“Neither did I,” said Jonathan, who knew his father had soured on the president but didn’t know why. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I wish the election had come a couple of months later. Then I could have voted, too.” Having to wait till he was almost twenty-five to help pick a president struck him as dreadfully unfair. He tried to make the best of it: “One vote wouldn’t have mattered much this time around, anyhow.”

“No, but you never can tell when it will,” his father said. “As for that, you’re lucky. When I was your age, I was living somewhere different every year. I never put down enough roots to be able to register and vote, so I never did, not till after the fighting stopped and I settled down with your mother.”

Jonathan hadn’t thought about that. Lord, his father had been an old man by the time he finally got the chance to vote. Before Jonathan could say anything about it, the pilot announced they’d be landing soon. This was Jonathan’s first flight. His father took airplanes for granted, so he did his best to do the same. It wasn’t easy. Watching the ground rush up, feeling the jounce as the plane hit the runway...

And you’ll be going into space in a couple of days, he thought. If you’re getting excited about airplanes, what will you do when you blast off?

A trim captain halfway between his age and his father’s took charge of them when they got off the plane. The captain gave Jonathan’s shaved a head a couple of glances, but didn’t say anything.

The officer drove through drizzle to a barracks. The quarters the two Yeagers got struck Jonathan as spartan. His father accepted them with the air of a man who’d known worse. Sometimes Jonathan wondered what all his old man had been through in the days before he’d reached the scene himself. His father didn’t talk about that much.

When they went to the mess hall, some of the soldiers there also gave Jonathan’s shiny skull and casual civilian clothes odd looks. He ignored them. He wished he could have ignored the food. You could eat as much as you wanted, but he couldn’t see why anybody would want to eat any of it.

Along with his father, he spent the time till he went into space getting lectured about everything that could go wrong and what to do if anything did. The short answer seemed to be, If anything fails, you probably die. The long answers were more complicated, but they added up to the same thing.

People did die going into space. He thought about that as he boarded the upper stage with REDTAIL painted on its nose. He didn’t think about it for long, though. At not quite twenty-one, he didn’t really believe he could die.

“Going to pay a call on the Lizards, eh?” said the pilot, a Navy lieutenant commander named Jacobson. “I’ll get you there and I’ll bring you home again—as long as we don’t blow up.”

“If we do, it’ll be over in a hurry,” Jonathan’s father said. “Plenty of worse ways to go, believe you me.”

“Oh, yeah.” The Navy man glanced over at Jonathan. “First time l ever took up a guy dressed like a Lizard, I’ll tell you that.”

Jonathan knew his dad would defend him if he didn’t speak up for himself. But he figured he was old enough to do that, even if he hadn’t hit twenty-one yet: “One of the reasons I’m going up is that I dress this way. It’s supposed to set their minds at ease, I guess you’d say.” He still kept quiet about Kassquit; the lieutenant commander didn’t need to know about her.

“Okay, kid,” Jacobson said. “You’re on the manifest, so you’re going. Strap in good there. I know your old man’s done this before, but you haven’t, have you?”

“No, sir.” Jonathan tried not to be nervous as he settled himself on the foam-padded seat. He didn’t know how much good the safety harness would do, but he fastened it.

“Been a while for me,” his father said. “But I know I’d rather go up there in just body paint and shorts than in my uniform here. The Race likes it hot.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Jacobson said. “Well, get as comfy as you can, because we’ve got an hour to kill now, waiting for launch time.”

That hour seemed to Jonathan to stretch endlessly. At last, though, the countdown, hallowed by endless books and films, reached zero. The rocket motor roared to life beneath him; all at once, it felt as if three or four guys had piled onto his chest. He’d had that happen in football games. But here, the guys didn’t get up. They couldn’t—they were him, his own body weight multiplied by acceleration. Though it was only a matter of minutes, the time felt as long as the hour’s wait before blastoff.

Beside him, his father forced out a sentence a word at a time: “Watch that first step—it’s a lulu.”

“You all right, Dad?” Jonathan asked: wheezed, actually. He wasn’t having too much trouble with the acceleration, but his father—heck, his father was practically an old man.

“I’ll manage,” Sam Yeager answered. “I reckon I was born to hang.”

Before Jonathan could answer that, he stopped weighing several hundred pounds. In fact, as the rockets cut off he stopped weighing anything at all. He discovered another reason for his safety harness: to keep him from floating all over the Redtail’s cramped little cabin. He also discovered his stomach was trying to climb up his gullet hand over hand. Gulping, he did his best to get it back where it belonged.

