“Mighty generous of them. They’d tell King Canute he was welcome to hold back the tide, too,” Tom said bitterly. “The only thing they wouldn’t tell him was how to go about it.”
“Well, Tom, here’s the question I’ve got for you,” Sam said. “If the Lizards don’t want to change their minds-and it doesn’t look like they do-is this worth going to war to stop?”
“That’s not the point. The point is getting them to stop,” de la Rosa said.
Sam shook his head. “No. They don’t want to. They don’t intend to. They’ve made that as plain as they possibly can. As far as they’re concerned, they’re moving into a new neighborhood, and they’ve brought their dogs and cats and cows and sheep and some of their flowers along with them. They’re just making themselves at home.”
“Bullshit. They understand ecological issues fine. They don’t have any trouble at all,” Tom said. “Look at the fit they pitched about the rats. Have they caught any besides the first two? It‘d serve the Race right if the damn things did get loose.”
“As far as I know, those are the only ones they’ve got their hands on,” Sam said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. Is this something we fight about? Or is it already too late for that? You can’t put things back in Pandora’s box once they’re loose, can you?”
“Probably not.” De la Rosa looked as disgusted as he sounded. “But the arid country on Earth-everywhere from Australia to the Sahara to our own Southwest-is never going to be the same. The least we can do is get an agreement out of them not to introduce any more of their species to Earth. That’s locking the barn door after the horse is long gone, though.”
“I’ve been over this with Atvar before. He’s always said no. I don’t think he’s going to change his mind.” Sam Yeager sighed. He saw Tom’s point. He’d seen with his own eyes what creatures from Home were doing in and to the Southwest-and things had only got worse since he went into cold sleep. He sighed again. “Atvar will tell me the Race is as sovereign in the parts of Earth it rules as we are in the USA. He’ll say we have no right to interfere in what the Lizards do there. He’ll say we complain about being interfered with, but now we’re meddling for all we’re worth. It’s not a bad argument. How am I supposed to answer him?”
“Throw the rats in his face,” Tom suggested. “That will get him to understand why we’re worried.”
“He already understands. He just doesn’t care. There’s a difference,” Sam said. “No matter what happens from our point of view, the Lizards get major benefits by importing their animals and plants. If we try to tell them they can’t, we’re liable to have to fight to back it up. Is this worth a war? ”
Tom de la Rosa looked as if he hated him. “You don’t make things easy, do you?”
“Atvar’s told me the same thing. From him, I take it as a compliment. I’ll try to do the same from you,” Sam said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. The Lizards are changing the planet. I agree with you-that’s what they’re doing. Do we wreck it to keep them from changing it?”
“That’s not a fair way to put things,” Tom protested.
“No? That’s what it boils down to from here,” Sam said. “We can have a damaged ecology, or we can have a planet that glows in the dark. Or else you’ll tell me it’s not worth a war. But nothing short of war is going to make the Lizards change their policy about this.”
Instead of answering, de la Rosa stormed out of the room. Yeager wasn’t particularly surprised or particularly disappointed. Tom was a hothead. You needed to be a hothead to get involved in ecological matters. Every so often, though, even hotheads bumped up against the facts of life. Sometimes the cost of stopping a change was higher than the cost of the change itself.
He looked out the window again. He imagined saguaros putting down deep roots here. He imagined owls nesting in the saguaros, and roadrunners scurrying here and there in the shade of the cactuses snapping up whatever little lizardy things they could catch. He imagined sidewinders looping along. He imagined how the Lizards would feel about all of that-especially the ones who had the misfortune to bump into sidewinders. Would they go to war to keep it from happening? They might.
But it was already happening back on Earth. Too late to stop it now. And, whatever else happened, he couldn’t imagine an American colonization fleet crossing the light-years and coming down on Home. The Race had the population to spare for that sort of thing. The USA didn’t.
