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Johnson listened to Miriam Rosen with careful attention. He told himself he would have listened to her the same way even if she weren’t a redhead who wasn’t half bad-looking. Sometimes, for little stretches of time, he even believed it.
Lucy Vegetti said, “No, we can’t build everything, but we can sure build a heck of a lot.” She doubled in brass as an engineer, and was learning more about that part of her business every day. Redundancy again. Johnson was just glad he had one skill anybody aboard found useful. If he hadn’t, he might have gone out the air lock instead of coming along for the ride.
“Can we really do this?” he asked. “Or will we all die of old age out here before it happens?”
For a little while, silence reigned around him. He grimaced. He’d asked the question too bluntly, and stuck his foot in it. People knew they were never going to see Earth again, but they didn’t like to think about that when they didn’t have to. Just when the pause threatened to become really awkward, Dr. Rosen said, “We’ll probably find plenty of things besides old age to die of.”
That produced another silence, but not one aimed at Johnson. He smiled his thanks toward her. She didn’t smile back. He’d got to know she was like that: she spoke the truth as she saw it.
“I think we can do it,” Lucy Vegetti said. “I really do. Oh, we’ll need more help from back home, but we’ll get that. The Lewis and Clark showed that we could make constant-boost ships. The next one that comes out will be better. We’ll have a good start on things by then, too. Pretty soon, we’ll be mining a good stretch of the asteroid belt. I think we’ll find most of the metals we need, sooner or later.”
“What about uranium?” Miriam Rosen asked. “Not likely we’ll find much of that here, is it?”
Lucy shook her head. “We’d have to get lucky, I think. The asteroids aren’t as dense as rocks back on Earth, which means there are fewer heavy metals around. But you never can tell.”
Was she looking at Johnson when she said “get lucky”? He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to foul up a chance for later by messing up now. The rules on the Lewis and Clark hadn’t fully shaken out yet, but one thing was already clear: the ladies did the choosing. Maybe things would have been different if there’d been two gals for every guy, but there weren’t.
A couple of other male optimists came floating up to join the conversation. Johnson took his squeeze bags and lidded cup now empty of pills back to the assistant dietitian. Nothing got thrown away on the Lewis and Clark; everything was cleaned and reused. That included bodily waste water: one more thing the crew preferred not to think about. A spaceship beat even a nuclear-powered submarine as a self-contained environment.
Swinging out of the galley, Johnson went to the gymnasium. He logged in, strapped himself onto an exercise bicycle, and grimly began pedaling away. That helped keep calcium in his bones. He wondered why he was bothering. If he wasn’t going back to Earth and Earth’s gravity, who cared if his bones were made of calcium or rubber bands?
But orders prescribed at least half an hour of exercise every day. He’d been in the Army too long to think orders had to make sense. They were just there, and they had to be obeyed. On he pedaled, going nowhere.
In his time in Lodz, Mordechai Anielewicz had heard a lot of strange noises coming from alleys. Once, he’d foiled a robbery, though he hadn’t caught the robber: the fellow had leaped over a wall-an Olympic-quality jump-and got away. Once, he’d surprised a couple making love standing up in a doorway. He’d felt like leaping over a wall himself then; Bertha still didn’t know about that.
More often than not, though, noises down alleys meant animal fights: dog-dog, cat-cat, cat-dog. These furious snarls were of that sort, and under most circumstances Mordechai would have paid them no special attention. But, as he walked past the mouth of the alley, some of the noises proved to have a stridency the likes of which he’d never heard before. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he craned his neck to see what the devil was going on.
He was surprised enough to stop in midstride, one foot off the ground, till he noticed and made it come down. The alley was just an alley: cobblestones, weeds pushing up among them, a couple of dead vodka bottles. One of the beasts down it was a cat, sure enough; it was clawing at its foe like a lioness ripping the guts out of a zebra. But that foe…
“Gevalt, what is that thing?” Mordechai exclaimed, and hurried past a battered trash barrel toward the fight to find out. Whatever it was, he’d never seen anything like it. It was clawing at the cat, too, but it was also biting, and it had a very big mouth full of sharp teeth. Pretty plainly, it was getting the better of the fight, for the cat’s claws and even its needle-sharp canines had trouble piercing its scaly hide.
