Down to Earth c-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “What did you say, honey?” Barbara called from their bedroom, which was at the other end of the house.

  “Nothing, really-just grousing,” he answered, a little embarrassed that she’d heard him. He looked at how much meat he’d cut. Just after the Lizards hatched, it would have kept them going for a couple of days. Now it was just one meal, or would be after he put a couple of more slices on the plate. Donald and Mickey were almost five months old now, and a lot bigger than when they’d fought their way out of their eggshells.

  He took the plate piled high with ham down the hail to the Lizards’ room. They still liked to bolt whenever they got the chance, so he shut the door at the end of the hall before opening theirs. These days, they didn’t quite make the mad dash for freedom they had when they were smaller. It seemed more a game of the sort puppies or kittens might play. No matter what it was, though, he didn’t feel like running after them, not at his age he didn’t.

  When he did open the door to their room, he found them rolling on the floor clawing and snapping at each other. They rarely did any damage: again, they could have been a couple of squabbling puppies. From what he’d learned on the Race’s computer network, these brawls were normal for hatchlings of their age. He didn’t give his leather gauntlets a workout by pulling them apart, the way he had the first few times he’d caught them tangling.

  Even though he didn’t try to separate them, they sprang apart when he stepped inside. “You know I don’t like you doing that, don’t you?” he said to them. He talked to them whenever he fed them-whenever he had anything to do with them at all. They didn’t pick up language and meaning as readily as human babies did. But he’d already seen they were a lot smarter than dogs or cats. That did make sense. By the time they grew up, they’d be at least as smart as he was, maybe smarter.

  For the time being, they were more interested in him as the dinner wagon than in him as a person. Their eye turrets focused on the plate of sliced ham to the exclusion of everything else. They let out little excited hisses and snorts. Maybe it was Sam’s imagination, but he thought he caught some humanlike sounds among their noises. Were they trying to imitate him and his family? He supposed he would have to listen to a comparison recording of the noises of Lizard-raised hatchlings to be certain.

  “Come and get it, boys,” he said, though Mickey and Donald might have been girls for all he knew. He crooked his finger in the come-here gesture people used.

  It wasn’t a normal Lizard gesture. When they wanted to tell someone to come, they used a twist of the eye turret to get the message across. But Yeager watched Mickey crook one of his skinny, scaly, claw-tipped tiny fingers in just the same way as he hurried forward to get his lunch.

  Sam felt like cheering. Instead, he gave Mickey the first piece of ham. That usually went to Donald, who was a little larger and a little quicker. Mickey made the ham disappear in a couple of quick snaps. He cocked his head to one side and turned an eye turret up at Yeager, who was feeding Donald his first slice of meat.

  What wheels were spinning inside Mickey’s head? Sam had wondered that since the day the Lizard hatched. Lizards thought as well as people, but they didn’t think like people in a lot of ways. And did hatchlings, could hatchlings, really think at all in the strict sense of the word when they had no words with which to think?

  Quite deliberately, Mickey bent his finger into that purely human come-here gesture again. “You little son of a gun!” Yeager exclaimed. “You figured out that that means you get extra, didn’t you?” He rewarded the hatchling with another piece of ham.

  Donald had one eye turret on Sam, the other on Mickey. He saw the reward his-brother? sister? — had got. When he crooked his finger, he was imitating Mickey, not Yeager.

  “No, you fellows aren’t dumb at all,” Sam said, and gave Donald some meat. From then on, both Lizards kept making come-hither gestures till Yeager ran out of ham. “Sorry, boys, that’s all there is,” he told them. They didn’t understand that, any more than puppies or kittens would have. But their little bellies bulged, so they weren’t in imminent danger of starving to death. He looked from one of them to the other. “I don’t know. I have the feeling you guys may start talking sooner than you would if you were around a bunch of other Lizards. What have you got to say about that?”

