Down to Earth c-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “I have nothing to tell you,” Liu Han repeated, though she had to force the words out through lips numb with fear. One of the things the little scaly devils had learned from mankind was frightfulness. Just after coming to China, they would never have made such a threat.

  “And yet,” Ttomalss said in musing tones, “you did not physically torment me when I was in your power, though you could have done so. And, whether you believe me or not, I tried to do my best by your hatching: the best I could do, at any rate, given my limitations. Because of that, ordering the two of you subjected to torment would be unpleasant.”

  A little scaly devil with a conscience? Liu Han would not have counted on finding such a bourgeois affectation among the scaly devils. But, having found it, she was more than willing to take advantage of it. “You are an honorable opponent,” she said, though what was honor but another bourgeois affectation?

  “I wish I could say the same of your faction,” Ttomalss replied. “Since acquiring a hatchling to raise, I have not been involved with affairs in this subregion, you will understand, but I did review the record before making arrangements for this interview. Assassinations, sabotage…”

  “They are the weapons of the weak against the strong,” Liu Han said. “The Race is strong. If we had landcruisers and explosive-metal bombs, we would use them instead-believe me, we would.”

  “Oh, I do believe you,” Ttomalss said. “You need have no doubt about that. The question now remaining is how to make sure you and your hatchling and your male companion can do the Race no further harm.”

  No matter how hot the chamber was, a chill ran through Liu Han. She knew what the Party would do under such circumstances. Liquidation was the word that sprang to mind. The little scaly devils had not been in the habit of executing their opponents, but they grew more ruthless as time went by. That was the dialectic in action, too, though not in a way that worked to Liu Han’s advantage. She stood mute, waiting to hear her fate.

  In the end, she didn’t. Ttomalss said, “Those who administer the subregion will make the decision there. They can take their time; no point in haste as long as you are securely confined. If I am asked for my input, I will tell them that you could have done worse to me than you did.”

  “Thank you for that much,” Liu Han said. Instead of answering, Ttomalss broke the connection; the screen Liu Han was facing went dark. Her hopes were dark, too. The guard gestured with his rifle. She pulled on her jacket once more as she followed him out of the building. It would be cold out there in the camp. She wondered if she would spend the rest of her life behind razor wire.

  “Find Polaris,” Sam Yeager muttered, peering into the northern sky. When he did find the North Star, he aimed the polar axis of the, little refractor Barbara had bought him for Christmas toward it. That would let the equatorial mount follow the stars with only one slow-motion control.

  Loosening the tension screws on the right-ascension and declination axes, he swung the scope itself toward Jupiter, which glowed yellow-white in the southwestern sky. He sighted along the tube, then peered through the finder scope attached to it. When he spotted the planet in the finder’s field, he grunted in satisfaction and, fumbling a little in the dark, tightened the screws so the gears in the slow-motion controls would mesh. The knob for the right-ascension control was by the telescope’s focusing mechanism, that for the declination control on a flexible cable. Using them both, he brought Jupiter to the meeting point of the finder’s crosshairs. That done, he peered into the eyepiece of the main telescope-and there was Jupiter, fifty times life size.

  He fiddled with the focus. He could see three of the four Galilean satellites, and could also see the cloud bands girdling the planet. He thought about switching to an eyepiece with a shorter focal length for a closer look, but decided not to bother. With only a 2.4-inch objective lens, he wouldn’t see that much more. He’d learned that light grasp was really more important than magnifying power.

  Instead, he swung the scope toward Mars, a bloodred star in the east. When he found it, it looked like a tiny copper coin-only about a third as wide as Jupiter-in the low-power eyepiece. Now he did choose the 6mm orthoscopic instead of the 18mm Kellner-he wanted to see everything he possibly could. Mars got bigger and brighter day by day. It was nearing opposition, when it would be closest to Earth and best suited for observing.

  Even at 150 power, he couldn’t see much: the bright polar cap, and a dark patch on the red he thought was Syrtis Major. He couldn’t see the craters that pocked the planet’s surface. They weren’t beyond just the reach of his little amateur’s instrument; no Earth-based telescope could make them out.

