Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  He couldn’t mean it literally—so far as Johnson knew, there were no live Lizards within a couple of a hundred million miles. But what he likely did mean wasn’t hard to figure out: “Have we got permission from Little Rock to blast their spy ship to hell and gone, sir?”

  “No.” Healey looked as if having to give that answer made him want to bite, too. “But we have got permission to explore the possibility of covering the damn thing with black-painted plastic sheeting or aluminum foil or anything else we can spare that’ll make it harder for them to monitor us.”

  Johnson nodded. “I’ve heard there’s a second ship in the neighborhood, too.”

  Before he could say anything else, Brigadier General Healey pounced: “Where did you hear that, and from whom? It’s not supposed to be public news.” Johnson stood—or rather, floated—mute. He wasn’t about to rat on Lucy Vegetti, even if she hadn’t given him a tumble yet. Healey made a sour face. “Never mind, then. What you heard is true. We can only hope there aren’t any others we haven’t found.”

  “Yes, sir.” Johnson considered. “Well, if that’s so, how much trouble can we give them? Blind ’em, sure, but can we jam their radar and their radio receivers? If we can’t, is throwing a sack over them worth the trouble we’ll get into for doing it?”

  Now Healey turned the full power of that high-wattage glare on him. “If you’re yellow, Lieutenant Colonel, I can find somebody else for the job.”

  “Sir, as far as I’m concerned, you can go to the devil,” Johnson said evenly.

  Healey looked as if he’d just got a punch in the nose. Unless Johnson missed his guess, nobody’d told the commandant anything like that in a hell of a long time. He wished he’d said something worse. Goddamn military discipline, he thought. Alter a couple of deep, angry breaths, Healey growled, “You are insubordinate.”

  “Maybe so, sir,” Johnson replied, “but all I was trying to do was figure the angles, and you went and called me a coward. You’ve got my war record, sir. If that doesn’t tell you different, I don’t know what would.”

  Brigadier General Healey kept on glaring. Johnson floated in place, one hand securing him to the chair bolted to the floor in front of the commandant’s desk, the chair in which he’d be sitting if there were gravity or a semblance of it. When he didn’t buckle or beg for mercy, Healey said, “Very well, let it go.” But it wasn’t forgotten; every line of his face declared how unforgotten it was.

  Trying to get back to business, Johnson asked, “Sir, is it worth it to do whatever we can to those ships if we don’t destroy them? If it is, send me. I’ll go.”

  “As yet, we are still evaluating that,” Healey said gruffly. “Not all the variables are known.”

  “Well, of course we can’t know ahead of time what the Lizards will do if . . .” Johnson’s voice trailed away. Healey’s face had changed. He’d missed something, and the commandant was silently laughing at him on account of it. And, after a moment, he realized what it was. “Oh. Do we know if these ships are armed, sir?”

  “That’s one of the things we’re interested in finding out,” the commandant answered, deadpan.

  “Yes, sir,” Johnson said, just as deadpan. So Healey was thinking about turning him into a guinea pig, eh? That didn’t surprise him, not even a little bit. “When do you want me to go out, and which one do you want me to visit?”

  “We haven’t prepared the covering material yet,” Healey said. “When we do—and if we decide to—you will be informed. Until then, dismissed.”

  After saluting, Johnson launched himself out of the commandant’s office. He glided straight past Captain Guilloux, then used the handholds in the corridor to pull himself back to his tiny cubicle. The only thing his bunk and the straps securing him to it did that a stretch of empty air couldn’t was to make sure he didn’t bump up against anything while sleeping.

  He kept waiting for the order to climb into a hot rod and go blind one of the Lizards’ spy ships. The order kept on not coming. He didn’t want to ask Brigadier General Healey why it didn’t come. After a week or so, he broached the subject to Walter Stone in an oblique way.

  Stone nodded. “I know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you have to worry very much.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” Johnson said, which would do for a lie till a better one came along. “I was curious, though; I’ll say that.”

