“That’s what I get for coming out of the Marines,” Johnson said, laughing. “You never ride the real A and S boys this way.” Actually, he’d started a good deal northeast of the halls of Montezuma and he’d go over Africa even farther south of the shores of Tripoli, but who was he to trifle with a man’s poetic license?
Then another voice came over the speaker, one not using English: “U.S. spacecraft, this is the tracking station of the Race. Acknowledge.”
“I greet you, Dakar,” Johnson said in the Lizards’ lingo as the second-stage motor cut out and the one in the rear of his upper stage took over to finish the job of boosting him into orbit. He wasn’t over the radar or radio horizon for Dakar yet, but the Lizards’ orbital radar and satellite radio relays still beat the stuffing out of any merely human communications network. “Is that you, Hashshett?” As a Lizard would, he pronounced each sh and each t as a separate syllable.
“It is I. And you are Glen Johnson?” Hashshett turned the last syllable of Johnson’s name into a long hiss.
“I am. My trackers show me as good for my announced orbit. Do you confirm?” Johnson tacked on an interrogative cough.
“Confirming,” the Lizard answered after a pause that would have let him turn an eye turret toward his instruments. “Seeing a flight path in such conformity is good.”
As far as the Lizards were concerned, anything that conformed to the status quo ante was good. With four different powers owning orbiting nuclear weapons, people and the Lizards had grown far more punctilious than they’d once been about notifying one another of their launches. The Lizards had got very huffy very fast about wanting to be notified; persuading them that they needed to notify any mere humans of what they were up to had taken a lot more work.
Just then, on time to the second, the upper-stage motor cut out. Johnson went weightless. His stomach tried to climb up his windpipe hand over hand. He gulped and sternly told it to get back where it belonged. After a few nervous moments, it decided to listen to him. Puking while weightless did not win a pilot luckless enough to do it the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
Once he’d decided he wasn’t going to redecorate the inside of his cockpit, Johnson checked his own radar. He hadn’t really expected to see anything that would make him use his attitude jets to evade, but you never could tell. Space was a crowded place these days, loaded not only with manned (or Lizarded) spacecraft but also with all manner of unmanned satellites, some peaceful, some not, and with a lot of junk: discarded protective shrouds and upper stages that had reached orbit after delivering their cargo. The Lizards never stopped grumbling about the junk; not even their fancy radars and even fancier computing machines could tell the garbage from camouflaged weapons quietly floating and waiting for orders. The weapons that weren’t camouflaged maneuvered frequently, too; the longer they stayed in the same orbit, the more vulnerable they got.
Having made sure he didn’t need to evade, Johnson studied the radar screen again. He hadn’t been up since the colonization fleet came in from Tau Ceti II. The targets the radar showed were not only distant-in relatively high orbits-but big. They looked like Christmas-tree lights on the screen. They were so big, he knew he could spot them with his Mark I eyeball as well as with his electronic senses.
He peered in the direction the radar gave him. Sure as hell, there they were, some of them bright as Venus-brighter. Being in a lower, faster orbit, he passed them, but there were more ahead. All the way around the world, there were more ahead, with Lizards, millions upon millions of Lizards, lying in them in cold sleep like steaks in cardboard cartons on icebox shelves.
Seeing the ships of the colonization fleet filled him with awe. He’d come a couple of hundred miles into space. The USA, the Greater German Reich, and the USSR had bases on the moon. Americans and Germans had walked on Mars (bemusing the Lizards, who couldn’t figure out why they wanted to visit such a useless world). Americans and Germans were out in the asteroid belt, too, seeing if it held anything worthwhile (the very existence of the asteroid belt bemused the Lizards; the solar systems with which they had been familiar were much tidier places).
“Going out to see asteroids up close-that’s not bad,” Johnson muttered. But the ships he was looking at hadn’t crossed millions, or even tens of millions, of miles of space. They’d come better than ten light-years-say, sixty trillion miles. If that didn’t make you sit up and take notice, you were dead inside.
What would it be like, crossing ten light-years? I’d pay a lot to visit Home, Johnson thought, and wondered if he’d sooner go as a tourist or as part of a fleet that would smash the Lizards’ home planet so flat, even cockroaches (or whatever Home had instead of cockroaches) couldn’t live there.
He sighed. It didn’t matter. If the U.S. government, or any other human government, had plans for a starship, he didn’t know about them-and he kept his ear to the ground where such things were involved. He sighed again. Even if some human government did have plans for a ship that could cross interstellar space, odds were it wouldn’t be built till the turn of the century, if that soon. He’d had his fortieth birthday a couple of years before.
“Too old to go to the stars.” He shook his head, wondering what his life would have been like if the Lizards hadn’t come, if the world had just kept moving along its normal, expected course. “Christ!” he exclaimed. “I might have been too old to go into space at all.” That was a really frightening thought.
As long as he could come up here, as long as he was up here, he had work to do. He also had work he hoped he wouldn’t have to do. Again like its German equivalents, the Peregrine carried missiles and machine guns. The clumsy Russian spacecraft mounted machine guns, too. Even before the colonization fleet came, though, the Lizards had had far more in space than all of humankind put together. If push came to shove, they could probably knock people back inside the atmosphere. His job, and that of the other Americans in the Air and Space Force, and also that of their Nazi and Red opposite numbers, was to hurt them as much as he could before he got killed.
The radio crackled. “Peregrine, this is Osprey. Over.”
“Hello, Gus,” Johnson answered. “Peregrine here.” Most of the ships that flew out of Kitty Hawk were named for birds of prey. “You’ve been up here a while. Anything going on with the colonization fleet? Over.”
“They’ve made a few flights down,” Gus Wilhelm said. “More the past couple of days than earlier. They’re trying to figure out the lay of the land, you might say. It’s not what they expected when they left Home, not even close.”
Johnson laughed. “I’ll say it’s not. Have you listened to some of the first radio transmissions between the colonization fleet and the ones who’re already on Earth? Bob Hope couldn’t be half as funny if he tried for a year.”
“That’s the truth,” Gus agreed. “Yeah, I’ve heard some of those. And now they’ll know we listen in on ’em.”
“Like they didn’t already,” Glen Johnson said. He and Gus both laughed then. He settled back onto his couch, a man on a routine mission ready to turn back into a fighter pilot in a heartbeat if the mission stopped being routine. “Over and out.”
Through most of the long Tosevite year, Fotsev thought well of the city of Basra, where he was stationed. Oh, it got chilly in the winter, but he didn’t think there was any place on the surface of Tosev 3 that didn’t get chilly during the winter. Summers were quite pleasant; the hottest days would have been warm back on Home, too.
Males who’d fought farther north, up in the not-empire that called itself the SSSR, had horrifying tales to tell about Tosevite winters. Fotsev hadn’t hatched out of the egg yesterday; he knew how people lied to make stories sound better and themselves more heroic. He had stories of his own from the conquest of Argentina, and he wasn’t above inflating them when they needed inflating. But some of the males produced videos to prove they weren’t lying. The mere idea of trying to fight in drifts of frozen water taller than a male was enough to make him glad he’d never had to do it.