by Jerry Oltion
He grinned. "They picked up a little English, and Donna picked up enough of their language to get along. We mostly went fishin' during the day, and you don't want to talk much while you're doin' that anyway."
"Fishing?" Allen asked.
"Yeah. They've got trout the size of your leg just dying to take a fly." He shrugged. "Well, they're not really trout, but close enough."
Tippet said, "These aliens—the beach balls on sticks— did you form a political alliance with them?" Judy felt the back of her neck tingle. She knew what Tippet was getting at. If humanity already had allies, killing them off could be even messier than he thought.
Trent didn't realize what was at stake. Before Judy could say anything, he shook his head and said,
"No, we just made friends and had a good time."
Tippet didn't reply, but Judy could imagine the conversation going on in the hive mind. While they had been talking, the pickup had continued its drift toward the airlock door and bounced off. Now it was coming back toward them, cab first. Trent nodded toward it and said, "Hey, we ought to tie that down before it hurts somebody. Where can I park it?"
"Let's put it next to the Getaway Special," Tippet said. Allen and Trent grabbed the truck and brought it to a stop, bracing themselves on the walls, then pushed it toward the door into the garden.
"Careful!" Judy said as they both gave it a hearty shove. "It's going to be just as hard to stop as it was to get it moving."
It turned out to be harder, since there wasn't a convenient wall to push against. The truck came in at an angle, digging a trench in the ground with its right front bumper and flipping end-for-end before they brought it under control, but they finally—with much whooping and laughter amid the curses and grunts—managed to orient it with its tires against the ground. Trent went inside the camper and got some rope, which he threw over the top and tied to the bushes on either side. Then he leaned back against the driver's door, tucking one foot under the step to hold himself in place, and crossed his arms over his chest. "I gotta say thanks for coming along when you did. When those military bastards zapped our parachutes, I thought we were genuinely screwed."
"Thank Tippet," Allen said. "He's the one who heard your 'Mayday.' He's been monitoring transmissions from Earth for the last few days, trying to figure out what's going on down there." Donna had been about to go into the camper, but she stopped herself against the door frame.
"What is going on down there?"
"Long story," Allen said. "I don't know how long you've been away, but things have apparently been getting crazier and crazier since we left."
Trent laughed. "They were crazy enough when you left. You nicked our water line on your way out, so we had us a fountain right in the middle of the driveway. All the cops got soaked, and then a bunch of news guys showed up and started taking pictures, so all our neighbors came over to see what all the ruckus was about, and somebody called the fire department so they showed up with a truck, and by the time we got everything sorted out it seemed like half the town was millin' around in our yard."
"Did the cops arrest you for harboring fugitives?" Judy asked. Trent shook his head. "Are you kiddin'? They weren't after us. Once they realized you were gone for good, they took one look at the crowd and lit out for greener pastures."
"And so did you, apparently."
Trent nodded. "It looked like a good time to be makin' tracks. But hey, if we're going to swap stories, I'm gettin' a beer."
49
Trent unhooked his foot and pulled himself toward the camper door, but Donna said, "We gave the last of it to the roly-polys, remember?"
He slapped himself on the forehead. "Oh, dang, that's right." To Allen and Judy and Tippet, he said,
"They loved the stuff. Didn't get 'em drunk, near as we could tell anyway, but they took to it like cats to milk. I figure the first guy who sets up a brewery there will probably wind up runnin' the place."
"Is that your intention, then?" Tippet asked.
"Huh? Oh, hell no." He looked at the radio on Judy's waist, then at Tippet, no doubt trying to figure out which to address. He settled on Tippet himself. "Beer's for drinking, as far as I'm concerned, and brewin' the stuff is too much like work."
"Even if you would wind up 'runnin' the place,' as you put it?" Trent shook his head. "That sounds like an even bigger headache to me. No sir, I'll leave the runnin'
to people who like that sort of thing. Me, I just want to see what's out there." Tippet made a low whistling sound over the radio, but didn't offer any translation. Judy was only a few feet from the Getaway; she reached out and pulled herself inside headfirst. The place was a disaster area—literally, she supposed, given that it had suffered explosive decompression—but she sorted one-handed through the debris until she found the stuff sack she and Allen had carried food in on their walk to the creek. There were still two cans of Budweiser there, still intact and even relatively cold. She took one in either hand and wriggled outside with them.
