“Oh, huzzah.” Joy and rapture were not what filled Flynn’s voice. “I’m sure Mickey Mantle played catch with his little boy, too, after he retired. Do you suppose he got the same thrill as he did when he played for Kansas City?”
“Not fair,” Johnson said, but then he liked flying a scooter. The difference between him on the one hand and Flynn and Stone on the other was that he was a pilot who could fly a starship, while they were starship pilots. To them, scooters were like rowboats after the Queen Mary. Johnson went on, “With a little luck, you’ll have the chance to fly her back to Earth, too.”
“Well, yes, there is that,” Flynn agreed. “How very antiquated do you suppose we’ll be, there at the tail end of the twenty-first century? Like Civil War veterans when the Lizards came—that’s the comparison that springs to mind.”
“There were a few,” Johnson said. “Not many, but a few.”
“So there were.” Flynn nodded ponderously. “But at least they lived through the time in between. They saw the changes happen with their own eyes. When we get back, we’ll have been on ice most of the time. Everything we run into will be a surprise.”
“You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you?” Johnson said, and the other pilot nodded again. Some of those worries had occurred to Johnson, too. He didn’t see how he could have avoided them. Alone in his bunk in the wee small hours, all these light-years from Earth, what did he have to do but worry? After a bit, he added, “Something else makes me wonder.”
“Speak. Give forth,” Flynn urged.
“Okay. Here it is: how come there aren’t any other American starships here? Or starships from anywhere else, come to that?”
“We started first. You may possibly have noticed this,” Flynn said. “Then again, since you were in cold sleep for so long, you may have given up noticing things for Lent.”
“Oh, yeah. We started first. I knew that—knew it once I woke up, anyway,” Johnson said. “But so what? The Admiral Peary’s not as fast as a Lizard starship. You’d figure the state of the art back on Earth would get better. They’d build faster ships, and we’d have company. Only we don’t.”
“Who knows what’s on the way?” Flynn said.
“Well, I don’t,” Johnson admitted. “But radio’s twice as fast as a Lizard ship—I suppose that means it’s twice as fast as anything we’re likely to make, too. There’s the Molotov, but have you heard about starships besides her on the way?”
“No one has whispered anything into my pink and shell-like ear,” Flynn replied. Johnson snorted. Ignoring the noise, the other pilot continued, “This is not to say our beloved commandant and the Race don’t know more than I do.”
Johnson’s comment about their beloved commandant was worse than insubordinate. It was downright mutinous. Flynn clucked in mild reproach. Johnson cared very little. He said, “The Lizards might tell us what’s going on. You think Healey ever would?”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Flynn said, which was and wasn’t an answer at the same time.
“That’s me,” Johnson agreed. “That’s me right down to the ground. And I ask you, where’s our next starship after the Molotov? Where’s the new American ship, or the Japanese one? Hell, the Nazis are liable to be back in space again.”
“Maybe they’re waiting for news from us to get back to Earth,” Flynn said. “Maybe they didn’t know if the cold sleep worked as well as they thought. Maybe the HERE BE DRAGONS notices printed on all the road maps made them think twice. But now they’ll have to think that if we can do it, anybody can do it.”
“Maybe,” Johnson said. “That makes more sense than anything I thought of.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Flynn asked.
“Ha. Funny.” Johnson gave him a dirty look. It bounced off his armor of irony. Muttering, Johnson continued, “If you’re right, though, things have changed back on Earth. The Germans solve problems by throwing bodies at them till they go away—or they used to, anyhow.”
“Takes a lot of bodies to stretch from Earth to Tau Ceti,” Flynn observed. “And everyone who found out about a failure would laugh at the failed party. The Nazis always did have a hard time seeing a joke when it was on them.”
“Mm. Maybe,” Johnson said again. Once more, the other pilot had an answer for him. Whether it was the answer . . . Well, how could he say when he was in orbit around Home and the answer, whatever it was, lay back on Earth?
