As if to confirm that, a member of the Race came on the radio: “Shuttlecraft, we have you on radar. Trajectory for the shuttlecraft port outside Peking is acceptable.”
“How nice,” Nesseref said, acid in her voice. “The Big Uglies in the SSSR told me exactly the same thing.”
“Be glad they did,” answered the controller at the shuttlecraft port. “They can be most difficult, even dangerous, if your trajectory varies in any way from that which is planned. You will no doubt know this for yourself. But, speaking of dangerous, I will tell you something the Big Uglies in the SSSR did not: be extremely alert in your descent. Tosevite rebels are active in the area, and are equipped with missiles homing on radar and on the heat emissions of your engine as you brake for landing.”
“And what do I do if they launch one of these missiles at me?” Nesseref asked.
“You do the best you can, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller answered. “In that case, you discover how good a pilot you truly are, and how well you have studied and practiced the manual overrides. Shuttlecraft computers are not programmed to operate on the assumption that something is trying to shoot them down.”
“Here on Tosev 3, they should be,” Nesseref said indignantly.
“As may be, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller said. “Perhaps they will be, at some time in the future. For the present, good luck. Out.”
Relhost waggled an eye turret in an ironic way. “Good luck, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”
“I thank you so very much, superior sir,” Nesseref said.
Her own eye turrets went to the manual controls. Of course she’d put in endless simulator practice with them. But how seriously had she taken it? How well could she fly the shuttlecraft on her own? And, if something happened to her, who would take care of Orbit? Mordechai Anielewicz, perhaps? No. He had a beffel. The two animals wouldn’t get along. Nesseref hoped she wouldn’t have to find out the answers to any of her questions.
But, even as the computer activated the braking rocket for final descent into the shuttlecraft port, she kept an anxious eye turret on the radar screen. And so the controller’s shout of alarm in the radio was not a warning, only a distraction. “I can see it,” she snarled. “Now shut up.”
Her fingerclaw stabbed the manual override control. She didn’t adjust the burn right away, but eyed the radar and the displays around it for data on the missile’s performance. That was alarmingly good. Whatever she was going to do, she didn’t have long to do it.
Relhost said, “I suggest, Shuttlecraft Pilot, that you do not waste time.”
“You shut up, too,” Nesseref hissed, a moment later absently adding, “superior sir.”
She would have only one chance. She saw as much. If she maneuvered too soon, that cursed missile would follow and knock her down. If she maneuvered too late, she wouldn’t get the chance to maneuver at all. She checked her fuel gauge. She would worry about that later, too. Now…
Now her fingerclaw hit the motor control, giving her maximum thrust and, in effect, relaunching her. The missile had only begun to pull up when it burst a little below the shuttlecraft. Shrapnel fragments pattered off her ship. Some of them didn’t patter off-some pierced it. Alarm lights came on.
Nesseref gave control back to the computer. She hoped she had enough fuel to brake again. If she didn’t, the Big Uglies who’d launched the missile would win even if they hadn’t disabled her. She also hoped with all her liver that they had no more missiles to launch. She’d been lucky once-she thought she’d been lucky. She doubted she could manage it twice.
“Well done,” Relhost said.
“I hope so,” Nesseref answered. Fuel alarms weren’t hissing at top volume, so maybe she would be able to get down in one piece. She went on, “You had better help suppress these rebels, superior sir. Otherwise, I will be very disappointed in you.” She granted herself the luxury of an emphatic cough.
When David Goldfarb came into the office of the Saskatchewan River Widget Works, Ltd., he found Hal Walsh there before him. That was nothing out of the ordinary; he often thought Walsh lived at the office. The music blaring out of a skelkwank- disk player was a different matter. It was a song by a quartet of shaven-headed young Englishmen who called themselves, perhaps from their appearance, the Beetles.
As far as David was concerned, they made noise, not music. His boss, most of a generation younger, loved it. So did a lot of people Walsh’s age; the Beetles were, in Goldfarb’s biased opinion, much more popular than they had any business being. Walsh was singing along at the top of his lungs when Goldfarb walked in.