Lieutenant Commander Jacobson recognized that gulp. “Airsick bag to your right,” he said. “Grab it if you need it. Grab it before you need it, if you please.”

“I’ll try,” Jonathan said weakly. He found the bag, but discovered he didn’t have to clap it over his mouth, at least not right away. The pilot, meanwhile, was talking in the language of the Race and getting answers from the Lizards. Every so often, he’d use the Redtail’s motors to change course a little. Jonathan was too sunk in misery to pay much attention. His father was also quiet and thoughtful.

“We dock at the central hub of the Lizard ship,” Jacobson said after a while. “They spin most of their vessels for artificial gravity, but the axis stays weightless, of course.”

Again, Jonathan didn’t much care. The ship the Redtail approached looked big enough to have respectable gravity just from its own mass. Clanks and bangs announced contact. “Very neat,” his father said. “Very smooth.” It hadn’t felt smooth to him, but he had no standards of comparison.

“I’ll be waiting for you when the Lizards bring you back,” Jacobson said. “Have fun.” By his snort, he found that unlikely.

When the hatch opened, it revealed a couple of Lizards floating in a corridor. “The two Tosevites for the interview will come with us,” one of them said.

Jonathan undid his harness and pushed himself toward the Lizards. He flew as easily as if in a dream, but in a dream he wouldn’t have been fighting nausea. His father followed him. Sure enough, it was hot and dry in the spaceship, as hot and dry as it got in L.A. with the devil winds blowing.

Little by little, as Jonathan and his father followed the Lizards outward from the hub, weight, or a semblance of it, returned. By the time they got to the second deck out, they were walking, not floating. Jonathan approved. His stomach approved even more. The curved horizon of each deck seemed as surreal as something out of an Escher painting, but bodily well-being made him willing to forgive a lot.

At last, when his weight felt about the way it should have, the Lizard guides stopped using stairs and led his father and him along a corridor to a chamber with an open doorway. “The female Kassquit awaits within,” he said.

“We thank you,” Jonathan’s father replied in the language of the Race. He dropped back into English for Jonathan: “Let’s do it.”

“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said, also in English. “You go in first—that’s how they do things.” He was pleased he remembered some of what he’d learned.

“Right.” His father squared his shoulders and entered the chamber. As Jonathan followed, his father went back to the language of the Race: “I greet you, superior female. I am Sam Yeager; here with me is my hatchling, Jonathan Yeager.”

“I greet you, superior female,” Jonathan echoed. He had to work to hold his voice steady, but thought he managed. He’d known Kassquit would be naked, but knowing and experiencing were two different things, especially since she wasn’t just naked but shaved, not only her head but on all of her body.

“I greet you,” she said. She took her nudity altogether for granted. Her face showed nothing of what she thought. “How strange to make the acquaintance of my own biological kind at last.” She pointed to the body paint on Jonathan’s chest. “I see you are now wearing the marking of a psychological researcher’s assistant.”

“Yes,” Jonathan answered. “It is a true marking, for I assist my father here.” He tried to eye her paint without eyeing her breasts. “It is not much different from yours.”

“It is an accurate marking,” Kassquit said. “But it is not a true marking, for the Race did not give it to you.” She was as fussily precise as any real Lizard Jonathan had ever met.

His father asked, “How do you feel about meeting real Big Uglies at last?”

“Sore,” Kassquit replied at once. Jonathan was wondering whether he’d understood her correctly when she went on, “I had to be immunized against many Tosevite diseases before taking the risk of physical contact.”

“Ah,” Sam Yeager said. “Yes, you wrote to me about that. I respect your courage. I hope we bring you no diseases.”

“So do I,” Kassquit said. “I have never known illness, and have no desire to make its acquaintance.”

Jonathan gaped. He couldn’t help himself. She’d never been sick a day in her life? That hardly seemed possible. He wondered what his father was thinking—his father who’d almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and who complained these days that colds hung on a lot longer than they had when he was younger. Not wanting to contemplate his father’s mortality, he wondered if Mickey and Donald would grow up disease-free, too, because they wouldn’t meet any adult Lizards. He also wondered how many diseases Lizards had. They had doctors—he knew that much.

Kassquit said, “And what do you Big Uglies think of me?”

“You are an attractive young female,” Jonathan’s father answered. Jonathan would have agreed with that. His generation was a lot more relaxed about showing skin than his old man’s had been, but not so altogether oblivious about its even being an issue as Kassquit was. He had to work to keep his eyes on her face, not her breasts or the shaved place between her legs. His father went on, “The biggest differences between you and a wild Big Ugly are that you shave all your hair and that your face does not move much.”

