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“We’re prisoners, then,” David Goldfarb said.
“Not prisoners-not exactly, anyhow,” Williams answered.
“But not free, either.”
The immigration officer nodded. “No, not free.”
9
Glen Johnson peered out through the spacious glass canopy of his hot rod. That was the name that seemed to have stuck on the little auxiliary rockets the crew of the Lewis and Clark used to go exploring in the neighborhood of Ceres. He had radar and an instrument suite almost as complete as the one aboard Peregrine, but the Mark One eyeball was still his instrument of first choice.
Just for a moment, he glanced toward the shrunken sun. It showed only a tiny disk, barely a third the size it would have from Earth’s orbit. Lots of pieces of rock in the neighborhood looked bigger.
He watched the rocks and he watched the radar screen. At the moment, he was out ahead of Ceres, and moving away from it. Most of what he had to worry about was stuff he was approaching. He’d have to be more careful on the return trip, when he’d be swimming against the tide, so to speak. Hot rods were built to take it, but he didn’t want to put that to the test.
From the back seat, Lucy Vegetti said, “That dark one over to the left looks like it ought to be interesting. The one that looks like a squash, I mean.”
To Johnson, it looked like just another floating chunk of rock, with a long axis of perhaps a quarter of a mile. He shrugged. “You’re the mineralogist,” he said, and used the hot rod’s attitude jets to turn toward the little asteroid. “What do you hope we’ll find there?”
“Iron, with luck,” she answered.
He chuckled. “Here I am, alone with a pretty girl”-all the women on the Lewis and Clark looked good to him by now, even the sour assistant dietitian-“and all she wants to do is talk about rocks.”
“This is work,” Lucy said.
“Well, so it is.” Johnson glanced to the radar screen. He grunted in surprise, looked out the canopy, and grunted again. “What the devil?” he said.
“Is something wrong?” Lucy Vegetti asked.
“I dunno.” He looked down at the radar screen again. “The instruments are reporting something my eyes aren’t seeing.” He scratched his chin. “As far as I can tell, the set’s behaving the way it’s supposed to.”
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
“Either it’s misbehaving in a way I don’t know about, or else my eyes need rewiring,” he answered.
Lucy laughed, but he wasn’t kidding, or not very much. He didn’t like it when what his eyes saw didn’t match what the radar saw. If the instrument was wrong, it needed fixing. If it wasn’t wrong… He rubbed his eyes, not that that would do a whole lot of good.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to try to find out what’s going on,” he said. “No offense, but your rock isn’t going anywhere.”
“Go ahead,” Lucy Vegetti said, though she had to know he’d asked her permission only as a matter of form.
Ever so cautiously, Johnson goosed the hot rod toward what the radar insisted was there but his eyes denied. And then, after a bit, they stopped denying it. “Will you look at that?” he said softly. “Will you just look at that? Something’s getting in the way of the stars.” He pointed to show Lucy what he meant.
She nodded. “So it is. I see it, now that you’ve shown it to me, but I didn’t before. What do you suppose it could be?”
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” As Peregrine had back in Earth orbit, the hot rod mounted twin.50-caliber machine guns. He had teeth. He didn’t know if he’d need to use them, but knowing they were there helped reassure him. He slowed the hot rod’s acceleration-whatever this thing was, it didn’t seem to be under acceleration itself.
“No wonder we couldn’t see it before,” Lucy breathed as they got closer and the mystery object covered more and more of the sky. “It’s all painted flat black.”
“It sure is,” Johnson agreed. “And that’s a better flat black than anything we could turn out, which means…”
The mineralogist finished the sentence for him: “Which means the Lizards have sent something out to take a look at what we’re up to.”
When the hot rod got within a couple of hundred yards of the spacecraft, Johnson stopped its progress and peered through binoculars. From that range, he could see the sun sparkling off lenses here and there, and could also make out antennas aimed back toward Earth-much smaller and more compact than those the Lewis and Clark carried.
“What are you going to do about it?” Lucy asked.
Johnson’s first impulse was to cut loose with the machine guns the hot rod carried. He didn’t act on that impulse. Pulling a sour face, he answered, “I’m going to ask Brigadier General Healey what he wants me to do.” He didn’t like Healey, not even slightly. The commandant of the Lewis and Clark had hauled him aboard for the crime of excess curiosity, a crime that had just missed being a capital offense.
He had no trouble raising the Lewis and Clark; he would have been astonished and alarmed if he had. But convincing the radioman he really did need to talk to the commandant took a couple of minutes. At last, Healey said, “Go ahead, Johnson. What’s on your mind?”
His suspicions about the pilot had eased, but hadn’t gone away. Johnson got the idea Healey’s suspicions never went away. Well, he was going to feed one that had nothing to do with him. “Sir,” he answered, “I’ve found a Lizard spy ship.” He explained how that had happened.
When he was done, Healey let out along, clearly audible sigh. “I don’t suppose we ought to be surprised,” the commandant said at last. “The scaly sons of bitches have to be wondering what we’re up to out here.”
“Shall I shoot it up, sir?” Johnson asked. “That would give ’em a good poke in the eye turret.?
??
To his surprise, Healey said, “No. For one thing, we don’t know if this is the only machine they’ve sent out. They’re suspenders-and-belt… critters, so odds are it isn’t. And if you do, they’ll know what’s happened to it. We don’t want to give them any excuse to start a war out here, because odds are we’d lose it. Hold fire. Have you got that?”
“Yes, sir. Hold fire,” Johnson agreed. “What do I do, then? Just wave to the Lizards and go on about my business?”
“That’s exactly what you do,” Healey answered. “If you’d opened up on it without asking for orders, I would have been very unhappy with you. You did the right thing, reporting in.” Maybe he sounded surprised Johnson had done the right thing. Maybe the radio speaker in the hot rod was just on the tinny side. Maybe, but Johnson wouldn’t have bet on it.
He asked, “Sir, can we operate in a fishbowl?”
“It’s not a question of can, Johnson,” Brigadier General Healey answered. “It’s a question of must. As I said, we shouldn’t be surprised the Lizards are conducting reconnaissance out here. In their shoes, I would. We’ll just have to learn to live with it, have to learn to work around it. Maybe we’ll even be able to learn to take advantage of it.”
Johnson wondered if his superior had gone out of his mind. Then he realized that Lizard spaceship he was next to wasn’t just taking pictures of what the Lewis and Clark and its crew were up to. It also had to be monitoring the radio frequencies people used. Maybe Healey was trying to put a bug in the Lizards’ ears-or would have been, if they’d had ears.
If that was what he was up to, Johnson would play along. “Yes, sir,” he said enthusiastically. “They can look as much as they please, but they won’t be able to figure out everything that’s going on.”
Brigadier General Healey chuckled, an alien sound from his lips. “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“No, sir,” Johnson said. “I wouldn’t mind at all.” Behind him, Lucy Vegetti snickered. He turned around and gave her a severe look. She laughed at him, mouthing, You can’t act for beans.