  He chuckled under his breath. “No canals, either. No thoats. No four-armed green men swinging swords. No nothing.” The Lizards thought hysterically funny the Mars that people like Percival Lowell and Edgar Rice Burroughs had imagined. So did Yeager-now. When he was a kid, though, he’d devoured Burroughs’ tales of Barsoom.

  After he’d looked at Mars long enough to suit him, he turned on a flashlight whose plastic bulb cover he’d painted red with Barbara’s nail polish-red light didn’t hurt night vision. He chuckled again, thinking of all the things he’d learned in the couple of months since he’d got the scope for a present.

  “Who would have thought I’d’ve found myself a hobby at my age?” he said. He’d bought himself a Norton’s Star Atlas to find out what he could see now that he had the telescope. He ran his finger down the listing of double stars. “Gamma Leonis,” he muttered, and then nodded. The star was bright enough to be easy to spot-not very far from Mars at the moment, in fact-and its components were far enough apart for his little refractor to be able to split them.

  A couple of minutes later, he softly clapped his hands together. There they were, the brighter of the pair golden, the somewhat dimmer companion a dull red. A handsome one, he thought. Taking a pen from his breast pocket, he put a check by ?Leonis in the Norton’s. Little by little, he was learning the Greek alphabet, one more thing he’d never thought he’d do.

  That bright, moving light in the northern sky was a plane coming in for a landing at Los Angeles International Airport. Airplane lights coming straight at him had once tricked him into thinking he’d discovered a couple of supernovas. He knew better now.

  He glanced toward the back of the house. The room Mickey and Donald used was quiet and dark; they’d gone to sleep. Jonathan was still up studying. He had had the courtesy to pull down the shade. That golden glow didn’t bother Sam’s night vision much, where raw light from the overhead lamp would have.

  Yeager sighed. He’d hoped Jonathan might get interested in astronomy, too, but no such luck. Oh, the kid had come out and peered through the telescope a couple of times, but what he saw didn’t excite him. Sam could tell. When Jonathan thought of heavenly bodies, he didn’t think of Jupiter or Gamma Leonis-he thought of Karen, or possibly Kassquit.

  I was like that myself once upon a time, Sam thought. He remembered some of the cheap sporting houses he’d visited in his minor-league days-cheap because a guy in the bush leagues couldn’t afford any better and because a lot of the towns he went through didn’t boast any better. If he ever found out Jonathan was doing anything along those lines, he’d tan the kid’s hide for him. He recognized his own hypocrisy, and didn’t feel like doing anything about it. Do as I say, not as I do.

  He clicked on the red light again to check what other double stars he could look for as long as he was out here. N Hydrae-a pair of stars of just about sixth magnitude, separated by a bit more than nine seconds of arc-was easily within the capacity of his telescope. He swung it south from Leo.

  Splitting N Hydrae wouldn’t particularly challenge the scope. Finding it, though, would challenge him. Together, its stars added up to one fifth-magnitude object. In other words, it was invisible to the naked eye in the streetlight-saturated sky of Los Angeles. He would have to find a brighter nearby star he could see and then either starhop with the finder or use his setti
ng circles to bring N Hydrae into view.

  He decided to starhop; setting circles still seemed like black magic to him. Taking the telescope out to the middle of the back yard so he could see over the eucalyptus tree next door that helped spoil the view to the southeast, he realigned the polar axis on Polaris, then found the battered rectangle of stars that formed the main part of the constellation Corvus, and then went south and east from the Crow toward his target, checking his path with the star atlas each step of the way.

  And there, by God, was the star that had to be N Hydrae. He turned off the flashlight and worked the slow-motion controls to center it on the finder’s crosshairs. He’d just turned away from the finder and bent his head toward the main telescope’s eyepiece when a noise from off to one side made him look up.

  Someone was scrambling over the fence that separated Yeager’s yard from the one behind it. Sam straightened. He wished he had his . 45, but it was back in the house. The intruder-a man-dropped down into the yard and trotted toward the house.

