Aftershocks (13 page)

Turning to Mickey Flynn, the
Lewis and Clark’s
second pilot—the man just senior to him—he said, “I wonder how many of those stars you could see from Earth on a really clear night.”

“Sixty-three percent,” Flynn answered at once.

“How do you know that?” Johnson asked. He was prepared to take the figure as gospel truth. Flynn collected strange statistics the way head hunters collected heads.

“Simple,” he said now, beaming as if the entire magnificent show out there beyond the window had been created for his benefit alone. “I made it up.”

He had a splendid deadpan; if he’d claimed he’d read it somewhere or done some arcane calculations to prove it, Johnson would have believed him.

As things were, Johnson snorted. “That’ll teach me to ask you a serious question.”

“No,” Flynn said. “It’ll teach me to give you a serious answer. If I’d been any more serious, I would have been downright morose.” His face donned moroseness as he might have donned a sweater.

All it got him was another snort from Glen Johnson. Johnson peered ahead toward Jupiter, on which Ceres and the
Lewis and Clark
were slowly gaining. “I keep thinking I ought to be able to see the Galilean moons with the naked eye.”

“When Jupiter’s in opposition in respect to us, you will be able to,” Flynn told him. “We’ll only be two astronomical units away then, more or less—half as far as we would be back on Earth. But for now, we have the same sort of view we would from back home . . . minus atmosphere, of course.” Before Johnson could say anything, the other pilot held up a hand, as if taking an oath. “And that, I assure you, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

“So help you Hannah,” Johnson said, at which Flynn assumed an expression of injured innocence. Nevertheless, Johnson believed him; the numbers felt right. Flynn and Walter Stone, the first pilot, both knew the mathematics of space travel better than he did. He’d flown fighter planes against the Lizards and then upper stages into Earth orbit—other people had done the thinking while he’d done the real piloting. If he hadn’t got overly curious about what was going on aboard the American space station, he never would have been shanghaied when the space station turned out to be a spaceship. He hadn’t wanted to come along, but he wasn’t going back, not after two and a half years in weightlessness.

“Lieutenant Colonel Johnson! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson!” His name rang out over the
Lewis and Clark’s
PA system.
Oh, Christ!
he thought.
What have I done to piss off the commandant now?
But it wasn’t the commandant: the PA operator went on, “Report to scooter launching bay one immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Johnson. Lieutenant Colonel—”

“See you later,” Johnson said to Flynn as he pushed off from a chair and glided out of the control room.

“And I’ll be glad to be seen,” Flynn called after him. Johnson was already swinging from one corridor handhold to the next: in weightlessness, imitating chimpanzees swinging through the trees was the best way to get around. Corridor intersections had mirrors mounted to cut down on collisions.

“What’s going on?” Johnson asked when he got to the launch bay.

A technician was giving the scooter—a little rocket with a motor mounted at the front and another at the rear—a once-over. He said, “There’s some kind of medical trouble in Dome 27, on that rock with the big black vein through it.”

“Okay, I know the one you mean,” Johnson said. “About twenty miles rearward of us, right?” He waited for the tech to nod, then went on, “Is it bad enough that they want me to bring a doctor over?” One of the things going out into space had done was let people find new ways to maim themselves.

But the technician said, “No. What they want you to do is bring the gal back here so the doc can look her over, see what’s going on.”

“Gal?” Johnson clicked his tongue between his teeth. Women made up only about a third of the
Lewis and Clark’s
crew. Losing anybody hurt. Losing a woman . . . The idea shouldn’t have hurt twice as much, but somehow it seemed to. “What’s wrong with her? She hurt herself?”

“No,” the tech said again. “Belly pain.”

“Okay. I’ll go get her.” The
Lewis and Clark
had a chamber that could be spun to simulate gravity—only about .25g, but that was enough for surgery. Operating in weightlessness, with blood floating everywhere, wasn’t even close to practical. The chamber, so far as Johnson knew, hadn’t been used yet, but there was a first time for everything.

“You’re ready,” the tech said. “You’re fully fueled, oxygen supply is full, too, batteries are good, radio checks are all nominal.”