“Your hatchling also shaves his hair,” Kassquit said.

“Uh—not as much of it as you do,” Jonathan said, and felt his face heat in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber. “I try to look like a member of the Race.”

“So do I—with rather more reason than you.” Kassquit could be tart when she chose. She went on, “As for my face, my caregiver, Ttomalss, speculates that I needed to see moving faces when newly hatched to learn to move mine as wild Tosevites do. Since his face cannot move, I never acquired the art myself. I do not miss it.” She shrugged. Her breasts were so small and firm, they hardly jiggled. Jonathan couldn’t help noticing that.

His father asked, “From what you know of life down on Tosev 3, what do you miss about it?”

“Nothing!” Kassquit used an emphatic cough. “Except genetically, I am not of your kind.”

“But that is a large exception,” Jonathan’s father said. “It means you can never be fully of the Race, either. What is it like, staying forever betwixt and between?”

What was going on behind Kassquit’s impassive mask? Jonathan couldn’t tell. At last, she said, “I was made to be a bridge between my kind and Big Uglies.” She pointed at Jonathan. “He—your hatchling—is a bridge between your kind and the Race. So are you, Sam Yeager—or should I say, Regeya? We reach from opposite sides toward each other.”

“To the Race, you are a Big Ugly, too,” Jonathan’s father pointed out.

Kassquit shrugged again. “I am of the Empire. You are not. Males and females of the Race, Rabotevs, Hallessi—they are my kind. You are not.”

“Look in a mirror,” Jonathan suggested. “Then try to say that. See if it is truth.”

A receptionist at the front entrance to the residence nodded politely to him as he came up. “May I help you, Lieutenant Colonel?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.” Yeager gave his name, adding, “I have an eleven o’clock appointment with the president.”

She checked the book in front of her, then looked carefully at the identification card he showed her. When she was satisfied his image matched his face, she nodded again. “Go to the waiting room, sir. He’ll be with you as soon as he finishes with the Russian foreign commissar.”

“Thanks,” Yeager said, and grinned in bemusement as he headed down the hall. The Russian foreign commissar, then him? He’d never expected to be mentioned in the same breath with such luminaries, not back in the days when he was bouncing around the mid- to lower minor leagues. Then his idea of big shots was fellows who’d had a cup of coffee in the majors before dropping down again.

He grinned once more when he got to the waiting room. One of the things set out for people, along with Look and U.S. News and Interspecies Report, to read was the Sporting News. The Los Angeles Browns were two days away from squaring off with the Phillies in the World Series. His heart favored the Browns. If he’d had to put money on the Series, though, he would have bet on the Phils.

I might have made it to the big time as a coach, he thought. I might have. If I had, I might have been standing in the first-base box two days from now. Instead, he was sitting here waiting to talk with the president of the United States. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind as a younger man, but it wasn’t so bad, either.

Out came Andrei Gromyko. He didn’t look happy, but he had the sort of face that wasn’t made for looking happy. “Good day,” he said to Yeager in excellent English. He strode out of the room without waiting for a reply.

In his wake, a flunky in an expensive suit emerged from President Warren’s office. He gave Sam a smile wide enough to make up for the one he hadn’t got from the Russian. It also made him want to check to be sure his wallet was still in his hip pocket. The flunky said, “The president will see you in a few minutes. He wants to finish writing up his notes first.”

“Okay by me,” Sam answered—as if Warren needed his permission to do some work before summoning him. He returned to the Sporting News. Like Budweiser beer, it had survived the Lizard occupation of St. Louis.

He almost went past the necrology listing for Peter Daniels, who’d caught briefly for the Cardinals before the First World War. Then his eyes snapped back. Peter Daniels, more commonly known as Mutt, had been his manager at Decatur in the I-I-I League when the Lizards invaded the USA, and had gone into the Army with him. So Mutt had made it to almost eighty. That wasn’t a bad run, not a bad run at all. Sam hoped he’d be able to match it.

Here came the flunky again. “The president will see you now, Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Thanks.” Yeager got to his feet, walking into the office, and saluted his commander in chief. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Sit down, Yeager.” Earl Warren didn’t believe in wasting time. “We have a couple of things to talk about today.”

“Yes, sir.” Sam sat. A houseman brought in coffee on a silver tray. When the president took a cup, Yeager did, too.

