Homeward Bound (46 page)

“Well, good,” he said again, and got another laugh from her. She packed up her supplies and walked out of his room. Sam laughed, too, though he was damned if he was sure it was funny. The closest, most intimate physical contact he’d had with a woman since his wife died—and he’d been on the wrong end of a rubber glove. If that wasn’t mortifying, he didn’t know what would be.

He didn’t usually worry about such things. He didn’t usually get reminded about them quite so openly, though. He was still a man. His parts did still work. He laughed once more. They would work, anyhow, if he could find himself some company.

Major Coffey had managed. Sam shrugged. No accounting for taste. Kassquit had always fascinated him, but he’d never thought she was especially attractive. He shrugged again. Jonathan would have told him he was wrong—and Karen would have hit Jonathan for telling him that.

Someone knocked on the door. That meant an American stood in the hall. A Lizard would have pressed the button for the door hisser. Sam looked around. Had Dr. Blanchard forgotten something? he wondered hopefully. He didn’t see anything that looked medical. Too bad.

He opened the door. There stood Tom de la Rosa. Sam aimed an accusing forefinger at him. “
you’re
not a beautiful woman,” he said.

De la Rosa rubbed his mustache. “With this on my upper lip, I’m not likely to be one, either.”

“Well, come on in anyhow,” Sam said. “I’ll try not to hold it against you.”

“I’m so relieved.” Tom walked past Yeager and over to the window. “You’ve got a nicer view than we do. See what you get for being ambassador?”

Sam had come to take the view for granted. Now he looked at it with fresher eyes. It was pretty impressive, in a stark, Southwestern way. “Reminds me a little of Tucson, or maybe Albuquerque.”

“Somewhere in there,” Tom de la Rosa agreed. “If we don’t get what we need here, you know, Tucson and Albuquerque are going to look a lot more like this. They look a lot more like this now than they did when we went into cold sleep.”

“I do know that,” Sam said. “Arizona and New Mexico are just about perfect country for plants and animals from Home.”

“And if they crowd ours out, I don’t know how we’re going to get rid of them,” Tom said. “The Lizards don’t show a whole lot of give on this one.”

“You’ve got that wrong,” Sam said. De la Rosa sent him a questioning look. He spelled out what he meant: “The Lizards don’t show any give at all on this one. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just making themselves at home—or at Home—on Earth.”

De la Rosa winced at the audible capital letter. When he recovered, he said, “But it’s not right, dammit. They’ve got no business imposing their ecology on us.”

“Starlings and English sparrows in the United States. And Kentucky bluegrass. And Russian thistle, which is what a lot of tumbleweeds are,” Sam said mournfully. “Rats in Hawaii. Mongooses—or is it mongeese?—too. Rabbits and cats and cane toads in Australia. I could go on. It’s not as if we haven’t done it to ourselves.”

“But we didn’t know any better. Most of the time we didn’t, anyhow,” Tom de la Rosa said. “The Race knows perfectly well what it’s doing. It knows more about ecology than we’ll learn in the next hundred years. The Lizards just don’t give a damn, and they ought to.”

“They say they haven’t introduced anything into territory we rule. They say what they do on territory they rule is their business—and if their critters happen to come over the border, they don’t mind if we get rid of them.”

“Mighty generous of them. They’d tell King Canute he was welcome to hold back the tide, too,” Tom said bitterly. “The only thing they wouldn’t tell him was how to go about it.”

“Well, Tom, here’s the question I’ve got for you,” Sam said. “If the Lizards don’t want to change their minds—and it doesn’t look like they do—is this worth going to war to stop?”

“That’s not the point. The point is getting them to stop,” de la Rosa said.

Sam shook his head. “No. They don’t want to. They don’t intend to. They’ve made that as plain as they possibly can. As far as they’re concerned, they’re moving into a new neighborhood, and they’ve brought their dogs and cats and cows and sheep and some of their flowers along with them. They’re just making themselves at home.”

“Bullshit. They understand ecological issues fine. They don’t have any trouble at all,” Tom said. “Look at the fit they pitched about the rats. Have they caught any besides the first two? It‘d serve the Race right if the damn things did get loose.”

“As far as I know, those are the only ones they’ve got their hands on,” Sam said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. Is this something we fight about? Or is it already too late for that? You can’t put things back in Pandora’s box once they’re loose, can you?”

