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After Lucy got her food, she came over to him and gave him a hug. That was in the rules. “How you doing?” he asked. “I didn’t know you’d gotten back from Ceres.”
“They don’t need me down there, not for a while,” she answered. She was short and stocky and very definitely looked Italian. On Earth, she might have been dumpy, but nobody sagged in space. She ate some potato and sighed. “God, I miss butter. But anyhow, I’m here for a while. The ice miners are a going concern on the asteroid, so pretty soon they’ll send me out prospecting somewhere else. Meanwhile, I get to come back to the big city and look at the bright lights for a while.” Her wave encompassed the Lewis and Clark.
“God help you,” Johnson said. “All that time away has softened your brain.” They both laughed. But he knew what she meant. There were more people aboard the Lewis and Clark than anywhere else for millions of miles. Seeing faces she hadn’t set eyes on for a while-not seeing the faces she’d been cooped up with for weeks-had to feel pretty good. Glen added, “You need somebody to drive your hot rod for you, just let me know.”
“I’d do better to let Brigadier General Healey know,” she said, and he nodded with regret altogether unfeigned. His opinion of the spaceship’s commandant was not high; the commandant’s opinion of him was, if anything, even lower. Had Healey had his druthers, he would have flung Johnson out the air lock when he came aboard the Lewis and Clark. Unlike the others here, Johnson hadn’t intended to come out to the asteroid belt in the first place. He’d just been curious about what was going on at the orbital space station. He’d found out, all right. Lucy’s smile changed. She lowered her voice and went on, “I like riding with you.”
His ears heated. So did certain other relevant parts. He and Lucy had been lovers before the water-mining project took her away. Now that she was back, he hadn’t known whether she would be interested again. All a guy on the Lewis and Clark could do was wait and hope and look cute. He snorted when that crossed his mind. He’d never been real good at cute.
But Lucy had made the first move, so he could make the next one: “Any time, babe. More fun than the exercise bike-I sure as hell hope.”
She laughed again. “Now that you mention it, yes. Not that it’s the highest praise in the world, you know.” Later, in the privacy of his tiny cubicle, she gave him praise of a more substantial nature. Weightlessness wasn’t bad for such things, except that the people involved had to hang on to each other to keep from coming apart: no gravity assist there. Johnson found nothing at all wrong with holding Lucy tightly.
When he peeled off his rubber afterwards, though, he had a thought foolish and serious at the same time. “What the devil will we do when we run out of these things?” he asked.
Lucy gave him a practical answer: “Anything but the real thing. We can’t afford to have any pregnancies till we build a spinning station to simulate gravity, and we can’t stand the drain on our medical supplies that a lot of abortions would cause.”
“I hear they’ve already had one or two,” he said, not much liking the idea. But none of the animal research suggested that getting pregnant while weightless was a good idea for people.
“I’ve heard the same thing,” Lucy said, nodding. “But nobody’s named names, which is probably just as well.”
“Yeah.” Johnson reached out and caressed her. Sure as hell, in the absence of gravity nothing sagged. Pretty soon, Lucy was caressing him, too. He wasn’t so young as he had been, but he wasn’t so old as he would be, either. He rose to the occasion, and he and Lucy spent the next little while trying not to get her pregnant again.
Straha woke one morning to find the weather exasperatingly chilly. “It is going to be autumn again before long,” he said to his driver at breakfast, as if the Big Ugly could do something about that. “I shall have to endure the worst of this planet’s weather.”
“In Los Angeles? No such thing, Shiplord,” the driver replied, shaking his head. As an afterthought, he used the Race’s negative gesture, too. “If you wanted to go to Siberia, now…”
“I thank you, but no,” Straha said with dignity. “This is quite bad enough; I do not require worse.”
“And remember,” his driver went on after another forkful of scrambled eggs, “winter here only comes half as often as it does on Home.”
“That is a truth,” Straha admitted. “The inverse truths are that it lasts twice as long and is more than twice as bad, even here.”
His driver let out several yips of Tosevite laughter. “We would call this weather perfect, or close enough. You really need to go to someplace like Arabia to make you happy. That is one place the Race is welcome to.”
