Page 110 of Aftershocks (Colonization 3)

But he thought he got his answer anyhow, for Brigadier General Healey went on, “Whoever ran off at the mouth, he didn’t just cost the president’s neck, either. A lot of good officers are sitting on the sidelines now. They might have known this or that, and they kept quiet, the way they were supposed to. And what kind of thanks did they get for it? I’ll tell you what,” Healey said savagely. “They got the bum’s rush, that’s what. It isn’t right.”

“Yes, sir,” Johnson said, and then, greatly daring, “Sir, did you know anything about what was going on?”

Brigadier General Healey’s face was a closed door. “You are dismissed, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said, and bent to the papers secured to his desk by rubber bands.

After saluting, Johnson pushed off from the chair and glided out of the commandant’s office. He was thinking hard. Healey had done his best to put him together with Sam Yeager and to get him to say he thought Yeager was the one who’d let the Lizards know the USA had attacked their starships.

Johnson shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I’ll say that,” he muttered. He wouldn’t have said it even if he thought it true, not without certain proof he wouldn’t. He knew one thing, though: he wouldn’t have wanted to be in Sam Yeager’s shoes, not for all the tea in China.

Sam Yeager brushed his wife’s lips with his own and headed for the door. “See you tonight, hon,” he said. “Don’t know why they want me downtown today, but they do. Have fun with Mickey and Donald.”

Barbara rolled her eyes. “I expect I will. They don’t pay so much attention to me as they do to you.”

“I’m bigger,” Sam said. “That probably counts for something. I’ve got a deeper voice, too. That would count for something with people. I’m not sure how much it matters to the Lizards. Maybe we ought to try to find out.”

“Don’t you think we ought to treat them as kids first and guinea pigs second?” Barbara asked.

“Part of me does,” Yeager admitted. “The other part’s the one that’s seen Kassquit. It doesn’t matter whether we say we’re treating them as kids or as guinea pigs. They’ll end up guinea pigs. They can’t help it. We don’t know enough to raise them the way the Race would.”

“I’m not sure the Lizards really raise them at all when they’re this young,” his wife said. “They just try to keep them from eating one another.”

“You may be right,” Sam said. “Whether you are or not, though, I’ve still got to go downtown.”

“I know,” his wife answered. “Be careful.”

“I will. I always am.” Sam patted the.45 on his hip. “It’s part of my uniform, and I wear it. There aren’t all that many people who know about what went on and are dangerous-at least, I hope there aren’t. But I’m not taking any chances any which way.” Before Barbara could answer, he closed the door and went out to the car.

Driving into the middle of Los Angeles during the morning rush hour reminded him of why he didn’t like to do it very often. Fighting his way to a parking space once he got off the freeway hammered the lesson home. And crowding into an elevator to go up to the offices where he worked when he couldn’t stay at home added a final unwelcome exclamation point.

Just being here was enough to give him the willies. This was where Lieutenant General LeMay had chewed him out for getting too curious about the space station that became the Lewis and Clark. Had LeMay known what all else he was curious about, the lieutenant general would have chewed him out a lot harder.

Sam grimaced and walked a little straighter. He was still here, while Curtis LeMay didn’t work for the U.S. Army any more. There was a small cadre of high-ranking officers-formerly highranking officers-who didn’t work for the U.S. Army any more. None of them had ever said a word in the papers about why they didn’t work for the Army any more. Yeager suspected something truly drastic would happen to them if they did try to go to the papers.

He wondered if Harold Stassen had succeeded in rooting out everybody involved in the attack on the colonization fleet. He supposed it was possible, but had his doubts nonetheless. Stassen had probably done just enough to keep the Lizards from screaming too loud, and not a lot more.

“Good morning, Yeager,” said Colonel Edwin Webster, Sam’s superior.

“Good morning, sir.” Sam saluted. He cast a longing glance toward the coffee pot, but asked, “What’s up?” Duty came first.

Webster saw the glance. “Pour yourself some joe if you want it, Yeager,” he said. “World’s not going to end because you take the time to drink a cup.”

“Thanks.” Yeager grabbed one of the plastic-foam cups that were steadily ousting waxed cardboard. He adulterated the coffee with cream and sugar, then came back to Colonel Webster. After blowing on the coffee and taking a sip, he said, “Ready when you are, sir.”