“Probably not.” De la Rosa looked as disgusted as he sounded. “But the arid country on Earth—everywhere from Australia to the Sahara to our own Southwest—is never going to be the same. The least we can do is get an agreement out of them not to introduce any more of their species to Earth. That’s locking the barn door after the horse is long gone, though.”

“I’ve been over this with Atvar before. He’s always said no. I don’t think he’s going to change his mind.” Sam Yeager sighed. He saw Tom’s point. He’d seen with his own eyes what creatures from Home were doing in and to the Southwest—and things had only got worse since he went into cold sleep. He sighed again. “Atvar will tell me the Race is as sovereign in the parts of Earth it rules as we are in the USA. He’ll say we have no right to interfere in what the Lizards do there. He’ll say we complain about being interfered with, but now we’re meddling for all we’re worth. It’s not a bad argument. How am I supposed to answer him?”

“Throw the rats in his face,” Tom suggested. “That will get him to understand why we’re worried.”

“He already understands. He just doesn’t care. There’s a difference,” Sam said. “No matter what happens from our point of view, the Lizards get major benefits by importing their animals and plants. If we try to tell them they can’t, we’re liable to have to fight to back it up.
Is this worth a war?
”

Tom de la Rosa looked as if he hated him. “You don’t make things easy, do you?”

“Atvar’s told me the same thing. From him, I take it as a compliment. I’ll try to do the same from you,” Sam said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. The Lizards are changing the planet. I agree with you—that’s what they’re doing. Do we wreck it to keep them from changing it?”

“That’s not a fair way to put things,” Tom protested.

“No? That’s what it boils down to from here,” Sam said. “We can have a damaged ecology, or we can have a planet that glows in the dark. Or else you’ll tell me it’s not worth a war. But nothing short of war is going to make the Lizards change their policy about this.”

Instead of answering, de la Rosa stormed out of the room. Yeager wasn’t particularly surprised or particularly disappointed. Tom was a hothead. You needed to be a hothead to get involved in ecological matters. Every so often, though, even hotheads bumped up against the facts of life. Sometimes the cost of stopping a change was higher than the cost of the change itself.

He looked out the window again. He imagined saguaros putting down deep roots here. He imagined owls nesting in the saguaros, and roadrunners scurrying here and there in the shade of the cactuses snapping up whatever little lizardy things they could catch. He imagined sidewinders looping along. He imagined how the Lizards would feel about all of that—especially the ones who had the misfortune to bump into sidewinders. Would they go to war to keep it from happening? They might.

But it was already happening back on Earth. Too late to stop it now. And, whatever else happened, he couldn’t imagine an American colonization fleet crossing the light-years and coming down on Home. The Race had the population to spare for that sort of thing. The USA didn’t.

He wondered how much he’d accomplished by coming here. That he’d got here alive was pretty impressive, too. He’d had the audience with the Emperor and the private meeting afterwards. But what had he gained that he couldn’t have got from Reffet and Kirel back on Earth? Anything?

If he had, he was hard pressed to see it. He understood Tom de la Rosa’s frustration. He had plenty of frustration of his own. The Lizards here on Home were less inclined to compromise than the ones back on Earth had been. They thought they were right, and any miserable Big Ugly had to be wrong.

One thing the flight of the
Admiral Peary
had proved: humans could fly between the stars. The Race couldn’t ignore that. The Lizards would have to be wondering what else might be on the way. Maybe the colonists back on Earth could radio ahead and let Home know other starships were coming, but maybe not, too. If humans wanted to send secret expeditions, they might be able to.

Sam grimaced. The
Reich
might do that. And any German expedition would come with guns not just handy but loaded. The Nazis owed the Lizards for a defeat. After all this time, would they try to pay them back?

How am I supposed to know?
Sam asked himself. All he knew about what the
Reich
was like these days, he got from the radio bulletins beamed Homeward by America and by the Lizards themselves. It didn’t seem to have changed all that much—and there was one more thing to worry about.

Whenever Jonathan Yeager saw Kassquit, he wanted to ask her if she was happy. She certainly gave all the signs of it, or as many as she could with a face that didn’t show what she was thinking. Frank Coffey seemed pretty happy these days, too. Jonathan had no great urge to ask him if he was. That was none of his business, not unless Coffey felt like making it his business.

