Homeward Bound (41 page)

“Since when has that kind of worry ever stopped you?” After a long, long pause, Johnson added, “Sir?” He didn’t have to waste much time being polite to Healey. As far as he knew, the
Admiral Peary
had no brig. He didn’t need to worry about blowing a promotion, either. What difference did it make, when he never expected to see Earth again? He could say whatever he pleased—and if Healey felt like baiting him, he’d bait the commandant right back.

Healey’s bulldog countenance was made for glowering. But the scowl lost a lot of its force when its owner lost the power to intimidate. “You are insubordinate,” the commandant rasped.

“Yes, sir, I sure am,” Johnson agreed cheerfully. “You’d be doing me a favor if you sent me down to Home with the doctor, you know that? I’d be keeping company with a nice-looking woman till gravity squashed me flat. You’d be stuck up here with yourself—or should I say stuck on yourself?”

That struck a nerve. Healey turned the glowing crimson of red-hot iron. A comparable amount of heat seemed to radiate from him, too. He got himself a plastic pouch of food and spent the rest of supper ignoring Johnson.

The meal was a sort of a stew: bits of meat and vegetables and rice, all bound together with a gravy that was Oriental at least to the extent of having soy sauce as a major ingredient. A spoon with a retracting lid made a good tool for eating it.

Johnson did wonder what the meat was. It could have been chicken, or possibly pork. On the other hand, it could just as well have been lab rat. How much in the way of supplies had the starship brought from Earth? The dietitians no doubt knew to the last half ounce. Johnson didn’t inquire of any of them. Some questions were better left unanswered.

When he reported to the control room the next morning, Brigadier General Walter Stone greeted him with a reproachful look. “You shouldn’t ride the commandant so hard,” the senior pilot said.

“He started it.” Johnson knew he sounded like a three-year-old. He didn’t much care. “Did you tell him he should stay off my back?”

“He has reasons for being leery of you,” Stone said. “We both know what they are, don’t we?”

“Too bad,” Johnson said. “We both know his reasons never amounted to a hill of beans, too, don’t we?”

“No, we don’t know that,” Walter Stone said. “What we know is, nobody ever proved those reasons have anything to do with reality.”

“There’s a reason for that, too: they don’t.” Johnson had stuck with his story since the 1960s.

“Tell it to the Marines,” said Stone, an Army man.

Since Johnson had been a Marine now for something approaching ninety years, he chose to take umbrage at that—or at least to act as if he did. He got on fine with Mickey Flynn; he and Stone had been wary around each other ever since he involuntarily joined the crew of the
Lewis and Clark.
They would probably stay that way as long as they both lived.

Stone wasn’t obnoxious about his opinions, the way Lieutenant General Healey was. That didn’t mean he didn’t have them. To him, Johnson would always be below the salt, even if they’d come more than ten light-years from home.

Prig,
Johnson thought, and then another word that sounded much like it. The first was fair enough. The second wasn’t, and he knew as much. Stone was extremely good at what he did. Johnson knew himself to be unmatched at piloting a scooter. No human being was better than Walter Stone at making a big spaceship behave. Johnson had seen that with both the
Lewis and Clark
and the
Admiral Peary.
If the other man had a personality that seemed to be made of stamped tin . . . then he did, that was all.

“Hello!” Dr. Melanie Blanchard floated up into the control room, and Johnson forgot all about Stone’s personality, if any. The doctor went on, “I’m making my good-byes. The shuttlecraft will take me down to Home tomorrow.”

“We’ll miss you,” Johnson said, most sincerely. Stone nodded. The two of them had no quarrel about that.

Dr. Blanchard said, “No need to. The doctors aboard will be able to take care of you just fine in case anything goes wrong. They’ll do better than I could, in fact. My specialty is cold-sleep medicine, and they tend to people who are actually warm and breathing to begin with.”

Johnson and Stone looked at each other. Johnson could see he and the senior pilot shared the same thought. He spoke before Stone could: “We weren’t exactly thinking of your doctoring.”

“Oh.” Melanie Blanchard laughed. “You boys say the sweetest things.” She was careful to keep her tone light. She’d been careful for as long as Johnson had known her. He was sure he and Stone weren’t the only men aboard the
Admiral Peary
who thought of her not just as a physician. He was pretty sure nobody’d had the chance to do anything but think. The ship was big enough to fly from Earth to Home, but not big enough to keep gossip from flying if there were anything to gossip about. If anything could travel faster than light, gossip could.