He looked down at the Lizards’ world. The landscape down there was almost as familiar as Earth’s by now. With less cloud cover than was usual on Earth, he could see better, too. They were coming up on Sitneff. The dust storm that had plagued the city where the Americans were staying had subsided. “I wonder how Melanie’s doing down there,” he said.
“Pretty well, by all the reports,” Flynn said. “Why? Did you think she couldn’t live without you?”
“Actually, I thought she’d be so glad to get away from you that she’d start dancing too soon and hurt herself,” Johnson answered.
“Have I been reviled? Have I been insulted? Have I been slandered? Have I been traduced? Have I been given the glove? Have I been slammed? Have I been cut? Have I—?” Flynn went on pouring out synonyms till anyone would have thought him the second coming of the illustrious Dr. Roget.
“Enough, already!” Johnson exclaimed by the time it was much more than enough.
Mercifully, the other pilot fell silent. Johnson enjoyed the quiet for about five minutes. Then the intercom summoned him to Lieutenant General Healey’s office. He enjoyed that not at all. He would rather have gone to the dentist.
By all the signs, Healey was less than enamored of having him there. The commandant growled, “Congratulations. You’ve managed to make the Lizards love you.”
“Sir?” Johnson said woodenly. If he wasn’t baiting Healey, Healey would be baiting him. He didn’t want to give the other man a handle if he could help it.
But Healey only nodded, which made his J. Edgar Hoover jowls wobble. “That’s right. Your rescue mission with the scooter impressed the hell out of them. And so we’ve arranged a cultural exchange mission with the Race.”
“Sir?” Johnson said again, this time in surprise.
“We’re going to trade them one of our scooters for one of theirs,” Healey said. “There’s not a damn thing on one of our scooters that can help them militarily, and they must feel the same way about theirs. So we’ll swap, and look them over, and see if we learn anything.”
“Oh.” Johnson knew he still sounded startled. Had anyone but Healey told him that, he wouldn’t have been. But he’d always figured Healey would sooner swap missiles with the Lizards than information.
“I’m so glad this meets with your approval.” The commandant’s sarcasm would have stung more if Johnson hadn’t already been on the receiving end of it so often. Healey said, “The scooter is waiting at Lock Two. The sooner you fly it to the Horned Akiss, the sooner we’ll get a Lizard scooter to play with.”
“All right,” Johnson said. “Now that I know where I’m going, I expect I can get there. It does make things easier, you know.”
Healey waved that away. He waved away almost everything Johnson said, whether or not the motion showed. “Go on,” he said.
Johnson went. He enjoyed flying the scooter. Had Lieutenant General Healey known how much he enjoyed it, the commandant probably would have chosen someone else for the job. Healey never had wanted him to have any fun.
Well, too bad for the redoubtable lieutenant general. Johnson got into his spacesuit, then ran checks on the scooter. Everything came up green. He hadn’t thought Healey would want him to have an unfortunate accident, but you never could tell.
The outer airlock door opened. Johnson used the scooter’s little steering jets to ease it out into space. As soon as he did, he started to laugh. He knew exactly how the little spacecraft was supposed to respond when he goosed it. It was definitely slower than it should have been, which meant it was heavier than it should
have been.
“You sandbagging son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, having first made sure his radio was off. Before sending the Lizards a scooter, Healey had made sure it didn’t perform as well as it might have. He wanted the Race to keep right on underestimating what humans could do. That struck Johnson as singularly pointless way the hell out here. If he said anything about it, though, the commandant would probably order him back and clap him in irons.
Instead, he called the Horned Akiss on one of the Race’s signaling frequencies. He found out the Lizards there were expecting him. That came as a relief. It would have been just like Healey to send him out and hope the Race would shoot him down. Evidently not—not this time, anyway.
Once Johnson got clear of the Admiral Peary, he aimed the scooter at the Horned Akiss and fired up the rear engine. Sure enough, the little rocketship was lugging an anvil; its acceleration wasn’t a patch on what it should have been. Inside his suit, he shrugged. Sooner or later, he’d get there.
