Part 22 (1/2)
He chuckled. ”Here I am, alone with a pretty girl”-all the women on the Lewis and Clark Lewis and Clark looked good to him by now, even the sour a.s.sistant diet.i.tian-”and all she wants to do is talk about rocks.” looked good to him by now, even the sour a.s.sistant diet.i.tian-”and all she wants to do is talk about rocks.”
”This is work,” Lucy said.
”Well, so it is.” Johnson glanced to the radar screen. He grunted in surprise, looked out the canopy, and grunted again. ”What the devil?” he said.
”Is something wrong?” Lucy Vegetti asked.
”I dunno.” He looked down at the radar screen again. ”The instruments are reporting something my eyes aren't seeing.” He scratched his chin. ”As far as I can tell, the set's behaving the way it's supposed to.”
”What's that mean?” she asked.
”Either it's misbehaving in a way I don't know about, or else my eyes need rewiring,” he answered.
Lucy laughed, but he wasn't kidding, or not very much. He didn't like it when what his eyes saw didn't match what the radar saw. If the instrument was wrong, it needed fixing. If it wasn't wrong... He rubbed his eyes, not that that would do a whole lot of good.
”If you don't mind, I'm going to try to find out what's going on,” he said. ”No offense, but your rock isn't going anywhere.”
”Go ahead,” Lucy Vegetti said, though she had to know he'd asked her permission only as a matter of form.
Ever so cautiously, Johnson goosed the hot rod toward what the radar insisted was there but his eyes denied. And then, after a bit, they stopped denying it. ”Will you look at that?” he said softly. ”Will you just look at that? Something's getting in the way of the stars.” He pointed to show Lucy what he meant.
She nodded. ”So it is. I see it, now that you've shown it to me, but I didn't before. What do you suppose it could be?”
”I don't know, but I intend to find out.” As Peregrine Peregrine had back in Earth orbit, the hot rod mounted twin .50-caliber machine guns. He had teeth. He didn't know if he'd need to use them, but knowing they were there helped rea.s.sure him. He slowed the hot rod's acceleration-whatever this thing was, it didn't seem to be under acceleration itself. had back in Earth orbit, the hot rod mounted twin .50-caliber machine guns. He had teeth. He didn't know if he'd need to use them, but knowing they were there helped rea.s.sure him. He slowed the hot rod's acceleration-whatever this thing was, it didn't seem to be under acceleration itself.
”No wonder we couldn't see it before,” Lucy breathed as they got closer and the mystery object covered more and more of the sky. ”It's all painted flat black.”
”It sure is,” Johnson agreed. ”And that's a better flat black than anything we could turn out, which means...”
The mineralogist finished the sentence for him: ”Which means the Lizards have sent something out to take a look at what we're up to.”
When the hot rod got within a couple of hundred yards of the s.p.a.cecraft, Johnson stopped its progress and peered through binoculars. From that range, he could see the sun sparkling off lenses here and there, and could also make out antennas aimed back toward Earth-much smaller and more compact than those the Lewis and Clark Lewis and Clark carried. carried.
”What are you going to do about it?” Lucy asked.
Johnson's first impulse was to cut loose with the machine guns the hot rod carried. He didn't act on that impulse. Pulling a sour face, he answered, ”I'm going to ask Brigadier General Healey what he wants me to do.” He didn't like Healey, not even slightly. The commandant of the Lewis and Clark Lewis and Clark had hauled him aboard for the crime of excess curiosity, a crime that had just missed being a capital offense. had hauled him aboard for the crime of excess curiosity, a crime that had just missed being a capital offense.
He had no trouble raising the Lewis and Clark Lewis and Clark; he would have been astonished and alarmed if he had. But convincing the radioman he really did need to talk to the commandant took a couple of minutes. At last, Healey said, ”Go ahead, Johnson. What's on your mind?”
His suspicions about the pilot had eased, but hadn't gone away. Johnson got the idea Healey's suspicions never went away. Well, he was going to feed one that had nothing to do with him. ”Sir,” he answered, ”I've found a Lizard spy s.h.i.+p.” He explained how that had happened.
When he was done, Healey let out along, clearly audible sigh. ”I don't suppose we ought to be surprised,” the commandant said at last. ”The scaly sons of b.i.t.c.hes have to be wondering what we're up to out here.”
”Shall I shoot it up, sir?” Johnson asked. ”That would give 'em a good poke in the eye turret.”
To his surprise, Healey said, ”No. For one thing, we don't know if this is the only machine they've sent out. They're suspenders-and-belt... critters, so odds are it isn't. And if you do, they'll know what's happened to it. We don't want to give them any excuse to start a war out here, because odds are we'd lose it. Hold fire. Have you got that?”
”Yes, sir. Hold fire,” Johnson agreed. ”What do I do, then? Just wave to the Lizards and go on about my business?”
”That's exactly what you do,” Healey answered. ”If you'd opened up on it without asking for orders, I would have been very unhappy with you. You did the right thing, reporting in.” Maybe he sounded surprised Johnson had done the right thing. Maybe the radio speaker in the hot rod was just on the tinny side. Maybe, but Johnson wouldn't have bet on it.
