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“Yeah, I suppose,” his father said. “But it hardly seems like a road trip without ’em. I’ve been spoiled. I have this idea of how things are supposed to work, and I’m disappointed when they turn out different.”
“You probably expect flat tires, too,” Jonathan said.
His father nodded. “You bet I do. I’ve seen enough of them. Heck, I’ve helped change enough of them. I wonder what the Lizards use for a jack.”
“Let’s hope we don’t find out,” Jonathan said. To his relief, his father didn’t argue with him.
They had no trouble getting to the Crimson Desert. The bus rolled south and east out of Sitneff, into open country. By any Earthly standards, that would have been desert. By the standards of Home, it wasn’t. It was nothing but scrub. Treeish things were few and far between, but smaller plants kept the ground from being too barren. Every once in a while, Jonathan spotted some kind of animal scurrying along, though the bus usually went by too fast to let him tell what the creature was.
Mountains rose ahead. The bus climbed them. The road grew steep and narrow; Jonathan got the feeling not a whole lot of vehicles came this way. He hadn’t thought Home would have roads to nowhere, but the one they were on sure gave that feeling. Up and up it went. The bus’ engine labored a little. The driver turned off the air conditioning, but it kept getting cooler inside the bus anyhow. It might have dropped all the way down into the seventies. It was the coolest Jonathan had been anywhere on Home this side of the South Pole.
A few minutes later, they came to what was obviously the crest of the grade. Trir said, “This is the third-highest pass on all of Home.” Without checking an atlas, Jonathan had no idea whether she was right, but nothing about the place made him want to disbelieve her.
The bus seemed relieved to find a downhill slope. The driver knew her business. She never let it get going too fast, but she was never too obvious about riding the brakes, either. The change in the weather on the other side of the mountains was immediate and profound. Before long, three or four Americans and Kassquit all called for the driver to turn the air conditioning on again. With a sigh, she did. It suddenly seemed to be fighting a much more savage climate.
“There!” Trir pointed ahead, out through the windshield. “Now you can see why this place got its name.”
Jonathan craned his neck for a better look. Sure enough, the cliffsides and the ground were of a reddish color, brighter than rust. He wouldn’t have called most of it crimson, but he wouldn’t have revoked anyone else’s poetic license, either. And color names didn’t translate perfectly between the Race’s language and English to begin with.
Down went the bus, into the middle of the desert. By the noises the air conditioning made, it was working harder and harder. By the way sweat ran down Jonathan’s face, it wasn’t working hard enough. “How hot is it outside?” he asked.
“Probably about fifty-five hundredths,” Trir answered.
The Race divided the distance between water’s freezing and boiling points into hundredths-the exact equivalent of Celsius degrees. The USA still routinely used Fahrenheit. Jonathan was struggling to do the conversion in his head when Frank Coffey spoke in horrified English: “Jesus! That’s just the other side of 130!”
It could get that hot on Earth… just barely. But Trir spoke as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. What was that line about mad dogs and Englishmen? Noel Coward had never heard of Lizards when he wrote it.
Ten minutes later, the bus stopped. Air like a blast furnace rolled inside. It’s a dry heat, Jonathan thought in something not far from despair. That worked fine when the temperature was in the nineties. Over a hundred, it wore thin. At the moment, all it meant was that Jonathan would bake instead of boiling.
Trir seemed perfectly happy. “Is it not a bracing climate?” she said. “Come out, all of you, and look around.” She skittered out of the bus and down onto the ground.
Major Coffey wasn’t the only human being who said, “Jesus!” But they’d come all this way. There wasn’t-Jonathan supposed there wasn’t-much point just to staying in the bus. He got to his feet and went out into the Crimson Desert.
Jesus! didn’t begin to do it justice. Jonathan found he had to keep blinking almost as fast as he could. If he didn’t, his eyeballs started drying out. In between blinks, he looked around. The place did have a stark beauty to it. Wind and dust had carved the crimson cliffs into a cornucopia of crazy shapes. Not all the shades of red were the same. There were bands and twists of rust and scarlet and crimson and carmine and magenta. Here and there, he spotted flecks of white all the brighter for being so isolated. Tau Ceti beat down on him out of a greenish blue sky.
“Does anything actually live here?” Tom de la Rosa asked. “Can anything actually live here?” He didn’t sound as if he believed it. Jonathan had trouble believing it, too.
But Trir made the affirmative gesture. “Why, certainly. You can see the saltbushes there, and the peffelem plants.”
Jonathan couldn’t have told a saltbush from a peffelem plant if his life depended on it. Both varieties looked like nothing but dry sticks to him. “Where do they get their water?” he asked. The inside of his mouth was drying out, too.
“They have very deep root structures,” the guide replied.
All the way to China didn’t seem to apply, not here on Home. Or maybe it did. By the way the air and the ground felt, plants might have needed ten light-years’ worth of roots to draw any water to these parts.
But then, to his amazement, something moved under those sticklike caricatures of plants. “What was that?” he said, his voice rising in surprise.
“Some kind of crawling thing,” Trir answered indifferently. “There are several varieties in these parts. Most of them live nowhere else on Home.”
“They come already cooked, too, I bet,” Jonathan’s father said in English.
When he translated that into the Race’s language, Trir laughed. “It is hot, certainly, but not so hot as all that.”
“I agree,” Kassquit said.
She’d been raised to take for granted the temperatures Lizards normally lived with. This probably felt the same for her as it did for Trir. The Americans,
though, were used to Earthly weather. Dr. Blanchard said, “Be careful of heatstroke. I’m glad I made sure we brought plenty of water.”
“Can we go back inside the bus, please?” Linda de la Rosa said. “I’m feeling medium rare, or maybe a little more done than that.”
“But I wanted to talk about the famous fossils not far from here,” Trir said. “These are some of the fossils that the famous savant Iffud used to help establish the theory of evolution.” She paused. “You Tosevites are familiar with the theory of evolution, are you not?”
“Why, no,” Major Coffey said, straight-faced. “Suppose you tell us what it is. It sounds as if it might be interesting.”
“Cut it out, Frank,” Jonathan said in English, and poked him with an elbow. Then he went back to the language of the Race: “He is joking, Senior Tour Guide. We have known of the theory of evolution for more than three hundred of your years.”
“We have known of it for more than 110,000 years,” Trir said starchily.
So there, Jonathan thought. But the trip to the Crimson Desert had turned out to be interesting in ways he hadn’t expected. And he told himself he would never complain about the weather in Sitneff again, no matter what.
Mickey Flynn gazed out of the Admiral Peary ’s control room at Home below. “I feel… superfluous,” he remarked. “Not a great deal for a pilot to do here. Now that I contemplate matters, there’s nothing for a pilot to do here, as a matter of fact.”
“You buzz around on a scooter, same as I do,” Glen Johnson said.
“Oh, huzzah.” Joy and rapture were not what filled Flynn’s voice. “I’m sure Mickey Mantle played catch with his little boy, too, after he retired. Do you suppose he got the same thrill as he did when he played for Kansas City?”
“Not fair,” Johnson said, but then he liked flying a scooter. The difference between him on the one hand and Flynn and Stone on the other was that he was a pilot who could fly a starship, while they were starship pilots. To them, scooters were like rowboats after the Queen Mary. Johnson went on, “With a little luck, you’ll have the chance to fly her back to Earth, too.”