"Here," she said, reaching out toward Trent. "Whoa!" Trent said when he saw what it was. "You still got some of that?"
"That's the last of it, but yeah." She handed one to Trent, and held out the other one for Donna. Donna put her hands up, palms-out. "No, I'll share Trent's. You guys have the other." Judy didn't argue. A beer would taste great, and she had no idea when she'd get the chance again.
"Careful when you open it," she said to Trent. "In zero-gee, it comes boiling out like nobody's business." She showed him what she meant, popping the tab and immediately slurping up the jet of foam that sprayed out. When she couldn't hold any more in her mouth, she handed the can to Allen and let him take the rest.
Trent tried the same trick, but he got beer all over his beard, and when he handed the can to Donna, she let go of the camper shell and wound up doing a slow spiral into the air, amber droplets of beer making a miniature galaxy around her. Everyone burst into laughter, especially when Donna started going after the loose beer drops and slurping them down one at a time.
"I've got to get a picture of this," Trent said, opening the driver's door of the truck and retrieving a disposable Digimatic from inside. Donna hammed it up for the shot, sticking her tongue out and stretching her neck forward.
Trent took the shot, then rubbed his nose-print off the screen in back and showed the image to Judy and Allen. "This is your camera, by the way," he said. "It was still in the house when you left." Allen shrugged. "That's all right. We wound up bringing souvenirs home with us." He took the camera and flipped through the images while Judy and Tippet watched over his shoulder. There were shots of an Earthlike planet from space, more shots from the ground of trees and rocks and flowers, shots of Trent standing next to the pickup with the parachute dangling from a tree branch overhead, shots of Donna with the beach-ball-on-stick aliens (who apparently came in varying shades of yellow, green, and red), and one group shot of Trent, Donna, and a bunch of aliens together, standing on a dock in front of a sleek metal boat, all of them holding stringers of fish and grinning like fools. At least Judy assumed that's what the aliens were doing with their mouths open in wide ovals. When Tippet saw that one, he said, "Were you certain these fish weren't intelligent creatures as well?"
"Yeah," Trent said, "we thought about that, but the roly-polys were catchin' 'em and eatin' 'em, so we figured it was okay."
"And you weren't worried about allergic responses, or poisoning?" He shrugged. "We were careful, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, you know?"
"Yes," Tippet said. "Yes, I do know that."
There was an embarrassing moment of silence, then from overhead Donna said, "Hey, nice tree. Every spaceship should have a tree in it."
Judy looked over at the tree they had brought with them, now dormant in the light. "Actually, we picked it up on the same planet we found Tippet," she said. "It's intelligent, too. It only wakes up at night, but when it does, it can walk around."
"Yeah? That must have been spooky."
Ju
dy laughed. "It was."
Donna reached out for a hand back to the ground, and Trent stretched out toward her, but it took him and Allen together to bridge the gap.
When she was on the ground again, Trent took a sip of beer and said, "So, bring us up to speed. What's happening on Earth?"
They weren't happy to hear about the escalating tension between nations, or about the almost-war after the attack on the "overlord's" ship. "The dumb shits," Trent muttered when he heard about that, but when Judy described how Tippet felt about letting humanity loose in the galaxy, his eyes narrowed to little slits. With his dark beard and black hat, he looked like he might avenge his race's death ahead of time.
"You do that, buddy, you better get us all," he said, staring straight at the little butterfly, who once again hovered well out of reach.
They were still in the garden with the Getaway and the pickup and the tree. Donna had brought out cookies and corn chips from the camper, and everyone was floating at odd angles around the open door like football fans at a zero-gee tailgate party, but the conversation was anything but festive.
"We could track you down if necessary," Tippet said. "But we would rather not."
"Then don't," said Trent.
"It's not that simple."
He shook his head. "It's exactly that simple. If you don't want to get into a fight, then don't start one."
"We have already started one," Tippet pointed out. "At Judy and Allen's urging, and reluctantly even then, but our masquerade has become real."
