Aftershocks (39 page)

“Are you all right, dear?” Jonathan’s mother asked his father. For a moment, Jonathan had no idea what she meant. But then he saw that, if the blood of the people of Indianapolis was on Earl Warren’s hands, it was also on the hands of his dad. If the Lizards hadn’t found out who’d attacked the colonization fleet, they wouldn’t have destroyed the city. He too looked anxiously toward his father.

“Yeah, I’m okay, or pretty much so, anyhow.” Sam Yeager’s voice was harsh. “Warren couldn’t live after he had to throw Indianapolis into the fire. Okay, but what about all the Lizards he killed? He didn’t lose a night’s sleep over them, and they hadn’t done anything to anybody, either. They couldn’t have—they were in cold sleep themselves. If Lizards aren’t people worth thinking about, what are they?”

Slowly, Jonathan nodded. “Truth,” he said—in the Lizards’ language.

At last, the TV screen cut away from the podium with nobody behind it. But when it did, Jonathan wished it hadn’t, for what it showed were the ruins of Indianapolis. Chet Huntley’s voice provided commentary: “These are the outskirts of the city. We cannot get closer to the center. We are not altogether sure it is safe to come even so close.”

A man walked into the camera’s line of sight. The right side of his face looked normal. The left, and his left arm, had been dreadfully burned. “Sir,” called a newsman behind the camera, “what happened, sir?”

“I was watering my lawn,” the man with half a normal face said. “Watering my lawn,” he repeated. “I was watering my lawn, and the whole god-damn world blew up.” He swayed like a tree in a high breeze, then slowly toppled.

“Flash must have got him,” Jonathan’s dad said. “If he’d been turned the other way, it would have been the other side of his face. Or if he’d been looking right at it . . .” His voice trailed away. Jonathan had no trouble figuring out what would have happened then. His stomach lurched. The camera panned across devastation.

The telephone rang. He sprang up and ran to answer it, as much to escape the images on the TV screen as for any other reason. “Hello?”

“Jonathan?” It was Karen. “My God, Jonathan . . .” She sounded as ravaged, stunned, disbelieving as he was.

“Yeah,” he said, for want of anything better. “This is what we were sitting on.”

“I know,” she answered. “I never imagined it would turn out like this.”

“I didn’t, either. I’m just glad they turned Dad loose and he got home okay.” Looking at some tiny private good in the midst of general disaster was a very human trait. Maybe that thought impelled what came next: “Karen,
will
you marry me, dammit?” She hadn’t said yes and she hadn’t said no.

It was the wrong time. It couldn’t have been a worse time. Maybe it couldn’t have been a better time, either, though, for she answered, “Yes, I think we should do that.” And then, before he could say anything else, she hung up.

Dazed, he walked back into the living room. He still didn’t get a chance to say anything, because his mother told him, “They’ve caught up with Vice President—President—Stassen.”

Sure enough, there was Harold Stassen, with the words
THIEF LAKE, MINNESOTA
superimposed on his image. He wore a fisherman’s vest that was all over pockets, a floppy hat, and an expression as sandbagged as everybody else’s. Jonathan thought it was cruel for a reporter to thrust a microphone in his face and bark, “In light of the present situation, Mr. President, what do you intend to do?”

Stassen gave what Jonathan thought was about the best answer he could: “I’m going to go back to Little Rock and find out exactly what happened. After that, with God’s help, I’ll try to take this country forward again. I have nothing else to say right now.”

In spite of that last sentence, the reporter asked, “Mr. President, were you aware that the United States launched the attack on the colonization fleet?”

“No,” Stassen said. “I was not aware of that, not until you told me a moment ago. Some officers will have some things to answer for. I expect to find out which ones.”

“You can start with Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay,” Jonathan’s father said, and then, thoughtfully rather than in anger, “I wonder if he’ll have the decency to kill himself. Too much to hope for, unless I’m wrong. And I wonder just how many know. Not a lot, or the secret wouldn’t have stayed secret this long.”

“Dad, Mom,” Jonathan said, “Karen just said she’d marry me.”

“That’s good, son,” his father said.

“Congratulations,” his mother added. But neither one of them heard him with more than half an ear. Almost all of their attention was on the TV screen, which cut away from the most unpresidential images of the new president to new scenes of the ruin that had without warning overtaken Indianapolis. Jonathan would have been angrier at them if his own eyes hadn’t been drawn as by a magnet to the television set.