“Let me in, then.” Johnson glided past the technician and into the scooter. After he closed the gas-tight canopy, he ran his own checks. It was his neck, after all. Everything looked the way the tech said it was. Johnson would have been astonished—and furious—had that proved otherwise. As things were, he spoke into the radio mike: “Ready when you are.”

“Okay.” A gas-tight door slid shut behind the scooter. A moment later, another one slid open in front of it. A charge of compressed air pushed the little rocket out of its bay. Johnson waited till it had drifted far enough away from the
Lewis and Clark,
then lit up his attitude jets and his rear motor and started off toward Dome 27.

He smiled in enormous pleasure as he made the trip. Mickey Flynn and Walter Stone were both much more qualified to pilot the
Lewis and Clark
than he was. If he ever got stuck with that assignment, it would only be because something had gone drastically wrong somewhere. In a scooter, though . . .

“In a scooter, I’m the hottest damn pilot in the whole solar system,” he said after making sure he wasn’t transmitting. Without false modesty, he knew he was right. His years as a combat flier and in Earth-orbital missions gave him a feel for the little rocket nobody else aboard the
Lewis and Clark
came close to matching. This was spaceflight, too, spaceflight in its purest form, spaceflight by the seat of his pants.

He made only one concession to his instruments: he kept an eye on the radar screen, to make sure his Mark One eyeball didn’t miss any tumbling rocks that might darken his day if they smacked into the scooter. He had to be especially watchful heading toward Dome 27, since he was going, so to speak, against the flow.

He spied one large object on the radar that he couldn’t see at all, but he didn’t let it worry him. He supposed it was inevitable that the Lizards should have sent out unmanned probes to keep an eye (or would it be an eye turret?) on what the Americans were doing in the asteroid belt. That made life difficult, but not impossible. And, as the Americans ran up more and more domes and spread farther and farther away from the
Lewis and Clark,
the Lizards’ surveillance job got harder and harder.

Their spy ship was well off the track between the
Lewis and Clark
and Dome 27, so Johnson didn’t waste more than a moment’s thought on it. He fired up the radio once more: “Dome 27, this is the scooter. I say again, Dome 27, this is the scooter. I understand you have a pickup for me. Over.”

“That’s right, Scooter,” said whoever was manning the radio at the pressure dome. “Liz Brock’s hurting pretty bad. We’re hoping it’s her appendix—anything else would be worse. Estimate your arrive time twenty minutes.”

“Sounds about right,” Johnson agreed. “I’ll get her back, and the doc’ll figure out what’s going on with her. Hope everything turns out okay. Out.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Liz Brock—that’s not so good.” She was the ship’s number-one expert on electrolyzing ice to get oxygen for breathing and fuel and hydrogen for fuel. She was also a nice-looking blonde. She’d never shown the least interest in Johnson, but he didn’t believe in wasting valuable natural resources.

He used his forward rocket motor to kill his velocity relative to the little asteroid on which Dome 27 had gone up, then guided the scooter into the dome’s airlock with tiny, delicate bursts from his attitude jets. Ever so slowly, the scooter settled toward the floor of the airlock: the gravity of the asteroid (which was less than a mile across) seemed almost as much rumor as reality.

As soon as the outer airlock door closed and his gauges showed there was pressure outside, Johnson unsealed the scooter’s canopy. He didn’t have to wait long. Two people floated into the airlock: Liz Brock and a man who was helping her. He said, “We’ve loaded her up with as much codeine as she can hold, and then maybe a little more for luck.”

“Doesn’t help,” the electrolysis expert said. Her voice was slow and dragging. “Doesn’t help
much,
I mean. I feel like I’m drunk. I feel like my whole head’s weightless. But I still hurt.” She looked like it. She had lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there the last time Johnson saw her. Skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. She kept one hand on the right side of her belly, though she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.

After she got into the scooter, Johnson fastened her safety harness when she didn’t do anything but fumble with it. Anxiously, he asked the fellow who’d helped her into the airlock, “She’s not throwing up, is she?”

“No,” the man answered, which relieved him: dealing with vomit in the scooter was the last thing he wanted to do.