President Warren picked up a fat manila folder. “Your reports on the Lizard hatchlings—Mickey and Donald: I like that—have been fascinating. I’ve enjoyed reading them not only for what they tell me about Lizard development but also for the way they’re written. You could have been published, I think, had you chosen to try to go in that direction.”

“Maybe, Mr. President, and thanks, but I hope you’ll excuse me for saying that I have my doubts,” Sam answered. He added, “I was also smart enough to marry a good editor. She makes me sound better than I would otherwise.”

“A good editor can do that,” Warren agreed. “A bad one... But back to business. In many ways, these two hatchlings seem to be progressing far faster than human children would.”

“They sure are, sir.” Yeager nodded. He almost added an emphatic cough, but wasn’t sure the president would understand. “Of course, they’re born—uh, hatched—able to run and grab onto things. That gives them a big head start. But they understand faster than babies do, the way puppies or kittens would.”

“But they aren’t short-lived, as dogs and cats are,” President Warren said.

“Oh, no, sir. They live as long as we do. Probably longer.” Yeager eyed the president with respect. Warren saw the implications of things. “The only thing they don’t do is, they don’t talk. They understand hand signals. They’re even starting to understand expressions, which is funny, because they don’t have any of their own to speak of. But no words yet. Nothing even really close.”

“A lot of babies are just starting to say ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ at nine or ten months,” the president pointed out. His stern face softened. “It’s been a while, but I remember.”

“I know, sir, but there isn’t anything in the noises they make that’s even close to ‘dada’ or ‘mama,’ ” Sam answered. “The one thing I will say is that there are more human-sounding noises in the babbling than there were when they first came out of their eggs. They’re listening to people, but they aren’t ready to start talking to people yet. We’ve got a ways to go before that happens.”

“All right, Lieutenant Colonel. You sound as if you’re doing a splendid job there,” Warren said. “And all that is in accordance with what you’ve been able to learn about hatchlings from the Lizards, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, sir, it sure is,” Yeager said. “I’ve had to be careful about that, though. You made it clear we don’t want them finding out what we’re up to there.” He didn’t mention the hypothetical he’d offered to Kassquit. He wished he hadn’t done it, but too late now.

“It may turn out to be a smaller problem than we believed at first,” the president replied. “That brings me to the next thing on the agenda, your upcoming meeting with this”—he opened the folder and flipped through it to find the name he needed—“this Kassquit, yes.”

“That’s right sir.’ Sam nodded, oddly relieved to find Warren thinking about her, too. “Turns out the Lizards did unto us before we had the chance to do unto them. Kassquit is for them what Mickey and Donald will be for us in twenty years or so. She’s been raised as a Lizard, she wishes she were a Lizard, but she’s stuck with a human being’s body.”

“Yes.” The president flipped through more pages. “I’ve read your reports on your conversations with her with great interest—even if you were less than perfectly discreet, considering what you just said now.” No, Warren didn’t miss much. But he didn’t make an issue of it, continuing, “Do you think there’s any chance of teaching her she really is a human being and ought to be loyal to mankind instead of the Race?”

“No, Mr. President.” Yeager spoke decisively. “She’s a naturalized citizen of the Empire, you might say. We’re just the old country to her, and she’d no more choose us over them than most Americans would choose Germany or Norway or what have you over the USA, especially if they came here as tiny babies. She’s made her choice—or had it made for her by the way she was brought up.”

“Your point is well taken,” Warren said. “I still judge the meeting worthwhile, and I’m glad you and your son are going forward with it. Even if we have no hope of turning her, we can learn a lot from her.” He went back to the manila folder, which apparently held copies of all of Sam’s reports for quite some time. “Now—you raised another interesting point here: this note about the possibility of the Lizards’ domestic animals making themselves more at home on Earth than we wish they would.”

“I got to thinking about rabbits in Australia,” Sam answered. “There are other cases, too. Starlings, for instance. There weren’t any starlings in America seventy-five years ago. Somebody turned loose a few dozen of them in New York City in 1890, and now they’re all over the country.”

“The year before I was born,” Warren said musingly. “I see we may have a problem here. I don’t see what to do about it, though. We can hardly go to war with the Race over the equivalents of dogs and cows and goats.”

“I wouldn’t think so, sir,” Yeager agreed. “But these creatures are liable to damage big chunks of the world.”

“From the reports that have come in from certain areas—our desert southwest among them—that may already be starting to happen,” the president replied. “As I say, it may be a problem, and it may well get worse. But not all problems have neat, tidy solutions, however much we wish they would.”

