AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Do I have your permission to do that?”
“Mine? You certainly do.” Ttomalss did not tell the physicist his might not be the only permission required. He did say, “If they decide to attempt this research, I would appreciate it if they got word of their results back to me.”
“Yes, I can see how you might. Ah…” Pesskrag hesitated. “You do realize these experiments will not be attempted tomorrow, or even within the next quarter of a year? Colleagues will have to obtain materials and equipment, to say nothing of funding and permissions. These wings will spread slowly.”
“I see.” Ttomalss did, too-all too well. “Please bear in mind, though, and please have your fellow physicists also bear in mind, that these are liable to be the most important experiments they ever try. Please also bear in mind that the Big Uglies tried them years ago. The news is just now reaching us, because of light speed and because of whatever delay there was between the experiments themselves and when the Race learned of them. What you will be doing has been done on Tosev 3. Do we want to fall behind the Big Uglies? Do we dare fall behind them?”
“Until I looked at this, I would have said falling behind those preposterous creatures was impossible,” Pesskrag said. “Now I must admit this may have been an error on my part. Who would have believed that?” Amused and amazed, the physicist broke the connection.
Ttomalss was neither amused nor amazed. He knew the Big Uglies too well. He was alarmed. The natives of Tosev 3 had been bad enough when they knew less than the Race. They’d used everything they did know, and they’d had an overabundant supply of trickery, not least because, being disunited, they’d spent the last centuries of their history cheating one another whenever they saw the chance. They’d pulled even a while ago. Their current presence on Home proved that. If they ever got ahead…
If they ever get ahead, how will we catch up? Ttomalss wondered. The Big Uglies had started far behind, but they ran faster. They’d caught up. Could the Race hope to pick up its pace if the Tosevites ever got ahead? That was part of what Ttomalss was trying to find out.
What he did find out failed to encourage him. A few days after he sent the data to Pesskrag, he got an angry telephone call from a male called Kssott. Kssott worked in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. “You have been distributing information that should have stayed confidential,” he said in accusing tones.
“Why should it stay confidential?” Ttomalss demanded. “Do you think that if you bury it in the sand it will never hatch? I can tell you that you are wrong. Among the Big Uglies, it has hatched already.”
“That is the information we most need to grasp with our fingerclaws and hold tight,” Kssott said.
“Why? It is a truth whether you admit it or not,” Ttomalss said angrily. “And if you do admit it, maybe you-we-can do something about it. If not, the Tosevites will keep on going forward, while we stay in the same place. Is that what you want?”
“We do not want to introduce unexamined changes into our own society,” Kssott said. “That could be dangerous.”
“Truth,” Ttomalss agreed sarcastically. “Much more dangerous than letting the Big Uglies discover things we have not. I have heard that the Big Uglies worry the Emperor himself. Why do they not worry you?”
Kssott said, “You are misinformed.”
“I most assuredly am not,” Ttomalss said, appending an emphatic cough. “I have that directly from a male who has it straight from the Emperor’s own mouth.”
All he got from Kssott was a shrug. “We have been what we are for a very long time. The Race is not ready for rapid change, nor capable of it. Would you disrupt our society for no good purpose?”
“No. I would disrupt it for the best of good purposes: survival,” Ttomalss said. “Would you keep it as it is so that the Big Uglies can disrupt it for us?”
“You find this a concern,” Kssott said. “The Imperial Office of Scientific Management does not. Our views will prevail. You may rest assured of that, Senior Researcher. Our views will prevail.” He sounded very certain, very imperial, very much a high-ranking male of the Race. Ttomalss wanted to kill him, but even that wouldn’t have done much good. There were too many more just like him.
As chief negotiator for the Americans, Sam Yeager sometimes had to put his foot down to be included on the junkets the other humans got to take. “I did not come here to sit in a conference room all day and talk,” he told one of the Lizards’ protocol officers. “I could do that back on Tosev 3, thank you very much. I want to see some of this world.”
“But did you not come here to negotiate?” the protocol officer asked. “I did not believe the purpose of your crossing interstellar space was tourism.”
The female had a point… of sorts. But Sam was convinced he did, too. “If Fleetlord Atvar and your other negotiators want to talk with me, I will gladly talk with them,” he said. “But let them come along on the journey, too.”
To the protocol officer, that must have seemed like heresy. But stubbornness won the day for Sam. And, once he’d won, once he was whisked off to the port city of Rizzaffi, he rapidly wished he’d let the protocol officer have her way. The prospect of visiting a seaside city on Home had seemed irresistible… till he got there.
To the Lizards, whose world was more land than water, ports were afterthoughts, not the vital centers they so often were on Earth. Rizzaffi, which lay on the shore of the Sirron Sea, proved no exception.
It also proved to have the nastiest weather Sam had ever known-and he’d played ball in Arkansas and Mississippi. Home was a hot place. The Lizards found Arabia comfortable. But most of this world was dry, which made the climate bearable for a mere human being.
Rizzaffi was a lot of things. Dry wasn’t any of them. Nigeria might have had weather like this, or the Amazon jungle, or one of the nastier suburbs of hell. You couldn’t fry an egg on the sidewalk, but you could sure poach one. Most of the buildings in the port were of highly polished stone. Things
that looked like ferns sprouted from their sides anyway. Mossy, licheny growths spread across them and even grew on glass.
The Lizards routinely used air conditioning in Rizzaffi, not to cut the heat but to wring some of the water out of indoor air. That did them only so much good. Every other advertisement in the town seemed to extol a cream or a spray to get rid of skin fungi.
“You know what this place is?” Frank Coffey said after their first day of looking around.
“Tell me,” Sam said. “I’m all ears.”
“This is where athlete’s foot germs go to heaven after they die.”
“If you think I’ll argue with you, you’re nuts,” Sam said. It had never quite rained during the first day’s tour. But it had never quite not rained, either. It was always mist or drizzle or fog, the sky an ugly gray overhead.
Rizzaffi reminded him of a classic science-fiction story about the mad jungles of Venus, Stanley Weinbaum’s “Paradise Planet.” Venus wasn’t like that, of course, but Weinbaum hadn’t known it wasn’t. He’d died a few years before the Lizards came to Earth. He’d barely made it to thirty before cancer killed him. News of his death had hit Sam hard; they’d been close to the same age.
He thought about mentioning “Paradise Planet” to Coffey. After a moment, he thought again. The younger man hadn’t been born when the story came out. To Coffey, Venus had always been a world with too much atmosphere, a world with the greenhouse effect run wild, a world without a chance for life. He wouldn’t be able to see it as Weinbaum had imagined it when jungles there were not only possible but plausible. And that, to Sam, was a shame.
As he discovered the next day, even the plants in Rizzaffi’s parks were like none humanity had ever seen. The trees were low and shrubby, as they were most places on Home. They had leaves, or things that might as well have been leaves, growing directly from their branches rather than from separate twigs or stalks. But those leaves were of different color and shape from the local ones with which Sam was familiar. Stuff that looked something like grass and something like moss grew on the ground below the treeish things. An animal that resembled nothing so much as a softshell turtle with a red Joseph Stalin mustache jumped into a stream before Sam got as good a look at it as he wanted.
