What impressed him most about the space station wasn’t its likely armament but, as he’d told the radio operator, how fast it was growing. An awful lot of launches had to be ferrying men and supplies up there. As far as he was concerned, that sort of spaceflight was bus driver’s work, but there was a lot of bus driver’s work going on to make the station expand so quickly.
He scratched his chin, wondering if he’d be able to finagle a ride up there himself, to see with his own eyes what was going on. After a moment, he nodded. That shouldn’t be hard to arrange.
A Lizard radar station called from the ground to inform him his orbit was satisfactory. “I thank you,” he answered in the language of the Race. The Lizard on the radio had sounded sniffy, as Lizards had a way of doing. If his orbit hadn’t been satisfactory, the Lizard would have been screaming his head off.
Johnson suddenly laughed. “That’s what it is!” he exclaimed, speaking aloud to enjoy the joke more. “There’s thousands of tons of powdered ginger up there, and they’re going to drop it on the Lizards’ heads. Wouldn’t that produce some satisfied customers?”
He knew he was anthropomorphizing. When the Lizards didn’t have it, they didn’t miss it the way people would. But when they were interested, they were a lot more interested than anybody above the age of nineteen could hope to understand.
“Hello, American spacecraft. Over.” The call was in crisp, gutturally flavored English. “Who are you?”
“Peregrine here, Johnson speaking,” Johnson answered. “Who are you, German spacecraft?” The German equivalents of his ship had orbits with about the same period as his own, but, because Peenemünde was a lot farther north than Kitty Hawk, they swung farther north and south than he did, and met only intermittently.
“Drucker here, in Käthe,” the flier from the Reich answered. “And I wish I were in Käthe right now, and not up here. Do I say this right auf Englisch?”
“If you mean what I think you mean, yeah, that’s how you say it,” Johnson replied with a chuckle. “Wife or girlfriend, Drucker? I forget.”
“Wife,” Drucker answered. “I am a lucky man, I know, to be still in love with the woman I married. Have you a wife, Johnson?”
“Divorced,” Johnson said shortly. “Spent too much time away from her, I guess. She got fed up with it.” She’d run away with a traveling salesman, was what Stella had done, but Johnson didn’t advertise that. Unless somebody asked him about her, he didn’t think of her twice a month. He wasn’t a man inclined to dwell on his mistakes.
“I am sorry that to hear,” Drucker said. “Here is to peace between us and confusion to the Lizards.”
“Yeah, I’ll drink to that any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Johnson said. “Every day I’m not up here, I mean.”
“They think all I have here is water and ersatz coffee and a horrible powder that turns water into something that is supposed to taste like orange juice,” Drucker said. “They are wrong.” He sounded happy they were wrong.
“Somebody’s listening to you,” Johnson warned.
“They will not shoot me for saying I do not like the tang of their orange drink,” the German answered. “They need a better reason than that.”
For once, Johnson wished the radio speaker in the Peregrine weren’t so tinny. He thought Drucker’s voice had an edge to it, but couldn’t be sure. He was probably imagining things. Spacemen were part of the Nazi elite. The Gestapo wouldn’t go after them. It would pick some poor, beat-up foreigners who couldn’t even complain.
After a pause that stretched, Drucker went on, “You and I and even the Bolsheviks in their flying tin cans—if we were not here, the Lizards would be able to do whatever they chose.”
“That’s so,” Johnson agreed. “Doesn’t mean we get along with each other, though.”
“Well enough not to use the rockets and bombs we have all built,” Drucker said. “That is well enough, when you think of how the world is.”
His signal was starting to break up as his flight path carried him south of the Peregrine. Glen Johnson found himself nodding. “I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, pal. Safe landing to you.”
“Safe . . .” A burst of static drowned out the last of the German’s words.
The rest of Johnson’s tour was uneventful. He approved of that. Events in space meant things going wrong—either in Peregrine, which was liable to kill him, or outside the ship, which was liable to mean the whole world and most of the spacecraft in orbit around it would go up in smoke.
He got down to Kitty Hawk in one piece. After the usual interrogation—almost as if he were a captured prisoner and not an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps—the bright young captain who’d grilled him asked, “And do you have any questions of your own, sir?”
It was, for the most part, a ritualistic question. Past the latest sports scores, what would a returning pilot want to know about what had happened during the mission he’d just completed? He knew better than anybody.
But, this time, Johnson said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.” The captain’s eyes widened; Johnson had taken him by surprise. But he recovered quickly, using a gracious gesture to urge the Peregrine’s pilot to go ahead. And Johnson did: “What are they throwing into that space station to make it grow so fast?”
“Sorry, sir, but I really don’t know a thing about that,” the captain replied. “Not my area of responsibility.”
“Okay,” Johnson said with a smile and a shrug. He got to his feet. So did the young captain, who gave him a precise salute. He did an about-face and left the interrogation room. As soon as he got outside, he scratched his head. Unless everything he’d learned about human nature over a lot of tables with poker chips on them was wrong, that bright young captain had been lying through his shiny white teeth.
