Homeward Bound (48 page)

Well, too bad for the redoubtable lieutenant general. Johnson got into his spacesuit, then ran checks on the scooter. Everything came up green. He hadn’t
thought
Healey would want him to have an unfortunate accident, but you never could tell.

The outer airlock door opened. Johnson used the scooter’s little steering jets to ease it out into space. As soon as he did, he started to laugh. He knew exactly how the little spacecraft was supposed to respond when he goosed it. It was definitely slower than it should have been, which meant it was heavier than it should have been.

“You sandbagging son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, having first made sure his radio was off. Before sending the Lizards a scooter, Healey had made sure it didn’t perform as well as it might have. He wanted the Race to keep right on underestimating what humans could do. That struck Johnson as singularly pointless way the hell out here. If he said anything about it, though, the commandant would probably order him back and clap him in irons.

Instead, he called the
Horned Akiss
on one of the Race’s signaling frequencies. He found out the Lizards there
were
expecting him. That came as a relief. It would have been just like Healey to send him out and hope the Race would shoot him down. Evidently not—not this time, anyway.

Once Johnson got clear of the
Admiral Peary,
he aimed the scooter at the
Horned Akiss
and fired up the rear engine. Sure enough, the little rocketship was lugging an anvil; its acceleration wasn’t a patch on what it should have been. Inside his suit, he shrugged. Sooner or later, he’d get there.

And, in due course, he did. He wasn’t invited aboard the Lizards’ ship. Instead, one of their scooters waited for him. “I greet you, Tosevite,” the Lizard aboard it called. “Shall we exchange craft?”

“That seems to be the point of the exercise.” Johnson brought his scooter up alongside the bigger one and killed relative velocity. By then, he’d stopped worrying about the extra weight he was carrying; it was like flying with a couple of passengers, and he’d done that often enough.

He read the Race’s language, so the controls on the other scooter made sense to him. He had to explain his to the Lizard, who might never have heard of English or of Arabic numerals. Fortunately, the male—or was it a female?—didn’t get flustered, saying, “It all seems straightforward enough.”

“It is,” Johnson agreed. “Just take it slow and easy, and you will do fine.”

“Good advice. I had not thought a Tosevite would be so sensible,” the Lizard replied. “The same also goes for you. Slow and easy, as you say.”

“Oh, yes.” Johnson made the affirmative gesture.

He
was
cautious flying the Lizards’ scooter back to the
Admiral Peary.
He had to get used to it. It performed about the way he’d expected, though. He hoped the Lizard pilot wouldn’t be too disappointed with the logy machine the Big Uglies had sent to the Race.

And then, when Johnson was almost back to the American starship, he said something about the commandant that would have made all his earlier remarks fit for a love letter. He couldn’t prove a thing, but he had a feeling. He shook his fist in the direction of Lieutenant General Healey’s office. Healey couldn’t see him, of course, any more than the commandant could hear him.
Too damn bad,
he thought.

Sam Yeager was sick and tired of the conference rooms in the hotel in Sitneff. One morning, he asked Atvar, “Fleetlord, would it offend you if we moved our discussions across the way to the park for a while?”

“Would it offend me? No,” the Lizard replied. “I do not think we would be so efficient there, though. And will you not grow uncomfortable as the day warms up?”

“That’s why I said ‘for a while,’ ” Yeager told him. “But I do not think it will be too bad. Sitneff is not that much warmer than Los Angeles, the city where I settled not long after the fight with the conquest fleet ended.”

“Well, then, Ambassador, let it be as you wish,” Atvar said. “Maybe changing where we talk will also change the direction in which our talks are going.”

“I must say that also occurred to me,” Sam agreed. “I am afraid their direction could use some changing.”

The way he looked at things, the problem was that his talks with Atvar had no direction. He would propose things. The fleetlord would either reject them, talk around them, or say they needed more study before anything could be settled. To the Race, more study often meant a delay of decades if not centuries.

Sam had been reluctant to point that out, not wanting to derail things altogether. But he had concluded that things were already about as derailed as they could be. He wondered whether Atvar felt the same way, or whether the Lizard was satisfied to stall. Sam hoped not. One way or the other, it was time to find out.