  They didn’t have anything to say about that. Jonathan wouldn’t have had anything to say about it at five months old, either. Physically, the Lizards were a long way ahead of where Jonathan had been at their age-he couldn’t even sit up unsupported then, let alone run and jump and fight. Yeager had always thought they were developing more slowly when it came to mental processes.

  Now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure. All right: maybe they wouldn’t talk as fast as a human baby would. But, plainly, a lot was going on inside their heads. It might not come out in words. One way or another, though, it looked as if it would come out.

  “See you later,” Sam told them, and waved goodbye. To his disappointment, they didn’t try to imitate that. Of course, it didn’t have food attached to its meaning. Maybe the big difference between the way they thought and the way people thought was just that they were a lot more practical.

  He went back to the kitchen, washed the plate, and set it in the dish drainer. Then he went back to the bedroom. “Those little guys are getting smarter,” he told Barbara, and explained what the hatchlings had done.

  “That is interesting,” she said. “I think you’re right. Something is definitely going on inside their heads-more than I would have expected, since they don’t have words with which to form concepts.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Sam answered: not surprising, considering that they were married and considering that he’d learned from her a lot of what he knew about the way languages worked. Something else was on his mind. “When do you suppose we can start letting them go around the house more?”

  “When we can teach them not to tear up the furniture so much,” Barbara replied promptly, as if she were talking about a couple of kittens that enjoyed sharpening their claws on the sofa. She went on, “If you’re right, though, we really might be able to start trying to teach them.”

  “Might be worth doing. They’d enjoy it.” Yeager was about to say something more, but paused, hearing footsteps on the front porch. If he could hear them, whoever was making them could hear him. A moment later, the mail slot in the front door opened. Envelopes landed on the rug. The footsteps went away. Sam said, “Let’s see… to whom we owe money today.” He wagged a finger under Barbara’s nose. “You were going to nail me if I said, ‘who we owe money to today.’ ”

  “Of course I was,” she answered. “That kind of grammar deserves it.” But she was laughing; she didn’t take herself too seriously, and didn’t mind teasing about what she admitted to be her obsession. They went out together to check the mail.

  “No bills,” Yeager said with some relief, shuffling the envelopes. “Just ads and political junk.”

  “I won’t be sorry to see the primary come,” Barbara said. “It’s still six weeks away, and look at everything we’re getting. ‘Junk’ is right.”

  Yeager held up a flyer extolling the virtues of President Warren. “I don’t know why his people bother to mail this stuff. He’s going to get reelected in a walk, let alone renominated. Christ, I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Democratic primary, too.”

  “He’s done a good job,” Barbara agreed.

  “I’ll vote for him again, no doubt about it,” Sam said. “And one of the reasons I’ll vote for him again is that he doesn’t take a lot of chances-which is probably why he has his people send this stuff out in carload lots.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Barbara said. “But, since we already know what we’re going to do…” She took the political flyers and the advertising circulars into the kitchen and pitched them in the trash.

  “Good for you,” Sam called after her. She was death on traveling salesmen, too. If they didn’t back away in a hur
ry, they’d get their noses smashed when she slammed the door in their faces. Having grown up on a farm, where such visitors were always made welcome, Sam liked to chat with them. Half the time, he’d buy things from them, too. Barbara and he didn’t have many arguments, but that could touch one off.

  He went into the study and turned on the human-built computer that shared desk space with-and used more of it than-the Lizards’ machine he preferred. But the Lizards didn’t have access to the rather fragmentary network that had grown up in the United States over the past few years. He certainly hoped they didn’t, anyhow. Still, if he could sneak around through their electronic playground, they were bound to be trying to sneak around through the USA’s.

  Waiting for the screen to come to life (which also took longer than it did in the Lizard-built computer), he wondered how good his country’s electronic security really was. He’d got in Dutch when he poked his nose in where it didn’t belong-he’d bought himself a royal chewing-out from a three-star general when he tried to find out what was going on with the Lewis and Clark before the United States was ready to let anybody know the answer.

