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“We’re not under attack,” Stone said. “All the Lizard spy ships we’ve identified are sitting there quietly. If there are any we haven’t identified, they’re sitting there quietly, too.”
Even before Johnson had finished his sigh of relief, Flynn said, “The assumption here, of course, is that they may not necessarily keep on sitting there quietly. I’ve heard assumptions I liked better.”
“Now that you mention it, so have I,” Johnson said. “They haven’t shown hostility since we first spotted them. Why are we worried all of a sudden?”
From behind him, a rough voice said, “You always were a nosy son of a bitch, weren’t you, Johnson?”
“Yes, sir, General Healey,” Johnson answered. As far as he was concerned, Brigadier General Charles Healey won the SOB prize hands down. He turned around and smiled into the commandant’s hard, blunt-featured face. “It’s made me what I am today, sir.”
Healey didn’t like taking sarcasm; he preferred dishing it out. After muttering under his breath, he said, “You’re plainly supernumerary here. Perhaps your station ought to be out in the scooter, engaging targets from the flank.”
“If you say so, sir.” Johnson shrugged. It wasn’t even a bad idea. He didn’t think it would help much-he didn’t think anything would help much against a determined Lizard attack-but it wouldn’t hurt, either. Of course, if things went wrong, as they were bound to do, he’d have the loneliest death in the solar system. “Tell me where to go, and I’ll go there.”
He knew Healey would rise to the line like a trout rising to a fly. But before Healey could say anything, Walter Stone asked, “Sir, what the devil is going on?”
Stone could get away with questions like that; the commandant approved of him. Brigadier General Healey scowled and sighed and answered, “Things are heating up between Cairo and Little Rock. I don’t know why, exactly”-the scowl got deeper; he didn’t like not knowing-“but they are. We need to be ready for whatever happens.”
“I’ve heard news I liked better,” Mickey Flynn observed.
“Me, too,” Stone agreed. “What touched this off, sir? President Warren’s not crazy, the way the Nazis were. He couldn’t be threatening the Lizards.”
“He’s not,” Healey said. “They’re angry at us, and I don’t know just why. I told you that.” He shook his head, annoyed at having to repeat himself.
“If they want to bad enough, they can wipe us right out of the asteroid belt, and that’s with the ship full of johnny-come-latelies,” Johnson said. Healey gave him another venomous look, presumably for seeing the truth and presuming to tell it.
“If they want to bad enough, they can wipe us off the face of the Earth,” Flynn said.
“We’d hurt ’em if they tried it.” Healey’s voice was savage. “We’d hurt ’em a lot worse than the Germans did. We’re stronger to begin with, and the Nazis already gave their defenses one good pounding.”
Johnson nodded at that. Every word the commandant said was true. And yet… He didn’t have to put and yet into words. Walter Stone did it for him:
“Mickey’s right, sir. I’m not saying you’re wrong. We’d hurt ’em. We’d hurt ’em plenty. But if they wanted to, they could smash us back to the Stone Age.”
“They’d really have to want to,” Johnson said. “That’s the point of all the bombs and rockets and submarines. They’d know they were in a fight.”
“Another few years,” Healey muttered. “Maybe just another couple of years. Another couple of years and the goddamn Lizards would have been talking out of the other side of their snouts. You boys all know it. That’s why we’re here.”
“One of the reasons, anyhow,” Flynn said.
“The A-number-one reason, and you know it as well as I do,” Healey ground out. He scowled at Mickey Flynn, challenging him to disagree. The Lewis and Clark’s number-two pilot maintained a discreet silence.
“There are a few other things going on,” Johnson said. “The mining, the colonies on every rock where we can run up a dome-we haven’t just come out here to fight a war. We’re here to stay, if we can do a little more spreading out before the Lizards try and drop the hammer on us.”
“All sorts of good things here,” Stone agreed. “The Race doesn’t have any real notion of how many goodies there are, either. From what they say, the solar systems in their Empire are tidier places than ours.”
“Smaller suns,” Mickey Flynn said. “Fewer leftover chunks of rock after their planets formed.” An eyebrow quirked. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”
“If they give us the time we need, it won’t be missing them,” Johnson said. Brigadier General Healey gave him a nasty look. “Don’t violate security,” he snapped.
And that did it. Johnson lost his temper. “Christ on a crutch, sir, give it a rest,” he said. “I’m not on the radio to the Race, and we all know what’s going on.”
“You’re insubordinate,” Healey said.
“Maybe I am-and maybe it’s about time, too,” Johnson retorted. “Somebody’s needed to tell you to go piss up a rope ever since before we left Earth orbit. If I’m the one stuck belling the cat, okay, I am, that’s all.”
“You have been nothing but trouble since you came aboard this spacecraft,” Healey said. “I should have put you out the air lock then.”
“Oh, he has his uses, sir,” Flynn said. “After all, whose money would we take in card games if he weren’t here?”
That was slander; Johnson more than held his own. But it distracted the commandant-and Johnson, too. Stone continued the work of changing the subject: “If the Lizards are angry enough at us now, what we might be able to do in a few years doesn’t matter. Remember the Hermann Goring.” The Reich’s imitation of the Lewis and Clark had been blown to atoms during the last round of fighting. Stone went on, “So why the devil are the
Lizards ticked at us?”
Brigadier General Healey shook his head. “I do not have that information. I already told you I don’t have it. I wish to God I did.” Every inch of him screamed that he thought he was entitled to the information, and that he blamed people back on Earth for withholding it from him. “The Lizards are playing it close to their scales, too, dammit. You’d think they’d be screaming from the housetops if they caught us doing something we weren’t supposed to, but they aren’t.”
Thoughtfully, Stone said, “Sounds like they will fight if they’re pushed, but they don’t want to do it unless they decide they have to.”
“But they’re pushing us,” Healey said. “That’s what makes this such a confusing mess.”
“Have they given us any demands?” Flynn asked.
“Nothing I’ve heard.” The commandant sounded all the more frustrated. “And I should hear, God damn it to hell. How am I supposed to do my job if I don’t know what the devil is going on?”
“What it sounds like is, if anybody admitted what the fuss was about, everything would go up in smoke right then and there,” Johnson said.
Brigadier General Healey nodded as if he and Johnson hadn’t had words a few minutes before. The riddle facing him was a bigger source of irritation than even his number-three pilot. “You’re right-and that doesn’t make any sense, either.”
“Nothing makes sense if you don’t know the answers,” Mickey Flynn observed. “The people who do know the answers must have, or think they have, good reason to make sure nobody else finds out. We call them senseless. They call us ignorant. Odds are, we and they are both right.”
“They’d better not be senseless, or all of us-and an awful lot of people and Lizards back on Earth-are in a ton of trouble,” Johnson said.