He used his attitude jets to slide out of the airlock, then went back to the
Lewis and Clark
faster than he’d gone away. When he returned to the ship, Dr. Miriam Rosen was waiting at the inner airlock door to the shuttle bay. “Come on, Liz, let’s get you over to the X-ray machine,” she said. “We’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on in there.”

“All right.” Liz Brock sounded altogether indifferent. Maybe that was the codeine talking. Maybe, too, it was the pain talking.

Johnson wanted to tag along to find out whatever he could, but didn’t have the nerve. He watched the doctor lead away the electrolysis expert. Before long, he’d get answers through the grapevine.

And he did. Things came out piecemeal, as they had a way of doing. It wasn’t appendicitis. He heard that pretty soon. He didn’t hear what it was for three or four days. “Liver cancer?” he exclaimed to Walter Stone, who told him. “What can they do about that?”

“Not a damn thing,” the senior pilot said grimly. “Keep her from hurting too bad till she dies—that’s about the size of it.” He seldom showed much of what he thought, but he was visibly upset here. “Could have been you or me, too, just as easy. No rhyme or reason to this—only dumb luck.”

“Yeah.” Johnson felt lousy, too. He didn’t mind being an ambulance driver, but he hadn’t signed up to be, in essence, a hearse driver. And there were also other things to worry about. “This won’t hurt the plan too much, will it?”

Now Stone looked stern and determined. “Nothing hurts the plan, Glen. Nothing.”

“Good,” Glen Johnson said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

 
4

With a shriek of decelerating jet engines, the Japanese airliner rolled to a stop on the runway just outside of Edmonton. The pilot spoke over the intercom, first in his own language and then in English hardly more comprehensible. “What the hell is he talking about?” Penny Summers asked.

“One from column A, two from column B,” Rance Auerbach guessed. Penny gave him a dirty look. He ignored it and went on, “It would have been a lot faster and a lot cheaper to fly a U.S. airliner out of Tahiti.”

“And it would have made stops in the States, too,” Penny pointed out. “I didn’t want to take the chance.”

“Well, okay,” Auerbach said with a sigh. “But I’ll tell you something: there aren’t a hell of a lot of places left where we can go without somebody wanting to take a shot at us as soon as we get there. That gets old, you know what I mean?”

“Things ought to be pretty peaceful for the layover here.” Penny sighed, too. Rance knew what that meant. Whenever she came to someplace peaceful, she got bored. When she got bored, she started turning things on their ear. He’d had enough of things’ getting turned on their ear. Telling her so wouldn’t do him any good. He knew as much. He didn’t think she started stirring things up on purpose—which didn’t mean they didn’t get stirred up.

Groundcrew men wheeled a deplaning ladder up to the airliner’s front door. Rance grunted even more painfully than usual as he heaved himself upright. Except for a couple of trips back to the head, he’d been trapped in a none-too-spacious seat ever since Midway Island. He hadn’t been sitting here forever—he couldn’t have been—but it sure as hell felt that way.

“Baggage and customs and passport control through Gate Four,” a groundcrew man bawled, again and again. “Gate Four!” He pointed toward the airport terminal, as if none of the deplaning passengers could possibly have noticed the big red 4 above the nearest gate without his help.

“Well, well, what have we here?” a Canadian customs man said, examining their documents with considerable interest. “Papers from the Race, valid for South Africa only—rather emphatically valid for South Africa only, I might add. Then all these endorsements from Free France, a Japanese transit visa, and a transit visa for the Dominion here. Fascinating. You don’t see things like this every day.”

“You see anything wrong?” Rance put a little challenge in his raspy, ruined voice.

“And you, sir, do not sound like a South African,” the customs man said. “You sound like an American from the South.”

“Doesn’t matter what I sound like,” Auerbach said. “Only thing that matters is, my papers are in order.”

“That’s right,” Penny agreed. A lot of places, they could have made things go smoothly by greasing the functionary’s palm. There were parts of the USA where that would have worked like a charm. Eyeing this customs man, Auerbach thought a bribe would only get him in deeper. He kept his hand away from his billfold.

“I think we had better have a look at your baggage,” the Canadian official said. “A good, thorough look.”