No gossip had ever clung to Dr. Blanchard. Johnson wished some would have; it would have left him more hopeful. He smiled at her now. “You think we talk sweet, you should give us a chance to show you what we can do.”

“Take no notice of him,” Walter Stone told the doctor. “I agree with everything he says, but take no notice of him anyway.” Johnson looked at Stone in surprise. Flynn wouldn’t have disdained that line. Johnson hadn’t thought Stone had it in him.

Melanie Blanchard laughed. “Flattery will get you—not as much as you wish it would,” she said, the laugh taking any sting from the words. “Being noticed is nice. Having people make nuisances of themselves isn’t.” She held up a hand. “You two haven’t. I could name names. I could—but I won’t.”

“Why not?” Johnson asked. “If you do, we’ll have something interesting to talk about.”

“You’ll be talking about me behind my back whether I name names or not,” she said. “I know how things work. If you were going down there, they’d talk about you, too. Oh, not the same way—you aren’t women, after all—but they would. Will you tell me I’m wrong?”

“Sure,” Johnson said. “If we were going down to Home, they’d talk about
him.
” He jerked a thumb at Walter Stone.

“Me? Include me out,” Stone said.

“Thank you, Mr. Goldwyn,” Johnson said. Stone grimaced. He looked as if he hadn’t wanted to give Johnson even that much reaction. Johnson turned back to Melanie Blanchard. “Five gets you ten your shuttlecraft pilot won’t be a Lizard. Rabotevs and Hallessi don’t care about ginger.”

“They don’t care about taking ginger,” she said. “I bet they’d like the money they’d make for smuggling it—you’ve said that yourself. Of course, we haven’t got any ginger to give them, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course,” Johnson and Stone agreed together.

Johnson didn’t know for sure whether the
Admiral Peary
carried ginger, whatever his suspicions. He could think of three people who might: Sam Yeager, Lieutenant General Healey, and Walter Stone. He didn’t ask the senior pilot. He was sure of one thing—the Lizards thought the humans’ starship was full of the stuff from top to bottom.

Come to think of it, Dr. Blanchard might know the truth about the herb, too. Had she just come out and told it, or was she operating on the principle that the Race might have managed to bug the
Admiral Peary
and needed to be told what they already wanted to hear?

She said, “I’m going to go below and make sure I’ve got everything I’ll need down on the surface of Home. In the meantime . . .” She glided over to Johnson and gave him a hug and a kiss. Then she did the same thing with Walter Stone. And then, waving impartially to both of them, she was gone.

“Damn,” Johnson said: a reverent curse if ever there was one. The memory of her body pressed against his would stay with him a long time. At his age, sex wasn’t such an urgent business as it had been when he was younger. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten what it was all about.

Walter Stone looked amazingly lifelike as he stared toward the hatchway down which Dr. Blanchard had gone. He shook himself like a man coming out of cold water. “Now that you mention it, yes,” he said.

“Lot of woman there,” Johnson observed. “I’d run into somebody like that, I probably would have stayed married and stayed on Earth.”

He waited for Stone to point out that he’d be dead now in that case. The other man didn’t. He only nodded.

With a sigh, Johnson added, “Of course, you notice she isn’t married herself. Maybe she’s not as nice as she seems.”

“Or maybe she thinks men are a bunch of bums,” Stone said. “You’ve got an ex-wife. Maybe she’s got an ex-husband or three.”

That hadn’t occurred to Johnson. Before he could say anything, a Lizard’s voice spoke from the radio: “Attention, the Tosevite starship. Attention, the Tosevite starship. We have launched a shuttlecraft to pick up your physician. This is the object you will discern on your radar.”

Sure enough, there it was: a blip rising from Home toward the
Admiral Peary.
“We thank you for the alert, Ground Control,” Stone said in the language of the Race.

A little later, the shuttlecraft pilot’s face appeared in the monitor. As Johnson had guessed, he was (or perhaps she was) a dark-skinned, short-faced Rabotev with eyes on stalks, not in turrets. “I greet you, Tosevites,” the pilot said. “Please give me docking instructions.”

