Aftershocks (53 page)

Don’t rub.
He’d learned that code in the bush leagues.
Don’t let the bastards know they hurt you.
A pitcher who’d just stuck a fastball in your ribs might suspect you weren’t too happy about it. But not rubbing was all about not letting the other guys know what you were feeling, or that you were feeling anything.

And so, outwardly calm, he sat in a waiting room in the Gray House, reading a
Newsweek
and pretending everything was just routine. After a while, a flunky came up to him and said, “The president will see you now, Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Okay.” Yeager put down the magazine and got to his feet. The Gray House dignitary led him into the president’s office. Seeing Harold Stassen behind the big desk there was a jolt. Yeager didn’t want to show that, either. He stiffened to attention and saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Sit down, Lieutenant Colonel,” President Stassen said. His voice didn’t carry nearly the weight of authority Earl Warren’s had. But Warren was gone, dead and buried.
The king is dead; long live the king.
Stassen asked, “Would you care for coffee, or anything else?”

“No, thank you, sir,” Sam answered.

“All right.” The president looked down at what were probably notes. “I understand you and your family are responsible for raising a couple of Lizard hatchlings as though they were human beings.”

“That’s right, Mr. President.” Hope blossomed in Yeager. Maybe Stassen had called him here to talk about Mickey and Donald. They were important, no doubt about it. If he were here on account of that, maybe Warren hadn’t said anything to anybody about his role in bringing down a presidency and wiping a city off the face of the earth.
Maybe I’m the only one who knows the whole story,
Sam thought.
Christ, I hope I am.

President Stassen said, “And how are the hatchlings now?”

“They’re fine, sir,” Sam said. “They’re toddlers right now, you know: growing like weeds and learning something new every day. They talk a lot more than regular Lizard hatchlings the same age would.”

Stassen shuffled papers—notes, sure enough. “I understand the Lizards have a long head start on us in this sort of research.”

“That’s true, but there’s nothing we could do about it,” Yeager said. “They got a hatchling—uh, a human baby—right after the first round of fighting ended. We couldn’t even think of trying the same sort of experiment till the colonization fleet brought females of the Race here.”

“Of course.” The president nodded. “Now, you’ve met the girl the Lizards are raising as one of their own.” He waited for Sam to nod, too, then asked, “What do you think of her?”

“Sir, Kassquit’s . . . pretty screwy, I’m afraid,” Yeager answered. “I don’t know how else to put it. Considering the way she was brought up, I don’t suppose that’s any big surprise. It’s probably God’s own miracle that she’s not even crazier than she is.”

“Does that mean . . .” Stassen glanced down again. “Does that mean Mickey and Donald are liable to end up disturbed, too?”

“From the point of view of the Race, do you mean, sir?” Sam sighed. “I’m afraid it does. I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it. I feel bad sometimes, but it’s important for us to know just how much like people they can become.” He sighed again. “Ttomalss, the Lizard who’s raised Kassquit, probably feels the same way in reverse.”

“I see.” Stassen scribbled something on a scratch pad. “To turn to another matter, how seriously do you view the spread of plants and animals from the Lizards’ home planet here on Earth?”

Did Stassen know Yeager had been seized while investigating that very thing? If he did, he didn’t show it. Sam decided to assume he didn’t, and answered, “It’s going to be a problem, yes, Mr. President. It may not be too big a problem here in the States, because I didn’t think too many creatures from Home will be able to stand the winters in most of the country. But in the tropics, especially the deserts, I’d bet there’ll be wholesale replacements. The Lizards are going to try to make Earth over to suit themselves. We’d probably do the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Stassen wrote himself another note. “Your opinion closely matches the views of other experts I’ve consulted.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” Sam breathed a little easier. This was just business. With any luck at all, he’d be able to get back home and go on raising the Lizard hatchlings—and, rather more than incidentally, getting ready for Jonathan’s wedding. He shifted in his chair, getting ready to stand up. “Is there anything else?”