“I was in orbital patrol when that satellite launched on the ships of the colonization fleet,” Glen Johnson said in the galley of the
Lewis and Clark.
“I figured it had to be the Nazis or the Reds. I never imagined the United States would do such a thing.”

“Now that you know better,” Dr. Miriam Rosen said, “what do you think of what President Warren did?”

“Falling on his sword, you mean?” Johnson said. “The country would have strung him up if he hadn’t.”

But the doctor shook her head, which made her dark, curly hair flip back and forth in a way that would have been impossible under gravity. “No, that’s not what I meant. What do you think of his sacrificing a city instead of everything we’ve done in space?”

Before Johnson could answer, Mickey Flynn said, “If the United States survives as an independent power, he’ll go down in history as a tragic hero of sorts. If we don’t, he’ll be a villain, of course.”

Johnson ate another mouthful of beans and diced peppers. The peppers provided essential vitamins. They were also hot enough to make his eyes cross. In a way, that was a welcome change from the blandness of most of what he ate aboard the spaceship. In another, more immediate, way, though, it made him drink from his plastic bottle of water before he could speak. When he did, he said, “Winners write history, sure enough.”

Flynn had another question: “What do you think of the fellow who let the Lizards know what we’d done?”

“That’s a funny thing,” Johnson said. “I watched those ships blow up. I don’t know how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of Lizards were in them. They never had a chance. They never even knew they died, because they never woke up out of cold sleep. If I’d known whether the Germans or the Russians launched on them, I’d’ve told the Race in a red-hot minute. I wouldn’t have felt bad about it. I’d have figured the bad guys were getting what they deserved.”

“It’s different when the shoe is on your own foot,” Dr. Rosen observed.

“Ain’t it the truth!” Johnson’s agreement was wholehearted if ungrammatical.

“If I had to guess—” Flynn began.

Johnson cut him off: “If I know you, Mickey, that means you’ve analyzed it seventeen ways from Sunday.”

“Not this time,” the second pilot said with dignity. “Not enough data. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, if I had to guess, I’d say Warren took the Race by surprise when he gave them Indianapolis instead of everything out here and everything in Earth orbit.”

“Congratulations,” Miriam Rosen said. “Second-guessing a dead man from a couple of hundred million miles away isn’t just a world record. If it’s not a solar system record, it’s got to be in the running.”

Flynn gravely inclined his head, which, since he floated perpendicular to the doctor, made him look absurd. “Thank you kindly. I’m honored to have such a distinguished judge. Now I shall elucidate.”

“That means explain, right?” Johnson asked—more harassing fire.

But Flynn gave better than he got, remarking, “Only a Marine would need an explanation of an explanation. Now if I may go on?” When Johnson, licking his wounds, didn’t rise to that, the second pilot did continue: “On the surface, giving up the installations is the easy, obvious choice. It costs no lives, it costs no money—in the short term, it looks better. And the Race is convinced we Tosevites live in the short term.”

“But in the long term, it would ruin the United States,” Johnson said. “It would put us at the Lizards’ mercy.”

“Exactly.” Flynn nodded again. “Whereas losing Indianapolis does us very little harm in the long run—unless, of course, one is unfortunate enough to live in Indianapolis. The Fleetlord probably threw in the destruction of a city as a goad to make us do what he really wanted. But when President Warren took him up on it, he had no choice this side of war but to accept, and the United States is and will be a going concern for some time to come. That’s why I say President Warren has a decent chance of being remembered kindly.”

“All that makes a good deal of sense,” Dr. Rosen said. “What do you think, Glen?”

“The last time you asked me that, Mickey got up on his soapbox,” Johnson replied, at which Flynn sent him an injured stare. Ignoring it, Johnson found himself nodding. “But I think it makes sense, too. Warren took a big chance, he got caught, and he paid the price that hurt the country least. Going on living after that . . . I guess I can see how he wouldn’t have wanted to.”

“He’d have been impeached and convicted as soon as the story broke,” Dr. Rosen said. “I wonder if we would have handed him over to the Lizards after that. Maybe it’s just as well we don’t have to find out.”

“Probably,” Flynn said.