  With any luck at all, the Race would have as much trouble. But he hadn’t tried to be sneaky. He supposed the Lizards would. And they’d been using computers as long as people had been counting on their fingers. How sneaky could they be if they put their minds to it?

  That wasn’t his problem. No: it was his problem, but he couldn’t do anything about solving it. He had other things on his mind, anyway. In his spare time-a concept ever more mythical, now that Mickey and Donald were around-he kept poking around, trying to find leads that would show either the Reich or the USSR had blown up the ships from the colonization fleet. If he ever did find anything, he intended to pass it on to the Lizards. As far as he was concerned, that attack had been murder, and could have touched off a nuclear war. He wouldn’t shed a tear if the Nazis or the Reds got hammered on account of it.

  Thanks to his dealings with the Race, he had a security clearance that let him go almost anywhere on the U.S. network (not quite, as he’d found out when he went snooping after data on the Lewis and Clark). He’d found a couple of interesting archives of signals received just after the orbiting weapon, whosever it was, launched its warheads at the orbiting ships of the colonization fleet.

  The screen went dark. After a moment, a message appeared: CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN. Disgustedly, he whacked the computer. That happened all too often with it. “Miserable half-assed piece of junk,” he growled.

  Few men in the history of the world-no, of the solar system-had enjoyed the view Glen Johnson had now. There was Ceres below him: mostly dust-covered rock, with a little ice here and there. It was the biggest asteroid in the whole damn belt, but not big enough to be perfectly round; it looked more like a roundish potato than anything else. The landscape put Johnson in mind of the heavily cratered parts of the moon. Rocks of all sizes had been slamming into Ceres for as long as it had been out there.

  Colonel Walter Stone had a different way of looking at things. “That’s the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “Yeah, any kid with that many zits wouldn’t like high school a whole hell of a lot,” Johnson agreed.

  “None of the other asteroids can tease Ceres, though,” his mentor observed. “They’re all just as ugly and just as pockmarked-or if there are any that aren’t, we haven’t found ’em yet. Still, no matter how ugly it is, we’re in business here, and that’s what counts.”

  “We’ve been in business for a while, too,” Johnson observed. “I can’t believe how fast we got here.”

  “Just a couple of months.” Stone sounded as complacent as if he’d got out behind the Lewis and Clark and pushed. “You have to remember, Glen old boy”-he put on a British accent too fruity to be real-“this isn’t one of those old-fashioned rocket ships. They’re as out of date as buggy whips, don’t you know.”

  “And we could have been a little faster, too, if we hadn’t swung wide to keep from coming too close to the sun.” Johnson shook his head in slow wonder. “I wouldn’t have believed how quick we could get here if I hadn’t done the math-well, had the math done for me, anyhow.”

  “And if we hadn’t been hanging around here in orbit for the past three and a half months,” Stone added. “Except we’re not really hanging around. We’re going exploring. That’s what it’s all about.”

  “Finding that big chunk of ice only a few hundred miles away was a lucky break,” Johnson remarked.

  “That’s not a chunk of ice-it’s an asteroid,” Walter Stone said. “And it was only part luck. There are lots of chunks of-uh, icy asteroids floating around here. The first exploration team saw that. No reason why one of ’em shouldn’t be someplace where we can get at it.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Mickey Flynn, a large, solidly built fellow who let nothing faze him, floated into the control room. “I’m here a couple of minutes early out of the goodness of my heart,” the Lewis and Clark ’s second pilot said, “so you poor peasants can get an early start on supper. I expect nothing in return, mind you. Worship isn’t necessary. Even simple adoration seems excessive.”

  “You’re what seems excessive,” Stone said with a snort. Being senior to Flynn, he could sass him with, if not impunity, at least something close. “And why should we trust anybody who’s named after a knockout drop?”

  “That’s Finn, my cousin,” Flynn said in dignified tones. “Sassenachs, the both of you. And Sassenachs wasting their time getting out of here by giving a hard time to a son of Erin who never did ’em any harm.”

