Second Contact (75 page)

Still, 2247 had the look of a reconnaissance satellite. It bristled with sensors and dishes, almost all of them aimed at the space station. A few swung from the station toward
Peregrine
as Johnson neared. What those said in electronic language was,
If you do anything nasty to me, I’ll know about it.
And what the satellite knew, the Lizards would learn at the speed of light.

But Johnson didn’t aim to do anything nasty to it. He took a couple of rolls of photographs as
Peregrine
reached its nearest approach to 2247. That done, he set down the camera and took out a screwdriver. He used it to undo a piece of sheet aluminum not far below his instrument panel. That done, he reached in and detached a length of wiring. The wire with which he replaced it was almost identical, but had bad insulation. Whistling, he plucked the panel out of the air and screwed it back into place. One of the screws had drifted farther away than he’d expected, which gave him an anxious moment, but he found it.

He waited till it was time to make the burn that would take him back into his lower orbit. When he flicked the switch, nothing happened. “Oh, damn,” he said archly, and turned his radio to the frequency the space station used. “Station, this is
Peregrine
. Repeat: station, this is
Peregrine
. I have had a main motor malfunction. My attempted burn just failed. I have to tell you, I’m glad you’re in the neighborhood.”

“This isn’t a gas station,
Peregrine
,” the space-station radio operator said, his voice friendly as vacuum.

“Christ!” Johnson hadn’t expected to be welcomed with open arms, but this went above and beyond, or maybe below and beneath. “What the hell do you want me to do, get out and walk?”

The silence that followed suggested the radioman would have liked nothing better. But Johnson wasn’t the only one listening out there. The fellow couldn’t very well tell his own countryman to get lost, not unless he wanted to create an enormous stink and raise enormous suspicions. And so, slower than he should have, he asked, “Can you make it here on your maneuvering jets,
Peregrine
?”

“I think so,” answered Johnson, who was sure he could: he’d done a lot of calculations before he requested permission to change orbit.

“All right,” the operator in the space station said. “You have permission to approach and suit up and come aboard. Do not— repeat, do not—approach by way of the unit on the end of the long boom there.”

“Why not?” Johnson asked. He wanted to find out what was on the end of that boom.

“Because you’ll regret it for the rest of your days if you do,” the radioman answered. “You want to be a damn fool, go ahead. No skin off my nose, but it will be off yours.” He had a very unpleasant laugh.

Johnson thought it over. He didn’t much care for the sound of it. “Roger,” he said, and picked a course that took him over toward the space station’s enormous, untidy main structure, giving the smaller, newer section on the end of the boom a wide berth.

“Smart fellow,” the radio operator said: he had to be tracking
Peregrine
’s slow, cautious approach either by radar or by eyeball. Did he sound disappointed that Johnson had listened to him, or was that just the tinny speaker inside
Peregrine
? Johnson didn’t know, and wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.

He didn’t have much of a chance to worry about it, anyhow. He was busy making sure his pressure suit—a distant, a very distant, descendant of the suits high-altitude pilots had started wearing around the time the Lizards came—was tight. If it failed, he had nobody to blame but himself . . . and he wouldn’t be blaming himself for long.

“You want to kill as much relative motion as you can there,” the radioman said. “A quarter mile is plenty close enough.”

“Roger,” Johnson said again, and then, with his transmitter off, “Yes, Mother.” Didn’t the fellow think he could figure all that out for himself? Maybe he wasn’t so glad to be visiting this place after all. It looked to be full of Nervous Nellies.

He bled his cabin air out through the escape vents, then opened the canopy and stepped out. He had more time here than he would have had trying to bail out of a burning fighter plane. An air lock opened in the space station. Tiny in the distance, a spacesuited man waved in the lock.

His jump took him in the general direction of the lock, but not straight toward it. To correct his path, he had a pistol that looked as if it should have come from a Flash Gordon serial but fired nothing more lethal than compressed air. Before he used it, he let that length of good wire go drifting off into space. Then he fixed his aim with it and slowed himself as he neared the air lock.

The other suited figure reached out, snagged him, and touched helmets to say something without using the radio: “That’s real smooth, sir.”

