Homeward Bound (47 page)

Mountains rose ahead. The bus climbed them. The road grew steep and narrow; Jonathan got the feeling not a whole lot of vehicles came this way. He hadn’t thought Home would have roads to nowhere, but the one they were on sure gave that feeling. Up and up it went. The bus’ engine labored a little. The driver turned off the air conditioning, but it kept getting cooler inside the bus anyhow. It might have dropped all the way down into the seventies. It was the coolest Jonathan had been anywhere on Home this side of the South Pole.

A few minutes later, they came to what was obviously the crest of the grade. Trir said, “This is the third-highest pass on all of Home.” Without checking an atlas, Jonathan had no idea whether she was right, but nothing about the place made him want to disbelieve her.

The bus seemed relieved to find a downhill slope. The driver knew her business. She never let it get going too fast, but she was never too obvious about riding the brakes, either. The change in the weather on the other side of the mountains was immediate and profound. Before long, three or four Americans and Kassquit all called for the driver to turn the air conditioning on again. With a sigh, she did. It suddenly seemed to be fighting a much more savage climate.

“There!” Trir pointed ahead, out through the windshield. “Now you can see why this place got its name.”

Jonathan craned his neck for a better look. Sure enough, the cliffsides and the ground were of a reddish color, brighter than rust. He wouldn’t have called most of it crimson, but he wouldn’t have revoked anyone else’s poetic license, either. And color names didn’t translate perfectly between the Race’s language and English to begin with.

Down went the bus, into the middle of the desert. By the noises the air conditioning made, it was working harder and harder. By the way sweat ran down Jonathan’s face, it wasn’t working hard enough. “How hot is it outside?” he asked.

“Probably about fifty-five hundredths,” Trir answered.

The Race divided the distance between water’s freezing and boiling points into hundredths—the exact equivalent of Celsius degrees. The USA still routinely used Fahrenheit. Jonathan was struggling to do the conversion in his head when Frank Coffey spoke in horrified English: “Jesus! That’s just the other side of 130!”

It could get that hot on Earth . . . just barely. But Trir spoke as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. What was that line about mad dogs and Englishmen? Noel Coward had never heard of Lizards when he wrote it.

Ten minutes later, the bus stopped. Air like a blast furnace rolled inside.
It’s a dry heat,
Jonathan thought in something not far from despair. That worked fine when the temperature was in the nineties. Over a hundred, it wore thin. At the moment, all it meant was that Jonathan would bake instead of boiling.

Trir seemed perfectly happy. “Is it not a bracing climate?” she said. “Come out, all of you, and look around.” She skittered out of the bus and down onto the ground.

Major Coffey wasn’t the only human being who said, “Jesus!” But they’d come all this way. There wasn’t—Jonathan supposed there wasn’t—much point just to staying in the bus. He got to his feet and went out into the Crimson Desert.

Jesus!
didn’t begin to do it justice. Jonathan found he had to keep blinking almost as fast as he could. If he didn’t, his eyeballs started drying out. In between blinks, he looked around. The place did have a stark beauty to it. Wind and dust had carved the crimson cliffs into a cornucopia of crazy shapes. Not all the shades of red were the same. There were bands and twists of rust and scarlet and crimson and carmine and magenta. Here and there, he spotted flecks of white all the brighter for being so isolated. Tau Ceti beat down on him out of a greenish blue sky.

“Does anything actually live here?” Tom de la Rosa asked. “
Can
anything actually live here?” He didn’t sound as if he believed it. Jonathan had trouble believing it, too.

But Trir made the affirmative gesture. “Why, certainly. You can see the saltbushes there, and the peffelem plants.”

Jonathan couldn’t have told a saltbush from a peffelem plant if his life depended on it. Both varieties looked like nothing but dry sticks to him. “Where do they get their water?” he asked. The inside of his mouth was drying out, too.

“They have very deep root structures,” the guide replied.

All the way to China
didn’t seem to apply, not here on Home. Or maybe it did. By the way the air and the ground felt, plants might have needed ten light-years’ worth of roots to draw any water to these parts.

But then, to his amazement, something moved under those sticklike caricatures of plants. “What was that?” he said, his voice rising in surprise.

“Some kind of crawling thing,” Trir answered indifferently. “There are several varieties in these parts. Most of them live nowhere else on Home.”