“I used to think they did,” Yeager said. “The older I get, though, the more it looks as if you’re right.”

“You’ve had some problems of your own,” President Warren observed. “If you weren’t fast with a pistol, I suspect I’d be talking with someone else right now.”

“Somebody tried to take a shot at me, sure enough.” Sam shrugged. “I still don’t have the faintest idea why.”

“One thing you keep doing, Lieutenant Colonel, is looking into matters that aren’t really any of your concern,” Warren answered. “I’ve had to mention this to you before. If you didn’t, you might not have had such difficulties.”

Sam Yeager started to say something, then stopped and studied the president. Was Warren trying to tell him something? Was it what it sounded like? Had that punk tried to punch his ticket because he’d shown he was too interested in the space station that became the Lewis and Clark or in the data store that held information about the night the colonization fleet was attacked?

This is the United States, he thought. Things like that don’t happen here... do they? They can’t happen here... can they?

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” the president asked, sounding like the kindly, concerned grandfather he also looked like.

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid I do,” Sam said. He wished he hadn’t put it like that, but that did him as much good as wishing he hadn’t swung at a curve down in the dirt.

“Nothing to be afraid of,” President Warren said easily. “You’re doing a wonderful job. I’ve said so all along. Keep right on doing it, and everything will be fine.” He closed the manila folder, an obvious gesture of dismissal.

Yeager got to his feet. “Okay, sir, I’ll do that,” he said. But, as he turned to go, he knew damn well it wasn’t okay. And he knew something else. It wouldn’t matter for beans come November, but he’d just changed his mind: he’d vote for Hubert Humphrey anyway.

When the telephone rang, Straha answered it in the language of the Race: “I greet you.” He enjoyed the confused splutters that commonly caused among Big Uglies. Most of them hung up without further ado. He also enjoyed that.

This time, though, he got an answer in the same tongue: “And I greet you, Shiplord. Sam Yeager here. How are you today?”

“I thank you—I am well,” Straha said. “I telephoned your home the other day, but learned you were out of the city.”

“I have returned,” the Tosevite said. Straha thought he sounded unhappy, but had trouble figuring out why. Any male should have been glad to complete a mission and come home once more. In that, the Big Uglies were similar to the Race.

Or maybe, Straha thought, I am simply misreading his tone. Although he had lived among the Big Uglies since defecting from the conquest fleet, he did not always accurately gauge their emotions. He felt no small pride at reading them as well as he did: his diligence had, in most instances, overcome billions of years of separate evolution.

“And what do you want from me today?” he asked. He assumed Yeager wanted something. Few if any Big Uglies were in the habit of calling him simply to pass the time of day. As a defector, he understood that. He was likelier to be a source of information than a friend. And yet, among the Tosevites, Sam Yeager was as close to a friend as he had. He sighed sadly, even though he despised self-pity.

“I was just wondering if anything new about Kassquit had bounced off your hearing diaphragms,” Yeager said. “You remember: the Big Ugly being raised as a female of the Race.”

“Of course,” Straha said, though he was glad Sam Yeager had reminded him who Kassquit was. “I regret to have to tell you, I have heard nothing.”

“Too bad,” Yeager said. “Anything I can find out would help a lot. If we can work things out with the Race, my hatchling and I will be going up into space to meet her. The more we know, the better off we will be.”

“If I hear anything of interest, you may rest assured I will inform you of it,” Straha said. “But I cannot tell you what I do not know.”

“Truth,” Yeager admitted. “It would make things a lot easier if you could. Well, I thank you for your time.” He shifted into English for two words—“So long”—and hung up.

Not altogether by chance—very likely not at all by chance—Straha’s driver strolled into the kitchen a moment later. “That was Sam Yeager, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes,” Straha answered shortly.

“What did he want?” the driver asked.

Straha turned both eye turrets toward him. “Why are you so curious whenever Yeager calls?” he asked in return.

The driver folded his arms across his chest and replied, “My job is being curious.” Your job is giving me the answers I need, was his unspoken corollary.

And, by the rules under which Straha had to live, the driver was right. With a sigh, he said, “He was making inquiries about Kassquit?”

Unlike the ex-shiplord, his driver didn’t need to be reminded who that was. “Oh. The female Tosevite up in space?” He relaxed. “All right. No problem there.”

That roused Straha to indignation: “If you Big Uglies have problems with your finest expert on the Race, my opinion is that you have severe problems indeed.”

