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“It’s different when the shoe is on your own foot,” Dr. Rosen observed.
“Ain’t it the truth!” Johnson’s agreement was wholehearted if ungrammatical.
“If I had to guess-” Flynn began.
Johnson cut him off: “If I know you, Mickey, that means you’ve analyzed it seventeen ways from Sunday.”
“Not this time,” the second pilot said with dignity. “Not enough data. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, if I had to guess, I’d say Warren took the Race by surprise when he gave them Indianapolis instead of everything out here and everything in Earth orbit.”
“Congratulations,” Miriam Rosen said. “Second-guessing a dead man from a couple of hundred million miles away isn’t just a world record. If it’s not a solar system record, it’s got to be in the running.”
Flynn gravely inclined his head, which, since he floated perpendicular to the doctor, made him look absurd. “Thank you kindly. I’m honored to have such a distinguished judge. Now I shall elucidate.”
“That means explain, right?” Johnson asked-more harassing fire.
But Flynn gave better than he got, remarking, “Only a Marine would need an explanation of an explanation. Now if I may go on?” When Johnson, licking his wounds, didn’t rise to that, the second pilot did continue: “On the surface, giving up the installations is the easy, obvious choice. It costs no lives, it costs no money-in the short term, it looks better. And the Race is convinced we Tosevites live in the short term.”
“But in the long term, it would ruin the United States,” Johnson said. “It would put us at the Lizards’ mercy.”
“Exactly.” Flynn nodded again. “Whereas losing Indianapolis does us very little harm in the long run-unless, of course, one is unfortunate enough to live in Indianapolis. The Fleetlord probably threw in the destruction of a city as a goad to make us do what he really wanted. But when President Warren took him up on it, he had no choice this side of war but to accept, and the United States is and will be a going concern for some time to come. That’s why I say President Warren has a decent chance of being remembered kindly.”
“All that makes a good deal of sense,” Dr. Rosen said. “What do you think, Glen?”
“The last time you asked me that, Mickey got up on his soapbox,” Johnson replied, at which Flynn sent him an injured stare. Ignoring it, Johnson found himself nodding. “But I think it makes sense, too. Warren took a big chance, he got caught, and he paid the price that hurt the country least. Going on living after that… I guess I can see how he wouldn’t have wanted to.”
“He’d have been impeached and convicted as soon as the story broke,” Dr. Rosen said. “I wonder if we would have handed him over to the Lizards after that. Maybe it’s just as well we don’t have to find out.”
“Probably,” Flynn said.
Johnson couldn’t quarrel with that, either. He said, “When we did give him to the Lizards, he’d have been covered with tar and feathers. He almost screwed up everything he’d been building-everything we’ve been building-for years and years.”
“And yet…” Flynn said in the thoughtful tones he used whenever he was going to go against conventional wisdom. “And yet, I wonder whether that one blow he got in against the colonization fleet before the Lizards were expecting anything hurt them more than losing Indianapolis hurt us. Five hundred years from now, historians will be arguing about that-but will they be our historians or males and females of the Race?”
“To be or not to be, that is the question,” Dr. Rosen said.
“I wasn’t joking, Miriam,” Mickey Flynn said.
“Neither was I,” she answered.
Slowly, Johnson said, “By doing what he did, Warren made sure the Lewis and Clark and now the Columbus would stay out here. He made sure we wouldn’t lose whatever space stations we build in Earth orbit and the weapons we’ve already got there. The Race still has to take us seriously. That’s not the smallest thing in the world. Twenty years from now, fifty years from now, it’s liable to be the biggest thing in the world. Five hundred years from now, it’s liable to say who’s writing the history books.” He raised his water bottle in salute. “Here’s to Earl Warren-I think.”
Flynn and Dr. Rosen also drank, with much the same hesitation he’d shown in proposing the toast. The PA system chimed the hour. As if he couldn’t believe it, Johnson’s eyes went to his wristwatch. It said the same thing the chime did.