"Only to you. The people on Earth think they blasted you out of the sky. They won't come lookin'
for you unless you cause more trouble. But if you do, I guarantee you they will." Tippet bobbed up and down over the chrome camper, his wings quivering. "This is only slightly less terrifying than the thought of what humanity could do to us if we don't strike first. We don't like either option."
Allen, anchored to the side of the pickup by one hand, said, "You have a possibility on one hand and a certainty on the other. It seems like the choice is pretty clear to me."
"It isn't," Tippet said. "Ours aren't the only races involved." Judy looked over the top of the Getaway at the tree, wondering what it would say if it were in on the conversation.
Wounded by a human nuclear attack, other members of its species cut down by would-be colonists; if it had spaceships and the hyperdrive, she didn't think it would be as generous as Tippet. The beach balls that Trent and Donna had discovered might be a little more sympathetic, but once people started dropping out of their sky by the thousands, building houses in their parks and catching all their fish, they would probably wish Tippet had prevented it while he could. There were undoubtedly more species out there who would feel the same way. Even if Tippet did let humanity out of the cradle, they might still band together to stop the plague from spreading throughout the galaxy.
Judy nearly laughed at the irony of it. They had threatened the Earth with a fictitious galactic federation, but it wouldn't be fictitious much longer. The only question was whether Earth was going to be around to join it once the dust settled.
Not that it would matter to anyone but humanity in the long run. The hyperdrive was out there. Even Tippet's people couldn't keep the secret from spreading like wildfire throughout the universe. Any contact with a spacefaring race was likely to make an intelligent but not-quite-there-yet race develop the capability, especially now that the hyperdrive had lowered the bar so drastically. And with every new race who learned how to use it, the same situation would arise.
"Holy shit," she said. This was a much bigger problem than she had thought. Far from preventing war, Allen's discovery could ignite it on a galactic scale. Would ignite it, over and over again, unless the cure could somehow be spread faster than the disease.
That was impossible. But what if the cure were at least spread with the disease? Would that be fast enough?
Everyone looked at her. Allen said, "What?"
"Give me a second." She hadn't thought it through, but there seemed only one logical thing to do. Humanity had started the problem; it was only fitting that they help stop it. And maybe save their own skins in the process. "It might work," she whispered.
Tippet said, "You see a solution to our dilemma?"
"Maybe."
"Yeah? What is it?" Allen asked.
She had to swallow before she could speak. This wasn't the sort of thing she could back away from once she set it into motion. If she opened her mouth, she would just dig herself deeper into the very political mess she had been trying to leave behind. Her life, personally, would probably be much simpler if she just shut up now and let Tippet make up his own mind. But she had brought this on herself. She had brought it on all of humanity, back when she had decided to let Allen spread his secret. And if she had learned anything from the last couple of weeks, it was that running from her problems only made them worse.
So maybe it was time to run headlong into them instead. She took a big breath, then said,
"Somebody's going to start a real galactic federation; why shouldn't that somebody be us?" 50
Her companions merely stared at her. "It's going to happen anyway," she said. "We know of four intelligent races so far, and there's undoubtedly more out there. All of them are going to have the same worry that Tippet does, even if we've been bombed back to the stone age. Hell, Tippet, if you do that to us, everybody else will be afraid of you—at least until somebody succeeds in wiping you out. And then somebody will wipe them out, and it'll escalate until there's only one race left. The only way to prevent that is to band together so the federation is stronger than any one race. They can keep the peace." Trent snorted. "Just like the U.N. does on Earth?"
"They're not perfect," Judy admitted, "but they've kept us from getting into another world war." Tippet flew up to hover near her right shoulder. "Humanity has already shown what it thinks of the Galactic Federation."
"That's because we were trying to provoke a war. If we give them a chance to work together instead of fight, they'll do it."
"Would they not think we were bluffing again?"
She shook her head. "They don't know it was us the last time. If we just show up and ask to talk, they'll listen." Assuming they didn't shoot first, but she didn't mention that possibility. Tippet no doubt understood that danger.