“Come on into my office,” Webster told him, and Yeager dutifully followed him back there. His superior went on, “We’ve had a devil of a lot more reports of animals and plants from Home in the Southwest and South the past couple of months. I know that’s what you were working on when you went on detached duty there this summer, so it seemed logical to call you in to have a look at them.”

“Detached duty,” Yeager echoed in a hollow voice. “Yeah.”

He eyed Colonel Webster. He’d been detached from his duty, all right, detached from it by a couple of fellows speaking in the name of the government of the United States and carrying pistols to back their play. He’d gone to Desert Center. After that, he might have fallen off the edge of the world. Detached duty was a cover story that could fit almost anything. Did Webster know more than he was letting on? If he did, Sam couldn’t see it on his face.

You start looking for people who know more than they’re letting on and you’ll start hearing voices pretty soon, he thought. They’ll come after you with a net and put you in a rubber room. Of course, if you don’t worry at all about what happens to you, you’re liable to disappear again, and this time odds are you won’t come back.

“Something you wanted to say about your duty?” Webster asked.

“Uh, no, sir,” Sam answered. “I was just thinking I was glad to get back to California.”

“Okay,” his superior said crisply. “Come on. I’ve got the reports waiting for you. This is a real problem. Maybe you’ll be able to figure out what to do about it. If you can, that’ll put you a long jump ahead of everybody else.”

“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it, sir,” Yeager said, “at least if you mean in terms of stopping these beasts. We may have to see if we can make them useful to us instead. Sometimes God gives you lemons. If He does, you’d better learn to like lemonade.”

“Could be.” Webster didn’t sound convinced. “So far, nobody has any idea how to do even that much.”

“Well, azwaca and zisuili can be pretty tasty,” Sam said. “The Lizards eat ’em. No reason we couldn’t.”

“They’re ugly as sin,” Colonel Webster observed.

“So are pigs, sir,” Yeager answered. “I grew up on a farm. Nobody who ever took care of livestock thinks it’s beautiful. And the people who don’t take care of it don’t usually give a damn what it looks like. All they’ll see is the meat in the butcher case, not the animals it came from.?

??

“Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-oh,” Webster sang in a surprisingly melodious baritone, “and on that farm he had some azwaca, ee-i-ee-i-oh. With a hiss-hiss here and a hiss-hiss there…”

Sam stared at the bird colonel as if he’d never seen him before in his life. “You okay, sir?” he asked quizzically.

“How the devil should I know?” Webster answered. “Do the kind of work we do and there’s something wrong with you if you don’t start going a little squirrelly after a while. Or are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” Yeager said. “You want to point me at those reports now?”

“I sure will,” Colonel Webster said. “For the time being, what I want you to do is flip through ’em fast. Cover as much ground as you can in the next couple of hours, then come back to my office and we’ll talk some more.”

“Okay, I can do that,” Sam said. He didn’t have an office here, though by his rank he would have been entitled to one. What he had was a sheet-metal desk in one corner of a room filled mostly by clerks and typists. It wasn’t even exclusively his; he shared it with a couple of other itinerant officers, and his key opened only two drawers. For obvious reasons, he’d never put anything he worried about anyone else seeing inside that meager space.

“There you go.” Colonel Webster pointed to the pile of papers in the plywood IN basket at the back right corner of the desk. “Skim those and head back to me at, oh, half past ten. Go ahead and set aside any you think you’ll need to look at more later on, but I’m going to want a broad overview from you then.”

“Right.” Yeager saluted, then sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. Webster headed back to his office. Sam got to work. He nodded to himself as he grabbed the report on top of the stack. At least his boss knew exactly what he wanted. Sam hated few things more than vague orders.

He hadn’t had much to do with the spread of plants and animals from Home since getting kidnapped from Desert Center. Now, every report he read made his eyebrows rise higher. Zisuili were eating the desert bare in Arizona. Plants from Home had been spotted outside Amarillo, Texas. Barren places throughout the Southwest were getting more barren. These creatures are worse than goats, somebody had written. That made Sam purse his lips and blow out an almost silent whistle. He knew how bad goats were. Nobody who’d ever kept them could doubt that. Imagining beasts more destructive than they were wasn’t easy. But the photos accompanying some of the reports at least raised the possibility that that writer knew what he was talking about.

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