Aftershocks (22 page)

With a sigh, Stone said, “The only trouble is, that would mean war back home, which we can’t afford.”

“I know.” Johnson grimaced. “It’s not just that we can’t afford it, either. We’d damn well lose.”

“Are you sure?” the senior pilot asked.

“You bet your ass I am,” Johnson said, and tacked on an emphatic cough. “Don’t forget, I’m the guy who flew all those orbital missions. I know what the Race has got out there; hell, I know half that hardware by its first name. Push comes to shove, we get shoved.”

“Okay, okay.” Half to Glen’s relief, half to his disappointment, Stone didn’t want to argue with him. He liked arguments he wouldn’t have any trouble winning. Stone waved at the mirror again. “One of the reasons we’re out here is to complicate the Lizards’ lives in all sorts of ways they haven’t even thought about yet. Having plenty of power and energy available is a long step in that direction.”

“Did I say you were wrong?” Johnson asked, and then, “Say, what’s this I hear about another ship heading this way before too long?”

Walter Stone suddenly looked a lot less like a buddy and a lot more like a pissed-off colonel. “Goddamn radio room here leaks like a goddamn sieve,” he growled. “They open their mouths any wider, they’ll fall right in.”

“Yeah, well, probably,” answered Johnson, who hadn’t heard the rumor from any of the radio operators. “But come on. Now that I’ve got some of the word, give me the rest of it. It’s not like I’m going to send the Race a postcard or anything.”

“Bad security,” Stone said. Johnson gave him a look. It must have been an effective look, because the senior pilot turned red and muttered under his breath. At last, with very poor grace, he went on, “Yeah, it’s true. They’re building it out in orbit now. Next opposition, or somewhere fairly close to then, it’ll head out here, and we’ll see some new faces.”

“Good,” Johnson said. “I’m sick of seeing your old face.” That earned him a glare from Stone’s old face. Grinning, he probed some more: “How many people will they be sending out?”

“All I know is, the complement is supposed to be larger than the crew of the
Lewis and Clark,”
Stone answered. Johnson nodded, glad of the news; that was more than he’d known. Stone went on, “Two reasons. First, they won’t have as long a trip, so they can bring more people with the same resources. And second, they’ll have improved the design of the new ship.”

“How?” Johnson asked eagerly. This was the stuff he wanted to hear, all right.

But Stone said, “How? How the devil should I know? Matter of fact, I don’t know that for a fact.” He paused, listened to himself, and shook his head in annoyance before continuing, “I’m just assuming there will be. We’re not Lizards, after all; we don’t think our designs are set in cement.”

“Neither do they, not exactly,” Johnson said. “It’s just that we’ve been refining our designs for fifty years—a hundred, tops—and they’ve been doing it for fifty thousand. After that long, they don’t find the need to make a whole lot of changes.”

“Don’t teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Stone said irritably. “I know all that as well as you do, and you know I know it, too.”

“Yeah, but you’re cute when you’re angry,” Johnson said, which won him another glare from the senior pilot. He grinned again and went on, “With more people, we’ll be able to spread out a lot farther. The Lizards won’t be able to keep an eye on us so easy.”

“Which is the point of the exercise,” Stone said, as if to an idiot.

“No kidding.” Johnson grinned once more, refusing to let the other man get his goat. Then he let his imagination run away with him. “One of these days, maybe, we’ll have a regular fleet of ships going back and forth between Earth and the asteroid belt.” His eyes and voice went far away. “Maybe, one of these days, we
will
be able to go home again.”

But Walter Stone shook his head again, this time in flat negation. “Forget about it.” His tone brooked no contradiction. “If a ship comes out here, it’ll stay out here for good. We haven’t got enough to let us afford to send anything back, especially not a big ship. Nice to dream about, yeah, but it won’t happen.”

Johnson thought it over and discovered he had to nod. “Might have done poor Liz Brock some good, though,” he said.

“No.” Again, Stone wasn’t taking any arguments. “For one thing, you die with cancer of the liver back on Earth, too. And for another, the point is to make it so we don’t need to go back to Earth for anything. We’re supposed to be figuring out how to do everything we need here without going back to Earth. That’s the plan, and we’re going to make it work.”

“It’s only part of the plan,” Johnson said.