Cars and trucks and buses halted when Yeager appeared at the crosswalk. Drivers and passengers all turned their eye turrets his way. “I enjoy being with you in public,” Atvar remarked as they crossed. “It is not easy for me to be anonymous, not with the body paint I put on. Next to you, though, I am invisible. Most refreshing.”

“Glad to be of service,” Sam said dryly. Atvar laughed.

When they got to the park, Sam led them to some tables and benches screened from the morning sun by the treelike shrubs behind them. “Are you sure you are comfortable, Ambassador?” Atvar asked.

“I thank you for your concern, but I am fine,” Sam said. He nodded politely to a Rabotev walking along the path. The dark-skinned alien hopped in the air in surprise. Sam Yeager turned back to Atvar. “I am fine as far as comfort goes, anyhow. I am less happy with the direction of our talks, to use your term.”

“I am sorry to hear that. It makes my liver heavy,” Atvar said.

“If it does, Fleetlord, a little more real cooperation might work wonders,” Sam said bluntly. “From my point of view, the Race seems to be doing its best to make these discussions go nowhere while appearing to make progress.”

“What an extraordinary notion,” Atvar exclaimed. “How can you possibly say that when you have conferred with the Emperor himself?” He cast his eye turrets down toward the pale, sandy soil beneath his feet.

“I can say it because it appears to me to be a truth. I am honored the Emperor said he wanted to help settle the differences between the Race and the United States. I am honored, yes, but I am not very impressed. He offered no proposals, only his good will. Good will is valuable; I do not reject it. But good will by itself does not solve problems.”

“You must not expect haste from us,” Atvar said. “Remember, we are not used to dealing with independent not-empires.” He laughed again. “We are not used to dealing with not-empires at all.”

“I understand that. I have tried to take it into account,” Sam said. “I am sorry, but it does not seem to be a good enough explanation. If you do not deal with us through diplomacy, we will end up fighting. Am I wrong?”

“Probably not,” Atvar answered. “If we do fight, the Race will win. Am I wrong?”

“You would have been right when I went into cold sleep, Fleetlord. I know that,” Sam said. “Now? Now I am not so sure any of your planets would get away untouched. You have been able to wreck Tosev 3 for a long time. Now we can also reach you. You would do well to remember that.”

“Is this diplomacy, or only a threat?” Atvar asked.

“It is diplomacy. It is also a threat,” Yeager answered. “I do not try to deny it. You did not worry about threatening us when you came to Tosev 3. You went ahead and did it, and not just with words. You invaded my not-empire. You occupied parts of it for years. You dropped nuclear weapons on Washington and Seattle and Pearl Harbor. These are truths, even if perhaps you would rather not remember them now. If we fight again, your worlds will learn what sort of truths they are.”

He waited. There was a chance that Atvar would stand up and spit in his eye. If that happened, he didn’t know what he’d do. Resign the ambassadorship, maybe, and go back up to the
Admiral Peary
and back into cold sleep. Someone else would have a better chance of getting a worthwhile agreement out of the Lizards.

Atvar’s tailstump lashed in agitation. Whatever he’d expected to hear, what Sam had just told him wasn’t it. At last, he answered, “Ambassador, you fought in that war. How can you speak of visiting its like on Home and the other worlds of the Empire?”

“You still do not see my point, Fleetlord, or not all of it,” Sam said. “The prospect bothers you more
because now it might happen to you, too.
” He added an emphatic cough. “It did not bother you at all when it could only happen to Big Uglies. And that is what I am trying to tell you: you were wrong not to be bothered under those circumstances. We have a saying: ‘what goes around comes around.’ Do you understand that? I had to translate it literally.”

“I think I do,” Atvar said. “It is another way of saying that what we did to you, you can now do to us.”

“That is part of it, but only part of it,” Yeager said. “You did it to us, and you thought you were right to do it to us. Why should we not think we are also right to do it to you?”

He watched the fleetlord’s tailstump quiver again. He could make a pretty good guess about what Atvar was thinking:
because we are the Race, and you are nothing but a pack of wild Big Uglies.
But that was the sort of thinking that had sent the conquest fleet out. It might have made some sense against an opponent who couldn’t hit back. The Lizards didn’t face that kind of opponent any more. If they didn’t keep it in mind, everybody would be sorry.