  “Sure you were.” Stone grinned at him, there in the privacy of the Lewis and Clark’s control room. Johnson grinned back. The spaceship’s chief pilot had been through the mill, even if he was an Army Air Force man and not a Marine. He knew the feeling of going out on a mission from which you didn’t expect to come back. He went on, “You don’t know this officially because I don’t know it officially, but we got, uh, discouraged from going on with that.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Johnson leaned forward in his seat. “I’m all ears.”

  “That’s not what Healey thinks—he figures you’re all mouth and brass balls,” Stone answered with a chuckle. “Anyway, this is all scuttlebutt, and you haven’t heard it from me.” Solemnly, Johnson crossed his heart, which made the number-one pilot laugh out loud. “What I heard is, we did a dry run, with a hot rod under radio control. Whoever was in charge of the beast inched it up to the spy ship, and when it got close enough . . .”

  “Yeah?” Johnson said. “What happened then?” Stone had hooked him, sure as if he’d been telling a hell of a dirty joke.

  “Then the damn thing—the spy ship, not the hot rod—broke radio silence, or that’s what they say,” Stone told him. “It sent out a recorded message in the Lizards’ language, something like, ‘You come any closer or do anything cute and we count it as an act of war.’ And so they backed up the hot rod and sent it home, and nobody’s said a word about it since.”

  “Is that a fact?” Johnson said.

  “Damned if I know,” Stone answered. “But it’s what I’ve heard.”

  No wonder Healey isn’t sending for me, Johnson thought. Then something else crossed his mind: I’m damn glad I didn’t open up on the lousy thing.

  13

  Jonathan Yeager sprawled across his bed, working on the chemistry notes and problems he’d missed because he’d gone into space. Karen sat in the desk chair a couple of feet away. The bedroom door remained decorously open. That was a house rule. Now that he’d finally turned twenty-one, Jonathan had proposed to his folks that they change it. They’d proposed to him that he keep his mouth shut as long as he lived under their roof.

  He pointed to a stretch of Karen’s notes he had trouble following. “What was Dr. Cobb saying about stoichiometry here?”

  Karen pulled the chair closer and bent over to see what he was talking about. Her red hair tickled his ear. “Oh, that,” she said, a little sheepishly. “I didn’t quite get that myself.”

  He sighed. “Okay, I’ll ask after lecture tomorrow.” He made motions that would have implied tearing his hair if he’d had any hair to tear. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get all caught up, and I was only gone a week.”

  “What was it like?” Karen asked. She’d been asking that ever since he got back from Kitty Hawk. He’d tried several different ways of explaining, but none of them satisfied her—or him, really.

  After some thought, he took another shot at it: “You’ve read Edgar Rice Burroughs, right?” When Karen nodded, he went on, “You know how the apes raised Tarzan but he still turned out to be a man pretty much like other men?” She nodded again. Jonathan said, “Well, it was nothing like that. I mean, nothing at all. Kassquit looks like a person, but she doesn’t act like a person. She acts just like a Lizard. My dad was right.” He laughed a little; that wasn’t something he said every day. “We just play at being Lizards. She’s not playing. She wishes she had scales—you can tell.”

  Karen nodded again, this time thoughtfully. “I can see that, I guess.” She paused, then found a different question, or maybe a different version of the same one: “How did it feel,
talking about important things with a woman who wasn’t wearing any clothes?”

  Was that what she’d been getting at all along? Jonathan answered, “For me, it felt funny at first. Kassquit didn’t even think about it, and I tried not to notice—you know what I mean?” He’d tried; he hadn’t succeeded too well. Not wanting to admit as much, he added, “I think it flustered my dad worse than it did me.”

  “That’s how it works for people that old,” she agreed with careless cruelty. Jonathan felt he’d passed an obscure test. He’d been attracted to Liu Mei when she visited Los Angeles, so now Karen was nervous about every female he met. Here, he thought she was wasting worry. UCLA boasted tons of pretty girls, all of them far more accessible and far more like him than one raised by aliens who’d spent her whole life on a starship.

  Interesting, now—Kassquit was certainly interesting. Fascinating, even. But attractive? He’d seen all of her, every bit; she was no more shy of herself than a Lizard was. He shook his head. No, he didn’t think so.

