Aftershocks (26 page)

“Whatever we get told to do,” answered the one called John. “So far, nobody’s told us to do anything except keep you on ice.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you ought to count your blessings about that, Lieutenant Colonel.”

By which he no doubt meant they could have buried Yeager in the yard behind the house without anyone’s being the wiser. That was probably—no, that was certainly—true. “But I haven’t done anything,” Sam said, knowing full well he was lying. “And you haven’t even tried to find out whether I’ve done anything,” which was the God’s truth.

Fred looked at John. John looked at the one named Charlie, who hardly ever said anything. He didn’t say anything now, either—he only shrugged. John, who seemed to be the boss, answered, “We haven’t had any orders to interrogate you, either. Maybe they don’t want us knowing whatever you know. I don’t ask questions. I just do what I’m told.”

“But I don’t know anything,” Sam protested, another great, thumping lie.

Fred chuckled. “Maybe they don’t want us catching ignorance, then.” Of the three there that day, and of the other three who spelled them in weekly shifts, he was the only one with even a vestigial sense of humor. He pointed at Sam’s empty cup. “You want some more coffee there?”

“Sure,” Yeager answered, and the—agent?—poured the cup full again. After a couple of sips, Sam tried a question he hadn’t asked before: “By whose orders are you keeping me here? I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, after all.”

He didn’t really expect to get an answer. Charlie just sat there looking sour. Fred shrugged, as if to say he was pretending he hadn’t heard the question. But John said, “Whose orders? I’ll tell you. Why the hell not? You’re here on the orders of the president of the United States, Mister Officer in the U.S. Army.”

“The president?” Sam yelped. “What the dickens does President Warren care about me? I haven’t done anything.”

“He must think you did,” John said. “And if the president thinks you did something, buddy, you did it.”

That, unfortunately, was likely to be correct. And Sam knew only too well what Earl Warren was liable to think he’d done. He’d done it, too, even if these goons didn’t know, or want to know, that. He had to keep up a bold front, though. If he didn’t, he was ruined. And so he said, “Tell the president that I want to talk to him about it, man to man. Tell him it’s important that I do. Not just for me. For the country.” He remembered the papers he’d given Straha and the things he’d told Barbara and Jonathan. It was important, all right.

“Crap,” Charlie said—from him, an oration.

John said the same thing in a different way: “President Warren’s a busy man. Why should he want to talk to one not particularly important lieutenant colonel?”

“Why should he want to make one not particularly important lieutenant colonel disappear?” Sam returned.

“That’s not for us to worry about,” John answered. “We got told to put you on ice and keep you on ice, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Yeager didn’t say anything. He just sat there and smiled his most unpleasant smile.

Charlie didn’t get it. Yeager hadn’t expected anything else. John didn’t get it, either. That disappointed Yeager. After a few seconds’ silence, Fred said, “Uh, John, I think he’s saying the big boss might want to see him for the same reason he had him put on ice, whatever the hell that is.”

“Bingo,” Sam said happily.

John didn’t sound or look happy. “Like I care what he’s saying.” He sent Sam an unpleasant look of his own. “Other thing he’s been saying all along is that he doesn’t know why he got nabbed. If he’s lying about that, who knows what else he’s been lying about?”

What that translated to was,
Who knows what we’re liable to have to try to squeeze out of him?
Back in his baseball days, Sam had known a fair number of small-time, small-town hoodlums, men who thought of themselves as tough guys. It had been a good many years, but the breed didn’t seem to have changed much, even if these fellows got their money from a much more important boss.

At this point, Sam had two choices of his own. He could say something like,
Anything happens to me, you’ll be sorry.
Or he could just sit tight. He decided to sit tight. These guys struck him as the sort who would take a warning as a sign of weakness, not as a sign of strength.

He wondered if Straha had yet decided he was really missing, and whether the ex-shiplord had looked at the papers he’d given him. Sam had his doubts. If Straha had seen those papers, wouldn’t he have got them to the Lizards in Cairo just as fast as he could? Yeager’s bet was that he would have. And if he had, the fur would have started flying by now. Sam was sure of that.