Looking at the face bare inches from his, Johnson recognized Captain Alan Stahl. He puckered up, as if to kiss the younger man. Stahl laughed. Johnson said, “I didn’t plan on coming up here, but here I am. Can you show me around?” Lying to somebody he knew was harder than holding off a stranger would have been, but he did it anyway.

Stahl didn’t laugh this time. He said, “I don’t know about that. We’ll have to see what Brigadier General Healey thinks.”

“Take me to him,” Johnson said as the outer air-lock door swung shut.

But, once he got a good look at Charles Healey, he wasn’t sure he was glad to have it. Despite looking nothing like Curtis LeMay, Healey had the same clenched-fist combativeness stamped on his face. And he knew about Johnson, growling, “You are the damned snoop who tried talking his way aboard this spacecraft before. You should have let well enough alone, Lieutenant Colonel.”

“I didn’t have much choice, sir,” Johnson answered with as good a show of innocence as he could muster. “My main motor wouldn’t fire.”

Save for having rubber bands holding down papers to keep them from floating away, Healey’s office might almost have belonged back on Earth. He picked up a telephone and barked into it: “Steve, go check out
Peregrine
. You find anything fishy, let me know.” He turned his glare back toward Johnson. “If he finds anything fishy, you’re history, just in case you were wondering.”

Johnson didn’t say anything to that. He simply nodded and waited. He had a considerable wait. Steve seemed thorough.

Presently, the telephone rang. Healey snatched it up, listened, and said, “Bad wiring, eh? All right. Can you fix it? You can? How long? Okay, that’s good enough. Stahl will take it downstairs again. We’ll say Johnson got sick up here and couldn’t.”

“What?” Glen Johnson yelped.

Brigadier General Healey glared at him. “You wanted to know so goddamn bad, didn’t you, Lieutenant Colonel? Well, now you’re going to know, by God. You’ve heard too much, you’ve probably seen too much, and you’re not going downstairs to run your mouth to anybody.” That hard face yielded a meager, a very meager, smile. “You’re part of the team now, whether you like it or not. Good thing you don’t have much in the way of family. That makes things easier. Welcome aboard, Johnson.”

“Christ!” Johnson said. “You’re shanghaiing me.”

“In a word, yes.” Healey had no budge in him, none at all. “You just signed up for the duration, soldier. You’re here permanently now, same as everybody else.”

“Permanently?” Johnson spoke the word as if he’d never heard it before. What the
hell
had he blundered into?

“That’s right, pal.” The general smiled again, this time with an odd sort of pride. He tapped his chest with his thumb. “That’s what you just bought. I don’t expect to set foot on Earth again, not ever. And neither should you.”

Sam Yeager had no trouble understanding why the Lizards had given him access to some parts of their computer network. “These are the sections that don’t tell me anything much,” he muttered. That wasn’t strictly true. But it was a red-letter day when he learned anything in those areas that he couldn’t have learned from the Race’s radio or television transmissions. The stretch of the network he was allowed to roam was the stretch where the Lizards presented the world their public face.

Even though he didn’t learn much, he dutifully skittered through it every day, so the Race could see how glad he was to have even that limited access to their computer network. But when he left, it was always with a sense of relief and anticipation, for his real work on the network started then.

After signing off as Yeager, he signed on as Regeya. Going from himself to the artificial male of the Race he’d created was like going from Clark Kent to Superman. Regeya leapt over all the obstacles that held Yeager back on the network. He could go anywhere, do anything a real male of the Race could go and do. Yeager’s Lizard friends had done a terrific job of creating a new identity for him.

And Yeager himself had done everything he could to make his scaly alter ego seem real to the males and females he’d met only as names and numbers on the computer screen. He’d fooled every damn one of them, as far as he could tell. To be accepted as a Lizard among Lizards . . . If that didn’t mean he’d done his homework, what could?

Sometimes Regeya seemed real to him, too. The fictitious male of the Race was fussier and more precise than he was himself. Yeager really did think differently when he assumed that identity. Things that wouldn’t have upset him as himself became infuriating while he looked down the snout he didn’t have at the innumerable follies of the Big Uglies.

