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Internally, the ship was laid out like a smaller version of the Lewis and Clark. Corridors had plenty of handholds by which people could pull themselves along. Intersecting corridors had convex mirrors that covered all approaches. Johnson used them, too. He’d seen some nasty collisions-Mickey Flynn hadn’t been kidding about that-and he didn’t want to be a part of one. You could get going at quite a clip. If you didn’t happen to notice that somebody else was barreling along, too…
His cabin was a little larger than the cramped cubicle that had gone by the name in the Lewis and Clark. His bunk was nothing more than a foam mattress with straps to keep him from drifting away. In weightlessness, what more did anyone need? A few people had nightmares of falling endlessly, but most did just fine. Johnson was glad he was, for once, part of the majority.
He didn’t feel like sleeping just now, though. He put a skelkwank disk into a player and started listening to music. Skelkwank light-a coherent beam of uniform frequency-was something humanity hadn’t imagined before the Lizards came. English had borrowed the word from the language of the Race. All sorts of humans had borrowed-stolen-the technology.
Johnson remembered records. He wondered if, back on Earth, even one phonograph survived. Maybe a few stubborn antiquarians would still have them, and museums. Ordinary people? He didn’t think so.
So much of the Admiral Peary used pilfered technology. Humanity had had radar before the Lizards came. People were beginning to work on atomic energy. But even there, the Race’s technology was evolved, perfected. Stealing had let humans evade any number of mistakes they would have made on their own.
Where would we be if the Race hadn’t come? Johnson knew where he would be in this year of our Lord 2031: he would be dead. But where would people be? Would the Nazis still be around, or would the USA and the Russians and England have smashed them? He was pretty sure the Germans would have gone down the drain. They were, after all, taking on the rest of the world without much help.
But even beaten, they were a formidable people. In the real world, they’d pulled themselves together after the Race’s invasion and again after the fight they’d stupidly picked with the Lizards over Poland in the 1960s. That had been a disastrous defeat, and had cost them much of their European empire. But they’d been recovering even when Johnson went into cold sleep, and reports from Earth showed they were working hard to reestablish themselves as a power to be reckoned with.
The Lizards worked hard to keep the Reich from violating the terms of the armistice they’d forced upon it. They had kept Germany from returning to space for a long time. But the Reich had quietly rearmed to the point where pulling its teeth now would only touch off another war. The Lizards didn’t want that. The last one had hurt them even though they won it. The Germans, by acting as if they weren’t afraid to take the chance of another scrap-and maybe, given Nazi fanaticism, they weren’t-had won themselves quite a bit of freedom of action.
Bastards, Johnson thought. But tough bastards. For the time being, though, the Germans would trouble the Race only back on Earth. Things were different for the Americans. They were here. Just a few minutes before, Johnson had watched Home through the glass of the control room.
And more American ships would be coming. The pilot was as sure of that as he was of his own name. The USA wasn’t a country that did things by halves. What would the Lizards do when almost as many American ships-and Russian ships, and maybe Japanese ships, too-as those of the Race flew back and forth between the Sun and Tau Ceti? For that matter, what would humanity do when that came true?
Ttomalss blamed his talk with Fleetlord Atvar for the worried interest with which he approached evidence of the Big Uglies’ growing scientific progress in the reports reaching Home from Tosev 3. And the more he looked, the more evidence he found. That didn’t surprise him, but didn’t leave him happy, either.
Some of the most recent reports alarmed him in a new way. When he’d stayed on Tosev 3, the worry had been that the Big Uglies were catching up with the Race in this, that, or the other field. That wasn’t what the scientists in the colonization fleet were saying now. Instead, they were writing things like, The Big Uglies are doing this, that, or the other thing, and we don’t know how. More and more often, the Race was falling behind.
Everything his own people did was refined and perfected and studied from every possible angle before it went into large-scale use. Their technology hardly ever malfunctioned. It did what it was supposed to do, and did it well. If something didn’t do what it was supposed to do, and do it all the time, they didn’t use it. They went into the unknown one fingerclaw’s width at a time.
The Big Uglies, by contrast, charged into the unknown with great headlong leaps. If something worked at all, they’d try it. If it was liable to fail and kill large numbers of the individuals who used it, they seemed to take that as part of the price of doing business. They scoffed at danger, even obviously preventable danger. When the Race came to Tosev 3, the Big Uglies had been making motor vehicles for a fair number of years. They’d made them, but they hadn’t bothered including safety belts. How many lives had that cost them? How many injuries? Whatever the number, the Tosevites hadn’t included them.