“Well, of course.” Stone sounded surprised he had to mention that.

A chime from the ship’s PA system announced the hour. Johnson said, “I’m off.” His shift was done. Stone’s still had two hours to go. Adding, “Don’t let anybody steal the chairs while I’m gone,” Johnson glided out of the control room.

Since the chairs, like all the furniture, were bolted down, that didn’t seem likely. As a parting shot, though, it could have been worse. Johnson brachiated to the galley. He ate strawberries, beans, potatoes—plants from the ever-growing hydroponics section. He also gulped vitamin pills. Not a whole lot of food that had come up from Earth was left; it was mostly reserved for celebrations. He missed meat, but less than he’d thought he would when it disappeared from the menu.

Some people were still complaining about that. The dietitian fixed one of them with a fishy stare and said, “It’s healthy. It’ll help you lose weight.”

“I’m already weightless,” the irate technician answered. “If I lose any more, I’ll invent antigravity.”

“There, you see?” said the dietitian, who didn’t realize her leg was being pulled. “That would be worthwhile, wouldn’t it?”

“That would be impossible, is what it would be,” the technician snarled. “Christ, I’d eat a lab rat by now, but we haven’t got any more of those left, either.” He took his food and glided off in high dudgeon.

Johnson was dutifully chewing his beans and wondering if the methane they made people generate was put to good use—he supposed he could ask somebody from the life-support staff about that—when Lucy Vegetti came floating into the galley. When the geologist saw Glen, she smiled and waved. So did he. He would have flown over and given her a big hug, but men didn’t make moves like that, not by the rules that had sprung up, for the most part informally, aboard the
Lewis and Clark.
Since men outnumbered women about two to one, women had all the choice. Johnson didn’t necessarily like it, but he knew better than to fight city hall.

After Lucy got her food, she came over to him and gave him a hug. That was in the rules. “How you doing?” he asked. “I didn’t know you’d gotten back from Ceres.”

“They don’t need me down there, not for a while,” she answered. She was short and stocky and very definitely looked Italian. On Earth, she might have been dumpy, but nobody sagged in space. She ate some potato and sighed. “God, I miss butter. But anyhow, I’m here for a while. The ice miners are a going concern on the asteroid, so pretty soon they’ll send me out prospecting somewhere else. Meanwhile, I get to come back to the big city and look at the bright lights for a while.” Her wave encompassed the
Lewis and Clark.

“God help you,” Johnson said. “All that time away has softened your brain.” They both laughed. But he knew what she meant. There were more people aboard the
Lewis and Clark
than anywhere else for millions of miles. Seeing faces she hadn’t set eyes on for a while—not seeing the faces she’d been cooped up with for weeks—had to feel pretty good. Glen added, “You need somebody to drive your hot rod for you, just let me know.”

“I’d do better to let Brigadier General Healey know,” she said, and he nodded with regret altogether unfeigned. His opinion of the spaceship’s commandant was not high; the commandant’s opinion of him was, if anything, even lower. Had Healey had his druthers, he would have flung Johnson out the air lock when he came aboard the
Lewis and Clark.
Unlike the others here, Johnson hadn’t intended to come out to the asteroid belt in the first place. He’d just been curious about what was going on at the orbital space station. He’d found out, all right. Lucy’s smile changed. She lowered her voice and went on, “I like riding with you.”

His ears heated. So did certain other relevant parts. He and Lucy had been lovers before the water-mining project took her away. Now that she was back, he hadn’t known whether she would be interested again. All a guy on the
Lewis and Clark
could do was wait and hope and look cute. He snorted when that crossed his mind. He’d never been real good at cute.

But Lucy had made the first move, so he could make the next one: “Any time, babe. More fun than the exercise bike—I sure as hell hope.”

She laughed again. “Now that you mention it, yes. Not that it’s the highest praise in the world, you know.” Later, in the privacy of his tiny cubicle, she gave him praise of a more substantial nature. Weightlessness wasn’t bad for such things, except that the people involved had to hang on to each other to keep from coming apart: no gravity assist there. Johnson found nothing at all wrong with holding Lucy tightly.

When he peeled off his rubber afterwards, though, he had a thought foolish and serious at the same time. “What the devil will we do when we run out of these things?” he asked.