Johnson scratched his head again. He could think of only one reason why the captain would lie: whatever was going on aboard the space station was secret. It had to be a pretty juicy secret, too, because the captain didn’t want him to know it was there at all. Had the fellow just said, Sorry, sir—classified, Johnson would have shrugged and gone about his business. Now, though, his bump of curiosity itched. What were they hiding, up there a few hundred miles?
Something the Lizards wouldn’t like. He didn’t need an Ivy League degree to figure that one out. He couldn’t see the Race breaking out in a sweat about whatever it was, though, not when they had starships from two different fleets practically blanketing the Earth.
“Security,” Johnson muttered, making it into a dirty word. And at that, he had it good. He wouldn’t have traded places with the Nazi in the upper stage of that A-45, not for all the tea in China he wouldn’t. And Russia was no better place to live than Germany, not if half of what people said was true.
Let’s hear it for the last free country in the world, he thought as he headed toward the bar to buy himself a drink to celebrate being alive. Even England was slipping these days. Johnson sadly shook his head. Who would have thought, back in the days when the limeys battled Germany singlehanded, they would have ended up sliding toward the Reich an inch at a time?
He shrugged again. Who would have thought . . . a whole lot of things over the past twenty years? If the United States had to get secret to stay free, he didn’t see anything in the whole wide world wrong with that.
He was on his second whiskey before the irony there struck him. By the time he’d started his third one, he’d forgotten all about it.
Atvar was glad to return to Australia. It was late summer in this hemisphere now, and the weather was fine by any standards, those of Home included. Even in Cairo, though, the weather had been better than bearable. What pleased him more was how far the colony had come since his last visit.
“Then, all we had were the starships,” he said to Pshing. “Now look! A whole thriving city! Streets, vehicles, shops, a power plant, a pipeline to the desalination center—a proper city for the Race.”
“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adj
utant replied. “Before very much longer, it will be like any city back on Home.”
“Indeed it will,” Atvar said with an emphatic cough. “This is going according to plan. When we proceed according to plan, we can move at least as fast as the Big Uglies. And here in the center of Australia, we shall have no Big Uglies interfering with our designs, except for the occasional savage like the one I saw the last time I was here. But this is and shall forevermore be our place on Tosev 3.”
“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing answered. “My only concern is that we are, in certain areas, still vulnerable to sabotage from the Tosevites. The desalination plant and pipeline spring to mind.”
“I am assured the security plans are good,” Atvar said. “They had better be good; we have had enough painful lessons from the Big Uglies on how to construct them and where our vulnerabilities lie.”
He did not want to think about security plans and sabotage, not now. He wanted to walk along the sidewalks of the growing city, to watch males and females peacefully going about their business and getting on with their lives. Before too many generations, if all went well, they would rule the whole planet, not just a little more than half. And the Empire could get on with the job of civilizing another world.
If all went well . . .
Very faintly, he could smell the pheromones that meant a female somewhere upwind was ripe for mating. He tried to ignore the odor. He couldn’t quite. For one thing, it made him a little more irritable than he would have been otherwise. Even here, in the heart of the Race’s haven on Tosev 3, the Tosevite herb had come. He sighed. The troubles this world brought seemed inescapable.
All over the town, alarms began hissing. Amplified voices shouted: “Missile attack! Incoming missile attack! Take cover against missile attack!”
“No!” Atvar screeched. All around him, the colonists stared foolishly. Every moment counted, but they did not seem to realize it. They had not been trained for this. Atvar did not know which way to start himself. The missiles could be coming from any direction. If they’d been launched from one of the accursed submersible ships the Big Uglies had developed, they would be here all too soon.
Antimissile sites ringed the city, as they ringed the whole area of settlement here in Australia. But they were not infallible. They had not been infallible against even the crude missiles the Big Uglies had had during the fighting. And Tosevite technology was better now than it had been then.
Atvar turned his eye turrets toward Pshing. “If we perish here, Kirel will take vengeance the likes of which this world has never seen.”
“Of course, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing sounded so calm, Atvar envied him. The fleetlord did not want to fall here. He wanted to bring the assimilation of this world into the Empire as far forward as he could. How much the universe cared about what he wanted was liable to be another question.
Alarms kept hissing. Atvar looked around for someplace to shelter against the nuclear missile he assumed would momentarily burst overhead. He saw nowhere to hide. Turning to Pshing, he said, “I am sorry you had to come here with me as part of your duties.” If he was about to die, he didn’t want to die with the apology unspoken.
Before Pshing could answer, antimissiles roared off their launch platforms. They would do what they could, but Atvar knew some of their targets were all too likely to elude them.
Explosions to the north, to the northwest, and overhead smote his hearing diaphragms. Debris fell out of the sky, crashing down around and in the city the Race was building. A great chunk dug a hole in the ground not far from Atvar. The leg and tailstump of a male or female stuck out from under it. That leg still twitched feebly, but no one could have lived after so much metal fell on him.
Still, despite the bursts overhead, no new temporary sun blazed into life above the city. “Exalted Fleetlord, we may live!” Pshing cried.