Maybe his captors had been expecting him to speak up and warn them. When he sat tight, they didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Were they unused to people who could bargain from a position of strength? Or were they just too dumb—and too far down on the totem pole—to realize he had some strength in this bargaining match?

Fred was the one who looked to have a clue. He gathered up the other two by eye and said, “I think we need to talk about this.”

They couldn’t go off into another room and leave Sam unattended. If they did, he was liable to be out the door like a shot. He didn’t know where the next closest house was—he’d come here at night, and had no idea how big a farm this was—but he might well make life difficult for these guys. Of course, they might shoot him if they caught up with him. It would be too bad if they did, too bad for him and, very possibly, too bad for the USA and the whole world.

He wondered if he could slide out of here while they talked among themselves. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind than John said, “Don’t even think about it, buddy.” Yeager wondered how he’d given himself away. Had his eyes slid longingly toward the door? Whatever the answer, he sat where he was.

After a couple of minutes, his guards broke apart. “Tell you what we’re going to do,” Fred said, his voice so full of sweet reason, Sam instantly grew suspicious. “We’re going to do just like you say, Lieutenant Colonel. We’ll pass your request along, and we’ll see what comes of it. If it gets turned down, it’s not our fault. Is that fair?” He beamed at Yeager.

“I don’t think kidnapping me in the first place was exactly fair,” Sam answered. “Besides, how do I know I can believe you? You can say you’ll pass it along and then just forget about it. How would I know you’re telling the truth?”

“What do you want us to do?” John asked. “Put it in writing?”

“That’d be nice,” Yeager said dryly.

Everybody laughed, as if they were good buddies sitting around shooting the breeze somewhere. Nobody was going to put anything in writing. If some people hadn’t put this, that, and the other thing in writing, Sam wouldn’t have been where he was now. In a lot of different ways, he wished he weren’t.

He decided to press just a little: “When you do pass the word along, you might want to let people know it’s already liable to be later than they think.”

“Crap,” Charlie said again.

“If you say so,” Sam answered. “But I think it’s important for the president to know everything that’s going on.”

“Now you listen up, Lieutenant Colonel,” John said. “You aren’t in a real good place to start telling people what to do. Nothing’s happened to your family—yet. You want to make real sure nothing does, you know what I mean?”

“Why, you son of a—” Sam surged to his feet.

He took half a step forward, but only half a step. All three of his watchdogs packed Army .45s. All three of them had the pistols out and pointed at his brisket in less time than he would have imagined possible. The difference between these guys and the small-town muscle he’d known in his younger days suddenly became obvious. The small-town punks had been minor leaguers, same as he’d been in those days. These fellows could have played in Yankee Stadium, and made the all-star team every year, too. Yeah, they were bastards, but they were awfully damn good at what they did.

Very slowly, Yeager sat down again. John nodded. “Smart boy,” he said. His .45 disappeared again. So did Fred’s. Charlie held on to his. He looked disappointed that Sam hadn’t given him the chance to use it. John went on, “You really don’t want to get your ass in an uproar, Lieutenant Colonel, honest to God you don’t. We said we’d pass things along, and we will.”

Sam studied him. “Saying things is easy. Really doing them—that’s something different. I’m telling you, President Warren needs to talk to me. He doesn’t know how much trouble he may end up in if he doesn’t.”

“Talk is cheap,” John said.

“That’s what I just told you,” Yeager answered. “But how many laws are you guys breaking by holding me here like this, not letting me see my lawyer, not letting me know what the charges against me are, or even if there are any charges against me?”

“National security,” Charlie intoned, as if reciting Holy Writ.

Yeager might have guessed he would say that. Yeager had, in fact, guessed he would say that. And he had a comeback ready: “If it turns out you’re right and everything works out okay, you guys are heroes. But if things go wrong, who’s going to end up with egg on his face? You guys will, because whoever’s over you sure as hell isn’t going to sit still and take the blame.”

“That’s not for you to worry about, Lieutenant Colonel,” Fred said. “That’s for us to worry about—and do we look worried?”

“No,” Sam admitted. “But the point is, maybe you ought to.”