He wondered how much he’d accomplished by coming here. That he’d got here alive was pretty impressive, too. He’d had the audience with the Emperor and the private meeting afterwards. But what had he gained that he couldn’t have got from Reffet and Kirel back on Earth? Anything?
If he had, he was hard pressed to see it. He understood Tom de la Rosa’s frustration. He had plenty of frustration of his own. The Lizards here on Home were less inclined to compromise than the ones back on Earth had been. They thought they were right, and any miserable Big Ugly had to be wrong.
One thing the flight of the Admiral Peary had proved: humans could fly between the stars. The Race couldn’t ignore that. The Lizards would have to be wondering what else might be on the way. Maybe the colonists back on Earth could radio ahead and let Home know other starships were coming, but maybe not, too. If humans wanted to send secret expeditions, they might be able to.
Sam grimaced. The Reich might do that. And any German expedition would come with guns not just handy but loaded. The Nazis owed the Lizards for a defeat. After all this time, would they try to pay them back?
How am I supposed to know? Sam asked himself. All he knew about what the Reich was like these days, he got from the radio bulletins beamed Homeward by America and by the Lizards themselves. It didn’t seem to have changed all that much-and there was one more thing to worry about.
Whenever Jonathan Yeager saw Kassquit, he wanted to ask her if she was happy. She certainly gave all the signs of it, or as many as she could with a face that didn’t show what she was thinking. Frank Coffey seemed pretty happy these days, too. Jonathan had no great urge to ask him if he was. That was none of his business, not unless Coffey felt like making it his business.
Jonathan wondered what the difference was. That he’d been intimate with Kassquit all those years ago? He thought there was more to it than that. He hoped so, anyhow. He had the strong feeling that Major Frank Coffey could take care of himself. He wasn’t nearly so sure about Kassquit. She couldn’t be a Lizard, however much she wanted to, but she didn’t exactly know how to be a human being, either. She was liable to get hurt, or to hurt herself.
And what can you do about it if she does? Jonathan asked himself. The answer to that was only too obvious. He couldn’t do a damn thing, and he knew it. He also knew Karen would grab the nearest blunt instrument and brain him if he tried.
He sighed. He couldn’t blame Karen for being antsy about Kassquit. To his wife, Kassquit was The Other Woman, in scarlet letters ten feet high. Kassquit wasn’t at her best around Karen, either.
It came as something of a relief when Trir said, “Would any of you Tosevites care for a sightseeing tour today?” at breakfast one morning.
“What sort of sights do you have in mind showing us?” Linda de la Rosa asked.
“Perhaps you would like to go to the Crimson Desert?” the guide said. “It has a wild grandeur unlike any other on Home.”
“I want to go,” Tom de la Rosa said. “I would like to see what you term a desert on this world, when so much of it would be a desert on Tosev 3.”
All the Americans volunteered-even Jonathan’s father, who said, “None of the negotiations going on right now will addle if we pause. Pausing may even help some of them.” Jonathan knew his dad wasn’t happy with the way things were going. He hadn’t expected him to come out and say so, though.
Then Kassquit asked, “May I also come? I too would like to see more of Home.”
“Yes, Researcher. You are welcome,” Trir said. “We will le
ave from in front of the hotel in half a daytenth. All of you should bring whatever you require for an overnight stay.”
“The Crimson Desert,” Karen said musingly. “I wonder what it will be like.”
“Hot,” Jonathan said. His wife gave him a sardonic nod. Had they been going to the desert on Earth, he would have warned her to take along a cream that prevented sunburn. As a redhead, she needed to worry about it more than most people did. But Tau Ceti wasn’t the sun. It put out a lot less ultraviolet radiation. Even in the warmest weather, sunburn wasn’t so much of a worry here.
They boarded the bus that had taken them out to the ranch. The driver left the hotel’s lot and pulled out into traffic. They were off. The bus’ dark windows kept Lizard drivers and passengers in other vehicles from gaping at Big Uglies. It didn’t keep the Americans from looking out. Whenever Jonathan saw a Lizard in a wig-or, every once in a while, a Lizard in a T-shirt-he had everything he could do not to howl with laughter. Then he’d run a hand over his own shaven skull and think about sauces and geese and ganders.
