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“Still a parvenu next to the Emperor,” Herrep said. Atvar made the affirmative gesture. The protocol master sighed. “Still, I could wish they had got here first. We shall just have to endure these others.”
“They are all nuisances, whether they come from empires or not-empires,” Atvar said. With a sigh of his own that came from years of experience, much of which he would rather not have had, he went on, “It may almost be just as well that many of them have kept their independence. They are too different from us. We had little trouble assimilating the Rabotevs and Hallessi, and we thought building the Empire would always be easy. Even if we do eventually succeed with the Big Uglies, they have taught us otherwise.”
“You would know better than I,” Herrep said. “Aside from the obvious fact that snoutcounting is ridiculous, everything I have seen of these Big Uglies-the ones who have come to Home-suggests they are at least moderately civilized.”
Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “Oh, yes. I would agree with you. The American Tosevites sent the best they had. I was not worried about their lack of civilization, especially not here on Home. I was worried about how fast they progress in science and technology, and about how different from us they are sexually and socially. I do wonder if those two difficulties are related.”
“What could we do if they are?”
“As of now, nothing has occurred to me-or, so far as I know, to anyone else.”
“Then why waste time wondering?”
“You are a sensible male, Protocol Master. Of course this is what you would say,” Atvar replied. “The trouble is, the Big Uglies make me wonder about the good sense of good sense, if that makes any sense to you.” By Herrep’s negative gesture, it didn’t. Atvar wasn’t surprised. Nothing about Tosev 3 really made sense to the Race. Trouble? Oh, yes. Tosev 3 made plenty of trouble.
Dr. Melanie Blanchard and Mickey Flynn were floating in the Admiral Peary ’s control room when Glen Johnson pulled himself up there. Johnson felt a small twinge of jealousy listening to them talk as he came up the access tube. He knew that was idiotic, which didn’t prevent the twinge. Yes, Dr. Blanchard was a nice-looking woman-one of the nicer-looking women for more than ten light-years in any direction-but it wasn’t as if she were his. And she would be going down to the surface of Home before long, a journey on which neither he nor Flynn could hope to follow.
“It’s too bad,” she was saying when Johnson emerged. “That is really too bad.”
“What is?” Johnson asked.
“News from Earth,” Mickey Flynn said.
Johnson waited. Flynn said no more. Johnson hadn’t really expected that he would. With such patience as the junior pilot could muster, he asked, “What news from Earth?”
“An Arab bomb in Jerusalem killed Dr. Chaim Russie,” Melanie Blanchard said. “He was the grandson of Dr. Moishe Russie, the man for whom the Lizards’ medical college for people is named.”
“Did you know this Chaim Russie?” Johnson asked.
“I met him once. He was still a boy then,” she answered. “I knew Reuven Russie, his father, a little better. He’d married a widow. She had a boy, and they’d had Chaim and another son of their own, who I think was also a doctor, and they were happy.” She shook her head. “Reuven Russie would have been up in his eighties when this happened, so he might not have lived to see it. For his sake, I hope he didn’t.”
Johnson nodded. The news was fresh here, but all those years old back on Earth. Dr. Blanchard had taken that into account. A lot of people didn’t. Johnson said, “Was the bomb meant for Lizards or for Jews?”
“Who knows?” she answered. “I don’t think the bombers were likely to be fussy. They weren’t before I went into cold sleep, anyhow.”
“No, I suppose not.” Johnson looked at Flynn. “There were advantages to being out in the asteroid belt for so long. News from Earth had to be big to mean much to us. When the Lizards fought the Nazis, that mattered-especially because they blew up the Germans’ spaceship.”
“The Hermann Goring, ” Flynn said.
“Yeah.” Glen Johnson felt a certain dull surprise that the name didn’t rouse more hatred in him than it did. Back in the vanished age before the Lizards came, Hitler had been public enemy number one, and the fat Luftwaffe chief his right-hand man. Then all of a sudden the Nazis and the USA were on the same side, both battling desperately to keep from being enslaved by the Race. Goring went from zero to hero in one swell foop. If the Germans started shooting missiles at the Lizards, more power to ’em. And if they’d been building the missiles to shoot them at England or the Russians, well, that was then and this was now. Nothing like a new enemy to turn an old one into a bosom buddy.
That was then and this was now. Now was unimaginably distant for anybody old enough to remember the days before the Lizards came: the most ancient of the ancient back on Earth, and a handful of people here who’d cheated time through cold sleep. He looked out through the antireflection-coated glass. That was Home unwinding beneath him, in its gold and greens and blues: seas surrounded by lands, not continents as islands in the world ocean. The Admiral Peary was coming up toward Sitneff, where Sam Yeager and the rest of the American delegation were staying.
“Looks like a pretty good dust storm heading their way,” Johnson said. The gold-brown clouds obscured a broad swath of ground.
“That kind of weather is probably why the Lizards have nictitating membranes,” Dr. Blanchard said.
“Gesundheit,” Mickey Flynn responded gravely. “I’ve heard the term before, but I never knew quite what it meant.”
Why, you sandbagging so-and-so, Johnson thought. If that wasn’t bait to get the nice-looking doctor to show off and be pleasant, he’d never heard of such a thing. He only wished he’d thought of it himself.
Melanie Blanchard was only too happy to explain: “It’s their third eyelid. A lot of animals back on Earth have them, too. It doesn’t go up and down. It goes across the eye like a windshield wiper and sweeps away the dust and grit.”
“Oh,” Flynn said. He paused, no doubt for effect. “I always thought it had something to do with cigarettes.”
“With cigarettes?” Dr. Blanchard looked puzzled.
Johnson did, too, but only for a moment. Then he groaned. His groan made the doctor think in a different way. She groaned, too, even louder. Flynn smiled beatifically. He would have seemed the picture of innocence if he hadn’t been so obviously guilty.
“That’s one more thing these evil people did when they shanghaied me,” Johnson told Dr. Blanchard. “I used to spend more of my time on Earth than I did in space, and I used to smoke. So when they tied me up and carried me away on the Lewis and Clark, I had to quit cold turkey.”
“Take a good look at him,” Flynn told the doctor. “Can you imagine anyone who’d want to tie him up and carry him away? Anyone in his right mind, I mean?”
She ignored that and replied to Johnson: “In a way, you know, they did you a favor. Smoking tobacco is one of the dumbest things you can do if you want to live to a ripe old age. Lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema… All sorts of pleasant things can speed you out the door.”
“I liked it,” Johnson said. “Nothing like a cigarette after dinner, or after…” He sighed. It had been a very, very long time since he’d had a cigarette after sex. He tried to remember just how long, and with whom. Close to seventy years now, even if he’d managed to dodge a lot of them.
Now Mickey Flynn surveyed him with an eye that, if it wasn’t jaundiced, definitely had some kind of liver trouble. He knew why perfectly well. He’d managed to hint about sex in front of Dr. Blanchard. If he hinted about it, he might make her interested in it, perhaps even with him.
