Down to Earth Read Free Page A

to. The fighting controls are right here.” He pointed. “We’ve got machine guns and missiles for close-in defense. None of that stuff is much different than what you used on the
Peregrine,
so you know what it can do.”
    “Nuclear tips on the missiles and all?” Johnson asked.
    “That’s right,” the senior pilot said, “except you carried two and we’ve got a couple dozen. And that doesn’t say anything about the mines.” He pointed to another rank of switches.
    “Mines, sir?” Johnson raised an eyebrow. “Now you’ve got me: I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
    “There are five of them, one controlled by each switch here,” Stone explained. “They’re the strongest fusion bombs we can build . . . and they’re equipped with the most sensitive timers we’ve got. If we know the Lizards are trying to come up our rear ends, we leave them behind, timed to explode right when the enemy ship is closest to them. Maybe we nail it, maybe we don’t, but it’s sure as hell worth a try.”
    “Even if we don’t wreck it, we might fry its brains.” Johnson grinned. “I like that. Whoever thought of it has a really sneaky mind.”
    “Thank you,” Walter Stone said.
    Johnson’s eyebrows jumped. “Was it you?”
    Stone grinned at him. “I didn’t say that. I said, ‘Thank you.’ Here, let’s fire up the simulator and see what you do if the Lizards decide to take a whack at us after all.”
    The simulator was a far cry from the Link machines on which Johnson had trained before the Lizards came. Like so much human technology, it borrowed—stole, really—wholesale from things the Race knew and people hadn’t back in 1942. The end result was something like a game, something like a God’s-eye view of the real thing, with the
Lewis and Clark
reduced to a glowing blip on a screen, the hypothetical Lizard pursuit ship another blip, and all the things they might launch at each other angry little sparks of light.
    Johnson “lost.” the
Lewis and Clark
six times in a row before finally managing to save the ship with a perfectly placed mine. By then, sweat soaked his coveralls and slid away from his forehead in large, lazy drops. “Whew!” he said. “Here’s hoping the Lizards don’t decide to come after us, because we’re sure as hell in trouble if they do.”
    “Amen,” Stone answered. “You will get better with practice, though—or you’d better get better, anyhow.”
    “I can see that,” Johnson said. “First couple of missions I flew, the only thing that kept me from killing myself was fool luck.” He paused, eyeing the man who was training him. “You practice on this thing a lot, don’t you?”
    “Every day, every chance I get,” Stone said solemnly.
    “I figured you would. It’s as close as you can come to the real McCoy,” Johnson said. The senior pilot nodded once more. Johnson took a deep breath. “Okay. With all the practice you put in, how often do you win?”
    “A little less than half the time,” Stone replied. “The goddamn Lizards can do more things than we can. Nothing’s going to change that. If you can’t handle the notion—well, too bad.”
    “They shot me down,” Johnson said.
    “Me, too.” Walter Stone reached over and slapped Johnson on the back. Without the safety strap, the blow would have knocked Johnson out of his chair. Stone went on, “We had to be crazy, going up against the Lizards in those prop jobs?”
    “They were what we had, and the job needed doing,” Johnson said. The life expectancy of a pilot who’d flown against the Lizards during the fighting was most often measured in hours. If Johnson hadn’t been wounded when the Lizards knocked his plane out of the sky, if he hadn’t spent a lot of his time afterwards flat on his back, odds were he would have gone up again and bought himself the whole plot instead of just a piece of it. He didn’t care to dwell on those odds.
    Stone said, “I think we’ve put