“I know I have. Making the case for war is easy-if one does not reckon in the dangers involved,” Kassquit said. “My hope is that your not-empire has indeed changed from its previous aggressive stance. If I can persuade my superiors of that-and if you wild Tosevites work to convince them of the same thing-we may possibly avert this fight, even now.”
“Would Sam Yeager be the American ambassador to the Race if we had not changed our ways?” Karen asked.
“Sam Yeager would not be your ambassador if the Doctor had survived,” Kassquit pointed out. “The Doctor was a very able diplomat. No one would say otherwise. But no one would say he was a shining example of peace and trust, either.”
She was right about that. If you were in a dicker with the Doctor, he would have had no qualms about picking your pocket. Not only that, he would have tried to persuade you afterwards that he’d done it for your own good. That talent had made him very valuable to the United States. Whether it had made him a paragon of ethics might be a different question.
“Do what you can with your own officials,” Karen said. “I will speak to Sam Yeager. As you say, we have to try.”
Kassquit used the affirmative gesture. They might not like each other, but that had nothing to do with anything right now. Karen rode up to her father-in-law’s room and knocked on the door. When he opened it, he said, “You look like a steamroller just ran over your kitten.”
She eyed him. “You don’t look so happy yourself.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not,” Sam Yeager said. “The small stuff is, Atvar is mad as hops because the Race found a rat-a half-grown rat-in a building a couple of miles from here. He keeps trying to make it out to be our fault, even though the cleaners let the darn things out.”
“A half-grown rat? So they’re breeding here, then,” Karen said.
“Sure looks that way,” Sam Yeager agreed. “And that’s just the small stuff. The big stuff is… Well, you know about the big stuff.”
“Yes, I know about the big stuff. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.” Karen summed up the conversations she’d just had with Trir and Kassquit. She went on, “What can we do? We have to be able to do something to convince the Lizards this war’s not worth fighting. Something-but I don’t know what.”
Sam Yeager let out a long, weary sigh. “If they’re bound and determined to go ahead and fight, I don’t know what we can do about it but hit back as hard as we can. They look to have decided that this is going to be the best chance they’ve got.” He shrugged. “They may even be right.”
“Even if they are, it’ll be a disaster!” Karen exclaimed.
Her father-in-law nodded. “I know that. I think they know it, too. If they don’t, it’s not because I haven’t told ’em. But if they think it’ll be a disaster now but maybe a catastrophe later…” He spread his hands.
“We don’t want a war with them. We just don’t, ” Karen said.
“Their attitude is, we may not want one now, but we’re a bunch of changeable Big Uglies, and sooner or later we will,” Sam Yeager said. “I don’t know how to convince them they’re wrong, either. And I’d better. If I can’t…”
“Kassquit is trying the same thing on their side.” Karen wasn’t used to talking about Kassquit with unreserved approval-or with any approval at all-but she did now.
“Good for her. I hope it helps some, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it,” Sam Yeager said. “I hope something helps some. If it doesn’t…” He paused again, and grimaced. “If it doesn’t, we’ll have a war on our hands.”
“We can see it’s madness. Kassquit can see it’s madness. The Lizards are usually more reasonable than we are. Why not now?” Karen could hear the despair in her voice.
“It’s what I told you before. They must think this is their best chance, or maybe their last chance. It doesn’t look that way to me, but I’m not Atvar or the Emperor.” Sam Yeager’s scowl grew blacker. “I’m just a scared old man. If something big doesn’t change in a hurry, four worlds are going to go up in smoke.”
In the control room these days, Glen Johnson felt more as if he were in a missile-armed upper stage in Earth orbit, or even in the cockpit of a fighter heading for action against the Lizards. Anything could happen, and probably would. He knew damn well that the Race could overwhelm the Admiral Peary. His job, and the job of everybody else on board, was to make sure they remembered they’d been in a fight.
The ship had a swarm of antimissiles that were supposed to be a hair better than the best the Race could fire. She also had close-in weapons systems-a fancy name for radar-controlled Gatling guns on steroids-to knock out anything the antimissiles missed. Put that together and it wouldn’t keep the Admiral Peary alive. It wasn’t supposed to. But it was supposed to keep her alive long enough to let her get her own licks in.