He and his pals spent the next hour examining the baggage not only by eye but with a fluoroscope. A customs man patted Rance down. A police matron took Penny off into another room. When she came back, steam was coming out of her ears. But the matron shrugged to the customs men, so Penny had passed the test.

“You see?” Rance said. “We’re clean.” He was awfully glad neither he nor Penny had tried to sneak a gun through the Dominion. Canadians didn’t like that sort of thing at all.

The lead customs agent glared at him. “You have close to fifty pounds of ginger in your suitcases,” he pointed out.

“It’s not illegal.” Rance and Penny spoke together.

“That’s so.” The customs man didn’t sound happy about it, but couldn’t deny it. “Still, I strongly suggest you would be very wise to keep your noses clean while you are in Edmonton. Give me those preposterous papers.” With quite unnecessary force, he applied the stamps that cleared them for entry.

Because Auerbach wasn’t up to carrying much, they rented a little cart to get all the luggage to the cab rank. Fortunately, the first waiting cabby drove an enormous Oldsmobile whose equally enormous trunk devoured all the suitcases with the greatest of ease.

“Four Seasons Hotel,” Penny told him as he held the door open for her and Rance.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “Best hotel in town.” His accent wasn’t that far removed from her Midwestern tones.
Next best thing to being back in the States,
Auerbach thought.

He hadn’t known what to expect from the hotel; choosing one from thousands of miles away couldn’t be anything but a gamble. But this gamble paid off. “Not bad,” Penny said as bellmen all but fought over their suitcases.

“How long do you expect to be staying, sir?” the desk clerk asked Rance.

“Only a few days,” Rance answered. With luck, they’d sell their ginger here and then head on to France with a nice stash. Without luck, they’d have to try to smuggle the ginger past the noses of the Race’s French chums, and probably past the Lizards’ own snouts, too. Rance didn’t like thinking about all the things that could happen without luck.

“Phew!” Penny said when they finally made it to their room.

“Yeah.” Rance hobbled over to the bed, let his stick fall to the thickly carpeted floor, and stretched out at full length on the mattress. His back made little crackling noises. “Jesus, that feels good!” he said. “I feel like I was stuffed into a sardine can for the last month.”

“I know what you mean.” Penny lay down beside him. “The Japs make seats and spaces between seats that suit them, but they’re too damn cramped for Americans. I’m not a great big gal, but I’m not teeny-tiny like that, either.”

He reached out and let his hand rest, almost as if by accident, on her leg. One thing led to another, and then to another after that: both of them, worn out by long travel and other, happier exertions, fell asleep on that big, comfortable bed. When Rance woke up, he heard the shower going. It stopped a couple of minutes later. Penny came out, wrapped in a white hotel towel. “Oh, good,” she said when she saw his eyes were open. “Now I don’t have to shake you.”

“You’d better not.” Sitting up made Rance’s ruined shoulder yelp, but he did it anyhow. “What time is it?” Asking her was easier than looking at the clock on the nightstand.

“Half past six,” she answered. “Why don’t you spruce up, too? Then we can go downstairs and get ourselves some supper.” As if to spur him out of bed, she let the towel drop.

“Okay,” he said, groping for his stick when he would sooner have been groping her. But soap and hot water were good in their own way. After endless hours in that airplane, he felt filmed with grime. Scraping sandy, gray-streaked stubble off his chin and cheeks made him look less like a stumblebum and more like an up-and-coming ginger dealer.

Everybody in the Vintage Room, the Four Seasons’ restaurant, looked like somebody, whether he was or not. Whiskies arrived with commendable speed. The steaks Rance and Penny ordered took a lot longer, though. The service was courteous and attentive, but it was slow. After Japanese food on the airliner, Auerbach’s stomach seemed empty as outer space. He finally lost patience. When his waiter walked by, he growled, “What are you doing, waiting for the calf to grow up so you can butcher it?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” The waiter didn’t sound more than professionally sorry. “I’m sure your supper will be ready before too very long.” Off he went. The restaurant wasn’t crowded, but things didn’t move very fast even so.

A couple of tables over, a fellow with a splendid graying handlebar mustache waved for his own waiter. “I say,” he boomed in tones unmistakably upper-crust British, “has everyone in your kitchen died of old age?”