When Atvar still didn’t say anything, Sam spoke again, quietly: “This too is what equality means.”

To his surprise, Atvar’s mouth fell open in a laugh, though the Lizard was anything but amused. “You know, of course, that Shiplord Straha almost cast me down from my position. His reason for doing so was that I had not prosecuted the war against the Tosevites hard enough to suit him. He felt that, if we did not do everything we could, regardless of consequences, to overcome Tosevite resistance, we would regret it one day. Enough of the assembled shiplords thought him wrong to let me keep the job. I reckoned him a maniac. Again, you know of this.”

“Oh, yes. I know of this.” Sam made the affirmative gesture. After Straha defected to the USA one jump ahead of Atvar’s vengeance, the exile and Yeager had become good friends. Sam didn’t remind Atvar of that; it would have been rude. Instead, he said, “But now I have to say I am not sure I see your point.”

“It is very simple—not complicated in the least,” Atvar answered. “My point is, Straha was right. Here we are, all these years later, and Straha was right. Irony has a bitter taste.”

This time, Sam had to think hard before deciding what to say next. He had heard Straha say the same thing. For all he knew, the shiplord was saying it right now back on Earth. “Does Straha still live?” he asked. “I was in cold sleep a long time, and have not heard.”

“I do not know if he
still
lives, but the signal that he has died has yet to reach Home,” Atvar replied. Sam used the affirmative gesture again. When news took years to travel from one sun to the next,
still
could be a nebulous notion. The fleetlord went on, “Are you not grateful for my mistaken moderation?”

“Are you sure it was mistaken?” Yeager said. “There is no guarantee you would have won a great and final victory with Straha in command. By what I recall, you were fighting pretty hard as things were.”

“We will never know, will we?” Atvar said. “Could the result have been much worse for my species than what in fact occurred?”

“I think it could have,” Sam Yeager said. “If you had not won, you would have had all the surviving Tosevite not-empires and empires mad for revenge against you. The fighting on Tosev 3 might never have stopped.”

Atvar shrugged. “And so? Even with constant fighting on Tosev 3, we probably would not have had to worry about Tosevites visiting Home.”

“Fleetlord, we really have a problem here, and you need to recognize it,” Yeager said. “If the Race cannot get used to the idea that we Big Uglies are doing things only you have been doing for thousands of years, then the two sides
will
collide. They cannot help but collide. And that will not be to anyone’s advantage.”

“Better to no one’s advantage than to yours alone,” Atvar said.

“I do not believe an agreement on even terms that everyone adheres to would be to anyone’s disadvantage,” Sam said. “If I am wrong, no doubt you will correct me. I think the Emperor would also want an equitable agreement. That was my impression from my meetings with him. Again, you will correct me if I am wrong.”

“You are not wrong. Where we differ, Ambassador, is in determining what goes into an equitable agreement.”

“An equitable agreement is one where both sides have the same duties and the same obligations,” Sam said.

“Why should that be so, when one side is stronger than the other?” Atvar came back. “Our superior strength should be reflected in any treaty we make.”

Sam used the negative gesture. What he felt like doing was tearing his hair, but he refrained. “First, all independent empires and not-empires have the same rights and duties,” he said. “This is true on Tosev 3, and it used to be true on Home as well. Ask the protocol master if you do not believe me. And second, as I have pointed out before, how much stronger you are is no longer obvious, the way it was when I went into cold sleep. Whether you are stronger at all is no longer obvious, in fact.”

He waited. He had to wait quite a while. At last, Atvar said, “This may not prompt a treaty, you know. This may prompt an effort to exterminate you while we still can.”

“The Race has been talking about that for a long time.” Sam did his best not to show how alarmed he was. “I do not believe exterminating us would be easy or cheap. I do believe you might end up exterminating yourselves in the process.”

“Possibly. But if we could be rid of you without destroying ourselves altogether, the price might well be worth paying.”

“Is this your opinion, the government’s opinion, or the Emperor’s opinion?” Sam asked. The answer to that might tell him where these talks were going—if they were going anywhere. He waited.