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“Too bad,” Donald said when her ordeal was over. “No all-expense-paid trip to the Moon for you, I’m afraid. But you do have the new refrigerator and five hundred dollars in cash, so this didn’t turn out too bad after all.”
“You’d better believe it!” Mrs. Donahue said gamely, and the audience gave her a big hand.
Later on, a young man did win a trip to the Moon, and just about passed out from excitement. Back on Earth, going to the Moon evidently still wasn’t something people did every day. Here from the Tau Ceti system, it didn’t seem quite such a big deal. Karen glanced over at Sam Yeager. He’d been to the Moon. He’d had a photo on his wall to prove it. Karen never had. If you lived in Southern California, going to Home and not the Moon was like going to Madagascar without ever visiting Long Beach.
At the end of the show, Donald’s eye turrets followed the lovely Rita’s… visible assets as if he were a human male with some special girl-watching equipment. Then one of them swiveled back toward the camera for a moment. “I know the real reason-reasons-you watch, you crazy people out there. You can’t fool me. We’ll see you tomorrow-and you’ll see us, too. So long.” The screen went dark.
“Pause,” Karen said in the Race’s language. For a wonder, the player listened to her twice running. She went back to English: “Do we really want to watch another episode right away?”
“If it’s got Rita in it, I’ll watch it,” Tom said. Linda planted a good, solid elbow in his ribs. He yelped, overacting-but he didn’t overact half as much as Donald did.
“Well,” Sam Yeager said, “it’s nice to know he’s making an honest living.”
“You call that honest?” Jonathan asked.
“He’s paying his own bills,” the older man answered. “If that’s the most popular game show in the country, he’s probably making money hand over fist. Of course, if that’s the most popular game show in the country, it’s probably a judgment on us all, but that’s a different story. But it’s not illegal, no matter what else you can say about it.”
“I think we’ve got the idea of what he does,” Frank Coffey said. “I wouldn’t mind leering at Rita some more-just don’t tell Kassquit about it-but it can wait. Rita’s a knockout, and Donald’s pretty damn funny, but the show…” He shuddered and knocked back his drink. Then he walked out of the room. Karen wondered if he realized he was whistling the theme song from You’d Better Believe It.
The de la Rosas and Dr. Blanchard also left. Sam Yeager got up, too, but only to fix himself another drink. “What’s up, Dad?” Jonathan asked-he’d noticed something was out of kilter, too, then. “You’re not just down in the dumps because Donald’s making a buffoon of himself on national TV. You were low before we got the disk.”
“Now that you mention it-yes,” his father said. He stared down at the glass in his hand, as if expecting to find the answer there. Karen had never seen him do that before. It alarmed her. After a moment, still looking down into the glass, Sam went on, “They don’t want to let me go home.”
“What? Why not?” As soon as the words were out of Karen’s mouth, she knew how silly they were. She knew damn well why not. She just hadn’t imagined it would still matter, not after all these years.
Jonathan had no trouble figuring it out, either. “That’s outrageous, Dad,” he said. “You were right, by God.”
“You’d better believe it,” his father said, and laughed a sour laugh. “But what’s that got to do with the price of beer?”
“What… exactly did Major Nichols tell you?” Karen asked.
“First off, they didn’t expect to find me the ambassador. They figured I’d be minding the Doctor’s p’s and q’s for him,” Sam Yeager said. “They were going to have me go on minding p’s and q’s for whatever young hotshot they’ve brought to take over here. Told me there were still hard feelings back home over what I did. I wonder how big a villain I am in the history books.” He swigged the almost-vodka.
“You shouldn’t be,” Karen said. “The people who ordered the attack on the colonization fleet were the villains.”
Her father-in-law shrugged. “I think so, too. But if the powers that be don’t…” He finished his drink. “I wonder if the Commodore Perry brought any real, live air conditioners for the new ambassador and his people. We should have thought of that ourselves, but we were too dumb.” His mouth twisted. “Of course, even if they do have ’em, they probably wouldn’t give me one.”