In the halfhearted Lizard way, the bus was air-conditioned. That meant it was hot inside, but not quite stifling. Jonathan’s father started to laugh. “What’s funny, Dad?” Jonathan asked.
“Another bus ride,” his father answered. “I used to think I’d taken the last one when I quit playing ball, but I was wrong.”
“I bet you never expected to take one on another world,” Jonathan said.
“Well, that’s a fact,” Sam Yeager agreed. “All the same, though, a bus ride is a bus ride. Some things don’t change. And I keep looking for greasy spoons by the side of the road. I don’t suppose the Race knows anything about chop-suey joints or hot-dog stands.”
“Probably a good thing they don’t,” Jonathan said.
“Yeah, I suppose,” his father said. “But it hardly seems like a road trip without ’em. I’ve been spoiled. I have this idea of how things are supposed to work, and I’m disappointed when they turn out different.”
“You probably expect flat tires, too,” Jonathan said.
His father nodded. “You bet I do. I’ve seen enough of them. Heck, I’ve helped change enough of them. I wonder what the Lizards use for a jack.”
“Let’s hope we don’t find out,” Jonathan said. To his relief, his father didn’t argue with him.
They had no trouble getting to the Crimson Desert. The bus rolled south and east out of Sitneff, into open country. By any Earthly standards, that would have been desert. By the standards of Home, it wasn’t. It was nothing but scrub. Treeish things were few and far between, but smaller plants kept the ground from being too barren. Every once in a while, Jonathan spotted some kind of animal scurrying along, though the bus usually went by too fast to let him tell what the creature was.
Mountains rose ahead. The bus climbed them. The road grew steep and narrow; Jonathan got the feeling not a whole lot of vehicles came this way. He hadn’t thought Home would have roads to nowhere, but the one they were on sure gave that feeling. Up and up it went. The bus’ engine labored a little. The driver turned off the air conditioning, but it kept getting cooler inside the bus anyhow. It might have dropped all the way down into the seventies. It was the coolest Jonathan had been anywhere on Home this side of the South Pole.
A few minutes later, they came to what was obviously the crest of the grade. Trir said, “This is the third-highest pass on all of Home.” Without checking an atlas, Jonathan had no idea whether she was right, but nothing about the place made him want to disbelieve her.
The bus seemed relieved to find a downhill slope. The driver knew her business. She never let it get going too fast, but she was never too obvious about riding the brakes, either. The change in the weather on the other side of the mountains was immediate and profound. Before long, three or four Americans and Kassquit all called for the driver to turn the air conditioning on again. With a sigh, she did. It suddenly seemed to be fighting a much more savage climate.
“There!” Trir pointed ahead, out through the windshield. “Now you can see why this place got its name.”
Jonathan craned his neck for a better look. Sure enough, the cliffsides and the ground were of a reddish color, brighter than rust. He wouldn’t have called most of it crimson, but he wouldn’t have revoked anyone else’s poetic license, either. And color names didn’t translate perfectly between the Race’s language and English to begin with.
Down went the bus, into the middle of the desert. By the noises the air conditioning made, it was working harder and harder. By the way sweat ran down Jonathan’s face, it wasn’t working hard enough. “How hot is it outside?” he asked.
“Probably about fifty-five hundredths,” Trir answered.
The Race divided the distance between water’s freezing and boiling points into hundredths-the exact equivalent of Celsius degrees. The USA still routinely used Fahrenheit. Jonathan was struggling to do the conversion in his head when Frank Coffey spoke in horrified English: “Jesus! That’s just the other side of 130!”
It could get that hot on Earth… just barely. But Trir spoke as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. What was that line about mad dogs and Englishmen? Noel Coward had never heard of Lizards when he wrote it.