Anielewicz stooped and grabbed a stick-always handy to have when breaking up a fight between animals-before advancing on the cat and the… thing. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps toward the beasts when the cat decided it had had enough. It broke free of the fight and levitated up a wooden fence, leaving only bloodstains behind to prove it had been there.
The other animal was bleeding, too, though not so badly. Now that Mordechai got a good look at it, he saw it was smaller than the cat it had just mauled. It stuck out a long, forked tongue and licked a couple of its worst wounds. It was looking at him, too; while it tended to itself, one turreted eye swung in his direction to make sure he didn’t mean trouble.
Realization smote him. “It must be from the Lizards’world!” he exclaimed: either that, or he was hallucinating. He shook his head; he couldn’t have imagined anything so funny-looking. And he did remember hearing that the colonization fleet had brought along some of the Lizards’ domesticated creatures. He hadn’t expected his first meeting with one to be in an alley, though.
Now that it wasn’t fighting, the Lizardy thing-he didn’t know what else to call it-seemed to relax. When Mordechai didn’t wave the stick or do anything else untoward, the animal turned both eye turrets toward him and let out an absurdly friendly squeak.
He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. Snarls and hisses were one thing. He would have expected noises like those from a small creature that could take on a cat and win. He hadn’t expected the thing to sound like a rubber squeeze toy.
Whatever he thought of the noises the animal made, it didn’t like the ones he made. It streaked past him, nimble as a champion footballer getting past a midfielder who only stepped onto a soccer pitch as a weekend amusement. It was, he thought, even faster and more agile than a cat, though it had shown no signs of being able to climb.
Out on the street, someone exclaimed in surprise: “What was that?” “What was what?” somebody else-a woman-said. “I didn’t see anything.”
Anielewicz laughed again as he threw down the stick and walked out of the alley. Some people were always unlucky enough to miss things. He wondered if this lady would ever have another chance to see an animal from another planet.
He also wondered, in a different and more urgent way this time, what an animal from another planet was doing in an alley in Lodz (besides fighting a cat, that is). He hadn’t intended to go by the Bialut Market Square-Bertha was reluctant to let him anywhere near the place, too, after his fiasco with the peasant woman selling eggs-but Bunim’s headquarters looked out onto it. He didn’t suppose the Lizards would mind talking about the animals they’d brought to Earth.
As he started for the market square, he laughed again. He wasn’t likely to have much immediate interest in animals from Home, and neither was any other Polish Jew. How likely were they to divide the hoof and chew a cud? Not very, which put them beyond the pale as far as he was concerned.
People and a few Lizards crowded the square. Since Mordechai wasn’t shopping, he ignored the frantic haggling in Yiddish and Polish and, every now and then, the hisses and pops of the language of the Race. He strode up to the building from which the Lizards administered this stretch of Poland-along with the shadow governments of the Jews and Poles. The g
uards in front of the building were alert, as they had reason to be. “What do you want?” one of them asked in passable Polish.
The male didn’t recognize him. Well, that was all right; he had trouble telling one Lizard from another. “I just saw an animal…” he began, also sticking to Polish-he could do a better job of describing the creature in that tongue than in the Race’s.
“Ah,” the guard said when he was through. “That is a beffel. They will run wild. ‘Crazy as a beffel on a leash’ is a saying in our language.”
“A beffel,” Mordechai repeated-now he had a name for the beast. “What good is it? Do you eat it, or is it just a pet?”
“Eat a beffel? What an ignorant Tosevite you are.” The guard’s mouth dropped open in amusement. So did his partner’s. “No. It is only a pet, as you say.”
“All right. I am ignorant-I’d never seen one till now. It was fighting a cat,” Anielewicz said. “Are they going to start running loose all over the place now?”
“I would not be surprised,” the guard replied. “They get to be nuisances back on Home. So do tsiongyu.”
“What’s a tsiongi?” Mordechai asked.
“Another kind of pet, larger,” the guard said. “You speak some of our language, to know the singular when you hear the plural.”
“Truth,” Anielewicz answered, shifting to the language of the Race. “So: are we to be overrun with animals from Home?”