“What do you think?” Johnson asked Mickey Flynn. “Are we ready for Armageddon?”
Flynn gave that his usual grave consideration. “I can’t say for sure,” he replied at last. “But I do know that Armageddon sick and tired of worrying about it.”
Johnson groaned, as he was no doubt intended to do. Mickey Flynn looked back blandly. Johnson was sick of worrying about it, too, which didn’t mean he wasn’t doing his share and then some. “What do we do if the balloon goes up?” he said.
This time, Flynn answered right away: “Well, it will be over in a hurry, anyhow.” That was what the Lizards would have called a truth. By the way he said it, he thought Johnson was a damn fool for asking the question. After only a short pause, Johnson decided he’d been a damn fool, too.
In the background was the radio chatter among the Lizards’ spaceships and orbiting stations and shuttlecraft. Johnson didn’t know how much good monitoring that would do. Nobody was likely to give the attack order in clear language. It would be encrypted, so the Americans wouldn’t realize what it was till things hit the fan.
Even so, the traffic was often fun to listen to. Lizards-and the occasional Rabotevs and Hallessi-bickered among themselves hardly less than humans did. Their insults revolved around rotten eggs and cloacas rather than genitals, but they used them with panache.
All at once, everything stopped. For about fifteen seconds, the radio waves might have been wiped clean. “What the hell?” Johnson said, in mingled surprise and alarm. He and Mickey Flynn had been talking about Armageddon. Had they just listened to the overture for it?
But then the Lizards returned to the air. Everybody was saying the same things: “What is that?” “Do you see that?” “Where did that come from?” “How did that get there?” “What could it be?”
Flynn pointed to the radar. It showed a blip that Johnson would have sworn hadn’t been there before, about two million miles out from Home and closing rapidly. “What have we got here?” Johnson said, unconsciously echoing the Lizards all around the Admiral Peary. “Looks like it popped out of thin air.”
“Thinner vacuum,” Flynn said, and Johnson nodded-the other pilot was right.
The Lizards started sending messages toward the blip: “Strange ship, identify yourself.” “Strange ship, please begin communication.” And another one, surely transmitted by a worried member of the Race: “Strange ship, do you understand? Do you speak our language?”
Speed-of-light lag for a message to get to the strange ship-where the devil had it come from? out of nowhere? — and an answer to come back was about twenty-one and a half seconds. That, of course, assumed the answerer started talking the instant he-she? it? — heard the Lizards, which was bound to be optimistic.
“Do you think we ought to send something, too?” Johnson asked. Mickey Flynn was senior to him; it was Flynn’s baby, not his. The other pilot shook his head. Johnson waved to show he accepted the decision. He found a different question: “Do you think it’s a good thing we’re at top alert?” Just as solemnly, Flynn nodded.
Close to a minute went by before the strange ship responded. When it did, the answer was in the Lizards’ language:
“We greet you, males and females of the Race.” The individual at the microphone had a mushy accent. Even as Johnson realized it was a human accent, the speaker went on, “This is the starship Commodore Perry, from the United States of America. We greet you, citizens of the Empire. And we also greet, or hope we greet, our own citizens aboard the Admiral Peary. ”
Johnson and Flynn both stabbed for the TRANSMIT button at the same time. Johnson’s finger came down on it first. That was his only moment of triumph. Flynn, as senior, did the talking: “This is the Admiral Peary, Colonel Flynn speaking. Very good to have company. We’ve been out here by ourselves for a long time.”
Again, there was a necessary wait for radio waves to travel from ship to ship. During it, Johnson wondered, What’s in a name? The Admiral Peary recalled an explorer who’d pitted himself against nature and won. The Commodore Perry was named for the man who’d gone to Japan with warships and opened the country to the outside world no matter what the Japanese thought about it. The Lizards might not notice the difference, especially since Peary and Perry were pronounced alike even if spelled differently. But Johnson did. What did it mean? This time, the person at the radio-a woman-replied in English: “Hello, Colonel Flynn. Good to hear from you. I’m Major Nichols-Nicole to my friends. We were hoping we’d find you folks here, but we weren’t sure, because of course your signals from Home hadn’t got back to Earth when we set out.”