Jonathan wondered what the difference was. That he’d been intimate with Kassquit all those years ago? He thought there was more to it than that. He hoped so, anyhow. He had the strong feeling that Major Frank Coffey could take care of himself. He wasn’t nearly so sure about Kassquit. She couldn’t be a Lizard, however much she wanted to, but she didn’t exactly know how to be a human being, either. She was liable to get hurt, or to hurt herself.

And what can you do about it if she does?
Jonathan asked himself. The answer to that was only too obvious. He couldn’t do a damn thing, and he knew it. He also knew Karen would grab the nearest blunt instrument and brain him if he tried.

He sighed. He couldn’t blame Karen for being antsy about Kassquit. To his wife, Kassquit was The Other Woman, in scarlet letters ten feet high. Kassquit wasn’t at her best around Karen, either.

It came as something of a relief when Trir said, “Would any of you Tosevites care for a sightseeing tour today?” at breakfast one morning.

“What sort of sights do you have in mind showing us?” Linda de la Rosa asked.

“Perhaps you would like to go to the Crimson Desert?” the guide said. “It has a wild grandeur unlike any other on Home.”

“I want to go,” Tom de la Rosa said. “I would like to see what you term a desert on this world, when so much of it would be a desert on Tosev 3.”

All the Americans volunteered—even Jonathan’s father, who said, “None of the negotiations going on right now will addle if we pause. Pausing may even help some of them.” Jonathan knew his dad wasn’t happy with the way things were going. He hadn’t expected him to come out and say so, though.

Then Kassquit asked, “May I also come? I too would like to see more of Home.”

“Yes, Researcher. You are welcome,” Trir said. “We will leave from in front of the hotel in half a daytenth. All of you should bring whatever you require for an overnight stay.”

“The Crimson Desert,” Karen said musingly. “I wonder what it will be like.”

“Hot,” Jonathan said. His wife gave him a sardonic nod. Had they been going to the desert on Earth, he would have warned her to take along a cream that prevented sunburn. As a redhead, she needed to worry about it more than most people did. But Tau Ceti wasn’t the sun. It put out a lot less ultraviolet radiation. Even in the warmest weather, sunburn wasn’t so much of a worry here.

They boarded the bus that had taken them out to the ranch. The driver left the hotel’s lot and pulled out into traffic. They were off. The bus’ dark windows kept Lizard drivers and passengers in other vehicles from gaping at Big Uglies. It didn’t keep the Americans from looking out. Whenever Jonathan saw a Lizard in a wig—or, every once in a while, a Lizard in a T-shirt—he had everything he could do not to howl with laughter. Then he’d run a hand over his own shaven skull and think about sauces and geese and ganders.

In the halfhearted Lizard way, the bus was air-conditioned. That meant it was hot inside, but not quite stifling. Jonathan’s father started to laugh. “What’s funny, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

“Another bus ride,” his father answered. “I used to think I’d taken the last one when I quit playing ball, but I was wrong.”

“I bet you never expected to take one on another world,” Jonathan said.

“Well, that’s a fact,” Sam Yeager agreed. “All the same, though, a bus ride is a bus ride. Some things don’t change. And I keep looking for greasy spoons by the side of the road. I don’t suppose the Race knows anything about chop-suey joints or hot-dog stands.”

“Probably a good thing they don’t,” Jonathan said.

“Yeah, I suppose,” his father said. “But it hardly seems like a road trip without ’em. I’ve been spoiled. I have this idea of how things are supposed to work, and I’m disappointed when they turn out different.”

“You probably expect flat tires, too,” Jonathan said.

His father nodded. “You bet I do. I’ve seen enough of them. Heck, I’ve helped change enough of them. I wonder what the Lizards use for a jack.”

“Let’s hope we don’t find out,” Jonathan said. To his relief, his father didn’t argue with him.

They had no trouble getting to the Crimson Desert. The bus rolled south and east out of Sitneff, into open country. By any Earthly standards, that would have been desert. By the standards of Home, it wasn’t. It was nothing but scrub. Treeish things were few and far between, but smaller plants kept the ground from being too barren. Every once in a while, Jonathan spotted some kind of animal scurrying along, though the bus usually went by too fast to let him tell what the creature was.