“Oh, for the love of God, Dad!” Jonathan said.
“Yes, for the love of God.” Sam Yeager sounded like something straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. Karen wondered if he did it on purpose.
She said, “Talk to their captain. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”
“Maybe.” Her father-in-law sounded dubious in the extreme. He also sounded furious-just how much so, she didn’t really understand till he went on, “I’d rather stay here than beg, though. Why should I have to beg for what I… darn well deserve anyway?” He held out his glass to her. “Fix me another one, would you? After all, I’ve got so much to celebrate.”
Atvar climbed out of the shuttlecraft at the Preffilo port. Males and females in the body paint of the imperial court met him in the terminal and whisked him away to the palace. He hadn’t been summoned to the capital for an audience with the Emperor, but for a working meeting with him. The ceremonial was much less involved. The honor might have been greater. A meeting with the Emperor meant he really wanted your opinion. An audience could mean anything at all. Champions at the biennial games got audiences with the Emperor.
Since it was only a meeting-if only was the right word-Atvar didn’t have to worry about the imperial laver and limner. His own body paint would do. The courtiers whisked him into the palace through a side entrance. No reporters waited to shout asinine questions at him. Word had got out that a second Tosevite starship had come to Home. Word on what kind of starship it was hadn’t, not yet. He wondered just how the males and females in charge of such things would get that across. He wondered if they could do it without touching off a panic. He would have panicked if he’d got news like that.
In fact, he had panicked when he got news like that. The Race was at the Big Uglies’ mercy, if they had any. If that wasn’t worth panicking about, what would be?
The 37th Emperor Risson sat in a conference room not much different from the ones in the hotel back in Sitneff, though the furniture was of higher quality. Atvar folded himself into the special posture of respect reserved for the Emperor alone. “Rise,” Risson told him, the overhead lights gleaming from his imperial gold body paint. “Now that you have done that, Fleetlord, let us forget about ceremony for the rest of this session.”
“Just as you say, your Majesty, so it shall be done,” Atvar replied. That had been a truth for Emperors for a hundred thousand years. How much longer would it stay a truth? The answer wasn’t in the Race’s hands.
By the way Risson’s eye turrets waggled, the same thought had occurred to him. Oddly, that relieved Atvar. He would not have wanted the Emperor blind to the consequences of what had happened here. Risson said, “Well, we have not seen an egg like this one since the days when Home was unified and we did not fight the last war among ourselves after all.”
“I wish I could say you were wrong, your Majesty.” Instead of saying that, Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “I only hope this one hatches as successfully. It will not be easy.”
“No.” Risson clicked his fingerclaws on the tabletop, as any thoughtful and not very happy member of the Race might have done. “By everything we can tell, the Big Uglies are not lying about what this new ship of theirs can do.”
“I wanted to think they were. I did not really believe it,” Atvar said.
“My reaction exactly,” Risson said. “Neither Straha nor the shuttlecraft pilot-Nesseref-appears to have been drugged and deluded.”
“In my opinion, Straha has long been deluded, but he thinks the same of me,” Atvar said.
“I kno
w something of the feuds that plagued the conquest fleet. I do not care to know more, from either side. They do not matter now,” the Emperor said. “The only thing that matters is verifying the Big Uglies’ claims. Straha and Nesseref tend to do that. So does the information we are receiving at speed-of-light from Tosev 3. The American Tosevites already know what we are hearing for the first time.”
“Your Majesty, however much I tried to keep from doing so, I thought I had to believe them as soon as that ship arrived,” Atvar said. “For one thing, it seemed to come out of nowhere. For another, it is the culmination of something toward which the Big Uglies have been reaching for some time. Our physicists are behind theirs, but they are at least beginning to reach in the same direction.”
“We are behind the Big Uglies. We change more slowly than they do. This does not bode well for us,” Risson said.