“I hope you’ve been picking up some of them as you followed our trail from Earth to Home,” Flynn said. “And if you don’t mind my asking, when did you set out?”
That was a good question. Here on the Admiral Peary, Johnson didn’t feel like too much of an antique, even if he had been in cold sleep longer than most. But these whippersnappers might not even have been born when Dr. Blanchard put him on ice. How much of an antique would he seem to them? Do I really want to know?
He had time to wonder about that again. Then Major Nichols’ voice came back: “About five and a half weeks ago, Colonel.”
Mickey Flynn drummed his fingers on his thigh in annoyance, one of the few times Johnson had ever seen him show it. “Five and a half weeks’ subjective time, sure. But how long were you in cold sleep?” Flynn asked.
Johnson nodded: another good question. If the Commodore Perry was still slower than Lizard starships, that said one thing. If she matched their technology, that said something else-something important, too. And if she was faster, even a little bit…
The wait for radio waves to go back and forth felt maddening. After what seemed like a very long time, Major Nichols answered, “No, Colonel. No cold sleep-none. Total travel time, five and a half weeks. There’ve been some changes made.”
Johnson and Flynn stared at each other. They both mouthed the same thing: Jesus Christ! The Lizards were bound to have somebody who understood English monitoring the transmission. The second that translator figured out what Major Nichols had just said, the Race was going to start having kittens, or possibly hatchling befflem. Johnson pointed to the microphone and raised an eyebrow. Flynn gave back a gracious nod, as if to say, Be my guest.
“This is Colonel Johnson, junior pilot on the Admiral Peary, ” Johnson said, feeling much more senior than junior. “I hope you brought along some proof of that. It would be really useful. Things are… a little tense between us and the Race right now.” He almost added an emphatic cough, but held back when he realized he didn’t know how people of Major Nichols’ generation would take that. After sending the message, he turned to Mickey Flynn. “Now we twiddle our thumbs while things go back and forth.”
Flynn suited action to word. He said, “Why don’t they have faster-than-light radio?” His thumbs went round and round, round and round.
“They do, in effect,” Johnson said. “They’ve got the ships-if those are what they say they are. Einstein must be spinning in his grave.”
“Colonel Johnson?” The voice of the woman from the Commodore Perry filled the control room again. “Yes, we have proof-all sorts of things that we know and the Race will hear about as its signals come in from Earth over the next few days and weeks. And we have a couple of witnesses from the Race aboard: a shuttlecraft pilot named Nesseref and Shiplord Straha.”
“Oh, my,” Johnson said. Even imperturbable Mickey Flynn looked a trifle wall-eyed. Straha had lived in exile in the USA for years. He’d been the third-highest officer in the conquest fleet, and then the highest-ranking defector after his effort to oust Atvar for not prosecuting the war against humanity vigorously enough failed. And he’d got back into the Lizards’ good graces by delivering the data from Sam Yeager that showed the United States had launched the attack on the colonization fleet.
“I’d like to be a fly on the wall when Straha meets Atvar again,” Flynn said.
“Admiral Peary, do you read me?” Major Nichols asked. “Are you there?”
“Where else would we be?” Flynn asked reasonably. “Ah, forgive me for asking, Major, but is the Commodore Perry armed?”
“That is affirmative,” Nicole Nichols said. “We are armed.” She used an emphatic cough, which answered that. “We did not know for certain that you had arrived when we departed, and we did not know what kind of reception we would get when we entered this solar system. Can you please summarize the present political situation?”
“I do believe I would describe it as a mess,” Flynn said, a word that summed things up as well as any other for Glen Johnson. Flynn went on, “You’ll need more details than that. I can put you through to Lieutenant General Healey, our commandant, and he can patch you through to Sam Yeager, our ambassador.”