Johnson couldn’t quarrel with that, either. He said, “When we did give him to the Lizards, he’d have been covered with tar and feathers. He almost screwed up everything he’d been building—everything we’ve been building—for years and years.”

“And yet . . .” Flynn said in the thoughtful tones he used whenever he was going to go against conventional wisdom. “And yet, I wonder whether that one blow he got in against the colonization fleet before the Lizards were expecting anything hurt them more than losing Indianapolis hurt us. Five hundred years from now, historians will be arguing about that—but will they be our historians or males and females of the Race?”

“To be or not to be, that
is
the question,” Dr. Rosen said.

“I wasn’t joking, Miriam,” Mickey Flynn said.

“Neither was I,” she answered.

Slowly, Johnson said, “By doing what he did, Warren made sure the
Lewis and Clark
and now the
Columbus
would stay out here. He made sure we wouldn’t lose whatever space stations we build in Earth orbit and the weapons we’ve already got there. The Race still has to take us seriously. That’s not the smallest thing in the world. Twenty years from now, fifty years from now, it’s liable to be the biggest thing in the world. Five hundred years from now, it’s liable to say who’s writing the history books.” He raised his water bottle in salute. “Here’s to Earl Warren—I think.”

Flynn and Dr. Rosen also drank, with much the same hesitation he’d shown in proposing the toast. The PA system chimed the hour. As if he couldn’t believe it, Johnson’s eyes went to his wristwatch. It said the same thing the chime did.

He said something, too: “I’m late. Walt’s not going to be very happy with me.”

“An understatement I would be proud to claim,” Flynn said. “I am also late—for my rest period. To sleep, perchance to dream . . .”

“Perchance to soak your head,” Johnson said over his shoulder as he pushed off to deposit his dishes in their boxes before heading for the control room. He thought he saw Flynn and the doctor leaving together by another exit, but was in too much of a hurry to escape the chief pilot’s wrath to be sure.

“So good of you to join me, Lieutenant Colonel,” Stone said in frigid tones when Glen did fly into the control room. “It would have been even better, of course, had you joined me four minutes and, ah, twenty-seven seconds ago.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Johnson said. Then he broke a cardinal military rule: never offer an excuse to atone for a failure. “Mickey and Miriam and I were trying to figure out what the devil’s going on back on Earth, and I just didn’t pay any attention to the time.”

And, for a wonder, it worked. Walter Stone leaned forward in his seat and asked, “Any conclusions?”

“Either Earl Warren is a hero or a bum, but nobody’s going to know for sure for the next five hundred years,” Johnson answered; that seemed to sum up a lunch’s worth of conversation in a sentence. He added a comment of his own: “Only God or the spirits of Emperors past can tell now, anyhow.”

Stone grunted laughter and said, “Truth,” in the Lizards’ language, tacking on an emphatic cough for good measure. After a couple of seconds of silence, he fell back into English: “He may be a hero for what he did, if you look at things that way. He
may
be. But I’ll tell you one thing, Glen—he’s the biggest bum since Benedict Arnold for letting himself get caught. If he was going to give those orders, every one of them should have been oral. If anybody did write anything down, he should have burned it the second the launch happened. Then there wouldn’t have been anything for Nosy Parkers later on. Am I right, or am I wrong?”

“Oh, you’re right, sir. No doubt about it. Nosy Parkers . . .” Johnson’s voice faded.

Stone thought he knew why, and laughed at the junior pilot. “You don’t think that’s so funny, because you were a Nosy Parker yourself, and look what it got you.”

“Yeah.” But Johnson remained abstracted. He’d known another Nosy Parker, a fellow named Yeager out in California who’d been as curious about what the hell was going on with the space station that became the
Lewis and Clark
as he was himself. And Yeager was a hotshot expert on the Race, too. If he’d been snooping, and if he’d found stuff that would have been better off gone, who was more likely to run and tell stories to the Lizards? Johnson almost spoke up, but he didn’t know anything, not for sure, and so he kept quiet about that. Instead, he said, “There’s almost always a paper trail in that kind of business. There shouldn’t be, but there is.”

“Well, I won’t say you’re wrong, because you’re not,” Stone said. “Even so, you’d think they’d be more careful with something that important. We’re goddamn lucky we didn’t have to pay anything more than Indianapolis.”