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“Well, yes, there is that,” Flynn agreed. “How very antiquated do you suppose we’ll be, there at the tail end of the twenty-first century? Like Civil War veterans when the Lizards came-that’s the comparison that springs to mind.”
“There were a few,” Johnson said. “Not many, but a few.”
“So there were.” Flynn nodded ponderously. “But at least they lived through the time in between. They saw the changes happen with their own eyes. When we get back, we’ll have been on ice most of the time. Everything we run into will be a surprise.”
“You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you?” Johnson said, and the other pilot nodded again. Some of those worries had occurred to Johnson, too. He didn’t see how he could have avoided them. Alone in his bunk in the wee small hours, all these light-years from Earth, what did he have to do but worry? After a bit, he added, “Something else makes me wonder.”
“Speak. Give forth,” Flynn urged.
“Okay. Here it is: how come there aren’t any other American starships here? Or starships from anywhere else, come to that?”
“We started first. You may possibly have noticed this,” Flynn said. “Then again, since you were in cold sleep for so long, you may have given up noticing things for Lent.”
“Oh, yeah. We started first. I knew that-knew it once I woke up, anyway,” Johnson said. “But so what? The Admiral Peary ’s not as fast as a Lizard starship. You’d figure the state of the art back on Earth would get better. They’d build faster ships, and we’d have company. Only we don’t.”
“Who knows what’s on the way?” Flynn said.
“Well, I don’t,” Johnson admitted. “But radio’s twice as fast as a Lizard ship-I suppose that means it’s twice as fast as anything we’re likely to make, too. There’s the Molotov, but have you heard about starships besides her on the way?”
“No one has whispered anything into my pink and shell-like ear,” Flynn replied. Johnson snorted. Ignoring the noise, the other pilot continued, “This is not to say our beloved commandant and the Race don’t know more than I do.”
Johnson’s comment about their beloved commandant was worse than insubordinate. It was downright mutinous. Flynn clucked in mild reproach. Johnson cared very little. He said, “The Lizards might tell us what’s going on. You think Healey ever would?”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Flynn said, which was and wasn’t an answer at the same time.
“That’s me,” Johnson agreed. “That’s me right down to the ground. And I ask you, where’s our next starship after the Molotov? Where’s the new American ship, or the Japanese one? Hell, the Nazis are liable to be back in space again.”
“Maybe they’re waiting for news from us to get back to Earth,” Flynn said. “Maybe they didn’t know if the cold sleep worked as well as they thought. Maybe the HERE BE DRAGONS notices printed on all the road maps made them think twice. But now they’ll have to think that if we can do it, anybody can do it.”
“Maybe,” Johnson said. “That makes more sense than anything I thought of.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Flynn asked.
“Ha. Funny.” Johnson gave him a dirty look. It bounced off his armor of irony. Muttering, Johnson continued, “If you’re right, though, things have changed back on Earth. The Germans solve problems by throwing bodies at them till they go away-or they used to, anyhow.”
“Takes a lot of bodies to stretch from Earth to Tau Ceti,” Flynn observed. “And everyone who found out about a failure would laugh at the failed party. The Nazis always did have a hard time seeing a joke when it was on them.”
“Mm. Maybe,” Johnson said again. Once more, the other pilot had an answer for him. Whether it was the answer… Well, how could he say when he was in orbit around Home and the answer, whatever it was, lay back on Earth?
He looked down at the Lizards’ world. The landscape down there was almost as familiar as Earth’s by now. With less cloud cover than was usual on Earth, he could see better, too. They were coming up on Sitneff. The dust storm that had plagued the city where the Americans were staying had subsided. “I wonder how Melanie’s doing down there,” he said.
“Pretty well, by all the reports,” Flynn said. “Why? Did you think she couldn’t live without you?”
“Actually, I thought she’d be so glad to get away from you that she’d start dancing too soon and hurt herself,” Johnson answered.
“Have I been reviled? Have I been insulted? Have I been slandered? Have I been traduced? Have I been given the glove? Have I been slammed? Have I been cut? Have I-?” Flynn went on pouring out synonyms till anyone would have thought him the second coming of the illustrious Dr. Roget.
“Enough, already!” Johnson exclaimed by the time it was much more than enough.
Mercifully, the other pilot fell silent. Johnson enjoyed the quiet for about five minutes. Then the intercom summoned him to Lieutenant General Healey’s office. He enjoyed that not at all. He would rather have gone to the dentist.
By all the signs, Healey was less than enamored of having him there. The commandant growled, “Congratulations. You’ve managed to make the Lizards love you.”
“Sir?” Johnson said woodenly. If he wasn’t baiting Healey, Healey would be baiting him. He didn’t want to give the other man a handle if he could help it.
But Healey only nodded, which made his J. Edgar Hoover jowls wobble. “That’s right. Your rescue mission with the scooter impressed the hell out of them. And so we’ve arranged a cultural exchange mission with the Race.”
“Sir?” Johnson said again, this time in surprise.
“We’re going to trade them one of our scooters for one of theirs,” Healey said. “There’s not a damn thing on one of our scooters that can help them militarily, and they must feel the same way about theirs. So we’ll swap, and look them over, and see if we learn anything.”
“Oh.” Johnson knew he still sounded startled. Had anyone but Healey told him that, he wouldn’t have been. But he’d always figured Healey would sooner swap missiles with the Lizards than information.
“I’m so glad this meets with your approval.” The commandant’s sarcasm would have stung more if Johnson hadn’t already been on the receiving end of it so often. Healey said, “The scooter is waiting at Lock Two. The sooner you fly it to the Horned Akiss, the sooner we’ll get a Lizard scooter to play with.”
“All right,” Johnson said. “Now that I know where I’m going, I expect I can get there. It does make things easier, you know.”
Healey waved that away. He waved away almost everything Johnson said, whether or not the motion showed. “Go on,” he said.
Johnson went. He enjoyed flying the scooter. Had Lieutenant General Healey known how much he enjoyed it, the commandant probably would have chosen someone else for the job. Healey never had wanted him to have any fun.
Well, too bad for the redoubtable lieutenant general. Johnson got into his spacesuit, then ran checks on the scooter. Everything came up green. He hadn’t thought Healey would want him to have an unfortunate accident, but you never could tell.
The outer airlock door opened. Johnson used the scooter’s little steering jets to ease it out into space. As soon as he did, he started to laugh. He knew exactly how the little spacecraft was supposed to respond when he goosed it. It was definitely slower than it should have been, which meant it was heavier than it should have been.
“You sandbagging son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, having first made sure his radio was off. Before sending the Lizards a scooter, Healey had made sure it didn’t perform as well as it might have. He wanted the Race to keep right on underestimating what humans could do. That struck Johnson as singularly pointless way the hell out here. If he said anything about it, though, the commandant would probably order him back and clap him in irons.
Instead, he called the Horned Akiss on one of the Race’s signaling frequencies. He found out the Lizards there were expecting him. That came as a relief. It would have been jus
t like Healey to send him out and hope the Race would shoot him down. Evidently not-not this time, anyway.
Once Johnson got clear of the Admiral Peary, he aimed the scooter at the Horned Akiss and fired up the rear engine. Sure enough, the little rocketship was lugging an anvil; its acceleration wasn’t a patch on what it should have been. Inside his suit, he shrugged. Sooner or later, he’d get there.
And, in due course, he did. He wasn’t invited aboard the Lizards’ ship. Instead, one of their scooters waited for him. “I greet you, Tosevite,” the Lizard aboard it called. “Shall we exchange craft?”