“Although the Race may be welcome to Arabia, I am not welcome in Arabia,” Straha said. “That will be true for as long as Atvar lives, and our medical care is quite good.”
“Then go out to the desert here,” his driver said. “It will be cooler than it was in high summer, but not so cool as it is here.”
“Now that,” Straha said, “that is almost tempting. And have I heard that certain of our animals and plants have begun making homes for themselves in that area?”
“That is a truth, Shiplord,” the Big Ugly agreed. “It is not a truth we are very happy about, but I do not know what we can do about it.”
“Is not Sam Yeager investigating this truth you find so unfortunate?” Straha enjoyed mentioning Yeager’s name every now and again, for no better reason than to make his driver jumpy.
Today it worked as well as it ever did. “How do you know that?” the driver demanded, his voice sharp.
“Because he told me,” Straha answered. “I did not and do not think that was any great secret. Azwaca and zisuili are not beasts easily confused for anything Tosevite. Your newspapers and your television shows have been full of reported sightings and speculations-some clever, some anything but-about what their effect on the landscape will be.”
“Speculations about the beasts from your planet are one thing,” his driver answered. “Speculations about Sam Yeager are something else again, something a good deal more sensitive.”
Straha started to ask why, then checked himself. He knew why. His driver had spelled it out for him before: Yeager was the sort of Tosevite who kept sticking his snout where it didn’t belong. Hidden in a safe place in the house were papers Yeager had entrusted to him, the results of that snout-sticking. Straha had fairly itched to learn what those papers contained ever since the Big Ugly gave them to him. But Yeager was his friend, and had asked him not to look at them except in case of his death or sudden disappearance. He would have obeyed such a request from a friend who was a member of the Race, and he had obeyed it for the Tosevite, too. That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious.
His driver went on, “One of these days, I fear that Yeager will go too far for his superiors, if indeed he has not gone too far already. When that happens, saying you are his friend will do you no good. Saying you are his friend may end up doing you a good deal of harm.”
“Is it as bad as that?” If it was as bad as that, maybe he would have to arrange to warn Yeager again.
“It is not as bad as that, Shiplord,” his driver answered, now in tones of somber relish. “It is a
great deal worse than that. He has done quite a lot to upset those superior to him.”
“Really?” Straha said, as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “How did matters come to such a pass?”
“Because he would not leave well enough alone,” the Big Ugly answered. “If you fail to listen to warnings for long enough, no more warnings come. Things start happening to you instead. Unfortunate things. Very unfortunate things.” He spoke the proper words, but he did not sound as if he thought such things were unfortunate-to the contrary, in fact.
“What could he have learned that was so dreadful?” Straha asked, now seriously alarmed.
His driver’s mobile Tosevite face twisted into an expression Straha recognized as annoyance. “I do not know,” the Big Ugly said, adding, “I do not want to learn. It is none of my affair.” Now pride filled his voice. “I am not like Yeager-I obey my orders. If my superiors were to order me to put my hand in the fire, I would do it.” To show he meant what he said, he took out a cigarette lighter and flicked the wheel to produce a flame.
“Put that thing away,” Straha exclaimed. “I believe you. You do not need to demonstrate.” He was speaking the truth, too. Big Uglies, far more than the Race, reveled in such displays of fanaticism.
Another click closed the lighter. “You see, Shiplord? You are my superior, and I obey you, too.” The driver laughed again.
“I thank you.” Straha tried to hold irony out of his voice. Which of them was the superior varied from day to day, sometimes from moment to moment. Straha’s rank meant little here; his utility to the American government counted for more, and his driver, these days, was much more consistently useful than he was.
The Big Ugly dropped into English: “I’m going outside to fiddle with the car for a while. I can’t get the timing quite the way I like it. These hydrogen engines are a lot harder to monkey with than the ones that use gasoline.”
“I hope you enjoy yourself, Gordon,” Straha answered, also in English. Some males and females of the Race had the same fondness for tinkering with machinery. Straha had never understood it himself. Tinkering with the way males and females worked had always been more interesting to him.
