“Yeah. That’s interesting, isn’t it?” Stone didn’t sound as if he liked the way it was interesting. Then he stabbed out a finger at Johnson. “But what about the Japs? What about the goddamn Japs, huh? They got discovered instead of the other way round, and they’re still in business.”
“Yes, sir, that’s right, they are, damn them. But you know how come they’re still in business?” Without giving Stone a chance to answer, Johnson continued, “They’re still in business because they wised up in a hurry. They learned everything they could from us and England and Germany and France, and inside of nothing flat they had their own factories going and they were making their own steamships and then they could damn well sail wherever they pleased. They started playing the same game everybody else was.”
“Yeah, and then the slant-eyed sons of bitches chose to sail for Pearl Harbor and give us one right in the nuts,” Stone growled. Like most purely human conflicts, the one between the USA and Japan had gone by the boards when the Lizards attacked. It was gone, but not forgotten.
“Oh, hell, yes, sir,” Johnson said. “But that’s the point: they were able to sail across the Pacific and kick us when we weren’t looking. If we’re able to do that to the Lizards one of these days, we won’t be so bad off. Even if we don’t do it, we won’t be so bad off, because we can.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Stone told him. The chief pilot waved around the Lewis and Clark’s control room. “This isn’t a bad first step, is it?”
“It’s a lot better than what we would have had if the Lizards hadn’t come, I’ll tell you that,” Johnson answered. “I wonder if we would even have been in space by now.” He shrugged. “No way to tell, I guess.” He didn’t say so aloud, but he thought of the Lewis and Clark as the equivalent of the first Japanese-built coastal steamer, which had surely been a clumsy, makeshift vessel that barely dared sail out of sight of land. It was very fine in its way, but what he wanted were battleships and aircraft carriers out on the open sea.