“Our docking apparatus is the same as the Empire uses,” Stone said. He had, no doubt, almost said
the same as the Race uses,
but that wouldn’t do with a Rabotev. “Lights will guide you to the docking collar. Call again if you have any trouble.”

“I thank you,” the shuttlecraft pilot replied. “It shall be done.”

The Rabotev was certainly capable. He—she?—docked with the
Admiral Peary
with a smooth efficiency anyone who’d flown in space had to respect. With the duty in the control room, Johnson couldn’t give Dr. Blanchard another personal good-bye. He sighed again. Memory wasn’t a good enough substitute for the real thing.

K
aren Yeager was starting to get to know the Sitneff shuttlecraft port. It wasn’t as familiar to her as Los Angeles International Air- and Spaceport, but she had some idea which turns to take to get to the waiting area. The shuttlecraft port also had one great advantage over LAX: she was a VIP here, not one more cow in a herd. She and Jonathan got whisked through security checkpoints instead of waiting in lines that often doubled back on themselves eight or ten times.

“I could get used to this,” she said as they took their seats in the waiting area. If the seats weren’t perfectly comfortable—well, they wouldn’t be here very long.

Her husband nodded. “Could be worse.” In English, he added, “Only drawback is everybody staring at us.”

“Well, yes, there is that,” Karen said. She too felt as if every eye turret in the waiting area were turned her way. That wasn’t quite true, but it wasn’t far wrong, either. Lizards attracted much less attention at airports back on Earth. Of course, there were millions of Lizards on Earth, and only a handful of humans here on Home.

She shifted in her seat. No, it wasn’t comfortable at all. Back on Earth, some airports had special seating areas for the Race. Karen didn’t plan on holding her breath till the Lizards returned the favor here.

A shuttlecraft landed. Its braking rockets roared. The Race was better at soundproofing than mere humans were, but she still felt that noise in her bones. Three Lizards got out of the shuttlecraft. Their friends or business colleagues or whatever they were greeted them when they came into the terminal.

After glancing at his watch, one of the Americans’ guards said, “Your fellow Tosevite should be grounding next.”

“I thank you.” Karen and Jonathan said the same thing at the same time. As couples who’ve been married for a long time will, they smiled at each other.

The guard was right. The groundcrew at the port moved the last shuttlecraft off the flame-scarred tarmac. A few minutes later, another one landed a hundred yards off to the left. This time, the pilot who emerged was a Rabotev. The Lizards in the waiting area paid no particular attention to him (or her); they were used to Rabotevs. But they exclaimed and pointed when Dr. Melanie Blanchard came down the landing ladder after him.

“She’s moving as if she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders, isn’t she?” Jonathan said.

“She probably feels that way, too,” Karen said. “She’s been out of gravity for quite a while now.”

Dr. Blanchard trudged across the concrete toward the waiting area. Lifting each foot and then putting it down took an obvious effort. A Lizard scurried into the shuttlecraft and came out with a pair of suitcases of Earthly manufacture. He hurried after the human. Carrying her luggage wasn’t very hard for him. By the way things looked, it might have killed her.

Turning to the guards, Karen said, “Can you please keep the reporters away from her? She is too tired to answer questions right away.”

“It shall be done, superior sir.” The Lizards still had as much trouble telling humans’ sexes apart as people did with them. Karen couldn’t get too annoyed, though, because the guards did do what she’d asked. The reporters shouted their questions anyhow, but they had to do it from a distance.

Dr. Blanchard waved to them. That took effort, too. “I am glad to be here,” she called in the language of the Race. She didn’t look or sound glad. She looked as if she wanted to fall over. And when she got to Karen and Jonathan, she sank into one of the seats by them regardless of how uncomfortable it was. “Whew!” she said. Sweat gleamed on her face. “Can I rest for a little while before we go on?”

“Sure,” Jonathan said. “How are you?”

“Hammered,” she answered frankly. “I remember I used to take gravity for granted. What I don’t remember is how. I feel like I’ve got two great big football players strapped to my back.”

“You’ll get used to it again,” Karen said.

Melanie Blanchard nodded. Even that looked anything but easy for her. “I suppose I will,” she said. “In the meantime, though, I’m a shambling wreck—only I can’t shamble for beans, either.”