“Just one thing more, Lieutenant Colonel.” The president switched gears: “How do you feel about your part in everything that’s happened over the past few months?”

Yeager grunted, but did his best to pull his face straight.
Don’t rub.
“Sir, I did what I thought I had to do,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“And you have no trouble living with the loss of Indianapolis?” Stassen asked.

“No trouble?” Sam shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that, Mr. President. I wouldn’t say that at all. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about it. But the scales balance, as far as I’m concerned. Do you think President Warren lost any sleep over the Lizards in the colonization fleet?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Stassen said. “Until the recent tragic events, I had no idea he’d had anything to do with them.” His chuckle was mirthless. “As you may know, the vice president mostly has about as much use as the vermiform appendix.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, you should have known what he’d done,” Yeager said. “The way things are these days, a vice president needs to be able to hit the ground running if he finds out he’s president all of a sudden. And that’s happened a couple of times lately—well, Cordell Hull wasn’t vice president when he took over, but you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” the president agreed. “Hull probably had an easier time taking over than I did, because he was more involved in making decisions than I was. President Warren did as he thought best. Now I have to do the same.”

He started to say something more, but checked himself. Sam had a pretty good idea of what it would have been, though.
Everything would have been fine if only you hadn’t stuck your big nose into the middle of things.
It was even true, for those who didn’t think of the Lizards as people. Earl Warren hadn’t, not down deep where it counted.

“Is there anything else?” Sam asked again.

This time, Harold Stassen shook his head. “That will be all, Lieutenant Colonel. I did want to meet you, though. I think you understand the reasons for my curiosity.”

“Yes, sir, I think so.” Now Yeager was the one who didn’t say everything he was thinking.
If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be president right now.
He’d never dreamt of having that kind of influence on events. He’d never wanted it, either. But what you wanted and what you got were two different things. He’d turned fifty-eight this year. For a while there, in that house somewhere near the Four Corners, he’d wondered if he would ever see an-other birthday.

“All right, then,” Stassen told him. “You may go.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” But before he left the office, Sam said, “May I ask you something, sir?”

“Go ahead,” the president said. “But I don’t promise to answer. I think you understand the reasons for that, too.”

Nobody will ever trust you with anything truly important again, not as long as you live.
That was what the president meant, even if he was too polite to say so. Sam held his face steady.
Don’t rub, no matter how much it hurts.
He tried to speak casually, too: “Wasn’t that an awfully big meteor that slammed into Mars? The Race’s computer network had some pretty spectacular pictures from their space-based telescopes.”

“Yes, I’ve seen a few of them,” Harold Stassen said. “The astronomers will have a new crater to name, from what I understand. Mars, fortunately, is pretty much worthless real estate.”

“A good thing a rock that size didn’t hit Earth,” Sam agreed. “It would have been worse than an explosive-metal bomb, from what the Lizards say.”

“You’re probably right—or my briefing officers tell me the same thing, anyhow,” Stassen said. “Now, what was this question you wanted to ask?”

“Never mind, sir,” Sam said. “You’d probably just tell me I was sticking my nose in again where it didn’t belong, and I don’t see much point to that. I’ll keep my mouth shut from the beginning this time.”

“That is probably a very good idea,” the president said. “Good day, Lieutenant Colonel, and a safe flight back to Los Angeles.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” Yeager wished Stassen hadn’t said that. Now he was going to worry till the airplane’s landing gear hit the runway at L.A. International Airport. The president, or people close to him, wouldn’t make an airliner crash to get rid of one gadfly. . . would they? Sam didn’t want to think so, but he knew there were people who wanted to see him dead.

If something like that happened, the Lizards would have a lot of sharp questions to ask American authorities. If they didn’t like the answers they got, they were liable to take a spectacular revenge. Sam didn’t care too much about that—he wouldn’t be around to see it. But the thought of such revenge might give second thoughts to anybody who wanted his family to cash his life-insurance policy.