“Crap,” Charlie said: a man of strong opinions and limited vocabulary. John and Fred didn’t contradict him—and, dammit, they
didn’t
look worried. Sam had to hope he’d planted some seeds of doubt . . . and that planting seeds of doubt mattered.

Because of the time he’d spent in space, Jonathan Yeager was going to graduate from UCLA a couple of quarters later than he would have otherwise. That had been the biggest thing on his mind when he got back to Gardena—till his father disappeared. He and his mother both knew, or thought they knew, why his father had disappeared. If they went to the papers, they might raise enough of a stink to get his dad released. They hadn’t done it, not yet. The stink they would raise might turn out to be a lot bigger and messier than that.

And so, now that classes had started again, Jonathan drove up to Westwood every day feeling as if he were in limbo. He didn’t know where his dad was, or when—or if—he might return. The police were supposed to be looking for Sam Yeager. So was the Army. So was the FBI. Nobody’d had any luck. Jonathan feared nobody was likely to have any luck, either.

He felt in limbo at UCLA, too. Because he’d dropped a couple of quarters behind, he wasn’t in so many classes with his friends—they’d gone on, and he hadn’t. What he’d learned from Kassquit and from the Race was and would be immensely valuable to him, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that fit into the university curriculum.

That was on his mind as he left his modern political science class—
modern,
of course, meaning
since the coming of the Lizards—
and headed out to the grass between Royce Hall and Powell Library to eat the ham sandwich and orange and cookies he’d brought from home. Brown-bagging it was cheaper than buying lunch from any of the campus greasy spoons, and his mom had started watching every penny since his dad hadn’t come home from Desert Center. “After all,” she’d said once, “you never know, I might disappear next.”

He was just sitting down when Karen walked by. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he waved. “Hi!” he said. “You got a few minutes?”

She paused, obviously thinking it over. They’d been an item—they’d been more than an item; they’d been drifting toward getting married—till he went up to the starship to instruct Kassquit about Tosevite sexual customs. Since then . . . since then, things had been tense, no two ways about it. He’d known they would be when he rode the shuttlecraft into space. He hadn’t known the war between the
Reich
and the Race would strand him up there for so long—which only made things between Karen and him that much tenser.

At last, though frowning, she nodded. “How are you?” she asked, leaving the walkway to sit down beside him. “Any word about your father?” She sounded genuinely worried there. They’d known each other since high school, and she’d always got on well with his folks.

“Nothing,” Jonathan answered with a grimace. “Zero. Zip. Zilch. I wish to God there were.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and brushed a lock of red hair back from her face. Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks and shoulders; she sunburned if you looked at her sideways. Despite that, she wore a flesh-colored halter top to show off the body paint that alleged she was a military communications specialist: like a lot of people of their generation, she was as passionately interested in the Lizards as was Jonathan. After a moment, she found another safe question to ask: “How are Mickey and Donald?”

She’d been there when they hatched from their eggs. Jonathan supposed that was a breach of security, but he hadn’t cared at the time, and his father had let him get away with it. “They’re fine,” he answered. “Growing like weeds, and learning new words all the time.” He hesitated, then plunged: “You know they always think it’s hot when you come over to see them.”

“Do they?” Karen’s voice wasn’t hot; it was colder than winter in Los Angeles ever got. “I like seeing them. I like seeing your mom, too. You . . . that hasn’t worked out so well since you got back, and you know it hasn’t.”

Jonathan’s sack lunch lay by him, forgotten. “Go easy,” he said. “I’ve told you and told you—what happened up there wasn’t what I thought it was going to be when I left.”

“I know,” she said. “It lasted longer, so you had more fun than you figured you would when you left. But you went up there intending to have fun. That’s the long and short of things, isn’t it, Jonathan?”

He admitted what he could scarcely deny: “That’s some of it, yeah. But it’s not all. It was almost like what fooling around with a real Lizard would be. We both learned a lot from it.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Karen said.

“I didn’t mean it like that, darn it,” Jonathan said. “Now she’s thinking about coming down here to see what life among the Big Uglies is like, and all she ever wanted to do before was stay on the starship and pretend she was a Lizard.”