“They come already cooked, too, I bet,” Jonathan’s father said in English.

When he translated that into the Race’s language, Trir laughed. “It is hot, certainly, but not so hot as all that.”

“I agree,” Kassquit said.

She’d been raised to take for granted the temperatures Lizards normally lived with. This probably felt the same for her as it did for Trir. The Americans, though, were used to Earthly weather. Dr. Blanchard said, “Be careful of heatstroke. I’m glad I made sure we brought plenty of water.”

“Can we go back inside the bus, please?” Linda de la Rosa said. “I’m feeling medium rare, or maybe a little more done than that.”

“But I wanted to talk about the famous fossils not far from here,” Trir said. “These are some of the fossils that the famous savant Iffud used to help establish the theory of evolution.” She paused. “You Tosevites are familiar with the theory of evolution, are you not?”

“Why, no,” Major Coffey said, straight-faced. “Suppose you tell us what it is. It sounds as if it might be interesting.”

“Cut it out, Frank,” Jonathan said in English, and poked him with an elbow. Then he went back to the language of the Race: “He is joking, Senior Tour Guide. We have known of the theory of evolution for more than three hundred of your years.”

“
We
have known of it for more than 110,000 years,” Trir said starchily.

So there,
Jonathan thought. But the trip to the Crimson Desert had turned out to be interesting in ways he hadn’t expected. And he told himself he would never complain about the weather in Sitneff again, no matter what.

Mickey Flynn gazed out of the
Admiral Peary
’s control room at Home below. “I feel . . . superfluous,” he remarked. “Not a great deal for a pilot to do here. Now that I contemplate matters, there’s nothing for a pilot to do here, as a matter of fact.”

“You buzz around on a scooter, same as I do,” Glen Johnson said.

“Oh, huzzah.” Joy and rapture were not what filled Flynn’s voice. “I’m sure Mickey Mantle played catch with his little boy, too, after he retired. Do you suppose he got the same thrill as he did when he played for Kansas City?”

“Not fair,” Johnson said, but then he liked flying a scooter. The difference between him on the one hand and Flynn and Stone on the other was that he was a pilot who could fly a starship, while they were starship pilots. To them, scooters were like rowboats after the
Queen Mary.
Johnson went on, “With a little luck, you’ll have the chance to fly her back to Earth, too.”

“Well, yes, there is that,” Flynn agreed. “How very antiquated do you suppose we’ll be, there at the tail end of the twenty-first century? Like Civil War veterans when the Lizards came—that’s the comparison that springs to mind.”

“There were a few,” Johnson said. “Not many, but a few.”

“So there were.” Flynn nodded ponderously. “But at least they lived through the time in between. They saw the changes happen with their own eyes. When we get back, we’ll have been on ice most of the time. Everything we run into will be a surprise.”

“You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you?” Johnson said, and the other pilot nodded again. Some of those worries had occurred to Johnson, too. He didn’t see how he could have avoided them. Alone in his bunk in the wee small hours, all these light-years from Earth, what did he have to do but worry? After a bit, he added, “Something else makes me wonder.”

“Speak. Give forth,” Flynn urged.

“Okay. Here it is: how come there aren’t any other American starships here? Or starships from anywhere else, come to that?”

“We started first. You may possibly have noticed this,” Flynn said. “Then again, since you were in cold sleep for so long, you may have given up noticing things for Lent.”

“Oh, yeah. We started first. I knew that—knew it once I woke up, anyway,” Johnson said. “But so what? The
Admiral Peary
’s not as fast as a Lizard starship. You’d figure the state of the art back on Earth would get better. They’d build faster ships, and we’d have company. Only we don’t.”

“Who knows what’s on the way?” Flynn said.

“Well, I don’t,” Johnson admitted. “But radio’s twice as fast as a Lizard ship—I suppose that means it’s twice as fast as anything we’re likely to make, too. There’s the
Molotov,
but have you heard about starships besides her on the way?”

“No one has whispered anything into my pink and shell-like ear,” Flynn replied. Johnson snorted. Ignoring the noise, the other pilot continued, “This is not to say our beloved commandant and the Race don’t know more than I do.”

