t you?”
“Every day, every chance I get,” Stone said solemnly.
“I figured you would. It’s as close as you can come to the real McCoy,” Johnson said. The senior pilot nodded once more. Johnson took a deep breath. “Okay. With all the practice you put in, how often do you win?”
“A little less than half the time,” Stone replied. “The goddamn Lizards can do more things than we can. Nothing’s going to change that. If you can’t handle the notion-well, too bad.”
“They shot me down,” Johnson said.
“Me, too.” Walter Stone reached over and slapped Johnson on the back. Without the safety strap, the blow would have knocked Johnson out of his chair. Stone went on, “We had to be crazy, going up against the Lizards in those prop jobs?”
“They were what we had, and the job needed doing,” Johnson said. The life expectancy of a pilot who’d flown against the Lizards during the fighting was most often measured in hours. If Johnson hadn’t been wounded when the Lizards knocked his plane out of the sky, if he hadn’t spent a lot of his time afterwards flat on his back, odds were he would have gone up again and bought himself the whole plot instead of just a piece of it. He didn’t care to dwell on those odds.
Stone said, “I think we’ve put you through the wringer enough for one day. Why don’t I turn you loose a couple minutes early so you can make it down to the mess hall before shift change?”
“Thank you, sir,” Johnson said, and unbuckled his belt. “My next shift back here with you, I want another go at the simulator.”
“You wouldn’t be much use to me if you didn’t,” Stone told him. “Somehow or other, I think that can be arranged.”
Catching one of the many handholds in the control room, Johnson swung toward the mess hall; at.01g, brachiating worked much better than walking. He almost approached eagerness. For good stretches-sometimes even for hours at a time-he could forget he was never going home again.
Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yeager was muttering at the Lizard-built computer on his desk. Sorviss, a male of the Race who lived in Los Angeles, had been doing his best to restore Yeager’s full access to the Race’s computer network. So far, his best hadn’t been good enough. Sam had learned a great deal on the network pretending to be a male of the Race named Regeya. As Sam Yeager, human being, he was allowed to visit only a small part of the network.
“You son of a bitch,” he told the screen, which said ACCESS DENIED in large red letters-Lizard characters, actually.
He was picking up the telephone to let Sorviss know his latest effort had failed when his son Jonathan burst into the study. Yeager frowned; he didn’t like getting interrupted while he was working. But what Jonathan said made him forgive the kid: “Come quick, Dad-I think they’re hatching!”
“Holy smoke!” Sam put the phone back on its hook and sprang to his feet. “They’re three days early.”
“When President Warren gave them to you, he said the best guess for when they’d hatch might be ten days off either way.” Jonathan Yeager spoke with the usual impatience of youth for age. He’d turned twenty not too long before. Sam Yeager didn’t like thinking of it in those terms; it reminded him he’d turned fifty-six not too long before. Jonathan was already on his way up the hall. “Are you coming or not?” he demanded.
“If you don’t get out of the way, I’ll trample you,” Sam answered.
Jonathan laughed tolerantly. He was a couple of inches taller than his father, and wide
r through the shoulders. If he didn’t feel like being trampled, Sam would have had a devil of a time doing it. The overhead light gleamed off Jonathan’s shaved head and off the body paint adorning his chest and belly: by what it said, he was a landcruiser-engine mechanic. Young people all over the world imitated Lizard styles and thought their elders stodgy for clucking.
Sam’s wife Barbara was standing in front of the incubator. The new gadget made the service porch even more crowded than it had been when it held just that washing machine and drier and water heater. “One of the eggshells already has a little hole in it,” Barbara said excitedly.