“We may indeed,” Atvar said. “The antimissiles are performing excellently.” They were performing better than he’d imagined they could, let alone hoped. Those continuing explosions above him had to be Tosevite missiles intercepted and blasted out of the sky. Had they been anything else, one of those missiles would have ensured that he never heard anything again.
He opened his mouth to laugh exultantly. As he inhaled, all the strange, alien scents of the Australian desert went past his scent receptors and into his lung. Among them was a spicy scent he did not remember from his previous visit. He had never smelled anything like it before. It was, he thought, the most delicious odor he’d ever known, with the possible exception of a female’s pheromones. It reminded him of those pheromones, as a matter of fact.
“What is that splendid smell?” he asked aloud.
No sooner asked than answered. The response formed in his head even as Pshing spoke the words: “Exalted Fleetlord, I do not know for certain, but I think that must be ginger.”
“Yes. Truth,” Atvar said. He could see the truth, all but hanging there in front of his eyes. It was as obvious as Venteff’s Theorem on the relationship between the squares of the sides of a right triangle and the square of the hypotenuse. Everything suddenly seemed obvious to him. He had never felt so brilliant, never since the day when he’d used the egg tooth at the end of his snout to break through the shell that separated him from the wider world.
“I never tasted ginger before,” Pshing said.
“Neither did I.” Regret filled Atvar. If he’d been using the Tosevite herb during the fighting, the Big Uglies surely would have had to yield to the Race. He felt certain and swift and strong, very strong.
Other males and females must have felt the same way, for they rushed upon the chunk of metal that had crushed one of their comrades and hauled it away. Some of them exclaimed in horror and disgust, for they were colonists, not males from the conquest fleet, and the crushed remains they uncovered were outside their experience. But they had acted swiftly and decisively, without the Race’s usual long pauses for thought.
“They did well,” Pshing said. For the moment, the action was what counted, not what resulted from it.
“Truth,” Atvar said again. He wondered which Tosevite notempire had launched this attack against the Race in its citadel on Tosev 3. Whoever it was certainly had some strange notions of what an attack was. But for the handful of males and females hit by falling pieces of rocket, the rest of the members of the Race on whom the Big Uglies had chosen to shower so much ginger were, if anything, enjoying themselves more than they had before.
He paused and looked about, now here, now there, his eye turrets moving independently of each other. The smell of ginger was not the only marvelous odor coming to his scent receptors now. Along with it, he smelled female pheromones.
Yes, of course, he thought. I remember. Ginger brings them into their season. The Big Uglies had spent all the years since his arrival on Tosev 3 raising his ire; never once had the erectile scales atop his head risen with it. They were for only one sort of display, the sort he made now.
Pshing was also displaying his crest. So were other males, too, as far as the eye turret could reach. And females were lowering their heads and raising their hindquarters into the mating posture. They might have been uninterested mere moments before, but the ginger floating through the air in a fine, delicious cloud did to them what the coming of the season would have done back on Home.
Atvar advanced on the nearest female he saw. With every step he took, his own posture grew more nearly upright. But he was not the only male approaching her. Fury filled him, lest the other male get there before him. “Go back!” he shouted. “I am the fleetlord!” He showed his claws in a threatening gesture.
The other male also displayed his claws. “I do not care who you are!” he shouted back, a shocking lack of decorum at any time but the season. Then, it was every male for himself. “I am going to mate with this female.”
“No!” Atvar hurled himself at the male from the colonization fleet. He was older, but he also knew how to fight, not only as a c
ommander but also as an individual. Before long, the other male fled, hissing and wailing in dismay.
The female over whom they’d fought turned an eye turret back toward Atvar. “Hurry!” she said. “This is uncomfortable.”
He did his best to oblige. It wasn’t uncomfortable while it went on: very much the reverse. As soon as he’d finished, the female skittered away. But he, like the other males in the city, kept right on smelling the pheromones from other females that announced they were still receptive.
It was, in fact, very much the way a day during the season would have gone back on Home. In other words, not a cursed thing got done. Males sought females and brawled among themselves. Females stopped and waited where they stood for males. Sometimes a single mating was enough to satisfy them. Sometimes, perhaps depending on how much ginger they’d inhaled and tasted, they wanted more.
Only slowly did the difference between here and Home sink into Atvar’s mind: what with ginger and pheromones, he was far more distracted than he should have been. Back on Home, everyone expected the season. It was part of the rhythm of the year, not a disruption.
Here in Australia, the reverse was true. This city had just hatched from its egg. Much of it, in fact, still remained inside the shell. Males and females had plenty to do without worrying about the distraction of mating as if they were so many Big Uglies. Some of that work would get done wrong now. Some of it would not get done at all. Out across the city, more males and females were liable to be hurt by the sudden onset of the season than from debris falling out of the sky.
Clever, Atvar thought after a while. The Big Uglies who had done this were liable to be more clever than he was at the moment. His wits working far less clearly than they should have, he wondered whether inciting the Race to mate could be construed as an act of war. Was it not closer to what the Tosevites called, for no obvious reason, a practical joke?
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