He asked, ”Sir, can we operate in a fishbowl?”
”It's not a question of can can, Johnson,” Brigadier General Healey answered. ”It's a question of must must. As I said, we shouldn't be surprised the Lizards are conducting reconnaissance out here. In their shoes, I would. We'll just have to learn to live with it, have to learn to work around it. Maybe we'll even be able to learn to take advantage of it.”
Johnson wondered if his superior had gone out of his mind. Then he realized that Lizard s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p he was next to wasn't just taking pictures of what the Lewis and Clark Lewis and Clark and its crew were up to. It also had to be monitoring the radio frequencies people used. Maybe Healey was trying to put a bug in the Lizards' ears-or would have been, if they'd had ears. and its crew were up to. It also had to be monitoring the radio frequencies people used. Maybe Healey was trying to put a bug in the Lizards' ears-or would have been, if they'd had ears.
If that was what he was up to, Johnson would play along. ”Yes, sir,” he said enthusiastically. ”They can look as much as they please, but they won't be able to figure out everything that's going on.”
Brigadier General Healey chuckled, an alien sound from his lips. ”That wouldn't be so bad, would it?”
”No, sir,” Johnson said. ”I wouldn't mind at all.” Behind him, Lucy Vegetti snickered. He turned around and gave her a severe look. She laughed at him, mouthing, You can't act for beans. You can't act for beans.
”Anything else?” Healey barked. When Johnson said there wasn't, the commandant broke the connection. That was in character for him, where the chuckle hadn't been-hadn't even come close.
”So we just go on about our business?” Lucy asked. ”That won't be so easy, not for some of the things we'll need to do sooner or later.”
Johnson shrugged; his belt held him in his seat. He'd spent his adult life in the service; he knew how to evaluate military problems. ”Yes and no,” he said. ”If you know the other guy is watching, you can make sure he only sees what you want him to see, and sometimes you can lead him around by the nose. What's really bad is when he's watching and you don't know he's there. That's when he can find out stuff that hurts you bad.”
”I can see how it would be.” The mineralogist sounded thoughtful. ”You make it seem so logical. Every trade has its own tricks, doesn't it?”
”Well, sure,” Johnson answered, surprised she needed to ask. ”If we hadn't had some notion of what we were doing, we'd all be singing the Lizard national anthem every time we went to the ballpark.”
She laughed. ”Now there's a picture for you! But do you know what? Some of the Lizard POWs who ended up settling in the States like playing baseball. I saw them on the TV news once. They looked pretty good, too.”
”I've heard that,” Johnson said. ”I never saw film of them playing, though.”
”More important to worry about what they're doing out here,” Lucy said. ”And whatever it is, they'll have a harder time doing it because you were on the ball. Congratulations.”
”Thanks,” he said in some confusion. He wasn't used to praise for what he did. If he carried out his a.s.signments, he was doing what his superiors expected of him, and so didn't particularly deserve praise. And if he didn't carry them out, he got raked over the coals. That was the way things worked. After a moment, he added, ”I never would have spotted it if you hadn't sent me out this way, so I guess you deserve half the credit. I'll tell General Healey so, too.”
They spent the next little while wrangling good-naturedly about who deserved what, each trying to say the other should get it. Finally, Lucy Vegetti said, ”The only reason we did come out here was to get a look at that asteroid shaped like a zucchini. Can we still get over there?”
Johnson checked the gauges for the main tank and the maneuvering jets, then nodded. ”Sure, no trouble at all.” He chuckled. ”Now I can't stop halfway there and say, 'I'm sorry, sweetheart, but we just ran out of gas on this little country road in the middle of nowhere.' ”
They were in the middle of nowhere, all right, far more so than they could have been anyplace on Earth. The very idea of a road, country or otherwise, was absurd here. Lucy said, ”I didn't figure you for that kind of guy anyway, Glen. You're not shy if you've got something on your mind.”
”I've got something on my mind, all right,” he said.
”Maybe I've got something on mine, too,” she answered. ”Maybe we could even find out-after we give this asteroid the once-over and after we get back to the Lewis and Clark Lewis and Clark.”
”Sure,” Johnson agreed, and swung the nose of the hot rod away from the Lizard spy craft and toward the asteroid that interested Lucy.
Vyacheslav Molotov had disliked dealing with Germans longer than he'd disliked dealing with Lizards. On a personal level, he disliked dealing with Germans more, too. He made allowances for the Lizards. They were honestly alien, and often were ignorant of the way things were supposed to work on Earth. The Germans had no such excuses, but they could make themselves more difficult than the Lizards any day of the week.
Paul Schmidt, the German amba.s.sador to Moscow, was a case in point. Schmidt was not a bad fellow. Skilled in languages-he'd started out as an English interpreter-he spoke good Russian, even if he did always leave the verb at the end of the sentence in the Germanic fas.h.i.+on. But he had to take orders from Himmler, which meant his inherent decency couldn't count for much.