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When the telephone rang in her flat, she hurried to answer it. She’d dreaded the phone in Marseille: it was too likely to be Dieter Kuhn. Here, though, she hadn’t had any trouble. “Allo?”
“Hello, Professor.” Even if Rance Auerbach hadn’t been speaking English, she would have known his wrecked, rasping voice at once. He went on, “How are things going for you up there?”
“Things are… very well, thank you. Thank you very much,” Monique replied. She also used English, and was glad for the chance to practice it. Auerbach was a ginger dealer, too, but somehow that bothered her less in him than it did in her brother. She said, “Is it that I could ask you something?”
“Sure. Go ahead,” he told her, and she poured out the substance of her conversations with Ttomalss and her worries about what the Race was learning. When she’d finished, Auerbach said, “The world would be a better place if everybody’s troubles were so small.”
“Thank you,” Monique said again, this time in French: a breathy sigh of gratitude. She felt as if he were a priest who’d just given her absolution and a very light penance after a particularly sordid confession. “You have no idea how much you relieved me there. I want to be able to see myself in a mirror without flinching.”
That produced a long silence. At last, Auerbach spoke in English again:
“Yeah. Don’t we all?” Monique suddenly wondered if she were the only one whose conscience bothered her.
18
“Yes, Colonel Webster,” Jonathan Yeager’s father was saying into the telephone. “I think we’ll be all right if we keep cool. We have to stay firm out there, but we can’t get pushy about it or we’ll make them nervous. My professional opinion is, everybody’d be sorry if that happened.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay, sir, I’ll put it in writing for you, too,” and hung up.
“More trouble about the motors on the rocks in the asteroid belt?” Jonathan asked.
His dad nodded. “You betcha. They can’t blame me for that one, so they’re asking my advice instead.” Sam Yeager’s chuckle sounded sour to Jonathan. “Hell, son, I didn’t even know this was going on-though I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had suspicions ever since that big meteor slammed into Mars.”
“Have you?” Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “You never said anything about it to me-or to Mom, either, that I know of.”
“Nope.” His father shook his head. “Not much point to talking about suspicions when you don’t know for sure. Last time I was back in Little Rock, I did ask President Stassen about it.”
“Did you?” That his father was in a position to ask questions of the president of the United States still sometimes bemused Jonathan. “What did he tell you?”
“Not much.” His father looked grim. “I didn’t really expect him to. He was probably afraid I’d go running to the Lizards with whatever I heard. That’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense I’m going to be stuck with for the rest of my life.”
“That’s not fair!” Jonathan exclaimed with the ready outrage of youth.
“Probably not, but I’m stuck with it, as I said.” His dad shrugged. “I could go on and talk about what sort of lesson that should be for you, and that you should always keep an eye on your reputation no matter what. But if I did that, you’d probably look around for something to hit me over the head with.”
“Yeah, probably,” Jonathan agreed. “You’re not too bad as far as lectures go, but-”
“Thanks a lot,” his father broke in. “Thanks a hell of a lot.”
Jonathan grinned at him. “Any old time, Dad.” But the grin had trouble staying on his face. “What are the Lizards going to do, out there in the asteroid belt? If they try doing anything, will we fight them?”
“It’s like I told Ed Webster: if we don’t do anything to get ’em twitchy, I think we can ride out the storm,” his father answered. “But I also think they have to think we’d fight if they did try anything out there. A lot of the time, you end up not having to fight if you show you’re ready to in a pinch.”
“If we did fight the Race, we’d lose, wouldn’t we?” Jonathan asked.
“Now? Sure we would, same as we would have last summer,” his father replied. “But that’s not the point, or it’s only part of the point. The other part is how bad we’d hurt ’em if we went down swinging. They don’t like what the Nazis did to them, and we’d do more and worse.” He sighed. “If that outbound probe of theirs hadn’t spotted our rocket lighting up, we could have built a much stronger position out in the asteroid belt before the Race caught on.”
A strong position in the asteroid belt was something less than important to Jonathan. “Do you think there’ll be a war, or not?” he asked. “The whole idea of fighting the Race seems like such a waste of everything worthwhile to me…”
“I know it does,” his father said slowly. “It seems that way to a lot of kids in your generation. I’ll tell you something, though: when the Lizards first came to Earth, they shot up the train I was riding on, and I volunteered for the Army as soon as I made it into a town where they’d take me. So did Mutt Daniels, my manager, and he was about as old then as I am now. They took both of us, too. They didn’t even blink. That’s how things were back in those days.”
Jonathan knew that was how things had been back in those days. He tried to imagine it, tried and felt himself failing. Stumbling a little, he said, “But the Race isn’t so bad, really. You know that’s true, Dad.”
“I know it’s true now,” Sam Yeager said. “I didn’t know it then. Nobody knew it then. All we knew was that the Lizards came out of nowhere and started beating the crap out of us. And if we-and the Reds, and the Nazis, and the British, and the Japs-hadn’t fought like mad bastards, the Lizards would’ve conquered the whole world, and you and your pals wouldn’t be looking at them from the outside and thinking how hot they are. You’d be looking at ’em up from under, and no way to get out from under ’em.”
“Okay. Okay.” Jonathan hadn’t expected a speech. Maybe his dad hadn’t expected to make one, either, because he looked a little surprised at himself. Jonathan went on, “I understand what you’re saying, honest. Things do seem different to me, though. I can’t pretend they don’t.”
“I know they do.” His father’s laugh was rueful. “You take the Race and spaceships and explosive-metal bombs and computing machines for granted. They’re part of the landscape to you. You’re not an old fogy who remembers the days before they got here.”
“No, not
me.” Jonathan shook his head. The old days, like Dad said, he thought, and then, The bad old days. People didn’t know much back then.
Now his father was the one who said, “Okay. You can’t help being young, any more than I can help being… not so damn young.” He ran a hand through his hair, which really was getting thin on top. But even if he wasn’t so young, even if he was going bald, his eyes could still get a wicked twinkle in them. “Of course, if it weren’t for the Lizards, you wouldn’t be here at all, because I never would have met your mother if they hadn’t come.”
“I know. You’ve told me that before. I don’t like thinking about it.” Jonathan didn’t like thinking about that at all. Imagining his own existence as depending on a quirk of fate was uncomfortable. Uncomfortable? Hell, it was downright terrifying. As far as he could tell, he’d always been here and always would be here. Anything that shook such foundations was not to be trusted.
“What do you like thinking about?” his father asked slyly. “Your wedding, maybe? Or your wedding night?”
“Dad!” Reproach rang in Jonathan’s voice. His father was an old man. He had no business thinking about stuff like that.
“Just wait till you have kids,” his father warned him. “You’ll tell them about what it might have taken to make sure they weren’t born, and they won’t want to listen to you, either.”
“I hope I don’t go and do stuff like that,” Jonathan said. “Maybe I’ll remember how much I hated it when you did it to me.”
His dad laughed at him, which only annoyed him more than ever. Sam Yeager said, “Maybe. But don’t bet anything much on it, or you’ll be sorry. I didn’t like it when my father did it to me, but that’s not stopping me. Once you get to a certain age and see your kid acting a certain way, well, you just naturally start acting a certain way yourself.”
“Do you?” Jonathan said darkly. He wanted to think he’d be different when he turned into an old man, but would he? How could he tell now? A lot of years lay between him and his father’s age, and he was in no hurry to pass through them.
