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Prig, Johnson thought, and then another word that sounded much like it. The first was fair enough. The second wasn’t, and he knew as much. Stone was extremely good at what he did. Johnson knew himself to be unmatched at piloting a scooter. No human being was better than Walter Stone at making a big spaceship behave. Johnson had seen that with both the Lewis and Clark and the Admiral Peary. If the other man had a personality that seemed to be made of stamped tin… then he did, that was all.
“Hello!” Dr. Melanie Blanchard floated up into the control room, and Johnson forgot all about Stone’s personality, if any. The doctor went on, “I’m making my good-byes. The shuttlecraft will take me down to Home tomorrow.”
“We’ll miss you,” Johnson said, most sincerely. Stone nodded. The two of them had no quarrel about that.
Dr. Blanchard said, “No need to. The doctors aboard will be able to take care of you just fine in case anything goes wrong. They’ll do better than I could, in fact. My specialty is cold-sleep medicine, and they tend to people who are actually warm and breathing to begin with.”
Johnson and Stone looked at each other. Johnson could see he and the senior pilot shared the same thought. He spoke before Stone could: “We weren’t exactly thinking of your doctoring.”
“Oh.” Melanie Blanchard laughed. “You boys say the sweetest things.” She was careful to keep her tone light. She’d been careful for as long as Johnson had known her. He was sure he and Stone weren’t the only men aboard the Admiral Peary who thought of her not just as a physician. He was pretty sure nobody’d had the chance to do anything but think. The ship was big enough to fly from Earth to Home, but not big enough to keep gossip from flying if there were anything to gossip about. If anything could travel faster than light, gossip could.
No gossip had ever clung to Dr. Blanchard. Johnson wished some would have; it would have left him more hopeful. He smiled at her now. “You think we talk sweet, you should give us a chance to show you what we can do.”
“Take no notice of him,” Walter Stone told the doctor. “I agree with everything he says, but take no notice of him anyway.” Johnson looked at Stone in surprise. Flynn wouldn’t have disdained that line. Johnson hadn’t thought Stone had it in him.
Melanie Blanchard laughed. “Flattery will get you-not as much as you wish it would,” she said, the laugh taking any sting from the words. “Being noticed is nice. Having people make nuisances of themselves isn’t.” She held up a hand. “You two haven’t. I could name names. I could-but I won’t.”
“Why not?” Johnson asked. “If you do, we’ll have something interesting to talk about.”
“You’ll be talking about me behind my back whether I name names or not,” she said. “I know how things work. If you were going down there, they’d talk about you, too. Oh, not the same way-you aren’t women, after all-but they would. Will you tell me I’m wrong?”
“Sure,” Johnson said. “If we were going down to Home, they’d talk about him. ” He jerked a thumb at Walter Stone.
“Me? Include me out,” Stone said.
“Thank you, Mr. Goldwyn,” Johnson said. Stone grimaced. He looked as if he hadn’t wanted to give Johnson even that much reaction. Johnson turned back to Melanie Blanchard. “Five gets you ten your shuttlecraft pilot won’t be a Lizard. Rabotevs and Hallessi don’t care about ginger.”
“They don’t care about taking ginger,” she said. “I bet they’d like the money they’d make for smuggling it-you’ve said that yourself. Of course, we haven’t got any ginger to give them, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course,” Johnson and Stone agreed together.
Johnson didn’t know for sure whether the Admiral Peary carried ginger, whatever his suspicions. He could think of three people who might: Sam Yeager, Lieutenant General Healey, and Walter Stone. He didn’t ask the senior pilot. He was sure of one thing-the Lizards thought the humans’ starship was full of the stuff from top to bottom.
Come to think of it, Dr. Blanchard might know the truth about the herb, too. Had she just come out and told it, or was she operating on the principle that the Race might have managed to bug the Admiral Peary and needed to be told what they already wanted to hear?
She said, “I’m going to go below and make sure I’ve got everything I’ll need down on the surface of Home. In the meantime…” She glided over to Johnson and gave him a hug and a kiss. Then she did the same thing with Walter Stone. And then, waving impartially to both of them, she was gone.
“Damn,” Johnson said: a reverent curse if ever there was one. The memory of her body pressed against his would stay with him a long time. At his age, sex wasn’t such an urgent business as it had been when he was younger. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten what it was all about.