“Oh, good,” Penny said with a laugh. “We’re not the only ones who can’t get fed.”

“Not the only ones starving to death, you mean,” Rance grumbled. He studied the Englishman. After a moment, he grunted softly. “God damn me to hell and throw me in a frying pan if that’s not Basil Roundbush. I haven’t seen him in years, but that’s got to be him. Couldn’t be anybody else, by Jesus.”

“That ginger smuggler you have connections with?” Penny asked.

“The very same,” Auerbach said. “Now what the devil is he doing here? I hadn’t heard that he’d given up on England.” He paused. “For that matter, with the Nazis down for the count, there’s no point in giving up on England, you know?” His eyes narrowed. “Maybe he’s here on business.”

“Yeah.” Penny’s eyes lit up. “Maybe we could do some business if he is. Finding somebody like that—we wouldn’t need to chase around after locals with connections. It could save us a lot of time.”

“You’re right. Money, too.” Rance grabbed his stick and used it to get to his feet. He limped over to the table where Basil Roundbush was sitting and sketched a salute. “Long as you’re not getting fed, either, want to not get fed along with my lady friend and me?”

Roundbush’s gaze swung toward him. The Englishman was so handsome, Rance wondered if he ought to let him anywhere near Penny. But it was done now. And, no slower than if he’d seen Rance day before yesterday, Roundbush said, “Auerbach, as I live and breathe.” He sprang to his feet and shook Rance’s hand. “What are you doing in this benighted Land Without Supper?”

“This and that. We can talk about it, if you want to,” Auerbach said. “And I might ask you the same question. I will ask you the same question, when you get over there.”

“I hope my waiter eventually realizes where I’ve gone—or even that I’ve gone.” But Roundbush grabbed his own drink and followed Rance back to his table. He bowed over Penny’s hand and kissed it. She did everything but giggle like a schoolgirl. Auerbach had known she would. Sourly, he waved to his waiter for another drink. Roundbush’s waiter came by the empty table and stared in blank dismay. More handwaving got that straightened out. The dinners did eventually arrive.

Over what even a Texan had to admit was pretty good beef, Rance asked, “And what
are
you doing in Canada?”

“Taking care of a nasty little spot of business,” Basil Roundbush answered. “Chap named David Goldfarb—fellow wouldn’t do what he was supposed to. Can’t have that go on: bad for business, don’t you know?”

“Goldfarb?” Rance’s ears pricked up. “Not the fellow you sent down to Marseille?”

“Why, yes. How the devil could you know that?” Before Auerbach spoke, Roundbush answered his own question: “Don’t tell me you were the people the Lizards had involved in that fiasco. Small world, isn’t it?”

“Too damn small, sometimes,” Rance said.

“It could be, it could be.” Basil Roundbush waved airily. “In any case, the bloke’s not wanted anything to do with us since. He knows rather more than he should, and so . . .” He shrugged. “Unfortunate, but that’s how life is sometimes.”

“You ask me, you ought to leave him alone,” Rance said. “You asked for trouble, sending a Jew down into the
Reich.
I’d give you what-for, too, you tried that on me.”

Penny kicked him under the table. He wondered why, till he remembered they might be able to sell Roundbush their ginger. Well, that was water over the dam now. The Englishman gave him a frosty stare. “I’m afraid your opinion doesn’t much concern me, old man. I intend doing what suits me, not what suits you.”

Rance’s temper kindled. He didn’t care who the limey was, or how big a wheel. Nobody brushed him off like that. Nobody. “You can goddamn well leave him alone, mister, or you’ll answer to me.”

Penny kicked him again, harder. He ignored that, too. He’d thought she would make trouble here, and now he was doing it. Roundbush didn’t laugh in his face, but he came close. He said, “If you think your foolish words will do the slightest thing toward changing my mind, old man, I must tell you you’re mistaken.”

“If you think I’m just talking,
old man,
you’re full of shit,” Rance replied. Penny did her best to take his leg off at the ankle. The Lizards had done their best to take it off at the thigh. He wasn’t afraid of anything, not any more, not even—maybe especially not—of dying. It gave him an odd sort of freedom. He intended to make the most of it.