That didn't seem to be his major concern anyway. "You would voluntarily give up your autonomy to join a group mind?" He sounded incredulous, almost offended by the idea. Then she remembered that he was from a hive that wouldn't link with the others on its homeworld for fear of losing its identity.
"It wouldn't be a group mind," she said. "Just an alliance of partners."
"An alliance whose purpose is to threaten its members with retaliation if any of them causes trouble. Would humans join such a thing?"
"We already have," she pointed out. "The United Nations isn't the strongest political force in the world, but it's strong enough to make even the United States think twice about getting too far out of hand. The U.N. will join the Galactic Federation in a heartbeat if they can get in at the outset, because they'll figure they can wind up running it."
"What if they do?" Tippet asked.
"So what if they do? It'll still work. Once there are enough members to keep the others in line, it won't matter who plays host."
"Perhaps not. I'm not convinced." Tippet whistled for a moment, and the garden window began to constrict.
"Hey, what's going on?" Trent asked.
"I need to confer with another potential member of the Federation." As the garden darkened, Tippet said, "In the meantime, while we wait for it to wake up, I have a question for you."
"Shoot," said Trent.
"What?"
"Ask your question."
"Oh. I see. Very well; you said I'll leave the runnin' to people who like that sort of thing.' What about this? Would you help run the Federation if we decide to implement it?" Trent ran his fingers through his beard, then took
off his hat and scratched his head under his matted-down hair. He looked over at Donna, then back at Tippet, now just a shadowy night moth in the twilight. Judy knew just how he felt. No pressure.
But he finally shook his head and said, "Nope."
"You wouldn't do it."
"That's right. Sorry, but I'm not the type."
"And how many of your fellow humans do you think would feel the same way?"
"Hell, I don't know," he replied. "Probably a lot of 'em. Most of us just want to live our lives in peace, you know?"
"No," Tippet said. "We did not know. But it's encouraging to hear that." Whether he was being sarcastic or not was anyone's guess, but he didn't provide any more clues. The high-frequency speaker near the tree squealed to life with sound too high-pitched to register as more than a twitter of distant birds, and a moment later the tree's leaves rustled in response. Judy wished she could give the same answer to Tippet's question as Trent had. She hadn't gone into space to spread politics to the stars; she wanted to explore. But if Tippet went for her proposal, then she would bet money that she would have to have to play diplomat for years to come. Better than playing Overlord, she supposed, though probably not as satisfying. Tippet talked with the tree for nearly ten minutes, during which time he ignored the humans completely. While he was absorbed in conversation, Trent leaned forward in the dark and whispered,
"Should we make a break for it?"
They could bug out in the pickup. It would leave a hole in the starship, and they couldn't land when they got to Earth, but they might at least be able to warn people that their fate was being deliberated by aliens out in the asteroid belt. On the other hand, what could Earth do about it even if they knew? Come out here and bomb the ship again? Hell, if they just wanted to do that, she or Allen could simply leave in the Getaway. With its jump field set wide enough to collect the pickup in passing, it would probably yank the guts right out of the starship and kill everyone on board.
Even so, she couldn't believe that would be enough to stop the threat. Tippet hadn't said anything about sending a hyperdrive-equipped scout back to his home planet, but he would be a fool not to. He and the other hive minds were probably in constant communication with relay satellites by now. And if they were still trying to decide what to do, the loss of the ship would probably sway them toward war. She shook her head. "We've got to see what he decides first." Trent obviously didn't like it, but he stayed put. She didn't like it either. Now she knew how Tippet felt: Waiting to see what happened might doom her whole race, but acting too soon could be even worse. She would never have believed how frustrating it could be to sit tight and wait while the clock ran out, but that was the best option. She could only hope that Tippet would think so, too. And if he didn't? She steeled herself to leap for the Getaway. If it was going to be war, she could at least take out the flagship. She wouldn't be able to get into a spacesuit, but Trent and Donna and Allen could at least get to safety in the pickup before she jumped, and they could warn Earth what was coming. She slipped her good arm around Allen and gave him a squeeze. He squeezed back, and she nearly cried out from the pain of her broken ribs, but she wanted to feel his embrace no matter what the cost. It might be the last time.
