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“It’s crossed my mind,” Jonathan said. “As long as we can go faster than light and the Lizards can’t, they’d be like Chinese junks going up against the Royal Navy. Whether they understand that or not is liable to be a different question, though. And we have no idea what things are like back on Earth these days, not really.”
“We can find out, though.” Karen looked out the window, but her eyes were light-years from Home. “Grandchildren. Great-grandchildren. Our own sons-older than we are.” She shook her head.
“Not many people will have to cope with that,” Jonathan said. “The bottom just dropped out of the market for cold-sleep stock.”
“It did, didn’t it?” Karen said. “So many things we’ll have to get used to.”
“If Dad doesn’t go back, I don’t know that I want to,” Jonathan said. “If all the people here decided to stay behind if the Commodore Perry wouldn’t let him aboard, that would show the moderns how much we thought of him. I don’t know what else we can do to change their minds.”
“That… might work,” Karen said slowly. She’d plainly been seeing Los Angeles in her mind, and didn’t seem very happy about being recalled to Home-especially about being told she might do better staying here. Jonathan gulped the rest of his drink. She was Sam Yeager’s daughter-in-law. The other Americans were just his friends. Would they sacrifice return tickets for his sake? Will I have to find out? Jonathan wondered.
The Commodore Perry excited Glen Johnson and the other pilots who’d come to the Admiral Peary from the Lewis and Clark much less than most other people. “What the hell difference does it make if we can go back to Earth in five weeks, or even in five minutes?” Johnson said. “We can’t go home any which way.”
“Wouldn’t you like to see all the newest TV shows?” Mickey Flynn asked.
“Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn, except maybe about the lovely Rita,” Johnson answered, with feeling. What male couldn’t like the lovely Rita?
“Wouldn’t you like to see some new faces?” Flynn persisted. He pointed to Walter Stone. “The old faces are wearing thin, not that anyone asked my opinion.”
Stone glowered. “I love you, too, Mickey.”
“I’d like to see some young, pretty girls in person,” Johnson said. “The only thing is, I don’t think any young, pretty girls would be glad to see me.”
“Speak for yourself, Johnson,” Flynn said.
“That was his johnson speaking,” Stone said. Johnson and Flynn both looked at him in surprise. He didn’t usually come out with such things. He went on, “I want to know what they’ll do with the Admiral Peary. We figured this crate would go obsolete, but we never thought it would turn into a dodo.”
The comparison struck Johnson as only too apt. Next to the Commodore Perry, the Admiral Peary might as well have been flightless. She’d crossed more than ten light-years-and, except for her weapons and the ginger she carried, she was ready for the scrap heap. “They ought to put her in a museum,” Johnson said.
“So our grandchildren can see how primitive we were?” Flynn inquired.
“That’s what museums are for,” Johnson said. “Our grandchildren are going to think we’re primitive anyhow. My grandfather was born in 1869. I sure thought he was primitive, and I didn’t need a museum to give me reasons why. Listening to the old geezer go on about how us moderns were going to hell in a handbasket and taking the whole world with us did the job just fine.”
“And here he was, right all the time,” Walter Stone said. “Way it looks now, we’ve got four worlds going to hell in a handbasket, not just one. Biggest goddamn handbasket anybody ever made.”
“You really think the Lizards are going to jump us?” Johnson asked. He didn’t get on well with Stone, but he had to respect the senior pilot’s military competence.
“What worries me is that it might be in their best interest to try,” Stone answered. “If they wait for us to build a big fleet of faster-than-light ships, their goose is cooked. Or we can cook it whenever we decide to throw it in the oven.”
“How many FTL ships will we have by the time their attack order reaches Earth?” Mickey Flynn asked.
“Not as many as if they wait twenty years and then decide they’re going to try to take us,” Stone said. “They usually like to dither and look at things from every possible angle and take years to figure out the best thing they could do. Well, here the best thing they can do is not take years figuring it out. I wonder if they’ve got the brains to see that.”
“It would be out of character,” Johnson said.
“They’ve been worrying about us for a long time,” Stone returned. “They were nerving themselves for something before the Commodore Perry got here. Would Yeager have had us send a war warning back to Earth if he weren’t worried?”
“The question is, will the Commodore Perry make things better or worse?” Flynn said. “Will it make them think they can’t possibly beat us, and so they’d better be good little males and females? Or will they think the way you think they’ll think, Walter, and strike while the iron is hot?”
Stone didn’t answer right away. Glen Johnson didn’t blame him. How could you help pausing to unscramble that before you tried to deal with it? When Stone did speak, he confined himself to one word: “Right.”
“Yes, but which?” Flynn asked.
“One of them, that’s for damn sure,” Stone said. “The other interesting question is, what sort of a wild card is the Commodore Perry when it comes to weapons? I know what we’ve got. Our stuff is a little better than what the Lizards use-not a lot, but a little, enough to give us a good fighting chance of making them very unhappy in case of a scrap.”
“We had junk on the Lewis and Clark, ” Johnson said.
Stone nodded. “Compared to this? You’d better believe it. Well, the Commodore Perry is more years ahead of us than the Lewis and Clark is behind us. So what is she carrying, and how much can she do to Home if she gets annoyed?”
Johnson whistled softly. “Think about the difference between World War I biplanes and what we flew when the Lizards got to Earth.”
“There’s another one,” Stone agreed.
Flynn pointed down-up? — toward the surface of home. As it happened, the Admiral Peary was flying over Preffilo. Even from so high in the sky, Johnson could pick out the palace complex at a glance. Flynn said, “Have the Lizards wondered what the Commodore Perry is carrying?”
“We haven’t had any intercepts indicating that they have,” Stone said. “Maybe they aren’t wondering. Maybe they are, but they’re keeping their mouths shut about it.”
“Somebody ought to whisper in their hearing diaphragms,” Johnson said. “The more they wonder about what’ll happen if they get cute, the better off we’ll be.”
“That’s actually a good idea.” By the way Stone said it, hearing a good idea from Johnson was a surprise. “We can arrange it, too.”
“The ambassador should be able to do it,” Johnson said. “If the Lizards will listen to anybody, they’ll listen to him.”
“They may be the only ones who will,” Flynn said. “I understand that that’s the purpose of an ambassador and all, but when your own side won’t…”
“Healey,” Johnson said, in the tones he would have used to talk about a fly in his soup. Walter Stone stirred. He was and always had been in the commandant’s corner. He was about as decent a guy as he could be while ending up there, which said a good deal about his strengths and his weaknesses.
Before Stone could rise to Healey’s defense, before Johnson could snarl back, and before the inevitable fight could break out, Mickey Flynn went on, “Ah, but it isn’t just Healey. There’s a difficulty, you might say, with the people from the Commodore Perry, too.”
“Why, for God’s sake?” Johnson asked. “The people on that ship either weren’t born or weren’t out of diapers when he went into cold sleep.”
“Call it institutional memory,” Flynn said. “Call it whatever you want
, but they don’t want to give him a ride back to Earth. He’s not like us-he could go home again. He could, except that he can’t.”
“Where did you hear that?” Johnson asked.
“One of the junior officers who was touring this flying antiquity,” Flynn said.
“Only goes to show the brass hats back home haven’t changed.” The opinion of the powers that be in the United States that Johnson expressed was not only irreverent but anatomically unlikely. He went on, “Yeager saved our bacon back there in the 1960s. He let us come talk with the Lizards now with our hands clean.”