One of the Lizard guards came up to her and bent into the posture of respect. “I greet you, superior female. Shall we now return to the hotel where your species stays?”

“I thank you, but please let me rest first,” she replied. “I have been weightless for a very long time, and I need a little while to get used to being back in gravity again.”

The guard made the affirmative gesture. “As you say, so shall it be.” He went back to holding off the reporters.

“I wish it were, ‘As you say, so shall it be,’ ” Dr. Blanchard said in English. “Then I’d tell myself everything was fine, and it would be—‘physician, heal thyself.’ I’d love to. Only problem is, I can’t.”

“When we do go back to the hotel, you can stretch out on a sleeping mat,” Karen said. “Then come over to our room, if you’ve got the energy. We’ve got ice cubes. As near as I can tell, they’re the only ones on the planet.” She spoke with what she hoped was pardonable pride.

“And we’ve got the Race’s equivalent of vodka,” Jonathan added. “What they use for flavored liquor is amazingly nasty—of course, they think the same thing about scotch and bourbon. But this is just ethyl alcohol cut with water. You can drink it warm, but Karen’s right—it’s better cold.”

“Vodka over ice sounds wonderful. Getting up off the sleeping mat and going to your room . . .” Dr. Blanchard laughed ruefully and shook her head. “Maybe if I say pretty please, you’ll bring me a drink instead?”

“That might be arranged,” Karen said.

“We’ll be friends forever if it can,” Melanie Blanchard said. “Is the car back to the hotel very far from here?”

“About as far as it was from the shuttlecraft to where you are,” Jonathan answered.

The doctor heaved herself to her feet. She wobbled for a moment. Jonathan held out his arm. She took it, but then steadied and stood on her own. To the guard, she called, “I am ready to go to the car now, as long as I do not have to move too fast.”

“Set whatever pace you please, superior female,” the Lizard replied. “Our orders are to accommodate ourselves to your needs.”

“I thank you. That is very kind.” Dr. Blanchard dropped back into English to tell Karen and Jonathan, “Why don’t you lead the way? You know where you’re going, and I haven’t got the faintest idea.”

“I don’t think we’ll lead. I think we’ll go one on each side of you, in case you need propping up,” Jonathan said. That turned out to be a good idea. Dr. Blanchard walked as if she were a St. Bernard plowing through thick snow. Home’s gravity field seemed harder for her than drifts after a blizzard were for a dog. The Lizard carrying her suitcases followed, while the guards spread out on all sides.

When they reached the car, she sank down into a seat with a groan of pleasure. “This one even fits my butt,” she said happily. “All the time in the world on an exercise bike up there isn’t the same as ten minutes in gravity, believe you me it isn’t.”

She seemed a little better by the time they got back to the hotel. That relieved Karen; she’d feared the doctor would be in no shape to take care of herself, let alone anybody else. But Melanie Blanchard walked more easily than she had before, and even paused briefly to talk with reporters waiting outside. She might need a while to do a thorough job of adjusting, but it seemed likely she would.

When the humans went into the lobby, Karen’s father-in-law met them with an expression she found hard to fathom. Was it grim, or was he swallowing a belly laugh? He sounded grim when he said, “We have a . . . situation here.”

“What’s up, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

“A cleaning crew went into your room while you were out meeting Dr. Blanchard,” Sam Yeager answered. “They were fooling with the rats’ cages. We’ve had an escape.”

“Oh, dear,” Melanie Blanchard said. “I was hoping to do some work with them.”

“That’s not the problem,” Karen said, which was, if anything, an understatement.

Sam Yeager nodded. “No, it’s not. The Race told us they’d raise holy hell if anything of ours got loose on Home. We promised on a stack of Bibles we wouldn’t let the critters loose—and we didn’t.”

“They don’t care what they’ve done to Earth’s ecology,” Karen said. “They claim that’s not their worry. But if we return the favor, it’s a different story. How many got away?”

“Eight or ten, I think,” her father-in-law answered. “You’ll know better than I do when you see your room, because you have a better notion of how the cages were laid out. But as of now, I’m open to suggestions.”

“Why should we worry?” Karen said. “It’s the Lizards’ own fault. If they want to catch the rats, tell ’em to buy a cat.”

