Homeward Bound

by Harry Turtledove

  His cabin was a little larger than the cramped cubicle that had gone by the name in the Lewis and Clark. His bunk was nothing more than a foam mattress with straps to keep him from drifting away. In weightlessness, what more did anyone need? A few people had nightmares of falling endlessly, but most did just fine. Johnson was glad he was, for once, part of the majority.

  He didn’t feel like sleeping just now, though. He put a skelkwank disk into a player and started listening to music. Skelkwank light—a coherent beam of uniform frequency—was something humanity hadn’t imagined before the Lizards came. English had borrowed the word from the language of the Race. All sorts of humans had borrowed—stolen— the technology.

  Johnson remembered records. He wondered if, back on Earth, even one phonograph survived. Maybe a few stubborn antiquarians would still have them, and museums. Ordinary people? He didn’t think so.

  So much of the Admiral Peary used pilfered technology. Humanity had had radar before the Lizards came. People were beginning to work on atomic energy. But even there, the Race’s technology was evolved, perfected. Stealing had let humans evade any number of mistakes they would have made on their own.

  Where would we be if the Race hadn’t come? Johnson knew where he would be in this year of our Lord 2031: he would be dead. But where would people be? Would the Nazis still be around, or would the USA and the Russians and England have smashed them? He was pretty sure the Germans would have gone down the drain. They were, after all, taking on the rest of the world without much help.

  But even beaten, they were a formidable people. In the real world, they’d pulled themselves together after the Race’s invasion and again after the fight they’d stupidly picked with the Lizards over Poland in the 1960s. That had been a disastrous defeat, and had cost them much of their European empire. But they’d been recovering even when Johnson went into cold sleep, and reports from Earth showed they were working hard to reestablish themselves as a power to be reckoned with.

  The Lizards worked hard to keep the Reich from violating the terms of the armistice they’d forced upon it. They had kept Germany from returning to space for a long time. But the Reich had quietly rearmed to the point where pulling its teeth now would only touch off another war. The Lizards didn’t want that. The last one had hurt them even though they won it. The Germans, by acting as if they weren’t afraid to take the chance of another scrap—and maybe, given Nazi fanaticism, they weren’t—had won themselves quite a bit of freedom of action.

  Bastards, Johnson thought. But tough bastards. For the time being, though, the Germans would trouble the Race only back on Earth. Things were different for the Americans. They were here. Just a few minutes before, Johnson had watched Home through the glass of the control room.

  And more American ships would be coming. The pilot was as sure of that as he was of his own name. The USA wasn’t a country that did things by halves. What would the Lizards do when almost as many American ships—and Russian ships, and maybe Japanese ships, too— as those of the Race flew back and forth between the Sun and Tau Ceti? For that matter, what would humanity do when that came true?

  Ttomalss blamed his talk with Fleetlord Atvar for the worried interest with which he approached evidence of the Big Uglies’ growing scientific progress in the reports reaching Home from Tosev 3. And the more he looked, the more evidence he found. That didn’t surprise him, but didn’t leave him happy, either.

  Some of the most recent reports alarmed him in a new way. When he’d stayed on Tosev 3, the worry had been that the Big Uglies were catching up with the Race in this, that, or the other field. That wasn’t what the scientists in the colonization fleet were saying now. Instead, they were writing things like, The Big Uglies are doing this, that, or the other thing, and we don’t know how. More and more often, the Race was falling behind.

  Everything his own people did was refined and perfected and studied from every possible angle before it went into large-scale use. Their technology hardly ever malfunctioned. It did what it was supposed to do, and did it well. If something didn’t do what it was supposed to do, and do it all the time, they didn’t use it. They went into the unknown one fingerclaw’s width at a time.