And, in due course, he did. He wasn’t invited aboard the Lizards’ ship. Instead, one of their scooters waited for him. “I greet you, Tosevite,” the Lizard aboard it called. “Shall we exchange craft?”
“That seems to be the point of the exercise.” Johnson brought his scooter up alongside the bigger one and killed relative velocity. By then, he’d stopped worrying about the extra weight he was carrying; it was like flying with a couple of passengers, and he’d done that often enough.
He read the Race’s language, so the controls on the other scooter made sense to him. He had to explain his to the Lizard, who might never have heard of English or of Arabic numerals. Fortunately, the male—or was it a female?—didn’t get flustered, saying, “It all seems straightforward enough.”
“It is,” Johnson agreed. “Just take it slow and easy, and you will do fine.”
“Good advice. I had not thought a Tosevite would be so sensible,” the Lizard replied. “The same also goes for you. Slow and easy, as you say.”
“Oh, yes.” Johnson made the affirmative gesture.
He was cautious flying the Lizards’ scooter back to the Admiral Peary. He had to get used to it. It performed about the way he’d expected, though. He hoped the Lizard pilot wouldn’t be too disappointed with the logy machine the Big Uglies had sent to the Race.
And then, when Johnson was almost back to the American starship, he said something about the commandant that would have made all his earlier remarks fit for a love letter. He couldn’t prove a thing, but he had a feeling. He shook his fist in the direction of Lieutenant General Healey’s office. Healey couldn’t see him, of course, any more than the commandant could hear him. Too damn bad, he thought.
Sam Yeager was sick and tired of the conference rooms in the hotel in Sitneff. One morning, he asked Atvar, “Fleetlord, would it offend you if we moved our discussions across the way to the park for a while?”
“Would it offend me? No,” the Lizard replied. “I do not think we would be so efficient there, though. And will you not grow uncomfortable as the day warms up?”
“That’s why I said ‘for a while,’ ” Yeager told him. “But I do not think it will be too bad. Sitneff is not that much warmer than Los Angeles, the city where I settled not long after the fight with the conquest fleet ended.”
“Well, then, Ambassador, let it be as you wish,” Atvar said. “Maybe changing where we talk will also change the direction in which our talks are going.”
“I must say that also occurred to me,” Sam agreed. “I am afraid their direction could use some changing.”
The way he looked at things, the problem was that his talks with Atvar had no direction. He would propose things. The fleetlord would either reject them, talk around them, or say they needed more study before anything could be settled. To the Race, more study often meant a delay of decades if not centuries.
Sam had been reluctant to point that out, not wanting to derail things altogether. But he had concluded that things were already about as derailed as they could be. He wondered whether Atvar felt the same way, or whether the Lizard was satisfied to stall. Sam hoped not. One way or the other, it was time to find out.
Cars and trucks and buses halted when Yeager appeared at the crosswalk. Drivers and passengers all turned their eye turrets his way. “I enjoy being with you in public,” Atvar remarked as they crossed. “It is not easy for me to be anonymous, not with the body paint I put on. Next to you, though, I am invisible. Most refreshing.”
“Glad to be of service,” Sam said dryly. Atvar laughed.
When they got to the park, Sam led them to some tables and benches screened from the morning sun by the treelike shrubs behind them. “Are you sure you are comfortable, Ambassador?” Atvar asked.
“I thank you for your concern, but I am fine,” Sam said. He nodded politely to a Rabotev walking along the path. The dark-skinned alien hopped in the air in surprise. Sam Yeager turned back to Atvar. “I am fine as far as comfort goes, anyhow. I am less happy with the direction of our talks, to use your term.”
“I am sorry to hear that. It makes my liver heavy,” Atvar said.
“If it does, Fleetlord, a little more real cooperation might work wonders,” Sam said bluntly. “From my point of view, the Race seems to be doing its best to make these discussions go nowhere while appearing to make progress.”
“What an extraordinary notion,” Atvar exclaimed. “How can you possibly say that when you have conferred with the Emperor himself?” He cast his eye turrets down toward the pale, sandy soil beneath his feet.