  “What?” Karen asked.

  Before Jonathan could answer, one of the Lizard hatchlings skittered down the hall. He stopped in the doorway, his eye turrets swinging from Jonathan to Karen and back again. They lingered longer on Karen, not because the hatchling found her attractive—a really preposterous notion—but because he saw her less often. Jonathan waved. “Hello, Donald,” he called.

  Donald waved back. He and Mickey had got good at gestures, though the sounds they made were nothing but hissing babbles.

  “I greet you,” Karen called to him in the language of the Race.

  He stared at her as if he’d never heard such noises before. And, except from himself and Mickey, he hadn’t. “Don’t do that,” Jonathan told Karen. “My dad would go through the roof if he heard you. We’re supposed to raise them like people, not like Lizards. When they learn to talk, they’ll learn English.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry,” Karen said. “I knew that, but I forgot. When I see a Lizard, I want to talk Lizard talk.”

  “Mickey and Donald won’t be Lizards, any more than Kassquit is really a person,” Jonathan said. Then he paused. “Still and all, I think there’s a little part of her that wants to be a person, even if she doesn’t know how.”

  Karen didn’t want him talking about Kassquit any more. She made a point of changing the subject. She made a literal point: pointing at Donald, she said, “He sure is getting big.”

  “I know,” Jonathan said. “He and Mickey are an awful lot bigger than human one-year-olds would be.” His mother would have flayed him if he’d said Mickey and him. However he said it, it was true. The baby Lizards weren’t babies any more, not to look at they weren’t. They’d grown almost as if inflated by CO2 cartridges, and were closer in size to adult Lizards than to what they’d been when they came out of their eggs.

  Liu Mei never learned to smile. Neither did Kassquit, Jonathan thought. I wonder what sorts of things Mickey and Donald will never be able to do because we’re raising them instead of Lizards. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. And he didn’t feel like broaching the subject to Karen, not when she plainly didn’t want him thinking about Liu Mei or Kassquit.

  After another wave, Donald scurried back up the hall. Karen said, “I wonder why they grow so much faster than people do.”

  “Dad says it’s because they take care of themselves so much more than human babies do,” Jonathan answered. “If you’re on your own, the bigger you are, the fewer the things that can eat you and the more things you can eat.”

  “That sounds like it makes pretty good sense,” Karen said. Jonathan automatically turned that like to as if in his mind. Karen was lucky enough not to have parents who got up in arms over grammar.

  With a grin, he said, “Yeah, I know, but it’s liable to be true anyhow.” Karen started to nod, then noticed what he’d said and made a face. He made one back at her. With the air of somebody granting a great concession, he went on, “The things Dad says usually make pretty good sense.”

  “I know,” Karen said. “You’re so lucky. At least your parents know we’re living in the twentieth century. My folks think we’re still back in horse-and-buggy days. Or if they don’t think so, they wish we were.”

  Jonathan didn’t reckon himself particularly lucky in his choice of parents. Very few people his age did, but that never crossed his mind. He thought Mr. and Mrs. Culpepper were pretty nice, but he didn’t have to try to live with them. Pretty soon, he wouldn’t have to try to live with his own folks, either. Part of him eagerly looked forward to that. The rest of him wanted to stay right here, in the bedroom where he’d lived so long.

  If he did stay, he couldn’t very well share the bedroom with Karen. That was the best argument he could think of for leaving the nest.

  His mother looked in on them. “You kids are working hard,” she said. “Would you like some cookies and a couple of Cokes to keep you going?”

  “Okay,” Jonathan said.

  “Sure, Mrs. Yeager. Thanks,” Karen said.

  The look Jonathan’s mother sent him said what she wouldn’t say in words: that he had no manners, but his girlfriend did. Getting away from looks like that was another good reason for striking out on his own.

  Chocolate-chip cookies and sodas eased his annoyance. Were he living by himself, he’d have had to get up and fetch them himself. If I were married, I could ask my wife to bring them, he thought. He glanced over at Karen. Looking at her made him think of some of marriage’s other obvious advantages, too. That she might ask him to fetch Cokes and cookies didn’t cross his mind.

