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“When are you going down to the surface?” Johnson asked the doctor.
“I don’t know yet,” she answered. “I’ll have to take it easy down there for a while-I do know that. I spent too long weightless aboard the Lewis and Clark. ”
“Is it safe for you to go?” he said.
“I think so,” Dr. Blanchard answered. “If I have any doubts when the time comes, I’ll get a second opinion.”
“What if the other docs lie to you because they want to be the ones who go down there?” Johnson asked.
She looked startled, then shook her head. “No, they wouldn’t do that,” she said. “They need to know they can count on me, too.”
“Wouldn’t be so good if the doctor who was treating you might want you dead instead of better,” Flynn observed.
“Wanted-dead more than alive,” Johnson intoned solemnly.
She glared at each of them in turn. Had she been a Lizard with eye turrets that moved independently, she would have glared at both of them at the same time. “Thanks a lot, guys,” she said, mostly in jest. “Thanks a hell of a lot. Now I’ll be looking back over my shoulder whenever I see anybody else wearing a white coat.”
“Well, spread the word around,” Flynn said. “That way, the others will be looking over their shoulders at you, too.”
“Helpful,” Melanie Blanchard said. “Very goddamn helpful.” To show how helpful it was, she glided out of the control room.
“There-now look what you did,” Flynn said to Johnson. “You scared her away.”
“Me?” Johnson shook his head. “I thought it was you.”
Her voice floated up the hatchway by which she’d departed: “It was both of you, as a matter of fact.”
The two pilots looked at each other. They pointed at each other. Johnson started to laugh. Mickey Flynn, refusing to yield to such vulgar displays of emotion, looked even more impassive than before. That only made Johnson laugh harder than ever. He said, “No wonder we confuse the damned Lizards. We confuse each other, too.”
“You don’t confuse me a bit,” Flynn declared.
“That’s because you were confused to begin with,” Johnson answered. “And if you don’t believe me, ask Stone. He’ll tell you.”
Flynn shook his head. “He thinks he’s not confused, which only makes him the most confused of all.”
Johnson raised an eyebrow. “I have to think that one over.”
“I hope nothing breaks,” Flynn said helpfully. “But if it will assist in your cogitations, let me remind you that he still more than half wants to see how long you’ll last if you go out the air lock without a suit.”
Since he was right yet again, Johnson did the only thing a sensible man could do: he changed the subject. “Well,” he said, “one of these days, the Lizards are going to get in an uproar about ginger that has something behind it.”
“How can they do that?” the other pilot replied. “Everybody knows there is no ginger aboard the Admiral Peary. ”
“Yeah, and then you wake up,” Johnson said scornfully. “Missiles with bombs in their noses are weapons. We brought plenty of those. Ginger is a weapon, too. You think we don’t have any?”
Flynn shrugged. “I know about missiles. I know where they fit on the plans for the ship. I know how to arm them. I know how to launch them. I know how to tell the ship to do all that automatically in about nothing flat, so we can get the missiles away even if we’re under attack. Nobody has briefed me about ginger, which is the sum total of what I know about it. I will also point out that it’s the sum total of what you know about it, too.”
He was right again, of course. That didn’t mean Johnson wasn’t also right, not this time. “We can addle half the scaly so-and-sos down on that planet,” he insisted. “There’s got to be a way to get the herb from hither to yon.”
“You are assuming what you want to prove,” Mickey Flynn said. “If you’d gone to the same sort of school I did, the nuns would have rapped your knuckles with a steel yardstick for a breach of logic like that.”
“If I’d gone to the kind of school you did, I’d have to drop my pants if I wanted to count to twenty-one,” Johnson retorted.
Flynn eyed him with mild astonishment. “You mean you don’t? Truly, you are a fount-or at least a drip-of knowledge.”
“Thank you so much.” Johnson suddenly snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it!”
“I hope you can take something for it,” Flynn said with well-simulated concern.
Johnson ignored him. “I know where I’d put the ginger if I were designing the Admiral Peary. ” He held up a hand. “If you make that particular suggestion, I’m going to be very annoyed at you.”
With dignity, the other pilot said, “Moi? Je ne comprende pas.”
“Of course you don’t,” Johnson said. “Listen, how many people in cold sleep is this ship carrying?”
“Seventeen,” Flynn answered. “Or was it forty-six thousand? I forget.”
“Heh,” Johnson said. “Funny. But the point is, you don’t know for sure. I don’t, either. And neither do the Lizards. What looks like space for people in cold sleep could be space for the herb just as easily.”
“You have a low, nasty, suspicious mind,” Flynn told him.
“Why, thank you,” Johnson said.
“I don’t know. Why not thank me?”
Johnson scowled. “I’d throw something at you, but I might miss you and hit something valuable instead.”
Flynn assumed a look of injured innocence. By his face, his innocence had suffered enough injuries to end up on the critical list. Then he said, “You know, if you keep speculating about all these things we haven’t got, you won’t make our esteemed and benevolent commandant very happy with you.”
“Who’s going to tell him?” Johnson asked. “You?”
“Certainly not,” Mickey Flynn replied. “But the walls have ears, the ceilings have eyes, and the floors probably have kidneys or livers or something else you wouldn’t want to eat unless your stomach were rubbing up against your backbone.”
Walls with ears were a cliche. Ceilings with eyes at least made sense
. As for the rest… “Your mother dropped you on your head when you were little.”
“Only when I needed it,” Flynn said. “Of course, there were times when she needed to be retrained. Or was that restrained? Amazing how one’s entire childhood can revolve around a typographical error.”
“That’s not all that’s amazing,” Johnson said darkly, but Flynn took it for a compliment, which spoiled his fun.
Over the next few days, he wondered if the commandant would summon him to his office to give him a roasting. Then, when that didn’t happen, he wondered why it didn’t. Because the Admiral Peary carried no ginger, and the idea that it might was ridiculous? Or because the ship was full of ginger, and the less said about the herb, the better? The one thing that didn’t occur to Johnson was that Healey hadn’t heard his speculation. The floors did indeed have kidneys, or maybe livers.
Dr. Blanchard worked with grim intensity in the exercise chamber, doing her best to build up her strength for the trip down to the surface of Home. Johnson spent stretches on the exercise bicycle, too, but he didn’t get excited about them the way she did. He was in pretty good shape for a man who’d spent the last twenty years of his life weightless. He could exercise till everything turned blue and not be fit enough to face gravity.
He said, “I wish they’d send one of the other docs down, not you.”
“Why?” she demanded, working the bicycle harder than ever so that her sweaty hair plastered itself against the side of her face. “I’ll be damned if I want to go through all this crap for nothing.”
“Well, I can see that,” he said, pedaling along beside her at his own slower pace-one of the great advantages of a stationary bike. “But you’re a hell of a lot better looking than they are.”
“Not right now, I’m not,” she said, which wasn’t true, at least not to someone of the male persuasion. She added, “Besides, I must smell like an old goat,” which was.
Johnson denied it anyway, saying, “I’m the old goat.”
“What you are is a guy with too much time on his hands,” she said. “Exercise more. That’ll help some.”