  The Big Uglies, by contrast, charged into the unknown with great headlong leaps. If something worked at all, they’d try it. If it was liable to fail and kill large numbers of the individuals who used it, they seemed to take that as part of the price of doing business. They scoffed at danger, even obviously preventable danger. When the Race came to Tosev 3, the Big Uglies had been making motor vehicles for a fair number of years. They’d made them, but they hadn’t bothered including safety belts. How many lives had that cost them? How many injuries? Whatever the number, the Tosevites hadn’t included them.

  Their cold sleep followed the same pattern. It worked . . . most of the time. If the Tosevite called the Doctor died on the way to Home, well, that was unfortunate, but the Big Uglies hadn’t wanted to wait till the process got better. If they had waited, they wouldn’t have launched their starship in the first place.

  Whenever Ttomalss found evidence of Tosevite advances beyond anything the Race could match, he passed it on to males and females in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. And those males and females, as far as he could tell, promptly forgot all about it. Whenever he asked for follow-up, they acted as if they had no idea what he was talking about. They didn’t quite laugh at him to his face. He would have bet they laughed at him behind his back.

  He had spent a lot of years on Tosev 3. Maybe he’d picked up some small streak of perverse independence from the Big Uglies he’d studied for so long. Whatever the reason, he decided to forget about the males and females in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. He used the computer network to find the name and number of a physicist who taught at the local university.

  Pesskrag didn’t answer the phone. Ttomalss left a message on her machine and waited to see if she would call him back. If she didn’t, he vowed to call another working scientist and, if necessary, another and another till he found somebody who would listen to him.

  To his relief, the physicist did return his call the next day. When he saw her on the monitor, her youth astonished him. “I greet you, Senior Researcher,” she said. At least she wore no wig. “Do you really mean to tell me these Big Ugly things have made discoveries we have not? Excuse me, but I find that very hard to believe.”

  “If you are interested, I would be pleased to send you the data to evaluate for yourself,” Ttomalss answered. “Please believe me when I tell you that you will not wring my liver if you persuade me I am worrying over nothing.”

  “Send the data, by all means,” Pesskrag said. “I was amazed that these creatures could fly a starship, even a slow one. But that, after all, is something they learned from us. I will be even more surprised if they do prove to have learned anything we do not know.”

  “I will send the data I presently have. More comes in all the time. Decide for yourself,” Ttomalss said. “One way or the other, I look forward to your evaluation.”

  He transmitted the recent reports from Tosev 3. Technically, he probably wasn’t supposed to do that. The Imperial Office of Scientific Management had irked him enough that he didn’t care so much whether he was supposed to. He wanted answers, not proper bureaucratic procedures. Yes, the Big Uglies have corrupted me, he thought.

  This time, Pesskrag did not call back for several days. Ttomalss wondered if he ought to try to get hold of the physicist again. That, he convinced himself, would show Big Ugly–style impatience. He made himself wait. He told himself he’d waited for years in cold sleep. What could a few days matter now? But when he’d lain in cold sleep, he hadn’t known he was waiting. Now he did. It made a difference.

  He had just come back to his room from a negotiating session with the wild Tosevites when the telephone hissed for attention. “Senior Researcher Ttomalss. I greet you,” he said.

  “And I greet you. This is Physics Pro
fessor Pesskrag.”

  Excitement tingled under Ttomalss’ scales. One way or the other, he would find out. “I am glad to hear from you,” he said, and barely suppressed an emphatic cough. “Your thoughts are . . . ?”

  “My thoughts are confused. My thoughts are very nearly addled, as a matter of fact,” Pesskrag said. “I had expected you to send me a pile of sand, to be honest with you.”

  “I am not a physicist myself. I have no sure way of evaluating it,” Ttomalss said. “That is why I sent it to you. All I can say is, males and females with some expertise were concerned about it on Tosev 3. Did they have reason to be?”

  “Yes.” Pesskrag used an emphatic cough. “The Big Uglies are making experiments that never would have occurred to us. Some of these are large and elaborate, and will not be easy to duplicate here. Do you have more data than you provided me, by any chance?”

  “I am sorry, but I do not,” Ttomalss said.

