“Nothing, sir, not really,” Goldfarb said. He’d been thinking of a song from an American film he’d seen back before the war began, a catchy number called “California, Here I Come.” After all this time, he’d be right back where he started from.
Barbara Yeager folded her hands over her belly. More forcefully than a shout, the wordless gesture reminded Sam she was pregnant. After not showing for what seemed a very long time, these past couple of months she’d ballooned. A couple of months more and he’d be a father.
“I wish you weren’t going away,” Barbara said. She was a trouper; that was as close as she would come to reminding him things didn’t always work out exactly as planned. Just because the baby was due around Christmastime didn’t mean it had to wait that long.
He shrugged. “They gave me my orders, hon. It’s not like I have a whole lot of choice.” He patted the stripes on his shirtsleeve.
“You don’t fool me one bit, Sam Yeager,” Barbara said, laughing at him. Maybe they’d been married only seven months or so, but she read him like a book. “You’re champing at the bit, and you know it. You and your pulp fiction.”
She said it affectionately, so it didn’t sting, or not much. But he’d heard similar noises from so many people that his response sounded more nettled than it was: “It’s science fiction, not just any pulp fiction. And with the Lizards here, it’s not fiction any more, it’s the straight goods, same as… what the Met Lab was working on.” They were alone in their room, but he didn’t mention atomic bombs by name.
Barbara spread her hands. “That’s all true, and I admit every word of it. But you’re as excited about working with a real live spaceship as a little kid would be with an all-day sucker.”
“Well, what if I am?” he said, yielding the point. “I earned this chance, and I want to make the most of it. If I do a good job here, the way I did with the work on that light-amplifier gadget, maybe-just maybe-they’ll turn me into an officer. And that’s not minor league at all. I spent too much time in the bushes, babe-I want to hit the bigs.”
“I know,” Barbara answered. “I think that’s good-I think it’s better than good, as a matter of fact. But as I said, you can’t fool me. If we start building spaceships of our own, you want to ride one, don’t you?”
Sam hugged her. The way her belly pressed against his reminded him again of the child growing within her. He said, “Having a wife who understands me is a darn good thing. Sure, I’d love that, if it ever happens. And the only way it will is if I get real good at talking with the Lizards about how rockets work and what you’re supposed to do with ’em. I don’t have the education to know how to make ’em myself, or the training-and the reflexes-to be a pilot.”
“I understand all that,” she said, and kissed him fiercely. “And I’m proud of you for it, and I love you for working hard to make something of yourself-and I wish you weren’t going.”
“But I’ve got to.” He started to show her his wristwatch. Before he could, somebody knocked on the door. He quickly kissed her. “I’ve got to go now, hon.” She nodded. He opened the door.
Standing in the hall were an Army major and a Lizard with pretty fancy body paint. “Morning, Yeager,” the major said. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a thin, sandy mustache. The name tag above his right breast pocket saidTOMPKINS.
“Morning, sir.”
The major glanced toward the Lizard. “And you’ll know Vesstil, I expect-Straha’s pilot for his flight down here.”
“Oh, sure.” Sam shifted into the Lizards’ language: “In the name of the Emperor, I greet you and wish you health.” Every time he talked with a male of the Race, he was reminded of just how informal a language English was. He’d never thought about that till he started picking up Lizard talk.
“I return your wishes in the Emperor’s name,” Vesstil said in fair English. Even using English, he lowered his eyes at the mention of his sovereign.
“Okay, let’s go.” Tompkins sounded like a man in a hurry. Yeager waved to Barbara one last time and set off behind him. To Vesstil, Tompkins said, “We have clothes downstairs for you, to make you look like a human being if your friends upstairs are watching.”
“They are not my friends, not now,” the Lizard pilot said. “If they were my friends, I should not be here assisting you.” The remark held an unmistakable note of reproof. Sam wondered if Tompkins heard it.
A Lizard in trousers and shirt and wide-brimmed hat could not help looking anything but ridiculous, not at close range. From the air, though, he’d seem just another Big Ugly, which was the point of the exercise. He and his human companions got into a buckboard. A driver dressed like a hayseed clucked to the horses and flicked the reins. The wagon rattled off.
“We’d go faster if we were riding horses,” Sam said. “We would if Vesstil here could ride one, anyway.” He translated the remark for the Lizard’s benefit.
“I am willing to teach you how to fly the shuttlecraft the Race has made,” Vesstil said with dignity. “I am not willing to learn to barbarously balance myself on the back of a beast. These creatures strike me as being more dangerous than flying between the stars, which is but a matter of routine. Beasts are unpredictable.” By the way he said it, that was an inexpiable sin.
They were on the road north for several days. The highways held little traffic, and all of it drawn by horses or mules. Yeager felt transported back into the days of his father’s youth. Once they passed out of the pine woods and into those where broad-leafed trees predominated, the fiery colors of autumn replaced green. They interested Vesstil. None of the humans in the wagon could explain why the leaves changed color every year.
A sign on US 63 said they’d just passed from Arkansas up into Missouri. They’d also passed into what looked as if it had been one hell of a forest fire not so long ago. Yeager wondered if it had started when the rocket ship-the shuttlecraft, Vesstil called it-landed. He turned to Tompkins and said, “Sir, how do you go about hiding a shuttlecraft?”
“You’ll see when we get there,” the major answered, and set a finger alongside his nose. Sam didn’t know what to make of that, but he kept quiet.
Before long, the wagon was jolting down winding country roads and then along unpaved tracks that would turn into hub-deep glue at the first good rain. Off in the distance, Yeager saw what looked like the wreckage of the biggest tent in the world. About half a mile farther on, he spotted another enormous canvas Big Top, this one with a couple of bomb craters close by.
The proverbial cartoon lightbulb went on above his head. “We built so many tents, the Lizards never figured out which one had the pea under it.”
“Well, actually, they did,” Tompkins said. “But by the time they did, we’d managed to strip it pretty completely. They manufacture these critters the same way we do Chevvies, except maybe even better-everything comes apart real easy so you can work on it if you have to.”
“How else would you build something?” Vesstil asked.
“You’d be amazed,” Major Tompkins answered, rolling his eyes behind the horn-rims. “Your people have had a long, long time to learn to do everything the smooth way, the easy way, the efficient way. It’s not like that with us. A lot of the stuff we’re doing now, we’re doing for the very first time. We aren’t always as good at it as we might be, and we make a lot of dumb mistakes. But one way or another, we get it done.”
“This the Race has learned, often to its sorrow.” Vesstil made one of the leaky-kettle noises Lizards used when they were thinking hard. “The shiplord Straha, my commander that was, has this trait also, in larger measure, at least, than is usual for a male of the Race. Because the fleetlord would not heed him, he decided to join his fate to you.”
And yet Straha had had kittens about unauthorized body-paint designs. Even a radical Lizard, Sam thought, was a reactionary by human standards. He said, “I don’t really get to go aboard a real live spaceship, then? Too bad. Even working with the parts will be pretty good, though.”