He said something, too: “I’m late. Walt’s not going to be very happy with me.”
“An understatement I would be proud to claim,” Flynn said. “I am also late-for my rest period. To sleep, perchance to dream…”
“Perchance to soak your head,” Johnson said over his shoulder as he pushed off to deposit his dishes in their boxes before heading for the control room. He thought he saw Flynn and the doctor leaving together by another exit, but was in too much of a hurry to escape the chief pilot’s wrath to be sure.
“So good of you to join me, Lieutenant Colonel,” Stone said in frigid tones when Glen did fly into the control room. “It would have been even better, of course, had you joined me four minutes and, ah, twenty-seven seconds ago.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Johnson said. Then he broke a cardinal military rule: never offer an excuse to atone for a failure. “Mickey and Miriam and I were trying to figure out what the devil’s going on back on Earth, and I just didn’t pay any attention to the time.”
And, for a wonder, it worked. Walter Stone leaned forward in his seat and asked, “Any conclusions?”
“Either Earl Warren is a hero or a bum, but nobody’s going to know for sure for the next five hundred years,” Johnson answered; that seemed to sum up a lunch’s worth of conversation in a sentence. He added a comment of his own: “Only God or the spirits of Emperors past can tell now, anyhow.”
Stone grunted laughter and said, “Truth,” in the Lizards’ language, tacking on an emphatic cough for good measure. After a couple of seconds of silence, he fell back into English: “He may be a hero for what he did, if you look at things that way. He may be. But I’ll tell you one thing, Glen-he’s the biggest bum since Benedict Arnold for letting himself get caught. If he was going to give those orders, every one of them should have been oral. If anybody did write anything down, he should have burned it the second the launch happened. Then there wouldn’t have been anything for Nosy Parkers later on. Am I right, or am I wrong?”
“Oh, you’re right, sir. No doubt about it. Nosy Parkers…” Johnson’s voice faded.
Stone thought he knew why, and laughed at the junior pilot. “You don’t think that’s so funny, because you were a Nosy Parker yourself, and look what it got you.”
“Yeah.” But Johnson remained abstracted. He’d known another Nosy Parker, a fellow named Yeager out in California who’d been as curious about what the hell was going on with the space station that became the Lewis and Clark as he was himself. And Yeager was a hotshot expert on the Race, too. If he’d been snooping, and if he’d found stuff that would have been better off gone, who was more likely to run and tell stories to the Lizards? Johnson almost spoke up, but he didn’t know anything, not for sure, and so he kept quiet about that. Instead, he said, “There’s almost always a paper trail in that kind of business. There shouldn’t be, but there is.”
“Well, I won’t say you’re wrong, because you’re not,” Stone said. “Even so, you’d think they’d be more careful with something that important. We’re goddamn lucky we didn’t have to pay anything more than Indianapolis.”
“Yeah,” Johnson said again. “It’s not like we lost an important town.” The two men eyed each other in perfect understanding. They were both from Ohio, where Indianapolis was often known as Indian-no-place.
Stone said, “The one thing I do give Warren high marks for is keeping us in space. You know the concept of a fleet in being?”
“Sure.” Johnson nodded. “We’ve got enough stuff that they have to pay attention to us
whether we do anything or not.”
“That’s it,” Stone agreed. “If we’d had to give up everything, what would we be? An oversized New Zealand, that’s what.”
“But now we get to go on,” Johnson said. “It cost us. It cost us like hell. But we’re still in business. And one of these days…” He looked out through the glare-resistant glass at the seemingly countless stars.
“One of these days.” Like him, Walter Stone spoke the words as if they were a complete sentence.
“I wonder what kind of funeral they’ve got planned for Warren,” Johnson said. “A big fancy one, or just toss him in a trash can with his feet sticking out?”
“Me, I’d take the second one, and some hobo could steal his shoes,” Stone said. “But he was the president, so odds are they’ll do it up brown.” He paused. “Dammit.”