Ten minutes later, the bus stopped. Air like a blast furnace rolled inside. It’s a dry heat, Jonathan thought in something not far from despair. That worked fine when the temperature was in the nineties. Over a hundred, it wore thin. At the moment, all it meant was that Jonathan would bake instead of boiling.
Trir seemed perfectly happy. “Is it not a bracing climate?” she said. “Come out, all of you, and look around.” She skittered out of the bus and down onto the ground.
Major Coffey wasn’t the only human being who said, “Jesus!” But they’d come all this way. There wasn’t-Jonathan supposed there wasn’t-much point just to staying in the bus. He got to his feet and went out into the Crimson Desert.
Jesus! didn’t begin to do it justice. Jonathan found he had to keep blinking almost as fast as he could. If he didn’t, his eyeballs started drying out. In between blinks, he looked around. The place did have a stark beauty to it. Wind and dust had carved the crimson cliffs into a cornucopia of crazy shapes. Not all the shades of red were the same. There were bands and twists of rust and scarlet and crimson and carmine and magenta. Here and there, he spotted flecks of white all the brighter for being so isolated. Tau Ceti beat down on him out of a greenish blue sky.
“Does anything actually live here?” Tom de la Rosa asked. “Can anything actually live here?” He didn’t sound as if he believed it. Jonathan had trouble believing it, too.
But Trir made the affirmative gesture. “Why, certainly. You can see the saltbushes there, and the peffelem plants.”
Jonathan couldn’t have told a saltbush from a peffelem plant if his life depended on it. Both varieties looked like nothing but dry sticks to him. “Where do they get their water?” he asked. The inside of his mouth was drying out, too.
“They have very deep root structures,” the guide replied.
All the way to China didn’t seem to apply, not here on Home. Or maybe it did. By the way the air and the ground felt, plants might have needed ten light-years’ worth of roots to draw any water to these parts.
But then, to his amazement, something moved under those sticklike caricatures of plants. “What was that?” he said, his voice rising in surprise.
“Some kind of crawling thing,” Trir answered indifferently. “There are several varieties in these parts. Most of them live nowhere else on Home.”
“They come already cooked, too, I bet,” Jonathan’s father said in English.
When he translated that into the Race’s language, Trir laughed. “It is hot, certainly, but not so hot as all that.”
“I agree,” Kassquit said.
She’d been raised to take for granted the temperatures Lizards normally lived with. This probably felt the same for her as it did for Trir. The Americans,
though, were used to Earthly weather. Dr. Blanchard said, “Be careful of heatstroke. I’m glad I made sure we brought plenty of water.”
“Can we go back inside the bus, please?” Linda de la Rosa said. “I’m feeling medium rare, or maybe a little more done than that.”
“But I wanted to talk about the famous fossils not far from here,” Trir said. “These are some of the fossils that the famous savant Iffud used to help establish the theory of evolution.” She paused. “You Tosevites are familiar with the theory of evolution, are you not?”
“Why, no,” Major Coffey said, straight-faced. “Suppose you tell us what it is. It sounds as if it might be interesting.”
“Cut it out, Frank,” Jonathan said in English, and poked him with an elbow. Then he went back to the language of the Race: “He is joking, Senior Tour Guide. We have known of the theory of evolution for more than three hundred of your years.”
“We have known of it for more than 110,000 years,” Trir said starchily.
So there, Jonathan thought. But the trip to the Crimson Desert had turned out to be interesting in ways he hadn’t expected. And he told himself he would never complain about the weather in Sitneff again, no matter what.
Mickey Flynn gazed out of the Admiral Peary ’s control room at Home below. “I feel… superfluous,” he remarked. “Not a great deal for a pilot to do here. Now that I contemplate matters, there’s nothing for a pilot to do here, as a matter of fact.”
“You buzz around on a scooter, same as I do,” Glen Johnson said.
“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.”
Homeward Bound (colonization) Page 42