  He didn’t see Sam, who was partly screened by a lemon tree he’d planted a few years before. And, plainly, the intruder wasn’t looking for trouble. He came past the tree as if he had business to take care of and wanted to get it over with as fast as he could. Something that wasn’t a gun glistened in his right hand.

  “Hello, there,” Yeager said. The other fellow stopped as dead as if he’d been turned to stone. Sam’s dark-adapted eyes had no trouble seeing how astonished he looked. Yeager didn’t waste more than an instant on his expression, though. He took advantage of the frozen surprise he’d created and jumped the intruder.

  He got in a left to the face and a right to the belly that made the stranger double up. The other fellow tried to fight back after that, but never got the chance. One of the things the Army had taught Sam was that fighting fair wasted time and was liable to get you into trouble. As soon as he saw the opening, he kicked the intruder in the crotch.

  The fellow let out a horrible shriek and dropped the thing he’d been holding. It was a bottle, and it smashed when it hit the grass. The stink of gasoline filled Yeager’s nostrils. “Christ!” he burst out. “That’s a fucking Molotov cocktail!”

  Just winning the fight suddenly wasn’t enough any more. The intruder was down on the grass, writhing and clutching at himself. Sam kicked him again, this time in the face. He groaned and went limp.

  “Jonathan!” Yeager shouted. He stood there in the back yard, his heart pounding. I’m too old for this, he thought. Mutt Daniels had said that when they went into combat against the Lizards. Sam was as old now as Mutt had been then. He understood how his ex-manager had felt. “Jonathan!” he yelled again.

  A moment later, the back door opened. The porch light came on. “What’s up, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

  Blinking against the glare, Sam pointed to the man he’d beaten. “This son of a bitch was going to try and burn our house down,” he said. Barbara would have wanted him to say try to burn. Right this second, he didn’t care what his wife would have wanted. “Don’t just stand there, goddammit. Throw me some twine so I can tie him, and then call the cops.”

  “Right.” The porch light gleamed off Jonathan’s shaved scalp. He went back into the kitchen, found a ball of twine-good, solid stuff, not kite string-and threw it to Sam. Then he disappeared again. Yeager heard him talking on the phone and to Barbara. They both came out to see what was going on. By then, Sam had the intruder’s hands tied behind him and his ankles bound together.

  The man’s eyes were open when the police got there. “Jesus Christ, Yeager,” a cop said, looking at the fragments of glass and sniffing the gasoline. “Somebody out there doesn’t like you much, does he?”

  “Doesn’t look that way,” Sam answered. “Now that you’ve got this guy, maybe you can find out who.”

  “Hope so,” the Gardena policeman said. “Let’s get him into proper handcuffs-gotta look right when we take him to the station, you know.”

  “Okay by me,” Yeager said. “Give me a call when you know something, will you? I want to get to the bottom of this.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why anybody’d have it in for me, but somebody sure does.”

  “Yeah.” While his partner covered him, the cop cut the twine with which Sam had bound the intruder and handcuffed him instead. Then he hauled him to his feet. “Come on, pal. We’ve got some talking to do.” He led him out to the squad car.

  Yeager collapsed the legs to the telescope tripod and brought the instrument inside. “It’s a good thing you were out there,” Barbara said, shivering even though she was wearing a warm housecoat. “Otherwise…”

  “Don’t remind me.” Sam stowed the scope on the service porch-the same spot Mickey and Donald’s incubator had once occupied. Then he poured himself a stiff belt of bourbon. After he’d downed it, he poured another one. That let him get some sleep.

  When the Gardena police didn’t call him for two days, he called them. “Sorry, sir,” said the lieutenant to whom his call was passed. “I can only tell you two things. That fellow didn’t tell us anything much, but we didn’t have him long. The FBI took charge of him yesterday morning.”

  “Did they?” Sam said. “Nobody tells me anything-they haven’t called me for a statement yet, either. Give me their number, will you?”

  “Yes, sir,” the police lieutenant said. “It’s KLondike 5-3971.”

  “Thanks.” Yeager wrote it down, hung up, and dialed it. When he got the Los Angeles FBI headquarters, he explained who he was and what he wanted to know.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” The fellow on the other end of the line didn’t sound sorry; he sounded bored. “I’m not allowed to release any information on the phone. I’m sure you understand why.”