When Yeager got back out onto the street, he noticed that some of the trees were going from green to yellow and red. He’d been too worried about the meeting to pay any attention to that when he came to the Gray House. Now the sight made him smile. Living in California as he did these days, he seldom got such strong reminders of the passage from one season to the next.

He took a deep breath, then let it out.
I made it,
he thought.
If my plane home doesn’t crash, I made it, anyhow.
He didn’t really believe that would happen. Had Stassen wanted to get rid of him, his flight coming into Little Rock could have crashed, too.
Everything’s going to be okay.
Sometimes he could make himself believe that for as long as two or three minutes at a time.

“I shall soon be returning to the starship,” Ttomalss said from the monitor. Kassquit watched him with something less than delight. He was, as happened all too often these days, oblivious to that. Sounding more cheerful than he had any reasonable business being, he went on, “And then, I hope, your life can return to something approaching normal after the stressful time you have endured.”

“How do you define ‘normal,’ superior sir?” Kassquit asked.

“Why, as things were before you became involved with Big Uglies, of course,” Ttomalss answered. “That is your default setting, so to speak. Would not a return to such conditions prove welcome?”

He does not understand,
Kassquit thought.
And he has no idea how much of my interior life he either misunderstands or misses altogether.
He was, after all, a male of the Race. And she . . . wasn’t a female of the Race, no matter how much of a duplicate of a female of the Race he’d tried to make her into.

Speaking carefully, she replied, “If I could forget the memories of the time when Jonathan Yeager was here, that might perhaps be possible, superior sir. As things are, however, I have learned what it means to be part of a species with a continuously active sexuality. This knowledge goes some way toward redefining normality for me.”

And the inside of a fusion reaction is rather warm, and walking from Tosev 3 to Home would take a long time.
Kassquit felt in her belly the size of the understatement she’d just given her mentor.

Ttomalss, however, took it as literal truth without understatement. He said, “I suspect time will create a certain distancing effect. Your emotions will no longer seem so urgent as they do now.”

That did it. Kassquit snapped, “Do you not see—can you not see—that I do not want these emotions to fade? I want to preserve them. I want to feel others like them. They come closer to making life worth living than anything I have ever known aboard this starship.”

“Oh,” Ttomalss said tonelessly.

Kassquit knew she’d wounded him. Part of her was too angry to care. The rest of her remembered the time when he’d been far and away the most important individual in her universe. It hadn’t been very long before. It only seemed like forever. Her hands folded into fists. She was at war within herself. She feared she would stay that way as long as she lived.

Gathering himself, Ttomalss said, “Obliging you in this regard will not be easy, you know. I must tell you that, even among Tosevites, regular sexual relations do not necessarily guarantee happiness. The literature and music and moving pictures the Tosevites produce demonstrate as much without the shed skin of a doubt.”

“I believe it,” Kassquit said. “Please understand that I am not seeking only sexual pleasure. I can, to some degree, supply that for myself. But the companionship I enjoyed with Jonathan Yeager along with the sexual pleasure . . . I miss that very much.” She sighed. “However much I might wish to be one, I am not and cannot be a female of the Race. I am, to some degree, irrevocably a Big Ugly.”

She’d had that thought before she’d ever met any wild Tosevites, too. It had horrified and disgusted her then. It still did, to some degree. But she could not deny that she wanted to know more of the feelings she’d had when Jonathan Yeager was aboard the starship with her.

Ttomalss said, “Several Tosevite languages have a word for the emotional state you describe. Jonathan Yeager used the tongue called English, is that not a truth? In English, the term is . . .” He paused to consult the computer, then made the affirmative gesture to show he’d found what he wanted. “The term is
love.”

By the nature of things, he could have only an intellectual understanding of the emotion he named. But he was not a fool; he had indeed identified the feeling Kassquit craved. She made the affirmative gesture, too. “Jonathan Yeager taught me the word,” she agreed. “And, as you must know, he has informed me that he is entering into a permanent mating arrangement with a wild female Big Ugly—that, in effect, he loves someone else. This has been difficult for me to accept with equanimity.”