As usual, he failed to irk his driver. The fellow shifted into the language of the Race to drive home his point: “Shiplord, you were one of the best officers the conquest fleet had. That did not mean you always got on well with your colleagues. If you had, you and I would not be talking like this now, would we?”

“It seems unlikely,” Straha admitted. “Very well. I see what you mean. But if Yeager is as great a nuisance to his colleagues as I was to mine, he is a very considerable nuisance indeed” He spoke in tones of fond reminiscence; if he hadn’t made Atvar’s blood boil, it wasn’t for lack of effort.

His driver said, “He is,” and used an emphatic cough.

“I see,” Straha said slowly. He’d known Yeager had occasional trouble with the American authorities, but hadn’t really believed they were of that magnitude. No wonder I sometimes feel as if he and I were hatched from the same egg, he thought.

“Kassquit, though, is legitimate business for him,” the driver said. “He should stick to legitimate business. He would do better if he did.” With that, he turned on his heel and strode away.

Arrogant, egg-addled... But Straha cursed the driver only mentally, and even then the curse broke down half formed. The Big Ugly was anything but addled, and the ex-shiplord knew it. Indeed, his effortless competence was one of the most oppressive things about him.

When the driver had gone round the corner, Straha opened a drawer, took out a vial of ginger, poured some into the palm of his hand, and tasted. Even as pleasure surged through him, he carefully put the vial back and closed the drawer. The driver knew he tasted, of course. The driver got ginger for him. But he did not like to taste in front of the Big Ugly. He treated the Tosevite as he would have treated one of his own aides: no high-ranking officer cared to do something unseemly while his subordinates were watching.

Tasting ginger, of course, was legal under the laws of the United States. But those laws mattered only so much to Straha. He lived under them, yes, but they weren’t his. The whole snout-counting process by which the Big Uglies in the USA chose their lawmakers had never failed to strike him as absurd. Emotionally, he still adhered to the regulations of the conquest fleet, and under them tasting ginger was a punishable offense.

With the herb blazing in him, he followed the driver out to the front room. The Big Ugly had just settled down with a magazine, and seemed somewhat surprised to have to deal with Straha again so soon. “Can I help you with something, Shiplord?” he asked.

“Yes,” Straha answered. “You can tell me whose snout you intend to choose in the upcoming snoutcounting for the leader of your not-empire?’

“Oh, I think I’ll vote to reelect President Warren,” the driver answered in English.

Straha didn’t blame him for shifting languages; the Big Uglies’ tongue was better suited to discussing this strange quadrennial rite of theirs. The ex-shiplord also used English: “And why is that?”

“Well, the country’s doing okay, or better than okay,” the Tosevite said. “Warren’s made sure we’re strong, and I like the way he’s handled relations with the Race. We have a saying: don’t change horses in midstream. So I figure staying with the man we’ve got is probably the best way to go.”

That sounded cautious and conservative. It might almost have been a male of the Race speaking, not a Big Ugly. As a Tosevite might have stuck out his index finger, Straha stuck out his tongue. “Suppose Warren loses, though. Suppose more American Tosevites choose the snout of this other male, this... Humpty?”

“Humphrey,” his driver corrected. His sigh sounded like the sigh of a male of the Race. “Then they do, that’s all. Then Humphrey becomes president, and we all hope he does as good a job as Warren did. I’d support him. I’d follow his orders. I’d have to.”

“But you would still think all the time that this other male, the one you have leading you now, would be able to do the job better,” Straha persisted.

“Yes, I probably would,” the driver said.

“Then why would you follow Humphrey?” Straha took care to pronounce the name correctly.

“Because more people would have voted for him than for Warren,” the Big Ugly replied. “We’ve been over this before, Shiplord. With us, the government is more important than the names of the people in the top slots. Things go on any which way.”

“Madness,” Straha said with conviction. “What would happen if some large number of American Tosevites decided they did not like the way the snoutcounting—uh, the election—turned out, and refused to obey the male who was chosen?”

To his surprise, the driver answered, “We had that happen once, as a matter of fact. It was just over a hundred years ago.”

“Oh? And what was the result?” Straha asked.

“It was called the Civil War,” the driver said. “You may have noticed some of the anniversary celebrations we’ve been having.” Straha made the negative hand gesture. Lots of things went on around him that he didn’t notice. With a shrug, the driver went on, “Well, whether you’ve noticed or not, the war caused so much damage that we’ve never come close to having another one over an election.”