  “Okay.” Sam suppressed a sigh. Bureaucrats, he thought. He’d complained about them to Kassquit. “If I come down there and show you who I am, will somebody please tell me what the hell’s going on?”

  “I don’t know anything about that, sir,” the FBI man said, and hung up on him.

  When Yeager drove downtown, he did it in full uniform, hoping to overawe the flunkies. That worked-to a point. He got kicked up to a senior inspector named O’Donohue. The Irishman looked him over, inspected his ID, and said, “All I can tell you, Lieutenant Colonel, is that we’ve flown this fellow to Little Rock for more questioning.”

  “Christ,” Sam said. “Who the hell is he, anyway, and why won’t anybody tell me anything?”

  “We’re still trying to find out, sir,” O’Donohue answered. “When we do, I’m sure you’ll be contacted?”

  “Are you? I wish I were.” Yeager got to his feet. “All I see is that I’m getting the runaround, and I wish to hell I knew why.”

  O’Donohue just looked at him and didn’t say a word. After perhaps half a minute, Yeager put on his hat and walked out. He wondered if anyone would call him. Nobody did.

  “Would you believe,” Ttomalss said, “there are actually times when I wish I were a Big Ugly?”

  In the monitor on his desk, Felless’ image drew back in surprise and alarm. “No, I would not believe that,” she said, and used an emphatic cough to show how strongly she disbelieved it. “By the Emperor, why would you entertain such a mad desire?”

  “Because our society has trained us for many thousands of years to treat vengeance as undesirable,” he answered, “and because I wish I could enjoy taking my vengeance on the Tosevite female who kidnapped and imprisoned me during the fighting. Big Uglies still see nothing unfitting in revenge.”

  “Ah,” Felless said. “That, at least, I can understand. What I would like is vengeance on the male from the conquest fleet who first discovered ginger.”

  “And I can understand that,” Ttomalss said. “At least you finally managed to escape from Nuremberg.”

  “This Marseille place is not much of an improvement,” Felless said with another emphatic cough. “And the Big Uglies here, I think, may be even more addled than those in Nuremberg. I ev
en had one female refuse what would be a great reward for a Tosevite. Addled, I tell you.”

  “Most likely a criminal, or someone else with a good reason not to stick her snout in the air,” Ttomalss said.

  “It could be,” Felless said. “I had wondered about that myself. Having someone of your experience confirm it is valuable.”

  “I thank you,” Ttomalss said. But he didn’t want to talk about things that concerned Felless; he wanted to go on with his own train of thought. “Revenge is not unknown among us, or else Shiplord Straha would not still be living the life of an exile in the not-empire called the United States. I doubt Fleetlord Atvar will ever forgive him.”

  “I have heard something of this scandal,” Felless said. “Did Straha not try to raise a mutiny against the fleetlord?”

  “Not exactly-he tried to relieve Atvar, but proved not to have quite enough support among the other fleetlords,” Ttomalss answered. “But Atvar would have punished him as if it were a mutiny. I, though, cannot escape the belief that such efforts at vengeance are wrong.”

  “I have long been of the opinion that you males of the conquest fleet, from continual association with Big Uglies over so many years, have become more like them than is healthy,” Felless said.

  “It could be so,” Ttomalss said. “The converse is that you of the colonization fleet sometimes seem to have no understanding whatever of the realities of life on Tosev 3 and the need for certain accommodations with the Tosevites.”

  “We understand more than you think,” Felless replied. “But you of the conquest fleet do not seem to grasp the difference between understanding and approval. Approving of what goes on is in many cases impossible; we intend to change it.”

  “Good luck,” Ttomalss said.

  “And the continual sarcasm of the males of the conquest fleet is not appreciated, either,” Felless snapped. “I bid you farewell.” She broke the connection.

  Ttomalss glared at the blank monitor screen. As far as he was concerned, Felless represented a good part of what had gone wrong with the colonization fleet. Finding he represented what she thought was wrong with the conquest fleet did nothing to increase his fondness for her.