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“I stuck it under my tongue when I went into cold sleep, so I could pay Charon the ferryman’s fee in case I had to cross the Styx instead of this other trip we were making,” Flynn answered, deadpan.
“Yeah, sure. Now tell me another one,” Johnson said.
“All right. I won it off the commandant in a poker game.” Flynn sounded as serious with that as he had with the other.
“My left one,” Johnson said sweetly. “Healey’d give you an IOU, and it wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on.”
“Don’t you trust our esteemed leader?” Flynn asked.
Johnson trusted Lieutenant General Healey, all right. That it was trust of a negative sort had nothing to do with anything-so he told himself, anyhow. He said, “When I have the chance, I’ll buy you a drink with this.”
As far as he knew, there was no unofficial alcohol aboard the Admiral Peary. He wouldn’t have turned down a drink, any more than he would have turned down a cigar. Flynn said, “While you’re at it, you can buy me a new car, too.”
“Sure. Why not?” Johnson said grandly. What could be more useless to a man who had to stay weightless the rest of his days?
“A likely story. What’s your promise worth?” Flynn said.
“It’s worth its weight in gold,” Johnson answered.
“And now I’m supposed to think you a wit.” Flynn looked down his rather tuberous nose at Johnson. “I’ll think you half a wit, if you like. You filched that from The Devil’s Dictionary. Deny it if you can.”
“I didn’t know it was against the rules,” Johnson said.
“There’s an old whine in a new bottle,” Flynn said loftily.
“Ouch.” Johnson winced. He was a straightforward man. Puns didn’t come naturally to him. When he went up against Mickey Flynn, that sometimes left him feeling like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. All of a sudden, he laughed. The Lizards probably felt that way about the whole human race.
When Pesskrag called Ttomalss, the female physicist was more agitated than he had ever seen her. “Do you know what this means?” she demanded. “Do you have the faintest idea?”
“No. I am not a physicist,” Ttomalss said. “Perhaps you will calm yourself and tell me. I hope so, at any rate.”
“Very well. It shall be done. It shall be attempted, anyhow.” In the monitor, Pesskrag visibly tried to pull herself together. She took a deep breath and then said, “This has taken the egg of the physics we have known since before Home was unified, dropped it on a rock, and seen something altogether new and strange hatch out of it. Each experiment is more startling than the last. Sometimes my colleagues and I have trouble believing what the data show us. But then we repeat the experiments, and the results remain the same. Astonishing!” She used an emphatic cough.
“Fascinating.” Ttomalss wondered if he was lying. “Can you tell someone who is not a physicist what this means to him?”
“Before we understood-or thought we understood-the nature of matter and energy, we threw rocks and shot arrows at one another. Afterwards, we learned to fly between the stars. The changes coming here will be no less profound.”
“You suggested such things before,” Ttomalss said slowly. “I take it that what you suggested then now seems more likely?”
“Morning twilight suggests the sun. Then the sun comes over the horizon, and you see how trivial the earlier suggestion was.” Pesskrag might have been a physicist by profession, but she spoke poetically.
However poetically she spoke, she forgot something. Ttomalss said, “The Big Uglies dropped this egg some time ago. What sort of sunrise are they presently experiencing?”
“I do not know that. I cannot know that, being so many light-years removed from Tosev 3,” Pesskrag replied. “I must assume they are some years ahead of us. They made these discoveries first. From what you say, they are also quicker than we to translate theory into engineering.”
“Yes, that is a truth,” Ttomalss agreed. “If anything, that is an understatement. I asked you this before. Now I ask it again: can you prepare a memorandum telling me in nontechnical terms what sort of engineering changes you expect to hatch from these theoretical changes?”
This time, Pesskrag made the affirmative gesture. “I think I had better now. We are further along than we were, so what I say will be much less speculative than it would have the last time you asked me. I should send it to you by the day after tomorrow.”
“That will do. I thank you. Farewell.” Ttomalss broke the connection.
He knew memoranda often hatched more slowly than their authors thought they would. This one, though, came when Pesskrag promised it. Ttomalss read it on the monitor before printing a hard copy. Once he had read it, his first impulse was to conclude that Pesskrag had lost her mind. But she had evidence on her side, and he had only his feelings. He was, as he’d said, no physicist himself.
He was also alarmed. If she did know what she was talking about… If the Big Uglies knew the same sorts of things, and more besides… Ttomalss printed out the memorandum and took it to Atvar’s chamber. He was glad to find the retired fleetlord there. “This is something you should see, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said, and held out the paper.
“What is it, Senior Researcher?” Atvar seemed distracted, uninterested. “You will forgive me, I hope, but I have other things on my mind.”
“None of them is more important than this,” Ttomalss insisted.
“No?” Atvar swung one eye turret toward him. “I am concerned with the survival, or lack of same, of both the Race and the Big Uglies. Do you still hold to your claim?”
“I do, Exalted Fleetlord,” Ttomalss replied.
Slowly, Atvar’s other eye turret followed the first. “You really mean that,” he observed, astonishment in his voice. Ttomalss made the affirmative gesture. Atvar held out his hand in a way that suggested he was about as ready to claw as to grab. “Very well. Let me see this, so I can dispose of it and go on to other things.”
“Here, Exalted Fleetlord.” Ttomalss handed him the printout. Atvar began to read with one eye turret, as if to say the memorandum deserved no more. Ttomalss waited. Before long, the fleetlord was going over the document with both eyes, a sign it had engaged his interest. Ttomalss made the affirmative gesture again, this time to himself. He’d expected nothing less.
At last, Atvar looked up from the printout. “You really believe this will happen, Senior Researcher?”
“Pesskrag has never struck me as one who exaggerates for the sake of winning attention,” Ttomalss replied. “She believes this will happen. So do her colleagues. If it does, it will be important.”
“If it does, it will turn the world-several worlds-upside down,” Atvar said. Ttomalss could hardly disagree with that. The fleetlord went on, “Did I note that this is information derived from experiments modeled after those the Big Uglies have already carried out?”
“You did, yes.” Ttomalss waited to see how Atvar would respond to that.
The fleetlord let out a furious hiss. “We are going to have our work cut out for us, then, are we not?”
“It would appear so.” Ttomalss wondered how large an understatement that was.
Atvar said, “Do your pet physicists have an idea how long this will need to go from experiment to production?”
“This report does not state it,” Ttomalss answered. “The last time I asked Pesskrag the same question, she gave me an estimate-hardly more than a guess, she said-of at least a hundred fifty years.”
“That was her estimate for us?” Atvar asked. When Ttomalss showed that it was, Atvar asked a grimly sardonic question: “How long will it take the Big Uglies?”
“Again, Exalted Fleetlord, I have no idea. I am only a messenger here. Pesskrag would not offer an estimate for that.”
“Of course she would not.” Yes, irony had its claws in the fleetlord, all right. “What do she and her colleagues know of Tosevites? About what I know of physics. They could hardly know less than th
at, could they?”