  “Too bad,” the physicist told him. “Most of what you have given me is descriptive only, and not mathematical: it appears to be taken from the public press, not from professional journals. Even so, I would dearly love to see the results from some of these trials.”

  “Is that a truth?” the psychologist asked.

  “That is a truth.” Pesskrag used another emphatic cough.

  “In that case, maybe you should see if you can duplicate these experiments here,” Ttomalss said. “Maybe you should pass this information on to other physicists you know. If you do not have the facilities to duplicate what the Big Uglies are doing, maybe a colleague will.”

  “Do I have your permission to do that?”

  “Mine? You certainly do.” Ttomalss did not tell the physicist his might not be the only permission required. He did say, “If they decide to attempt this research, I would appreciate it if they got word of their results back to me.”

  “Yes, I can see how you might. Ah . . .” Pesskrag hesitated. “You do realize these experiments will not be attempted tomorrow, or even within the next quarter of a year? Colleagues will have to obtain materials and equipment, to say nothing of funding and permissions. These wings will spread slowly.”

  “I see.” Ttomalss did, too—all too well. “Please bear in mind, though, and please have your fellow physicists also bear in mind, that these are liable to be the most important experiments they ever try. Please also bear in mind that the Big Uglies tried them years ago. The news is just now reaching us, because of light speed and because of whatever delay there was between the experiments themselves and when the Race learned of them. What you will be doing has been done on Tosev 3. Do we want to fall behind the Big Uglies? Do we dare fall behind them?”

  “Until I looked at this, I would have said falling behind those preposterous creatures was impossible,” Pesskrag said. “Now I must admit this may have been an error on my part. Who would have believed that?” Amused and amazed, the physicist broke the connection.

  Ttomalss was neither amused nor amazed. He knew the Big Uglies too well. He was alarmed. The natives of Tosev 3 had been bad enough when they knew less than the Race. They’d used everything they did know, and they’d had an overabundant supply of trickery, not least because, being disunited, they’d spent the last centuries of their history cheating one another whenever they saw the chance. They’d pulled even a while ago. Their current presence on Home proved that. If they ever got ahead . . .

  If they ever get ahead, how will we catch up? Ttomalss wondered. The Big Uglies had started far behind, but they ran faster. They’d caught up. Could the Race hope to pick up its pace if the Tosevites ever got ahead? That was part of what Ttomalss was trying to find out.

  What he did find out failed to encourage him. A few days after he sent the data to Pesskrag, he got an angry telephone call from a male called Kssott. Kssott worked in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. “You have been distributing information that should have stayed confidential,” he said in accusing tones.

  “Why should it stay confidential?” Ttomalss demanded. “Do you think that if you bury it in the sand it will never hatch? I can tell you that you are wrong. Among the Big Uglies, it has hatched already.”

  “That is the information we most need to grasp with our finger-claws and hold tight,” Kssott said.

  “Why? It is a truth whether you admit it or not,” Ttomalss said angrily. “And if you do admit it, maybe you—we—can do something about it. If not, the Tosevites will keep on going forward, while we stay in the same place. Is that what you want?”

  “We do not want to introduce unexamined changes into our own society,” Kssott said. “That could be dangerous.”

  “Truth,” Ttomalss agreed sarcastically. “Much more dangerous than letting the Big Uglies discover things we have not. I have heard that the Big Uglies worry the Emperor himself. Why do they not worry you?”

  Kssott said, “You are misinformed.”

  “I most assuredly am not,” Ttomalss said, appending an emphatic cough. “I have that directly from a male who has it straight from the Emperor’s own mouth.”

  All he got from Kssott was a shrug. “We have been what we are for a very long time. The Race is not ready for rapid change, nor capable of it. Would you disrupt our society for no good purpose?”

  “No. I would disrupt it for the best of good purposes: survival,” Ttomalss said. “Would you keep it as it is so that the Big Uglies can disrupt it for us?”

