“Very well. That is a truth.” Reffet still sounded peevish. “I do not see how it is a truth to concern me, however. I am in charge of colonists, not soldiers.”
“All you care about is the immediate,” Atvar said, waggling his jaw as he dropped it to turn his laugh nasty. He took malicious pleasure in bouncing the other fleetlord’s words off his snout. “Anything that requires forethought is beyond you.”
“Very well.” Now Reffet sounded condescending. “What fresh nonsense is this?”
“It is no nonsense at all, but something we would have had to face sooner or later during our occupation of Tosev 3,” Atvar answered. “It might as well be now. Have you noticed that this is a world consumed by war and rebellion, that the Big Uglies in the regions we occupy continually try to overthrow our rule, and that the Tosevites’ independent not-empires-the SSSR, the Greater German Reich, the United States, and also the weaker ones like Nippon and Britain-train large numbers of their inhabitants as soldiers year after year?”
“I have noticed it,” Reffet admitted, “but you are the fleetlord of the conquest fleet. Soldiers are your responsibility.”
“Truth,” Atvar said. “They are. This is not Home, where, save in a Soldiers’ Time of preparation for conquest, we have no soldiers, only police. Here, we will need soldiers continuously, for hundreds of years to come. Where shall we get them, if we do not begin the training of males, and possibly females as well, from among your precious colonists?”
“What?” Reffet cried. “This is madness! It is nothing but madness! My colonists are colonists. How can they become fighters?”
“The males I command managed,” Atvar said. “I am certain I can recruit trainers from among them. Think, Reffet.” He didn’t bother being sardonic, not any more; the more he thought on this, the more important it looked. “How, long can the Race endure here on Tosev 3 without soldiers to defend us?”
Reffet did think. Reluctantly, Atvar gave him credit for it. After a pause, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet said, “It could be that you are correct. I shall not commit myself further than that without analysis from my experts. If you would also convene a panel of your experts to examine the issue, I should be grateful.”
With any other member of the Race on or near Tosev 3, Reffet could have given an order and heard It shall be done as reply. Having to make a polite request of Atvar surely grated on him. Atvar knew having to make a request of Reffet grated on him. Here, the request was nothing if not reasonable. “I will do that, and soon,” Atvar promised. “It is something we need to examine, as I said.”
“So it is.” Like Atvar’s, Reffet’s temper seemed to be cooling. He said, “If it proves we must do this thing, it will make us different from the members of the Race back on Home and inhabiting Rabotev 2 and Halless 1.”
“Males of the conquest fleet are already different from all other members of the Race,” Atvar replied. “My hope is that, over the course of hundreds of years, we will gradually incorporate all the Big Uglies into the Empire and assimilate them to our way of doing things. If we succeed there, the differences between those of the Race here on Tosev 3 and those living on the other worlds of the Empire will gradually disappear.”
“By the Emperor, may it be so,” Reffet said. He and Atvar cast down their eyes again. Then, half talking to himself, Reffet went on, “But what if it is not so?”
“That is my nightmare,” Atvar told him. “That has been my nightmare since we first discovered the Big Uglies’ true nature. They change faster than we do. They grow faster than we do. They are still behind us, but not by so much as they were when we came to Tosev 3. If they, or some of them, remain hostile, if they look like they are passing us…” His voice trailed away.
“Yes?” Reffet prompted. “What then?”
“We may have to destroy this world, and our own colony on it,” Atvar answered unhappily. “We may have to destroy ourselves, to save the Race.”
Under an acceleration of.01g, Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson had to wear a seat belt to stay in his chair. His effective weight was just over a pound and a half-not enough for muscles used to Earth’s robust gravity to notice. Any fidgeting at all would have sent him bouncing around the Lewis and Clark’s control room. Bouncing around in a room full of instruments wasn’t recommended.
He turned to Colonel Walter Stone, the American spaceship’s chief pilot. “This is the best seat in the house,” he said.
“You’d best believe it, Johnson,” Stone answered. The two of them might have been cousins: they were both lean, athletic men in their early middle years; both crew cut; both, by coincidence, from Ohio. Johnson had started in the Marines, Stone in the Army Air Corps. Each looked down his nose at the other because of that.
At the moment, though, Johnson wasn’t interested in looking anywhere except out through the panoramic window. It was double-coated to reduce reflection; peering out through it was about as close as a man could come to looking out on bare space. He saw more stars than he had since another guy after the same girl sucker-punched him in high school.
The Lewis and Clark was aimed roughly in the direction of Antares, the bright red star at the heart of Scorpio. The Milky Way was near its thickest there, and all the more impressive for not being dimmed and blurred by the lights and air of Earth. But Johnson didn’t pay much attention to the stars liberally sprinkled thereabouts. Instead, leaning forward in his seat, he peered farther south, toward a region that, even against the black sky of space, wasn’t so heavily populated.
He suddenly pointed. “That’s it! At least, I think that’s it.”
Walter Stone looked at him in bemusement. “Which one? And what’s it supposed to be, anyhow?”
“That faint orange one there.” Johnson pointed again. “I think that’s Epsilon Indi, the star the Lizards call Halless. They rule a planet that goes around that star.”
“Ah.” Enlightenment filled Stone’s craggy features. “You look farther west, and up closer to the equator, you can spot Tau Ceti, too. That’s the place the little scaly bastards call Home.” A moment later, he said “Home.” again, this time in the language of the Race. Returning to English, he went on, “And Epsilon Eridani’s farther west still. Rabotev is the Lizard name. Nothing to make either one of ’em stand out much. They’re just stars like the sun, a little smaller, a little cooler. Epsilon Indi’s quite a bit smaller and cooler.”
“Yeah.” Glen Johnson nodded. “What I wouldn’t give to be able to pay a call on the Lizards one of these days, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes?” Stone nodded, too. “I know exactly what you mean. I’d say the line for that particular craving forms on the left.”
“But they can come here, so it’s important that we figure out how to go there,” Johnson said. “Look at history. The people who discovered other people usually came off pretty well. The ones who got discovered didn’t have such a happy time of it. The Spaniards got rich. The Indians ended up slaving for them. No way in hell the Indians could have sailed to Spain, except in Spanish ships.”
“Yeah. That’s interesting, isn’t it?” Stone didn’t sound as if he liked the way it was interesting. Then he stabbed out a finger at Johnson. “But what about the Japs? What about the goddamn Japs, huh? They got discovered instead of the other way round, and they’re still in business.”
“Yes, sir, that’s right, they are, damn them. But you know how come they’re still in business?” Without giving Stone a chance to answer, Johnson continued, “They’re still in business because they wised up in a hurry. They learned everything they could from us and England and Germany and France, and inside of nothing flat they had their own factories going and they were making their own steamships and then they could damn well sail wherever they pleased. They started playing the same game everybody else was.”