If the Lizards had come to Earth now, in the twenty-first century, humans probably would have beaten the snot out of them. If they’d come any earlier than they did, they would have wiped the floor with people. Only in a narrow range of a few years would any sort of compromise solution have been possible. And yet that was what had happened. It was pretty strange, when you got right down to it.
Fiction has to be plausible. Reality just has to happen. Glen Johnson couldn’t remember who’d said that, but it held a lot of truth.
Most of Home was spread out before him. As usual, there was less cloud cover here than on Earth. Deserts and mountains and meadows and seas were all plainly visible, as if displayed on a map. Johnson wondered what effect Home’s geography had had on the Race’s cartography. Back on Earth, people had developed map projections to help them navigate across uncharted seas. Hardly any seas here were wide enough to be uncharted.
He shrugged. That was one more thing the Lizards could probably tell him about in great detail. But he didn’t want to know in great detail. Sometimes, like a cigar, idle curiosity was only idle curiosity.
Counting cold sleep, he hadn’t smoked a cigar in close to seventy years. Every now and then, the longing for tobacco still came back. He knew the stuff was poisonous. Everybody knew that these days. People still smoked even so.
He laughed, not that it was funny. “Might as well be ginger,” he muttered, “except you can’t have such a good time with it.”
All things considered, the Indians had a lot to answer for. The Europeans had come to the New World and given them measles and smallpox, and it didn’t look as if America had sent syphilis back across the Atlantic in return. But tobacco was the Indians’ revenge. It had probably killed more people than European diseases in the Americas.
The insidious thing about tobacco was that it killed slowly. Back in the days before doctors knew what they were doing, you were likely to die of something else before it got you. That meant people got the idea it was harmless, and the smoking habit-the smoking addiction-spread like a weed.
But with diseases like typhoid and smallpox and TB knocked back on their heels, more and more people lived long enough for lung cancer and emphysema and smoking-caused heart attacks to do them in. And kicking the tobacco habit was no easier than it had ever been. Once the stuff got its hooks in you, hooked you were. Some people said quitting heroin was easier than quitting tobacco.
Johnson hadn’t had any choice. He was healthier than he would have been if he’d kept on lighting up. He knew that. He missed cigars and cigarettes even so. He’d never smoked a pipe. He managed to miss those, too.
Then something else occurred to him. Humanity and the Race were both liable to be lucky. While European diseases had devastated the natives of the Americas, Lizards and people hadn’t made each other sick. They’d shot one another, blown one another up, and blasted one another with nuclear weapons. But germ warfare didn’t seem to work out. Thank God for small favors, he thought.
Mickey Flynn came up the access tube and into the control room. “A penny for your thoughts,” he said. “I know I’m overspending, but such is life.”
“Thank you so much. I’m always glad to be around people who respect my abilities,” Johnson said.
“As soon as I find them, you may rest assured I’ll respect them,” Flynn replied. “Now-are you going to earn your stipend, or not?”
“I hate to risk bankrupting you, but I’ll try,” Johnson said. With Flynn, you had to fight dryer with dryer. Johnson expanded on his musings about tobacco and disease. When he finished, he asked, “How did I do?”
The other pilot gravely considered. “Well, I have to admit that’s probably worth a penny,” he said at last. “Who would have believed it?” He reached into the pocket of his shorts and actually produced a little bronze coin-the first real money Johnson had seen aboard the Admiral Peary. “Here. Don’t spend it all in the same place.” Flynn flipped the penny to Johnson.
“I do hope this won’t break you,” Johnson said, sticking it in his own pocket. “Why on earth did you bring it along, anyhow? How did they let you get away with it?”
“I stuck it under my tongue when I went into cold sleep, so I could pay Charon the ferryman’s fee in case I had to cross the Styx instead of this other trip we were making,” Flynn answered, deadpan.
“Yeah, sure. Now tell me another one,” Johnson said.
“All right. I won it off the commandant in a poker game.” Flynn sounded as serious with that as he had with the other.
“My left one,” Johnson said sweetly. “Healey’d give you an IOU, and it wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on.”
“Don’t you trust our esteemed leader?” Flynn asked.
Johnson trusted Lieutenant General Healey, all right. That it was trust of a negative sort had nothing to do with anything-so he told himself, anyhow. He said, “When I have the chance, I’ll buy you a drink with this.”
As far as he knew, there was no unofficial alcohol aboard the Admiral Peary. He wouldn’t have turned down a drink, any more than he would have turned down a cigar. Flynn said, “While you’re at it, you can buy me a new car, too.”
“Sure. Why not?” Johnson said grandly. What could be more useless to a man who had to stay weightless the rest of his days?
“A likely story. What’s your promise worth?” Flynn said.
“It’s worth its weight in gold,” Johnson answered.
“And now I’m supposed to think you a wit.” Flynn looked down his rather tuberous nose at Johnson. “I’ll think you half a wit, if you like. You filched that from The Devil’s Dictionary. Deny it if you can.”
“I didn’t know it was against the rules,” Johnson said.
“There’s an old whine in a new bottle,” Flynn said loftily.
“Ouch.” Johnson winced. He was a straightforward man. Puns didn’t come naturally to him. When he went up against Mickey Flynn, that sometimes left him feeling like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. All of a sudden, he laughed. The Lizards probably felt that way about the whole human race.
When Pesskrag called Ttomalss, the female physicist was more agitated than he had ever seen her. “Do you know what this means?” she demanded. “Do you have the faintest idea?”
“No. I am not a physicist,” Ttomalss said. “Perhaps you will calm yourself and tell me. I hope so, at any rate.”
“Very well. It shall be done. It shall be attempted, anyhow.” In the monitor, Pesskrag visibly tried to pull herself together. She took a deep breath and then said, “This has taken the egg of the physics we have known since before Home was unified, dropped it on a rock, and seen something altogether new and strange hatch out of it. Each experiment is more startling than the last. Sometimes my colleagues and I have trouble believing what the data show us. But then we repeat the experiments, and the results remain the same. Astonishing!” She used an emphatic cough.
“Fascinating.” Ttomalss wondered if he was lying. “Can you tell someone who is not a physicist what this means to him?”
“Before we understood-or thought we understood-the nature of matter and energy, we threw rocks and shot arrows at one another. Afterwards, we learned to fly between the stars. The changes coming here will be no less profound.”
“You suggested such things before,” Ttomalss said slowly. “I take it that what you suggested then now seems more likely?”
“Morning twilight suggests the sun. Then the sun comes over the horizon, and you see how trivial the earlier suggestion was.” Pesskrag might have been a physicist by profession, but she spoke poetically.
However poetically she spoke, she forgot something. Ttomalss said, “The Big Uglies dropped this egg some time ago. What sort of sunrise are they presently experiencing?”