Today, feeling very Lizardy indeed, he typed in Regeya’s name, identification number, and password (he’d chosen
Rabotev 2
for a password—it was easy to remember, but did nothing to suggest Tosev or the Tosevites). He wondered if he could learn any more about Kassquit. Sometimes he thought she was another Big Ugly masquerading as a Lizard. He doubted it, though. His best guess was that she was his opposite number among the Race: a Lizard who somehow had the knack for thinking like a human being.

He waited for the network’s road map to come up onto the screen. He admired that road map; it let a Lizard, or even a sneaky Tosevite, find his way around the whole complex structure with the greatest of ease.
A telephone book with a zillion cross references
was the way he’d explained it to Barbara, but that didn’t begin to convey its intricacy.

But when the screen lit up, he didn’t see the road map. Instead, three words appeared on it in large, glowing characters: ACCESS PERMANENTLY DENIED. And then the screen went dark again, as if a Lizard had reached out and pulled the plug.

“Oh, dear,” Sam said, or words to that effect. Wondering if the network had hiccuped, he tried again. This time, he didn’t even get the forbidding three-word message. The screen just stayed dark. “Oh, dear,” he said again, rather more pungently than before.

He felt like kicking the Lizard computer. What the devil had gone wrong? One possibility leapt to mind: if Kassquit was a female who had a knack for understanding people, maybe she’d recognized him for what he was. That hurt his pride, but he supposed he’d live through it.

He didn’t want to have to live through it for long, though. He telephoned Sorviss, the male who’d done most to arrange his extended access in the first place, and explained what had gone wrong.

“I shall see what I can do,” Sorviss said—in English; he enjoyed his life among people as much as Yeager enjoyed pretending to be a Lizard. “I will call you back when I discover what the problem is.”

“Thanks, Sorviss,” Yeager said. “Maybe we’ll have to come up with a new name for me, or something like that.” Whatever they had to do, he wanted it taken care of. He couldn’t begin to do his job without the fullest possible access to what the Lizards were thinking and saying.

When the phone rang half an hour later, Sam sprang on it like a cat onto a mouse. It was Sorviss, all right, but he didn’t sound happy. “Restoring your access will not be easy or quick,” he said. “The Race has installed new security filters on the lines leading into the consulate here. I am not certain I will be able to find a way around them: they are well made.”

“Then Straha is liable to be cut off from the network, too, isn’t he?” Yeager asked.

“He is,” Sorviss agreed.

“He won’t like that,” Sam predicted.

“I think you are right,” the Lizard said. “I also think this is not something I can control. If the shiplord starts biting his arms”—a Lizard idiom translated literally into English, a sin whose reverse Yeager sometimes committed—“I can only say, ‘Oh, what a pity.’ ”

“Is that all you can say?” Yeager chuckled. A good many of the Lizards who’d chosen to stay in the USA after the fighting stopped had turned into confirmed democrats. They wanted nothing to do with the multilayered society in which they’d grown up, not any more they didn’t. Ristin and Ullhass, the males he’d known longest, were like that, too, though they stayed polite when dealing with their own kind.

“No, I could say some other things,” Sorviss answered. “But Straha would not be happy if they got back to his hearing diaphragms.”

“You’re right about that, I bet,” Sam said. “But I sure hope you can put me back on the network before too long. Without it, I’m like a man trying to do his job half blind. That’s not good.”

“I understand,” Sorviss said. “But you must understand that I will have to evade many traps to restore you without drawing the notice of the Race. Maybe this can be done; I am a male of skill. But I cannot say, ‘It shall be done.’ “ The last phrase was in the Lizards’ language.

“Okay, Sorviss. Please do everything you can. So long.” Yeager hung up, deeply discontented. He’d got along without the computer network for years. He supposed he could get along without it again for however long Sorviss needed to restore his access. That didn’t mean he was happy about it, any more than he would have been happy about having to write everything out by hand because his typewriter broke down.

He went back and entered the network in his own proper persona once more. As long as he was recognized as a Big Ugly—and restricted because he was recognized—everything went fine. The only problem was, he couldn’t find out even a quarter of the things he wanted to know. The Lizards didn’t talk about the American space station, for instance, in any discussion area to which Sam Yeager, Tosevite, had access.