  “You find this a concern,” Kssott said. “The Imperial Office of Scientific Management does not. Our views will prevail. You may rest assured of that, Senior Researcher. Our views will prevail.” He sounded very certain, very imperial, very much a high-ranking male of the Race. Ttomalss wanted to kill him, but even that wouldn’t have done much good. There were too many more just like him.

  As chief negotiator for the Americans, Sam Yeager sometimes had to put his foot down to be included on the junkets the other humans got to take. “I did not come here to sit in a conference room all day and talk,” he told one of the Lizards’ protocol officers. “I could do that back on Tosev 3, thank you very much. I want to see some of this world.”

  “But did you not come here to negotiate?” the protocol officer asked. “I did not believe the purpose of your crossing interstellar space was tourism.”

  The female had a point . . . of sorts. But Sam was convinced he did, too. “If Fleetlord Atvar and your other negotiators want to talk with me, I will gladly talk with them,” he said. “But let them come along on the journey, too.”

  To the protocol officer, that must have seemed like heresy. But stubbornness won the day for Sam. And, once he’d won, once he was whisked off to the port city of Rizzaffi, he rapidly wished he’d let the protocol officer have her way. The prospect of visiting a seaside city on Home had seemed irresistible . . . till he got there.

  To the Lizards, whose world was more land than water, ports were afterthoughts, not the vital centers they so often were on Earth. Rizzaffi, which lay on the shore of the Sirron Sea, proved no exception.

  It also proved to have the nastiest weather Sam had ever known— and he’d played ball in Arkansas and Mississippi. Home was a hot place. The Lizards found Arabia comfortable. But most of this world was dry, which made the climate bearable for a mere human being.

  Rizzaffi was a lot of things. Dry wasn’t any of them. Nigeria might have had weather like this, or the Amazon jungle, or one of the nastier suburbs of hell. You couldn’t fry an egg on the sidewalk, but you could sure poach one. Most of the buildings in the port were of highly polished stone. Things that looked like ferns sprouted from their sides anyway. Mossy, licheny growths spread across them and even grew on glass.

  The Lizards routinely used air conditioning in Rizzaffi, not to cut the heat but to wring some of the water out of indoor air. That did them only so much good. Every other advertisement in the town seemed to extol a cream or a spray to get rid of skin fungi.

  “You know what this place is?” Frank Cof
fey said after their first day of looking around.

  “Tell me,” Sam said. “I’m all ears.”

  “This is where athlete’s foot germs go to heaven after they die.”

  “If you think I’ll argue with you, you’re nuts,” Sam said. It had never quite rained during the first day’s tour. But it had never quite not rained, either. It was always mist or drizzle or fog, the sky an ugly gray overhead.

  Rizzaffi reminded him of a classic science-fiction story about the mad jungles of Venus, Stanley Weinbaum’s “Paradise Planet.” Venus wasn’t like that, of course, but Weinbaum hadn’t known it wasn’t. He’d died a few years before the Lizards came to Earth. He’d barely made it to thirty before cancer killed him. News of his death had hit Sam hard; they’d been close to the same age.

  He thought about mentioning “Paradise Planet” to Coffey. After a moment, he thought again. The younger man hadn’t been born when the story came out. To Coffey, Venus had always been a world with too much atmosphere, a world with the greenhouse effect run wild, a world without a chance for life. He wouldn’t be able to see it as Weinbaum had imagined it when jungles there were not only possible but plausible. And that, to Sam, was a shame.

  As he discovered the next day, even the plants in Rizzaffi’s parks were like none humanity had ever seen. The trees were low and shrubby, as they were most places on Home. They had leaves, or things that might as well have been leaves, growing directly from their branches rather than from separate twigs or stalks. But those leaves were of different color and shape from the local ones with which Sam was familiar. Stuff that looked something like grass and something like moss grew on the ground below the treeish things. An animal that resembled nothing so much as a softshell turtle with a red Joseph Stalin mustache jumped into a stream before Sam got as good a look at it as he wanted.

  “What was that thing?” he asked their guide.