So Big Uglies could learn from history. Straha wouldn’t have bet on it. The Tosevites were most adept technically; had they not been, this planet would be a firmly held part of the Empire. But they’d been doing their best to destroy one another when the conquest fleet arrived.

Straha wondered what would have happened if the Race had waited another couple of hundred years before sending out the conquest fleet. The Big Uglies had already been working on explosive-metal bombs. Maybe they would have committed suicide. Or maybe, Straha thought unhappily, not a single ship from the conquest fleet would have managed to land on Tosev 3.

The ginger was leaving him. So was the euphoria it had brought. Imagining the Race ambushed by fearsome Big Uglies came easy at such times. It had come too close to happening as things were.

“Is there anything else, Shiplord?” The driver returned to the language of the Race, a sure sign he considered the conversation on snoutcounting at an end.

“No, nothing else,” Straha answered. “You may return to your reading. What publication have you got there?”

By the way the driver hesitated, Straha knew he’d hit a nerve. He thought he knew what kind of nerve he’d hit, too. Sure enough, when the driver showed him the magazine, he found it to be one featuring female Big Uglies divested of most of the cloth wrappings they customarily used.

“I do not mind your titillating your mating urge if that does not interfere with your other duties, and it does not seem to,” Straha said.

Despite that reassurance, the driver closed the magazine and would not open it again while Straha was in the room. He was as embarrassed about openly indulging his sexuality as Straha was about tasting ginger in front of him. While different in so many ways, Big Uglies and the Race shared some odd things.

Straha said, “Never mind. I will leave you in privacy. And I will not hold it against you that you are so reluctant to extend me the same privilege.”

“Shiplord, my job is to keep you safe first and happy second,” the driver answered. “It is much harder for me to keep you safe if I do not know where you are and what you are doing.”

Other injections proved almost as unpleasant as that one. They made her arm or her buttock sore for a couple of days at a time. Some of them raised her body temperature as her immune system fought the germs that stimulated it. She’d never known fever before, and didn’t enjoy the feeling of lassitude and stupidity it brought.

As a physician readied yet another hypodermic, she asked, “By the Emperor, how many diseases are there down on Tosev 3?”

“A great many,” the male answered, casting down his eyes for a moment. “Even more than there are on Home, by all indications—or perhaps it is just that the Big Uglies can cure or prevent so few of them. This one is called cholera, I believe. It is not an illness you would want to have, and that is a truth.” He used an emphatic cough. “This immunization does not confer perfect resistance to the causative organism, but it is the best the Tosevites can do. Now you will give me your arm?”

“It shall be done,” Kassquit said with a sigh. She did not flinch as the needle penetrated her.

“There. That was very easy,” the physician said, swabbing the injection site with a disinfectant. “It was, in fact, easier than it would have been with a male or female of the Race. Here, your thin skin is an advantage.”

“How nice,” Kassquit said distantly. She did not want to be different from the Race. With all her heart, she wished she could be a female like any other. She knew what such wishes were worth, but couldn’t help making them.

Except for the one that had raised the pustule, the injection for the disease called cholera proved the most unpleasant Kassquit had endured. She enjoyed neither the pain nor the fever. They seemed to take forever to ebb. If the disease was worse than the treatment that guarded against it, it had to be very nasty indeed.

Sam Yeager telephoned Kassquit while she was recovering from the immunization. Not feeling up to dealing with the Big Ugly, she refused the call. Before long, he sent her a message over the computer network: I hope I have done nothing to cause offense.

That was polite enough to require a polite answer. No, she replied. It is only that I have not felt well lately.

I am sorry to hear it, he wrote back promptly. I did not think it would be easy for you to get sick up there, away from all the germs of Tosev 3. I hope you get better soon.

I have been free of the germs of Tosev 3, Kassquit answered. That is the cause of my present discomfort: I am being immunized against them, and some of the immunizations have unpleasant aftereffects.

Again, Sam Yeager wrote back almost at once. He had to be sitting by his computer as Kassquit was sitting by hers. Are you getting immunized so you can meet Big Uglies in person? he asked. If you are, I hope that my hatchling and I are two of the Big Uglies you will want to meet. We certainly want to meet you. He used the conventional symbol that represented an emphatic cough.

Despite its breezily informal syntax, Kassquit studied that message with considerable respect. Wild Big Ugly Sam Yeager might be, but he was anything but a fool. Yes, that is why I am being immunized, Kassquit told him, her artificial fingerclaws clicking on the keyboard. And yes, you and your hatchling are two of the Tosevites I am interested in meeting.

