Startled silence, and then the mike was seized and the familiar voice roared, “You son of a bitch!”
“But seeing you’ve come all this way, Major Cox,” Norrey said magnificently, “we’ll come in for a beer.”
“You dumb son of a bitch,” Harry’s voice came from afar. “You dumb son of a bitch.” The Monkey Bars had stopped winking. We had the message.
“After you, my love,” I said, unshipping the air tank, and as I reached the airlock my last thruster died. Bill Cox met us at the airlock with three beers, and mine was delicious.
The two sips I got before the fun started.
Like Phillip Nolan, I had renounced something out loud—and had been heard.
V
I took those two sips right away, and made them last. Officers and crew were frankly gaping at Norrey and me. At first I naturally assumed they were awed by anyone dumb enough to turn off their radios in an emergency. Well, I hadn’t thought of being dead as an emergency. But on the second sip I noticed a certain subtle classification of gaping. With one or two exceptions, all the female crew were gaping at me and all the male crew were gaping at Norrey. I had not exactly forgotten what we were wearing under our p-suits; there was almost nothing to forget. We were “decently” covered by sanitary arrangements, but just barely, and what is commonplace on a home video screen on Earth is not so in the ready room of a warship.
Bill, of course, was too much of a gentleman to notice. Or maybe he realized there was not one practical thing to do about the situation except ignore it. “So reports of your demise were exaggerated, eh?”
“On the contrary,” I said, wiping my chin with my glove. “They omitted our resurrection. Which by me is the most important part. Thanks, Bill.”
He grinned, and said a strange thing very quickly. “Don’t ask any of the obvious questions.” As he said it, his eyes flickered slightly. On Earth or under acceleration they would have flicked from side to side. In free fall, a new reflex controls, and he happened to be oriented out of phase to my local verticaclass="underline" his pupils described twin circles, perhaps a centimeter in diameter, and returned to us. The message was plain. The answers to my obvious next questions were classified information. Wait.
Hmmm.
I squeezed Norrey’s hand hard—unnecessarily, of course—and groped for a harmless response.
“We’re at your disposal,” is what I came up with.
He flinched. Then in a split second he decided that I didn’t mean whatever he’d thought I meant, and his grin returned. “You’ll want a shower and some food. Follow me to my quarters.”
“For a shower,” Norrey said, “I will follow you through hell.” We kicked off.
There was my second chance to gawk like a tourist at the innards of a genuine warship—and again I was too busy to pay any attention. Did Bill really expect his crew to believe that he had just happened to pick us up hitchhiking? Whenever no one was visibly within earshot, I tried to pump him—but in Space Command warships the air pressure is so low that sounds travel poorly. He outflew my questions—and how much expression does a man wear on the soles of his feet?
At last we reached his quarters and swung inside. He backed up to a wall and hung facing us in the totally relaxed “spaceman’s crouch,” and tossed us a couple of odd widgets. I examined mine: it looked like a wrist-watch with a miniature hair dryer attached. Then he tossed us a pair of cigarettes and I got it. Mass priorities in military craft differ from those of essentially luxury operations like ours or Skyfac’s: the Champion’s air system was primitive, not only low-pressure but inefficient. The widgets were combination aircleaner/ashtrays. I slipped mine over my wrist and lit up.
“Major William Cox,” I said formally, “Norrey Armstead. Vice versa.”
It is of course impossible to bow when your shoulders are velcro’d to the wall, but Bill managed to signify. Norrey gave him what we call the free-fall curtsy, a movement we worked out idly one day on the theory that we might someday give curtain calls to a live audience. It’s indescribable but spectacular, as frankly sexual as a curtsy and as graceful.
Bill blinked, but recovered. “I am honored, Ms. Armstead. I’ve seen all the tapes you’ve released, and—well, this will be easy to misunderstand, but you’re her sister.”
Norreysmiled. “Thank you, Major—”
“Bill.”
“—Bill. That’s high praise. Charlie’s told me a lot about you.”
“Likewise, one drunken night when we met dirtside. Afterwards.”
I remembered the night—weeks before I had consciously realized that I was in love with Norrey—but not the conversation. My subconscious tells me only what it thinks I ought to know.
“Now you must both forgive me,” he went on, and I noticed for the first time that he was in a hurry. “I’d like nothing better than to chat, but I can’t. Please get out of your p-suits, quickly.”
“Even more than a shower, I’d like some answers, Bill,” I said. “What the hell brings you out our way, just in the nicotine like that? I don’t believe in miracles, not that kind anyway. And why the hush?”
“Yes,” Norrey chimed in, “and why didn’t your own Ground Control know you were in the area?”
Cox held up both hands. “Whoa. The answer to your questions runs about twenty minutes minimum. In—” he glanced at his watch, “less than three we accelerate at two gravities. That’s why I want you out of those suits—my bed will accommodate air tank fittings, but you’d be uncomfortable as hell.”
“What? Bill, what the hell are you talking about? Accelerate where? Home is a couple o’ dozen klicks that-away.”
“Your friends will be picked up by the same shuttle that is fetching Dr. Panzella,” Cox said. “They’ll join us at Skyfac in a matter of hours. But you two can’t wait.”
“For what?” I hollered.
Bill arm-wrestled me with his eyes, and lost. “Damn it,” he said, then paused. “I have specific orders not to tell you a thing.” He glanced at his chronometer. “And I really do have to get back to the Worry Hole. Look, if you’ll trust me and pay attention, I can give you the whole twenty minutes in two sentences, all right?”
“I—yeah. Okay.”
“The aliens have been sighted again, in the close vicinity of Saturn. They’re just sitting there. Think it through.”
He left at once, but before he cleared the doorway I was halfway out of my p-suit, and Norrey was reaching for the straps on the right half of the Captain’s couch.
And we were both beginning to be terrified. Again.
Think it through, Bill had said.
The aliens had come boldly knocking on our door once, and been met by a shotgun blast named Shara. They were learning country manners; this time they had stopped at the fence gate, shouted “hello the house,” and waited prudently. (Saturn was just about our fence gate, too—as I recalled, a manned expedition to Saturn was being planned at that time, for the usual obscure scientific reasons.) Clearly, they wanted to parley.
Okay, then: if you were the Secretary General, who would you send to parley? The Space Commando? Prominent politicians? Noted scientists? A convention of usedcopter salesmen? You’d most likely send your most seasoned and flexible career diplomats, of course, as many as could go.
But would you omit the only artists in human space who have demonstrated a working knowledge of pidgin Alien?
I was drafted—at my age.
But that was only the first step in the logic chain. The reason that Saturn probe story had made enough of a media splash to attract even my attention was that it was a kind of kamikaze mission for the crew. Whose place we were assuming.