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“What an addled notion!” Pesskrag said. Ttomalss did not argue. He only waited. She went on, “I cannot imagine the circumstances under which such a thing would be permitted. I certainly hope the males and females in charge of such things are more responsible than you seem to believe.”
“If such matters were gripped by the fingerclaws of our males and females alone, I would agree with you,” Ttomalss said. “Do please remember the source of your inspiration here, though. Let me ask my question in a different way: what do you suppose the Big Uglies have been doing with the data you are just now discovering?”
“The Big Uglies?” Pesskrag spoke as if she were hearing of Tosevites for the first time. After some thought, she shrugged. “I am sorry, Senior Researcher, but I have not the faintest idea. How matter and energy behave is my province. How these strange aliens act is yours.”
“I will tell you how to estimate their behavior,” Ttomalss said.
“Please do.” The physicist sounded polite but skeptical.
“Make the most radical estimate of possibilities you have the power to invent in your own mind,” Ttomalss said. He waited again. When Pesskrag made the affirmative gesture, he went on, “Once you have made that estimate, multiply its capacity for disaster by about ten. Having done that, you will find yourself somewhere close to the low end of Tosevite possibilities.”
Pesskrag laughed. Ttomalss didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all. After a little while, Pesskrag noticed he wasn’t saying anything. She exclaimed, “But surely you must be joking!”
“I wish I were,” the psychologist said. “If anything, I am not giving the Big Uglies enough credit-or maybe blame is more likely to be the word I want.”
“I do not understand,” Pesskrag said.
“Let me show you, then. You may possibly have seen this image before.” Ttomalss called up onto the screen the picture of the Tosevite warrior the Race’s probe had snapped. He said, “Please believe me when I tell you this was the state of the art on Tosev 3 eighteen hundred years ago-eighteen hundred of our years, half that many by the local count.”
“Oh. I see,” Pesskrag said slowly. “And now…” Her voice trailed away.
“Yes. And now,” Ttomalss said. “And now several of their not-empires have kept their independence in spite of everything the Race could do. And now they are making important discoveries in theoretical physics before we are. Do you still believe I am joking, or even exaggerating?”
“Possibly not,” Pesskrag said in troubled tones. “We would not have made this discovery for a long time, if ever. I am convinced of that. So are my colleagues. Even imagining the experiment requires a startling radicalism.”
“And the Race is not radical,” Ttomalss said. Pesskrag hesitated, then used the affirmative gesture once more. So did the psychologist. He went on, “I need to tell you, I need to make you understand in your belly, that by our standards the Big Uglies are radical to the point of lunacy. If you do not understand that, you cannot hope to understand anything about them. Let me give you an example. During the fighting after the conquest fleet landed, they destroyed a city we held with an atomic weapon-a weapon they had not had when the fighting started. Do you know how they did it?”
“By remote control, I would assume,” Pesskrag replied.
Ttomalss made the negative gesture. “No. That is how we would do it. That is how they would do it now, I am sure. At the time, their remote-control systems were primitive and unreliable. They sailed a boat that travels underwater-one of their military inventions-carrying the bomb into this harbor. When the boat arrived, a brave male on it triggered the bomb, killing himself and the rest of the crew in the process.”
“Madness!” the physicist said.
“Yes and no,” Ttomalss answered. “Remember, it did us much more harm than it did the Big Uglies. And so they did not count the cost. They have a way of proceeding without counting the cost. That is why I asked where this discovery might go, and how long it might take to get there.”
The way Pesskrag’s eye turrets twitched told how troubled she was. “I am sorry, Senior Researcher, but I still cannot say for certain. We are going to have to modify a good deal of theory to account for the results of this experiment. We will also have to design other experiments based on this one to take into account what we have just learned. I do not know what sort of theoretical underpinnings the Big Uglies already have. If this was an experiment of confirmation for them, not an experiment of discovery… If that turns out to be so, they may have a bigger lead than I believe.”
“And in that case?” Ttomalss always assumed the Tosevites knew more and were more advanced than the available evidence showed. He was rarely wrong about that. He did sometimes err on the conservative side even so. Since he was trying to be radical, that worried him. But no member of the Race could be as Radical as a Big Ugly. Realizing that worried him, too.
“I need to do more work before I can properly answer you,” Pesskrag said. Her words proved Ttomalss’ point for him. That worried him more still. A Tosevite physicist wouldn’t have hesitated before answering. And that worried him most of all.
Lieutenant General Healey gave Glen Johnson a baleful stare as the two of them floated into the Admiral Peary ’s small, cramped refectory. “Too bad sending you down to the surface of Home would kill you,” the starship commandant rasped. “Otherwise, I’d do it in a red-hot minute.”
“Since when has that kind of worry ever stopped you?” After a long, long pause, Johnson added, “Sir?” He didn’t have to waste much time being polite to Healey. As far as he knew, the Admiral Peary had no brig. He didn’t need to worry about blowing a promotion, either. What difference did it make, when he never expected to see Earth again? He could say whatever he pleased-and if Healey felt like baiting him, he’d bait the commandant right back.
Healey’s bulldog countenance was made for glowering. But the scowl lost a lot of its force when its owner lost the power to intimidate. “You are insubordinate,” the commandant rasped.
“Yes, sir, I sure am,” Johnson agreed cheerfully. “You’d be doing me a favor if you sent me down to Home with the doctor, you know that? I’d be keeping company with a nice-looking woman till gravity squashed me flat. You’d be stuck up here with yourself-or should I say stuck on yourself?”
That struck a nerve. Healey turned the glowing crimson of red-hot iron. A comparable amount of heat seemed to radiate from him, too. He got himse
lf a plastic pouch of food and spent the rest of supper ignoring Johnson.
The meal was a sort of a stew: bits of meat and vegetables and rice, all bound together with a gravy that was Oriental at least to the extent of having soy sauce as a major ingredient. A spoon with a retracting lid made a good tool for eating it.
Johnson did wonder what the meat was. It could have been chicken, or possibly pork. On the other hand, it could just as well have been lab rat. How much in the way of supplies had the starship brought from Earth? The dietitians no doubt knew to the last half ounce. Johnson didn’t inquire of any of them. Some questions were better left unanswered.
When he reported to the control room the next morning, Brigadier General Walter Stone greeted him with a reproachful look. “You shouldn’t ride the commandant so hard,” the senior pilot said.
“He started it.” Johnson knew he sounded like a three-year-old. He didn’t much care. “Did you tell him he should stay off my back?”
“He has reasons for being leery of you,” Stone said. “We both know what they are, don’t we?”
“Too bad,” Johnson said. “We both know his reasons never amounted to a hill of beans, too, don’t we?”
“No, we don’t know that,” Walter Stone said. “What we know is, nobody ever proved those reasons have anything to do with reality.”
“There’s a reason for that, too: they don’t.” Johnson had stuck with his story since the 1960s.
“Tell it to the Marines,” said Stone, an Army man.
Since Johnson had been a Marine now for something approaching ninety years, he chose to take umbrage at that-or at least to act as if he did. He got on fine with Mickey Flynn; he and Stone had been wary around each other ever since he involuntarily joined the crew of the Lewis and Clark. They would probably stay that way as long as they both lived.
Stone wasn’t obnoxious about his opinions, the way Lieutenant General Healey was. That didn’t mean he didn’t have them. To him, Johnson would always be below the salt, even if they’d come more than ten light-years from home.