Their cold sleep followed the same pattern. It worked… most of the time. If the Tosevite called the Doctor died on the way to Home, well, that was unfortunate, but the Big Uglies hadn’t wanted to wait till the process got better. If they had waited, they wouldn’t have launched their starship in the first place.
Whenever Ttomalss found evidence of Tosevite advances beyond anything the Race could match, he passed it on to males and females in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. And those males and females, as far as he could tell, promptly forgot all about it. Whenever he asked for follow-up, they acted as if they had no idea what he was talking about. They didn’t quite laugh at him to his face. He would have bet they laughed at him behind his back.
He had spent a lot of years on Tosev 3. Maybe he’d picked up some small streak of perverse independence from the Big Uglies he’d studied for so long. Whatever the reason, he decided to forget about the males and females in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. He used the computer network to find the name and number of a physicist who taught at the local university.
Pesskrag didn’t answer the phone. Ttomalss left a message on her machine and waited to see if she would call him back. If she didn’t, he vowed to call another working scientist and, if necessary, another and another till he found somebody who would listen to him.
To his relief, the physicist did return his call the next day. When he saw her on the monitor, her youth astonished him. “I greet you, Senior Researcher,” she said. At least she wore no wig. “Do you really mean to tell me these Big Ugly things have made discoveries we have not? Excuse me, but I find that very hard to believe.”
“If you are interested, I would be pleased to send you the data to evaluate for yourself,” Ttomalss answered. “Please believe me when I tell you that you will not wring my liver if you persuade me I am worrying over nothing.”
“Send the data, by all means,” Pesskrag said. “I was amazed that these creatures could fly a starship, even a slow one. But that, after all, is something they learned from us. I will be even more surprised if they do prove to have learned anything we do not know.”
“I will send the data I presently have. More comes in all the time. Decide for yourself,” Ttomalss said. “One way or the other, I look forward to your evaluation.”
He transmitted the recent reports from Tosev 3. Technically, he probably wasn’t supposed to do that. The Imperial Office of Scientific Management had irked him enough that he didn’t care so much whether he was supposed to. He wanted answers, not proper bureaucratic procedures. Yes, the Big Uglies have corrupted me, he thought.
This time, Pesskrag did not call back for several days. Ttomalss wondered if he ought to try to get hold of the physicist again. That, he convinced himself, would show Big Ugly-st
yle impatience. He made himself wait. He told himself he’d waited for years in cold sleep. What could a few days matter now? But when he’d lain in cold sleep, he hadn’t known he was waiting. Now he did. It made a difference.
He had just come back to his room from a negotiating session with the wild Tosevites when the telephone hissed for attention. “Senior Researcher Ttomalss. I greet you,” he said.
“And I greet you. This is Physics Professor Pesskrag.”
Excitement tingled under Ttomalss’ scales. One way or the other, he would find out. “I am glad to hear from you,” he said, and barely suppressed an emphatic cough. “Your thoughts are…?”
“My thoughts are confused. My thoughts are very nearly addled, as a matter of fact,” Pesskrag said. “I had expected you to send me a pile of sand, to be honest with you.”
“I am not a physicist myself. I have no sure way of evaluating it,” Ttomalss said. “That is why I sent it to you. All I can say is, males and females with some expertise were concerned about it on Tosev 3. Did they have reason to be?”
“Yes.” Pesskrag used an emphatic cough. “The Big Uglies are making experiments that never would have occurred to us. Some of these are large and elaborate, and will not be easy to duplicate here. Do you have more data than you provided me, by any chance?”
“I am sorry, but I do not,” Ttomalss said.
“Too bad,” the physicist told him. “Most of what you have given me is descriptive only, and not mathematical: it appears to be taken from the public press, not from professional journals. Even so, I would dearly love to see the results from some of these trials.”
“Is that a truth?” the psychologist asked.
“That is a truth.” Pesskrag used another emphatic cough.
“In that case, maybe you should see if you can duplicate these experiments here,” Ttomalss said. “Maybe you should pass this information on to other physicists you know. If you do not have the facilities to duplicate what the Big Uglies are doing, maybe a colleague will.”