Lucy gave him a practical answer: “Anything but the real thing. We can’t afford to have any pregnancies till we build a spinning station to simulate gravity, and we can’t stand the drain on our medical supplies that a lot of abortions would cause.”

“I hear they’ve already had one or two,” he said, not much liking the idea. But none of the animal research suggested that getting pregnant while weightless was a good idea for people.

“I’ve heard the same thing,” Lucy said, nodding. “But nobody’s named names, which is probably just as well.”

“Yeah.” Johnson reached out and caressed her. Sure as hell, in the absence of gravity nothing sagged. Pretty soon, Lucy was caressing him, too. He wasn’t so young as he had been, but he wasn’t so old as he would be, either. He rose to the occasion, and he and Lucy spent the next little while trying not to get her pregnant again.

Straha woke one morning to find the weather exasperatingly chilly. “It is going to be autumn again before long,” he said to his driver at breakfast, as if the Big Ugly could do something about that. “I shall have to endure the worst of this planet’s weather.”

“In Los Angeles? No such thing, Shiplord,” the driver replied, shaking his head. As an afterthought, he used the Race’s negative gesture, too. “If you wanted to go to Siberia, now . . .”

“I thank you, but no,” Straha said with dignity. “This is quite bad enough; I do not require worse.”

“And remember,” his driver went on after another forkful of scrambled eggs, “winter here only comes half as often as it does on Home.”

“That is a truth,” Straha admitted. “The inverse truths are that it lasts twice as long and is more than twice as bad, even here.”

His driver let out several yips of Tosevite laughter. “We would call this weather perfect, or close enough. You really need to go to someplace like Arabia to make you happy. That is one place the Race is welcome to.”

“Although the Race may be welcome to Arabia, I am not welcome
in
Arabia,” Straha said. “That will be true for as long as Atvar lives, and our medical care is quite good.”

“Then go out to the desert here,” his driver said. “It will be cooler than it was in high summer, but not so cool as it is here.”

“Now that,” Straha said, “that is almost tempting. And have I heard that certain of our animals and plants have begun making homes for themselves in that area?”

“That is a truth, Shiplord,” the Big Ugly agreed. “It is not a truth we are very happy about, but I do not know what we can do about it.”

“Is not Sam Yeager investigating this truth you find so unfortunate?” Straha enjoyed mentioning Yeager’s name every now and again, for no better reason than to make his driver jumpy.

Today it worked as well as it ever did. “How do you know that?” the driver demanded, his voice sharp.

“Because he told me,” Straha answered. “I did not and do not think that was any great secret. Azwaca and zisuili are not beasts easily confused for anything Tosevite. Your newspapers and your television shows have been full of reported sightings and speculations—some clever, some anything but—about what their effect on the landscape will be.”

“Speculations about the beasts from your planet are one thing,” his driver answered. “Speculations about Sam Yeager are something else again, something a good deal more sensitive.”

Straha started to ask why, then checked himself. He knew why. His driver had spelled it out for him before: Yeager was the sort of Tosevite who kept sticking his snout where it didn’t belong. Hidden in a safe place in the house were papers Yeager had entrusted to him, the results of that snout-sticking. Straha had fairly itched to learn what those papers contained ever since the Big Ugly gave them to him. But Yeager was his friend, and had asked him not to look at them except in case of his death or sudden disappearance. He would have obeyed such a request from a friend who was a member of the Race, and he had obeyed it for the Tosevite, too. That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious.

His driver went on, “One of these days, I fear that Yeager will go too far for his superiors, if indeed he has not gone too far already. When that happens, saying you are his friend will do you no good. Saying you are his friend may end up doing you a good deal of harm.”

“Is it as bad as that?” If it was as bad as that, maybe he would have to arrange to warn Yeager again.

“It is not as bad as that, Shiplord,” his driver answered, now in tones of somber relish. “It is a great deal worse than that. He has done quite a lot to upset those superior to him.”

“Really?” Straha said, as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “How did matters come to such a pass?”

“Because he would not leave well enough alone,” the Big Ugly answered. “If you fail to listen to warnings for long enough, no more warnings come. Things start happening to you instead. Unfortunate things. Very unfortunate things.” He spoke the proper words, but he did not sound as if he thought such things were unfortunate—to the contrary, in fact.