  While Jonathan and Karen were eating cookies, Mickey came into the room. He watched them in fascination. Before he and Donald were allowed to go outside their room, they hadn’t seen the Yeagers eating. For all Jonathan knew, they might have thought they were the only ones who did.

  They knew better now. They’d also had to learn that grabbing whatever they wanted off people’s plates was against the rules. That had produced some interesting and lively scenes. Now they were good—most of the time, anyhow.

  Mickey was good more often than Donald. His eye turrets followed a cookie from the paper plate on the bed by Jonathan to Jonathan’s mouth. Watching, Karen snickered. “You ought to put sunglasses on him and give him a little tin cup,” she said.

  “I’ll do better than that.” Jonathan snapped his fingers, the signal his family had worked out after trial and error to let the little Lizards know they could come up and have some of the food a human was eating. Mickey advanced, hand outstretched. Jonathan held out a cookie. Mickey took it with surprising delicacy. Then, delicacy forgotten, he stuffed it into his mouth.

  Jonathan waited to see how he liked it. Lizards were more carnivorous than people, and Mickey and Donald were as emphatic as any human babies or toddlers about rejecting things they didn’t care for. But Mickey, after a couple of meditative smacks, gave a gulp, and the cookie was gone. He pointed to the paper plate, then rubbed his belly.

  Karen giggled. “He’s saying he wants some more.”

  “He sure is. And he’s not trying to steal it, either. Good boy, Mickey.” Jonathan held out another cookie. “You want this?”

  Mickey’s head went up and down in an unmistakable nod. “He’s really learning,” Karen said. “The Lizards use a hand gesture when they mean yes.”

  “He doesn’t know what the Lizards do, though,” Jonathan said. “He just knows what we do. That’s the idea.” He gave Mickey another cookie. This one disappeared without meditation. Mickey rubbed his belly again. Jonathan laughed. “You’re going to get fat. You give him one, Karen.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That way you get to keep more of yours, huh? See, I’m on to you.” But she held out a cookie. “Here, Mickey. It’s all right. You can have it.”

  Mickey hesitated. He was shier than Donald. And neither hatchling was as used to Karen as he was to the Yeagers. But the lure of chocolate chips seduced Mickey, as it had so many before him. He skit
tered forward, snatched the cookie out of Karen’s hand, and then scuttled away so she couldn’t grab him.

  “You like that?” Karen said as he devoured the prize. “I bet you do. You want another one? I bet you do.” Mickey stood there, eye turrets riveted on the cookie in her hand. “Come on. You want it, don’t you?”

  Mickey opened his mouth. That alarmed Jonathan. Was the hatchling going to take the cookie that way? He’d mostly outgrown such behavior—and Jonathan didn’t want him biting Karen. But, instead of going forward, Mickey stood there; he quivered a little, as if from intense mental effort. At last, he made a sound: “Esss.”

  “Jesus,” Jonathan said softly. He sprang to his feet. “Give him the cookie, Karen. He just said, ‘Yes.’ ” He hurried past her. “I’m going to get my folks. If he’s started talking, they need to know about it.”

  The motorcar pulled to a halt in front of a house not much different from the one in which Straha lived. By now, the ex-shiplord had grown used to stucco homes painted in bland pastels with swaths of grass in front of them. They seemed to be the local Tosevites’ ideal. He’d never been able to figure out why—taking care of grass struck him as a waste of both time and water—but it was so.

  “Here we are,” his driver said. “You may have a more interesting time than you expect.”

  “Why?” Straha asked. “Do you think someone will start shooting at the house, as happened on an earlier visit to Sam Yeager?”

  “No, that is not what I meant,” the driver answered. “If that happens, I will do my best to see that no harm comes to you. But the surprise I had in mind is not likely to be dangerous.”

  “What is it, then?” Straha demanded.

  His driver smiled. “If I told you, Shiplord, it would not be a surprise any more. Go on. The Yeagers will be waiting for you. And who knows? You may not be surprised at all.”