Since Walsh couldn’t carry a tune in a pail, he didn’t improve the music, if that was what it was. He did have the grace to stop, and even to look a little shamefaced. Better yet, at least from David’s point of view, he turned down the player.
“Good morning,” he said in the relative quiet thus obtained.
“Good morning,” Goldfarb answered. If Walsh wanted to play Beetles music at top volume, Goldfarb knew he couldn’t do much about it except look for another job. He didn’t care to do that, and his boss didn’t usually go out of his way to make the office miserable for him.
“I just wanted you to know, I’m the happiest fellow in the world right now,” Hal Walsh said. “I asked Jane to marry me last night, and she said she would.”
“Congratulations! No wonder you’re singing-if that’s what you want to call it.” David stuck out his hand. Walsh pumped it. Goldfarb went on, “That’s wonderful news-really terrific.”
“I think so,” his boss said, tacking on a Lizard-style emphatic cough. “And just think-if you hadn’t cut your finger, I probably never would have met her.”
“Life’s funny that way,” Goldfarb agreed. “You never can tell how something that seems little will end up changing everything. If you’d missed a phone call you ended up getting, or hadn’t got out of your motorcar five minutes before a drunk smashed it to scrap metal…”
“I know.” Walsh nodded vigorously. “It almost tempts you to wonder if bigger things work the same way. What if the French had won on the Plains of Abraham? Or if the Lizards hadn’t come? Or any of a dozen more things that occur to me in the blink of an eye?”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” David said. The mere idea made him open his eyes very wide. Thinking about changes in your life was one thing. You could see where, if things had happened differently or if you’d chosen differently, what happened next went wouldn’t have stayed the same, either. But trying to imagine the same phenomenon on a larger level, trying to imagine the whole world changing because something had happened differently… He shook his head. “Too big an idea for me to get my brain around so early in the morning.”
“You should read more science fiction,” Hal Walsh said. “Actually, that’s not the worst thing for somebody in our line of work to do anyhow. It goes a long way toward helping people think lefthanded, if you know what I mean. The more adaptable your mind is, the better the chance you have of coming up with something new and strange while you’re working with Lizard electronics.”
“I suppose there’s something to that,” Goldfarb admitted. “I used to read the American magazine called Astounding, back before the Lizards came. But it stopped getting across the Atlantic then, and I lost the habit.”
“They still print it,” Walsh said. “You can find it in the magazine counter at any drugstore here.” That was an Americanism David had taken a while to get used to; because he was so accustomed to chemist’s, the new word struck him as faintly sinister. His boss went on, “The issues from back before the war would be worth a pretty penny, if you’ve still got any of them.”
“Not likely,” Goldfarb answered. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
“Here in Edmonton, they’re liable to still be stacked up in the odd places, waiting to get shoveled away,” Walsh answered. “Still, though, I do take your point.”
The door opened. In strolled Jack Devereaux. He was never late, but he never looked as if he hurried, either. “Hello, all,” he said, and went to get himself a cup of tea. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“Cut and try,” David Goldfarb said. “A lot of bad language when things don’t go the way we want. Nothing too much out of the ordinary.” He noticed Hal Walsh taking a deep breath and, with malice aforethought, forestalled him: “Oh, and Hal’s getting married. Like I said, nothing important.”
That won him the glare he’d hoped he would get from his boss. It also won him a raised eyebrow from Devereaux. “Really?” the other engineer asked Hal Walsh.
“Yes, really,” Walsh said, still giving David a sour look. “I asked Jane, and she was rash enough to tell me she would.” That sounded as if he was doing some forestalling of his own.
“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard this morning,” the French-Canadian engineer said. “Of course, up till now I hadn’t heard much in the way of news this morning, so I don’t know exactly what that proves.”
“Thank you so much,” Walsh said. “I’ll remember you in my nightmares.”
Still helpfully slanderous, Goldfarb said, “He’s been blaming me-and you, too, because I cut my finger on that sheet metal when I was giving you a hand. If I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have had to take me to the doctor, and she’d still be a happy woman today.”