And maybe you don’t know what the devil you’re talking about, Jonathan thought. Mickey and Donald were no more normal Lizards than Kassquit was a normal human. With her example before them, the Americans had gone ahead anyway. Jonathan had been proud of that when the project first began. He wasn’t so proud of it any more. His family had done its best, but it couldn’t possibly have produced anything but a couple of warped Lizards.
He had more sympathy for Ttomalss than he’d ever dreamt he would. That was something he intended never to tell Kassquit.
“I have a question for you, superior Tosevite,” the second guard said. “Ginger is common and cheap on your world. Suppose all the males and females of the Race there fall into these perverted ways. How will we deal with them? How can we hope to deal with them, when they have such disgusting habits?”
The question was real and important. It had occurred to humans and to other members of the Race. The answer? As far as Jonathan knew, nobody had one yet. He tried his best: “I do not believe all members of the Race on Tosev 3 will change their habits. More of them use ginger there than here, yes, but not everyone there does-far from it. And those who keep to their old habits on Tosev 3 have learned to be more patient and respectful toward those who have changed their ways. Perhaps members of the Race here should learn to do the same. Sometimes different is only different, not better or worse.”
All three of his guards made the negative gesture. The one who had not spoken till now asked, “How do you Tosevites treat the perverts among you? I am sure you have some. Every species we know has some.”
“Yes, we do,” Jonathan agreed. “How do we treat them? Better than we used to, I will say that. We are more tolerant than we were. Perhaps you will find that the same thing happens to you as time goes by.”
“Perhaps we will, but I doubt it,” that third guard said. “What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong. How can we possibly put up with what anyone sensible can tell is wrong with a single swing of the eye turret?” His companions made the affirmative gesture.
“Your difficulty is, the Race’s society has not changed much for a very long time,” Jonathan said. “When anything different does come to your notice, you want to reject it without even thinking about it.”
“And why should we not? By the spirits of Emperors past, we know what is right and proper,” the guard declared. Again, his comrades plainly agreed with him. Jonathan could have gone on arguing, but he didn’t see the point. He wasn’t going to change their minds. They were sure they already had the answers-had them and liked them. He’d never thought of the Lizards as Victorian, but he did now.
14
The Race didn’t arrest Walter Stone after he returned their scooter to them. Glen Johnson assumed that meant whatever ginger had been aboard was removed before they got it back. Stone said, “What would you do if I told you they didn’t even search the scooter?”
“What would I do?” Johnson echoed. “Well, the first thing I’d do is, I’d call you a liar.”
Stone looked at him. “Are you calling me a liar?” His voice held a distinct whiff of fists behind the barn, if not of dueling pistols at dawn.
Johnson didn’t care. “That depends,” he answered. “Are you telling me the Lizards didn’t search the scooter? If you are, you’re damn straight I’m calling you a liar. They aren’t stupid. They know where ginger comes from, and they know damn well the Easter Bunny doesn’t bring it.”
“You’re the one who brought it the last time,” Stone observed.
“Yeah, and you can thank our beloved commandant for that, too,” Johnson said. “I’ve already thanked him in person, I have, I have. He played me for a sucker once, and he wanted to do it again. Do you think the Lizards would have given me thirty years, or would they have just chucked me out the air lock?”
“They didn’t find any ginger on the scooter,” Stone said, tacitly admitting they had looked after all.
“They didn’t find it when you took it over,” Johnson said. “Suppose there hadn’t been that delay before you flew it. Suppose I’d taken it when Healey told me to. What would they have found then?”
“I expect the same nothing they found when I got to their ship.” Stone sounded unperturbed, but then he usually did. He’d been a test pilot before he started flying in space. It wasn’t that nothing fazed him, only that he wouldn’t admit it if something did.
Being a Marine, Johnson had a dose of the same symptoms himself. That inhuman calm was a little more than he could take right now, though. “My ass,” he said. “And it would have been my ass if I’d taken the scooter over to the Horned Akiss. You’ve got a lot of damn nerve pretending anything different, too.”
“If you already know all the answers, why do you bother asking the questions?” Stone pushed off and glided out of the control room.
Resisting the impulse to propel the senior pilot with a good, swift kick, Johnson stayed where he was. Home spun through the sky above, or possibly below, him. He went around the world every hour and a half, more or less. What would things have been like for the Lizards in the days when they were exploring Home? Seas here didn’t all connect; there was no world-girdling ocean, the way there was on Earth. The first Lizard to circumnavigate his globe had done it on foot. How long had it taken him? What dangers had he faced?
The Race could probably answer all those questions as fast as he could ask them. It didn’t matter that woolly mammoths and cave bears had seemed at least as likely as people to inherit the Earth when the first Lizard went all the way around Home. The data would still be there. Johnson was as sure of that as he was of his own name. The Race had more packrat genes in it than humanity did.
But Johnson didn’t call the Horned Akiss or one of the Race’s other orbiting spacecraft to try to find out. He didn’t want chapter and verse. He wanted his own imagination. What would that Lizard have thought when he got halfway around? The animals and plants would have been strange. So would the Lizards he was meeting. They would have spoken different languages and had odd customs.
None of that was left here any more, not even a trace. Home was a much more homogenized place than Earth. Lizards everywhere spoke the same language. Even local accents had just about disappeared. From everything Johnson could tell, all Lizard cities except maybe the capital-which was also a shrine, and so a special case-looked pretty much alike. You could drop a female from one into another on the far side of Home and she’d have no trouble getting along.
Is that where we’re going? Johnson wondered. Even nowadays, someone from Los Angeles wouldn’t have much trouble coping in, say, Dallas or Atlanta. But Boston and San Francisco and New York City and New Orleans were still very much their own places, and Paris and Jerusalem and Shanghai were whole separate worlds.
Thinking of separate worlds made Johnson shake his head. You could take that imaginary female of the Race and drop her into a town on Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, and she still wouldn’t miss a beat. Oh, she’d know she wasn’t on Home any more; there’d be Rabotevs or Hallessi on the streets. But she’d still fit in. They’d all speak the same language. They’d all reverence the spirits of Emperors past. She wouldn’t feel herself a stranger, the way a woman from Los Angeles would in Bombay.
And the Lizards didn’t seem to think they’d lost anything. To them, the advantages of uniformity outweighed the drawbacks. He shrugged. Maybe they were right. They’d certainly made their society work. People had been banging one another over the head long before the Race arrived, with no signs of a letup any time soon. If the Race had stayed away, they might have blown themselves to hell and gone by now.