Walter Stone looked amazingly lifelike as he stared toward the hatchway down which Dr. Blanchard had gone. He shook himself like a man coming out of cold water. “Now that you mention it, yes,” he said.
“Lot of woman there,” Johnson observed. “I’d run into somebody like that, I probably would have stayed married and stayed on Earth.”
He waited for Stone to point out that he’d be dead now in that case. The other man didn’t. He only nodded.
With a sigh, Johnson added, “Of course, you notice she isn’t married herself. Maybe she’s not as nice as she seems.”
“Or maybe she thinks men are a bunch of bums,” Stone said. “You’ve got an ex-wife. Maybe she’s got an ex-husband or three.”
That hadn’t occurred to Johnson. Before he could say anything, a Lizard’s voice spoke from the radio: “Attention, the Tosevite starship. Attention, the Tosevite starship. We have launched a shuttlecraft to pick up your physician. This is the object you will discern on your radar.”
Sure enough, there it was: a blip rising from Home toward the Admiral Peary. “We thank you for the alert, Ground Control,” Stone said in the language of the Race.
A little later, the shuttlecraft pilot’s face appeared in the monitor. As Johnson had guessed, he was (or perhaps she was) a dark-skinned, short-faced Rabotev with eyes on stalks, not in turrets. “I greet you, Tosevites,” the pilot said. “Please give me docking instructions.”
“Our docking apparatus is the same as the Empire uses,” Stone said. He had, no doubt, almost said the same as the Race uses, but that wouldn’t do with a Rabotev. “Lights will guide you to the docking collar. Call again if you have any trouble.”
“I thank you,” the shuttlecraft pilot replied. “It shall be done.”
The Rabotev was certainly capable. He-she? — docked with the Admiral Peary with a smooth efficiency anyone who’d flown in space had to respect. With the duty in the control room, Johnson couldn’t give Dr. Blanchard another personal good-bye. He sighed again. Memory wasn’t a good enough substitute for the real thing.
11
Karen Yeager was starting to get to know the Sitneff shuttlecraft port. It wasn’t as familiar to her as Los Angeles International Air- and Spaceport, but she had some idea which turns to take to get to the waiting area. The shuttlecraft port also had one great advantage over LAX: she was a VIP here, not one more cow in a herd. She and Jonathan got whisked through security checkpoints instead of waiting in lines that often doubled back on themselves eight or ten times.
“I could get used to this,” she said as they took their seats in the waiting area. If the seats weren’t perfectly comfortable-well, they wouldn’t be here very long.
Her husband nodded. “Could be worse.” In English, he added, “Only drawback is everybody staring at us.”
“Well, yes, there is that,” Karen said. She too felt as if every eye turret in the waiting area were turned her way. That wasn’t quite true, but it wasn’t far wrong, either. Lizards attracted much less attention at airports back on Earth. Of course, there were millions of Lizards on Earth, and only a handful of humans here on Home.
She shifted in her seat. No, it wasn’t comfortable at all. Back on Earth, some airports had speci
al seating areas for the Race. Karen didn’t plan on holding her breath till the Lizards returned the favor here.
A shuttlecraft landed. Its braking rockets roared. The Race was better at soundproofing than mere humans were, but she still felt that noise in her bones. Three Lizards got out of the shuttlecraft. Their friends or business colleagues or whatever they were greeted them when they came into the terminal.
After glancing at his watch, one of the Americans’ guards said, “Your fellow Tosevite should be grounding next.”
“I thank you.” Karen and Jonathan said the same thing at the same time. As couples who’ve been married for a long time will, they smiled at each other.
The guard was right. The groundcrew at the port moved the last shuttlecraft off the flame-scarred tarmac. A few minutes later, another one landed a hundred yards off to the left. This time, the pilot who emerged was a Rabotev. The Lizards in the waiting area paid no particular attention to him (or her); they were used to Rabotevs. But they exclaimed and pointed when Dr. Melanie Blanchard came down the landing ladder after him.
“She’s moving as if she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders, isn’t she?” Jonathan said.
“She probably feels that way, too,” Karen said. “She’s been out of gravity for quite a while now.”
Dr. Blanchard trudged across the concrete toward the waiting area. Lifting each foot and then putting it down took an obvious effort. A Lizard scurried into the shuttlecraft and came out with a pair of suitcases of Earthly manufacture. He hurried after the human. Carrying her luggage wasn’t very hard for him. By the way things looked, it might have killed her.