“I can say it because it appears to me to be a truth. I am honored the Emperor said he wanted to help settle the differences between the Race and the United States. I am honored, yes, but I am not very impressed. He offered no proposals, only his good will. Good will is valuable; I do not reject it. But good will by itself does not solve problems.”
“You must not expect haste from us,” Atvar said. “Remember, we are not used to dealing with independent not-empires.” He laughed again. “We are not used to dealing with not-empires at all.”
“I understand that. I have tried to take it into account,” Sam said. “I am sorry, but it does not seem to be a good enough explanation. If you do not deal with us through diplomacy, we will end up fighting. Am I wrong?”
“Probably not,” Atvar answered. “If we do fight, the Race will win. Am I wrong?”
“You would have been right when I went into cold sleep, Fleetlord. I know that,” Sam said. “Now? Now I am not so sure any of your planets would get away untouched. You have been able to wreck Tosev 3 for a long time. Now we can also reach you. You would do well to remember that.”
“Is this diplomacy, or only a threat?” Atvar asked.
“It is diplomacy. It is also a threat,” Yeager answered. “I do not try to deny it. You did not worry about threatening us when you came to Tosev 3. You went ahead and did it, and not just with words. You invaded my not-empire. You occupied parts of it for years. You dropped nuclear weapons on Washington and Seattle and Pearl Harbor. These are truths, even if perhaps you would rather not remember them now. If we fight again, your worlds will learn what sort of truths they are.”
He waited. There was a chance that Atvar would stand up and spit in his eye. If that happened, he didn’t know what he’d do. Resign the ambassadorship, maybe, and go back up to the Admiral Peary and back into cold sleep. Someone else would have a better chance of getting a worthwhile agreement out of the Lizards.
Atvar’s tailstump lashed in agitation. Whatever he’d expected to hear, what Sam had just told him wasn’t it. At last, he answered, “Ambassador, you fought in that war. How can you speak of visiting its like on Home and the other worlds of the Empire?”
“You still do not see my point, Fleetlord, or not all of it,” Sam said. “The prospect bothers you more because now it might happen to you, too.” He added an emphatic cough. “It did not bother you at all when it could only happen to Big Uglies. And that is what I a
m trying to tell you: you were wrong not to be bothered under those circumstances. We have a saying: ‘what goes around comes around.’ Do you understand that? I had to translate it literally.”
“I think I do,” Atvar said. “It is another way of saying that what we did to you, you can now do to us.”
“That is part of it, but only part of it,” Yeager said. “You did it to us, and you thought you were right to do it to us. Why should we not think we are also right to do it to you?”
He watched the fleetlord’s tailstump quiver again. He could make a pretty good guess about what Atvar was thinking: because we are the Race, and you are nothing but a pack of wild Big Uglies. But that was the sort of thinking that had sent the conquest fleet out. It might have made some sense against an opponent who couldn’t hit back. The Lizards didn’t face that kind of opponent any more. If they didn’t keep it in mind, everybody would be sorry.
When Atvar still didn’t say anything, Sam spoke again, quietly: “This too is what equality means.”
To his surprise, Atvar’s mouth fell open in a laugh, though the Lizard was anything but amused. “You know, of course, that Shiplord Straha almost cast me down from my position. His reason for doing so was that I had not prosecuted the war against the Tosevites hard enough to suit him. He felt that, if we did not do everything we could, regardless of consequences, to overcome Tosevite resistance, we would regret it one day. Enough of the assembled shiplords thought him wrong to let me keep the job. I reckoned him a maniac. Again, you know of this.”
“Oh, yes. I know of this.” Sam made the affirmative gesture. After Straha defected to the USA one jump ahead of Atvar’s vengeance, the exile and Yeager had become good friends. Sam didn’t remind Atvar of that; it would have been rude. Instead, he said, “But now I have to say I am not sure I see your point.”
“It is very simple—not complicated in the least,” Atvar answered. “My point is, Straha was right. Here we are, all these years later, and Straha was right. Irony has a bitter taste.”
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