This time, Flynn answered right away: “Well, it will be over in a hurry, anyhow.” That was what the Lizards would have called a truth. By the way he said it, he thought Johnson was a damn fool for asking the question. After only a short pause, Johnson decided he’d been a damn fool, too.
In the background was the radio chatter among the Lizards’ spaceships and orbiting stations and shuttlecraft. Johnson didn’t know how much good monitoring that would do. Nobody was likely to give the attack order in clear language. It would be encrypted, so the Americans wouldn’t realize what it was till things hit the fan.
Even so, the traffic was often fun to listen to. Lizards-and the occasional Rabotevs and Hallessi-bickered among themselves hardly less than humans did. Their insults revolved around rotten eggs and cloacas rather than genitals, but they used them with panache.
All at once, everything stopped. For about fifteen seconds, the radio waves might have been wiped clean. “What the hell?” Johnson said, in mingled surprise and alarm. He and Mickey Flynn had been talking about Armageddon. Had they just listened to the overture for it?
But then the Lizards returned to the air. Everybody was saying the same things: “What is that?” “Do you see that?” “Where did that come from?” “How did that get there?” “What could it be?”
Flynn pointed to the radar. It showed a blip that Johnson would have sworn hadn’t been there before, about two million miles out from Home and closing rapidly. “What have we got here?” Johnson said, unconsciously echoing the Lizards all around the Admiral Peary. “Looks like it popped out of thin air.”
“Thinner vacuum,” Flynn said, and Johnson nodded-the other pilot was right.
The Lizards started sending messages toward the blip: “Strange ship, identify yourself.” “Strange ship, please begin communication.” And another one, surely transmitted by a worried member of the Race: “Strange ship, do you understand? Do you speak our language?”
Speed-of-light lag for a message to get to the strange ship-where the devil had it come from? out of nowhere? — and an answer to come back was about twenty-one and a half seconds. That, of course, assumed the answerer started talking the instant he-she? it? — heard the Lizards, which was bound to be optimistic.
“Do you think we ought to send something, too?” Johnson asked. Mickey Flynn was senior to him; it was Flynn’s baby, not his. The other pilot shook his head. Johnson waved to show he accepted the decision. He found a different question: “Do you think it’s a good thing we’re at top alert?” Just as solemnly, Flynn nodded.
Close to a minute went by before the strange ship responded. When it did, the answer was in the Lizards’ language: “We greet you, males and females of the Race.” The individual at the microphone had a mushy accent. Even as Johnson realized it was a human accent, the speaker went on, “This is the starship Commodore Perry, from the United States of America. We greet you, citizens of the Empire. And we also greet, or hope we greet, our own citizens aboard the Admiral Peary. ”
Johnson and Flynn both stabbed for the TRANSMIT button at the same time. Johnson’s finger came down on it first. That was his only moment of triumph. Flynn, as senior, did the talking: “This is the Admiral Peary, Colonel Flynn speaking. Very good to have company. We’ve been out here by ourselves for a long time.”
Again, there was a necessary wait for radio waves to travel from ship to ship. During it, Johnson wondered, What’s in a name? The Admiral Peary recalled an explorer who’d pitted himself against nature and won. The Commodore Perry was named for the man who’d gone to Japan with warships and opened the country to the outside world no matter what the Japanese thought about it. The Lizards might not notice the difference, especially since Peary and Perry were pronounced alike even if spelled differently. But Johnson did. What did it mean? This time, the person at the radio-a woman-replied in English: “Hello, Colonel Flynn. Good to hear from you. I’m Major Nichols-Nicole to my friends. We were hoping we’d find you folks here, but we weren’t sure, because of course your signals from Home hadn’t got back to Earth when we set out.”
“I hope you’ve been picking up some of them as you followed our trail from Earth to Home,” Flynn said. “And if you don’t mind my asking, when did you set out?”
That was a good question. Here on the Admiral Peary, Johnson didn’t feel like too much of an antique, even if he had been in cold sleep longer than most. But these whippersnappers might not even have been born when Dr. Blanchard put him on ice. How much of an antique would he seem to them? Do I really want to know?
He had time to wonder about that again. Then Major Nichols’ voice came back: “About five and a half weeks ago, Colonel.”
Mickey Flynn drummed his fingers on his thigh in annoyance, one of the few times Johnson had ever seen him show it. “Five and a half weeks’ subjective time, sure. But how long were you in cold sleep?” Flynn asked.
Johnson nodded: another good question. If the Commodore Perry was still slower than Lizard starships, that said one thing. If she matched their technology, that said something else-something important, too. And if she was faster, even a little bit…
The wait for radio waves to go back and forth felt maddening. After what seemed like a very long time, Major Nichols answered, “No, Colonel. No cold sleep-none. Total travel time, five and a half weeks. There’ve been some changes made.”
Johnson and Flynn stared at each other. They both mouthed the same thing: Jesus Christ! The Lizards were bound to have somebody who understood English monitoring the transmission. The second that translator figured out what Major Nichols had just said, the Race was going to start having kittens, or possibly hatchling befflem. Johnson pointed to the microphone and raised an eyebrow. Flynn gave back a gracious nod, as if to say, Be my guest.
“This is Colonel Johnson, junior pilot on the Admiral Peary, ” Johnson said, feeling much more senior than junior. “I hope you brought along some proof of that. It would be really useful. Things are… a little tense between us and the Race right now.” He almost added an emphatic cough, but held back when he realized he didn’t know how people of Major Nichols’ generation would take that. After sending the message, he turned to Mickey Flynn. “Now we twiddle our thumbs while things go back and forth.”
Flynn suited action to word. He said, “Why don’t they have faster-than-light radio?” His thumbs went round and round, round and round.
“They do, in effect,” Johnson said. “They’ve got the ships-if those are what they say they are. Einstein must be spinning in his grave.”
“Colonel Johnson?” The voice of the woman from the Commodore Perry filled the control room again. “Yes, we have proof-all sorts of things that we know and the Race will hear about as its signals come in from Earth over the next few days and weeks. And we have a couple of witnesses from the Race aboard: a shuttlecraft pilot named Nesseref and Shiplord Straha.”
“Oh, my,” Johnson said. Even imperturbable Mickey Flynn looked a trifle wall-eyed. Straha had lived in exile in the USA for years. He’d been the third-highest officer in the conquest fleet, and then the highest-ranking defector after his effort to oust Atvar for not prosecuting the war against humanity vigorously enough failed. And he’d got back into the Lizards’ good graces by delivering the data from Sam Yeager that showed the United States had launched the attack on the colonization fleet.
“I’d like to be a fly on the wall when Straha meets Atvar again,” Flynn said.