  Johnson undid his harness. “I’ll go to supper,” he said, unsnapping his safety belt. Now that the Lewis and Clark was in orbit around Ceres, he didn’t even have.01g to hold him in his seat. He pushed off, grabbed the nearest handhold, and then swung onto the next. Still snorting, Stone followed him.

  Because of the banter they’d traded with their relief, the mess hall was already crowded when they got to it. Then the banter started up again. A woman called, “If you’re here, who’s flying the damn ship?”

  “Nobody,” Johnson shot back. “And if you don’t believe me, go ask Flynn. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

  “No, he’d say that was going on during the shift before his,” somebody else returned. Walter Stone said something pungent. Johnson mimed being wounded. In spite of that, he was grinning. When he first involuntarily came aboard the Lewis and Clark, people wouldn’t give him the time of day. They treated him like a spy. A lot of people had thought he was a spy.

  Now he was one of the crew. He might not have helped build the spaceship, but he’d helped fly her. And even if he was a spy, he couldn’t very well telephone whoever he was spying for, not from a quarter of a billion miles away he couldn’t. What he could do, better than Stone or Flynn or anybody else, was fly the little hydrogen-burning rockets the Lewis and Clark used to explore the asteroids in Ceres’ neighborhood. They weren’t just like Peregrine, the upper stage he’d flown countless times in Earth orbit, but they weren’t very far removed, either. He understood them, the way his grandfather had understood horses.

  He didn’t fully understand the dynamics of chow lines in weightlessness, not yet. At last, though, he drifted up in front of the assistant dietitian, who gave him chicken and potatoes that had been frozen and dried out and were now reconstituted with water. They tasted like ghosts of their former selves.

  With them, he got a squeeze bulb full of water and a lidded plastic cup full of pills: vitamins and calcium supplements and God only knew what all else. “I think we carry more of these than we do of reaction mass,” he said, shaking the pills.

  The assistant dietitian gave him a dirty look. “What if we do?” she said. “If we get here but can’t finish the mission because we’re malnourished, what’s the point of coming at all?”

  “Well, you’ve got me there,” Glen said, and drifted away. There weren’t any tables or chairs-they were no good in weight
lessness, or even in.01g. Instead, he snagged a handhold and started gossiping with some people who looked interesting-which was to say, at least in part, some people who were female.

  More women had come along in the Lewis and Clark than he’d expected when he came aboard: they made up something close to a third of the crew. Very few of them were married to male crew members, either. Come to that, very few of the men were married. Johnson was divorced, Walter Stone a widower, Mickey Flynn a bachelor, and they were pretty typical of the crew.

  And military rules about fraternization were a dead letter. The Lewis and Clark wasn’t going home again. More people might come out, but nobody here was going back. People had to do the best they could with their lives out here, and to hell with Mrs. Grundy. So far as Johnson knew, nobody’d got pregnant yet, but that wasn’t through lack of effort.

  “Hi, Glen,” said the mineralogist, a brunette named Lucy Vegetti. She was on the plump side, but he liked her smile. He liked any woman’s smile these days. She went on, “Have you heard about the latest samples up from Ceres?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, sure haven’t. What’s the new news?”

  “Plenty of aluminum, plenty of magnesium, plenty of all the light metals,” she said. “All we need is energy, and we can get them out of the rocks.”

  “We’ve got energy, by God-we’ve got more energy than you can shake a stick at,” Johnson answered, pointing back toward the engine on its boom at the rear of the Lewis and Clark. “Just have to worry about getting it out.” He was also worrying about getting it in, but not to the point where it made him stupid. Any man who lived by himself and didn’t take advantage of the five-finger discount was a damn fool, as far as he was concerned.

  One of the ship’s three doctors-everything aboard the Lewis and Clark was as redundant as anybody could figure out how to make it-said, “But we can’t build everything we’ll need for the project out of aluminum and magnesium.”