That produced a pause a good deal longer than required by speed-of-light. “Sam Yeager is your ambassador? Where is the Doctor?” Major Nichols asked. She used interrogative coughs, too.
“They couldn’t revive him from cold sleep,” Flynn said.
“I… see. How… unfortunate,” Major Nichols said. “Well, yes, please arrange the transfer, Colonel, if you’d be so kind. Whoever the man on the spot has been, we’ll have to deal through him.”
Flynn fiddled with the communications controls. Lieutenant General Healey said, “It’s about time I get to speak for myself, Colonel.” Whatever he said after that, he said to Major Nichols. Johnson and Flynn shared a look. If the commandant hadn’t liked what the pilots were saying, he could have interrupted them whenever he pleased. But what really pleased him was complaining.
“Five and a half weeks from Earth to Home. Five and a half weeks. We can go back,” Johnson said dizzily.
“Maybe we can go back,” Flynn said. “If it’s not weightless aboard the Commodore Perry, I wouldn’t want to try it.”
Johnson said something of a barnyard nature. That hadn’t occurred to him. “I wonder how they did it,” he said, and then, “I wonder whether I’d get it if they told me.” Would his own great-grandfather have understood radio and airplanes? He doubted it.
Understood or not, though, the Commodore Perry was there. The Lizards were still trying to call it, a rising note of panic in their voices. One of them must have figured out what Major Nichols had said. And how would they like that?
16
Atvar awaited the shuttlecraft descending from orbit around Home with a sinking feeling in his liver. He made the negative gesture. No, that wasn’t true. As a matter of fact, his liver felt as if it had already sunk all the way down to his toeclaws. Even in his wildest nightmares, he had never imagined a day like this might come.
And Straha had. Of all the males of the Race the Americans might have picked to rub Atvar’s snout in his own failings, Straha was the prize example. Did they know that? Atvar laughed bitterly. Of course they did! They had to.
Faster than light! The Big Uglies could travel faster than light! The Race had decided that was impossible even before Home was unified, and hadn’t worried much about it since. Some Tosevite physicist had come to the same conclusion, and the Big Uglies had believed him… while Atvar was on Tosev 3, anyhow.
Unlike the Race, the Tosevites had kept worrying at the idea, though. The Race had got a scent of some of their earliest experiments, but…
Yes. But, Atvar thought bitterly. The difference between what the Race had and what the Big Uglies had was the difference between a scent and the beast it came from. And the Big Uglies’ beast was a starship.
Now what? the fleetlord wondered. Blasting the Commodore Perry would have been tempting-if another American starship might not be only days behind, might escape, and might bring word of war back to the United States long before the Race’s colony on Tosev 3 could hope to hear about it. That was a recipe for disaster.
Preventive war seemed to have gone up in smoke. Too late, too late, too late. Again, how could you hope to attack someone who knew the bite was coming long before your teeth sank in-and who could bite you whenever he pleased? Home, at least, could defend itself. What about Rabotev 2 and Halless 1? If the Big Uglies wanted to, they could smash the Empire’s other worlds before Home warned them they might be in danger.
Too late, too late, too late. The words tolled again, like a mournful gong inside Atvar’s head.
After a moment, he realized not all that noise was internal. Some came through his hearing diaphragms. The terminal at the shuttlecraft port was efficiently soundproofed. All the same, the braking rockets’ roar penetrated the insulating material and filled the building.
The windows facing the fire-scarred landing field were tinted. Even so, nictitating membranes flicked across Atvar’s eyes to protect them from the glare. The shuttlecraft settled smoothly onto the concrete. Crashes were vanishingly rare; computer control made sure of that. Atvar wouldn’t have minded seeing one of those rare, rare accidents now. No, he wouldn’t have minded a bit. Watching Straha cook…
Didn’t happen. The shuttlecraft’s braking rockets cut off. Silence returned to the terminal. Atvar didn’t quite let out a disappointed hiss. He hadn’t really hoped the shuttlecraft would crash-or, if he had, he hadn’t really expected it to.
Homeward Bound (colonization) Page 55
