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Stone looked at him. “Are you calling me a liar?” His voice held a distinct whiff of fists behind the barn, if not of dueling pistols at dawn.
Johnson didn’t care. “That depends,” he answered. “Are you telling me the Lizards didn’t search the scooter? If you are, you’re damn straight I’m calling you a liar. They aren’t stupid. They know where ginger comes from, and they know damn well the Easter Bunny doesn’t bring it.”
“You’re the one who brought it the last time,” Stone observed.
“Yeah, and you can thank our beloved commandant for that, too,” Johnson said. “I’ve already thanked him in person, I have, I have. He played me for a sucker once, and he wanted to do it again. Do you think the Lizards would have given me thirty years, or would they have just chucked me out the air lock?”
“They didn’t find any ginger on the scooter,” Stone said, tacitly admitting they had looked after all.
“They didn’t find it when you took it over,” Johnson said. “Suppose there hadn’t been that delay before you flew it. Suppose I’d taken it when Healey told me to. What would they have found then?”
“I expect the same nothing they found when I got to their ship.” Stone sounded unperturbed, but then he usually did. He’d been a test pilot before he started flying in space. It wasn’t that nothing fazed him, only that he wouldn’t admit it if something did.
Being a Marine, Johnson had a dose of the same symptoms himself. That inhuman calm was a little more than he could take right now, though. “My ass,” he said. “And it would have been my ass if I’d taken the scooter over to the Horned Akiss. You’ve got a lot of damn nerve pretending anything different, too.”
“If you already know all the answers, why do you bother asking the questions?” Stone pushed off and glided out of the control room.
Resisting the impulse to propel the senior pilot with a good, swift kick, Johnson stayed where he was. Home spun through the sky above, or possibly below, him. He went around the world every hour and a half, more or less. What would things have been like for the Lizards in the days when they were exploring Home? Seas here didn’t all connect; there was no world-girdling ocean, the way there was on Earth. The first Lizard to circumnavigate his globe had done it on foot. How long had it taken him? What dangers had he faced?
The Race could probably answer all those questions as fast as he could ask them. It didn’t matter that woolly mammoths and cave bears had seemed at least as likely as people to inherit the Earth when the first Lizard went all the way around Home. The data would still be there. Johnson was as sure of that as he was of his own name. The Race had more packrat genes in it than humanity did.
But Johnson didn’t call the Horned Akiss or one of the Race’s other orbiting spacecraft to try to find out. He didn’t want chapter and verse. He wanted his own imagination. What would that Lizard have thought when he got halfway around? The animals and plants would have been strange. So would the Lizards he was meeting. They would have spoken different languages and had odd customs.
None of that was left here any more, not even a trace. Home was a much more homogenized place than Earth. Lizards everywhere spoke the same language. Even local accents had just about disappeared. From everything Johnson could tell, all Lizard cities except maybe the capital-which was also a shrine, and so a special case-looked pretty much alike. You could drop a female from one into another on the far side of Home and she’d have no trouble getting along.
Is that where we’re going? Johnson wondered. Even nowadays, someone from Los Angeles wouldn’t have much trouble coping in, say, Dallas or Atlanta. But Boston and San Francisco and New York City and New Orleans were still very much their own places, and Paris and Jerusalem and Shanghai were whole separate worlds.
Thinking of separate worlds made Johnson shake his head. You could take that imaginary female of the Race and drop her into a town on Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, and she still wouldn’t miss a beat. Oh, she’d know she wasn’t on Home any more; there’d be Rabotevs or Hallessi on the streets. But she’d still fit in. They’d all speak the same language. They’d all reverence the spirits of Emperors past. She wouldn’t feel herself a stranger, the way a woman from Los Angeles would in Bombay.
And the Lizards didn’t seem to think they’d lost anything. To them, the advantages of uniformity outweighed the drawbacks. He shrugged. Maybe they were right. They’d certainly made their society work. People had been banging one another over the head long before the Race arrived, with no signs of a letup any time soon. If the Race had stayed away, they might have blown themselves to hell and gone by now.
If the Lizards had come to Earth now, in the twenty-first century, humans probably would have beaten the snot out of them. If they’d come any earlier than they did, they would have wiped the floor with people. Only in a narrow range of a few years would any sort of compromise solution have been possible. And yet that was what had happened. It was pretty strange, when you got right down to it.
Fiction has to be plausible. Reality just has to happen. Glen Johnson couldn’t remember who’d said that, but it held a lot of truth.
Most of Home was spread out before him. As usual, there was less cloud cover here than on Earth. Deserts and mountains and meadows and seas were all plainly visible, as if displayed on a map. Johnson wondered what effect Home’s geography had had on the Race’s cartography. Back on Earth, people had developed map projections to help them navigate across uncharted seas. Hardly any seas here were wide enough to be uncharted.
He shrugged. That was one more thing the Lizards could probably tell him about in great detail. But he didn’t want to know in great detail. Sometimes, like a cigar, idle curiosity was only idle curiosity.
Counting cold sleep, he hadn’t smoked a cigar in close to seventy years. Every now and then, the longing for tobacco still came back. He knew the stuff was poisonous. Everybody knew that these days. People still smoked even so.
He laughed, not that it was funny. “Might as well be ginger,” he muttered, “except you can’t have such a good time with it.”
All things considered, the Indians had a lot to answer for. The Europeans had come to the New World and given them measles and smallpox, and it didn’t look as if America had sent syphilis back across the Atlantic in return. But tobacco was the Indians’ revenge. It had probably killed more people than European diseases in the Americas.
The insidious thing about tobacco was that it killed slowly. Back in the days before doctors knew what they were doing, you were likely to die of something else before it got you. That meant people got the idea it was harmless, and the smoking habit-the smoking addiction-spread like a weed.
But with diseases like typhoid and smallpox
and TB knocked back on their heels, more and more people lived long enough for lung cancer and emphysema and smoking-caused heart attacks to do them in. And kicking the tobacco habit was no easier than it had ever been. Once the stuff got its hooks in you, hooked you were. Some people said quitting heroin was easier than quitting tobacco.
Johnson hadn’t had any choice. He was healthier than he would have been if he’d kept on lighting up. He knew that. He missed cigars and cigarettes even so. He’d never smoked a pipe. He managed to miss those, too.
Then something else occurred to him. Humanity and the Race were both liable to be lucky. While European diseases had devastated the natives of the Americas, Lizards and people hadn’t made each other sick. They’d shot one another, blown one another up, and blasted one another with nuclear weapons. But germ warfare didn’t seem to work out. Thank God for small favors, he thought.
Mickey Flynn came up the access tube and into the control room. “A penny for your thoughts,” he said. “I know I’m overspending, but such is life.”
“Thank you so much. I’m always glad to be around people who respect my abilities,” Johnson said.
“As soon as I find them, you may rest assured I’ll respect them,” Flynn replied. “Now-are you going to earn your stipend, or not?”
“I hate to risk bankrupting you, but I’ll try,” Johnson said. With Flynn, you had to fight dryer with dryer. Johnson expanded on his musings about tobacco and disease. When he finished, he asked, “How did I do?”
The other pilot gravely considered. “Well, I have to admit that’s probably worth a penny,” he said at last. “Who would have believed it?” He reached into the pocket of his shorts and actually produced a little bronze coin-the first real money Johnson had seen aboard the Admiral Peary. “Here. Don’t spend it all in the same place.” Flynn flipped the penny to Johnson.
“I do hope this won’t break you,” Johnson said, sticking it in his own pocket. “Why on earth did you bring it along, anyhow? How did they let you get away with it?”
