“I wish I were,” the psychologist said. “If anything, I am not giving the Big Uglies enough credit-or maybe blame is more likely to be the word I want.”
“I do not understand,” Pesskrag said.
“Let me show you, then. You may possibly have seen this image before.” Ttomalss called up onto the screen the picture of the Tosevite warrior the Race’s probe had snapped. He said, “Please believe me when I tell you this was the state of the art on Tosev 3 eighteen hundred years ago-eighteen hundred of our years, half that many by the local count.”
“Oh. I see,” Pesskrag said slowly. “And now…” Her voice trailed away.
“Yes. And now,” Ttomalss said. “And now several of their not-empires have kept their independence in spite of everything the Race could do. And now they are making important discoveries in theoretical physics before we are. Do you still believe I am joking, or even exaggerating?”
“Possibly not,” Pesskrag said in troubled tones. “We would not have made this discovery for a long time, if ever. I am convinced of that. So are my colleagues. Even imagining the experiment requires a startling radicalism.”
“And the Race is not radical,” Ttomalss said. Pesskrag hesitated, then used the affirmative gesture once more. So did the psychologist. He went on, “I need to tell you, I need to make you understand in your belly, that by our standards the Big Uglies are radical to the point of lunacy. If you do not understand that, you cannot hope to understand anything about them. Let me give you an example. During the fighting after the conquest fleet landed, they destroyed a city we held with an atomic weapon-a weapon they had not had when the fighting started. Do you know how they did it?”
“By remote control, I would assume,” Pesskrag replied.
Ttomalss made the negative gesture. “No. That is how we would do it. That is how they would do it now, I am sure. At the time, their remote-control systems were primitive and unreliable. They sailed a boat that travels underwater-one of their military inventions-carrying the bomb into this harbor. When the boat arrived, a brave male on it triggered the bomb, killing himself and the rest of the crew in the process.”
“Madness!” the physicist said.
“Yes and no,” Ttomalss answered. “Remember, it did us much more harm than it did the Big Uglies. And so they did not count the cost. They have a way of proceeding without counting the cost. That is why I asked where this discovery might go, and how long it might take to get there.”
The way Pesskrag’s eye turrets twitched told how troubled she was. “I am sorry, Senior Researcher, but I still cannot say for certain. We are going to have to modify a good deal of theory to account for the results of this experiment. We will also have to design other experiments based on this one to take into account what we have just learned. I do not know what sort of theoretical underpinnings the Big Uglies already have. If this was an experiment of confirmation for them, not an experiment of discovery… If that turns out to be so, they may have a bigger lead than I believe.”
“And in that case?” Ttomalss always assumed the Tosevites knew more and were more advanced than the available evidence showed. He was rarely wrong about that. He did sometimes err on the conservative side even so. Since he was trying to be radical, that worried him. But no member of the Race could be as Radical as a Big Ugly. Realizing that worried him, too.
“I need to do more work before I can properly answer you,” Pesskrag said. Her words proved Ttomalss’ point for him. That worried him more still. A Tosevite physicist wouldn’t have hesitated before answering. And that worried him most of all.
Lieutenant General Healey gave Glen Johnson a baleful stare as the two of them floated into the Admiral Peary ’s small, cramped refectory. “Too bad sending you down to the surface of Home would kill you,” the starship commandant rasped. “Otherwise, I’d do it in a red-hot minute.”
“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.”