Everybody laughed. Dr. Blanchard said, “Excuse me,” and sat down on the edge of a table. That was probably more comfortable than perching in what the Race used for chairs. The table was flat, not curved the wrong way for a human fundament.

“They are setting traps,” Sam Yeager said. “I have no idea how much good that will do. Can they find something rats really want to eat? Can the rats find something to eat and drink on their own?” He spread his hands. “I don’t know about that, either. Stay tuned for the next exciting episode, and we’ll find out.”

“They’ll have vermin of their own.” Dr. Blanchard looked and sounded happier sitting down. “They’ll have creatures that hunt vermin, too. The next interesting question may be whether those creatures feel like hunting rats.”

“Befflem, tsiongyu, and their wild cousins, I’d expect,” Jonathan said. “Yes, that could be mighty interesting. Befflem have turned into godawful nuisances back on Earth. There’d be a sort of poetic justice if rats did the same thing here.”

“I doubt the Race would appreciate it,” his father said dryly. “But they can’t blame us for the escape. They did it themselves. I wouldn’t want to be one of those cleaners right now, not for all the tea in China I wouldn’t.”

“If I wake up and find
myself
nose to nose with a rat, I’ll probably scream,” Karen said.

“If I wake up and find
myself
nose to nose with a rat, I’ll probably scream, too,” Sam Yeager said. “That’ll scare the rat out of a year’s growth, but I don’t suppose it’ll do much else.”

“If anything Earthly can establish itself on Home, I’d bet on rats,” Dr. Blanchard said thoughtfully. “They’ve evolved to live anywhere and eat anything. And they’ve evolved to live in cities alongside people. They might feel right at home here on Home.”

“That occurred to me, too,” Sam Yeager said. “I don’t know if it’s fully occurred to the Race yet. You have to have lived on Earth for a while before you understand just what pests rats can be, and there aren’t that many Lizards here who have.”

“If they don’t get it now, they will pretty soon,” Karen said.

“They may, anyhow,” Jonathan said. “Maybe rats
can’t
make it here. Maybe they won’t find anything to eat. Maybe the exterminators will get ’em. Maybe something local will think they’re delicious.”

“Maybe,” Dr. Blanchard said. “But nobody’s ever gone broke betting on rats.”

Senyahh held a strange creature by the tail. The creature was deceased. The bandage on the kitchen chief’s other hand said it hadn’t perished without putting up a fight. “What
is
this horrible thing, Exalted Fleetlord?” Senyahh demanded.

Atvar eyed it with a grim sense of recognition. The tail was long and naked and scaly, which made the animal seem a little less alien. The creature’s body, though, was soft-skinned and furry. Its head had the flaps of skin Tosevite creatures used to concentrate sound waves for their hearing diaphragms. The head was, at the moment, somewhat the worse for wear.

“What did you hit it with?” Atvar inquired.

“A frying pan,” Senyahh answered. “It bit me anyhow. And I almost missed it. It is as fast as a beffel, but I never saw anything like it before. What is it?”

“I believe it is called a
rat.
” Atvar pronounced the unfamiliar word as well as he could. “It is one of the escaped Tosevite animals. Congratulations on killing it.”

“Oh, one of those horrible creatures,” Senyahh said. “I thought they would be bigger and uglier and go around on their hind legs.”

“This is quite ugly enough, in my opinion,” Atvar said. “And I meant those congratulations. We believe the housekeeping staff let eight or ten
rats
escape. This is the first one of which we have seen the slightest trace.”

Senyahh swung the dead beast by the tail. “It will cause no more trouble,” she declared, a hunter’s pride in her voice.

“This one will not, no,” Atvar agreed. “But what of the others? What if they breed? What if they flourish? On Tosev 3, they are major pests. Do they have any diseases or predators here? I have my doubts.”

The head of the kitchens had her own concerns. She asked, “Are they good to eat?”

“I believe so, but the Big Uglies do not commonly consume them.” Atvar pointed to the female. “You are welcome to experiment on your own, but do not,
do not,
serve the results of your experiment to the American Tosevites—not even to Karen Yeager, with whom you quarreled.” He used an emphatic cough. “The cleaning crew that freed the
rats
has been sacked. If you give the Americans
rat
to eat, you will envy their fate. Do you understand me? Do I make myself plain?”