Johnson’s comment about their beloved commandant was worse than insubordinate. It was downright mutinous. Flynn clucked in mild reproach. Johnson cared very little. He said, “The Lizards might tell us what’s going on. You think Healey ever would?”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Flynn said, which was and wasn’t an answer at the same time.

“That’s me,” Johnson agreed. “That’s me right down to the ground. And I ask you, where’s our next starship after the
Molotov
? Where’s the new American ship, or the Japanese one? Hell, the Nazis are liable to be back in space again.”

“Maybe they’re waiting for news from us to get back to Earth,” Flynn said. “Maybe they didn’t know if the cold sleep worked as well as they thought. Maybe the
HERE BE DRAGONS
notices printed on all the road maps made them think twice. But now they’ll have to think that if we can do it, anybody can do it.”

“Maybe,” Johnson said. “That makes more sense than anything I thought of.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Flynn asked.

“Ha. Funny.” Johnson gave him a dirty look. It bounced off his armor of irony. Muttering, Johnson continued, “If you’re right, though, things have changed back on Earth. The Germans solve problems by throwing bodies at them till they go away—or they used to, anyhow.”

“Takes a lot of bodies to stretch from Earth to Tau Ceti,” Flynn observed. “And everyone who found out about a failure would laugh at the failed party. The Nazis always did have a hard time seeing a joke when it was on them.”

“Mm. Maybe,” Johnson said again. Once more, the other pilot had an answer for him. Whether it was
the
answer . . . Well, how could he say when he was in orbit around Home and
the
answer, whatever it was, lay back on Earth?

He looked down at the Lizards’ world. The landscape down there was almost as familiar as Earth’s by now. With less cloud cover than was usual on Earth, he could see better, too. They were coming up on Sitneff. The dust storm that had plagued the city where the Americans were staying had subsided. “I wonder how Melanie’s doing down there,” he said.

“Pretty well, by all the reports,” Flynn said. “Why? Did you think she couldn’t live without you?”

“Actually, I thought she’d be so glad to get away from you that she’d start dancing too soon and hurt herself,” Johnson answered.

“Have I been reviled? Have I been insulted? Have I been slandered? Have I been traduced? Have I been given the glove? Have I been slammed? Have I been cut? Have I—?” Flynn went on pouring out synonyms till anyone would have thought him the second coming of the illustrious Dr. Roget.

“Enough, already!” Johnson exclaimed by the time it was much more than enough.

Mercifully, the other pilot fell silent. Johnson enjoyed the quiet for about five minutes. Then the intercom summoned him to Lieutenant General Healey’s office. He enjoyed that not at all. He would rather have gone to the dentist.

By all the signs, Healey was less than enamored of having him there. The commandant growled, “Congratulations. You’ve managed to make the Lizards love you.”

“Sir?” Johnson said woodenly. If he wasn’t baiting Healey, Healey would be baiting him. He didn’t want to give the other man a handle if he could help it.

But Healey only nodded, which made his J. Edgar Hoover jowls wobble. “That’s right. Your rescue mission with the scooter impressed the hell out of them. And so we’ve arranged a cultural exchange mission with the Race.”

“Sir?” Johnson said again, this time in surprise.

“We’re going to trade them one of our scooters for one of theirs,” Healey said. “There’s not a damn thing on one of our scooters that can help them militarily, and they must feel the same way about theirs. So we’ll swap, and look them over, and see if we learn anything.”

“Oh.” Johnson knew he still sounded startled. Had anyone but Healey told him that, he wouldn’t have been. But he’d always figured Healey would sooner swap missiles with the Lizards than information.

“I’m so glad this meets with your approval.” The commandant’s sarcasm would have stung more if Johnson hadn’t already been on the receiving end of it so often. Healey said, “The scooter is waiting at Lock Two. The sooner you fly it to the
Horned Akiss,
the sooner we’ll get a Lizard scooter to play with.”

“All right,” Johnson said. “Now that I know where I’m going, I expect I can get there. It does make things easier, you know.”

Healey waved that away. He waved away almost everything Johnson said, whether or not the motion showed. “Go on,” he said.

Johnson went. He enjoyed flying the scooter. Had Lieutenant General Healey known how much he enjoyed it, the commandant probably would have chosen someone else for the job. Healey never had wanted him to have any fun.