Sam Yeager’s hatchling, Jonathan Yeager, intrigued her no end. She had never seen anyone who resembled her so closely. Living as she did among the Race, she had never imagined that anyone could resemble her so closely. He even shaved his head and wore body paint. It was as if he and she were two ends of the same bridge, reaching toward the middle to form... what?

If this world has a future as part of the Empire, she thought, its future will be as whatever forms in the middle of that bridge.

Once more, Sam Yeager wasted no time in replying. We very much look forward to it, superior female, he wrote. Shall we start setting up arrangements with the Race?

Part of Kassquit—probably the larger part—dreaded the idea. The rest, though, the rest was intrigued. And she agreed with Ttomalss that such a meeting would bring advantage to the Race. And so, in spite of a sigh, she answered, Yes, you may do that, and I will do the same. I do not know how long the negotiations will take.

Too long, Sam Yeager predicted.

Kassquit laughed. You are intolerant of bureaucracy, she observed.

I hope so, the wild Big Ugly wrote, which made Kassquit laugh again. Sam Yeager went on, Bureaucracy is like spice in food. A little makes food taste good. Because it does, too many males and females think a lot will make the food taste even better. But cooking does not improve that way, and neither does bureaucracy.

Some regulation is necessary, Kassquit wrote. She had known nothing but regulation throughout her life.

I said as much, Sam Yeager answered. But when does some become too much? Tosevites have been arguing that question for as long as we have been civilized. We still are. I suppose the Race is, too.

No, not really. Kassquit keyed the characters one by one. I have never heard such a discussion among the Race. We have, for the most part, the amount of regulation that suits us.

I do not know whether to congratulate the Race or offer my sympathy, the Tosevite responded. And as for you, you are with the Race but not of it, the way hatchlings of the Race would be if Big Uglies raised them.

I would like to meet such hatchlings, if there were any, Kassquit wrote. I have thought about that very possibility, though I do not suppose it is likely. Even if it were, such hatchlings would still be very small.

So they would, Sam Yeager replied. And I have another question for you—even if you did meet these hatchlings when they were grown, what language would you speak with them?

Why, the language of the Race, of course, Kassquit wrote, but she deleted the words instead of sending them. The Big Ugly had thought of something she hadn’t. If his kind were raising hatchlings of the Race to be as much like Tosevites as possible, they would naturally teach them some Tosevite tongue. Kassquit had trouble imagining males and females of the Race who didn’t know their own language, but it made sense that such hatchlings wouldn’t. And why not? She was a Big Ugly by blood, but spoke not a word of any Tosevite tongue.

What she did transmit was, I see that you have done a good deal of thinking on these matters. Do I understand that you have been dealing with the Race since the conquest fleet came to Tosev3?

Yes, the Tosevite answered. In fact, I was interested in non-Tosevite intelligences even before the conquest fleet got here.

Kassquit studied the words on the screen. Sam Yeager wrote the language of the Race well, but not as a male of the Race would have: every so often, the syntax of his own language showed through. That was what had first made her suspect he was a Big Ugly. Did his message mean what it looked to mean, or had he somehow garbled it? Kassquit decided she had to ask. How could you have known of non-Tosevite intelligences before the conquest fleet came? she wrote. Big Uglies had no space travel of their own up till that time.

No, we had no space travel, Sam Yeager agreed. But we wrote a lot of fiction about what it might be like if Tosevites met all different kinds of intelligent creatures. I used to enjoy that kind of fiction, but I never thought it would come true till the day the Race shot up the railroad train I was riding.

“How strange.” Kassquit spoke the words aloud, and startled herself with the sound of her own voice. The more she learned about the species of which she was genetically a part, the more alien it seemed to her. She wrote, Such things would never have occurred to the Race before spaceflight.

So I gather Sam Yeager replied. We speculate more than the Race does, or so it seems.

Is that good or bad? Kassquit wrote.

Yes. The unadorned word made her stare. After a moment, in a separate message, Sam Yeager went on, Sometimes differences are not better or worse. Sometimes they are just different. The Race does things one way. Big Uglies do things a different way—or sometimes a lot of different ways, because we are more various than the Race.

If it hadn’t been for that variability, Kassquit knew the Race would easily have conquered Tosev 3. The majority of the planet’s inhabitants, the majority of the regions of its land surface, had fallen to the conquest fleet with relatively little trouble. But the minority... The minority had given, and continued to give, the Race enormous difficulties.

Before Kassquit could find a way to put any of that into words, SamYeager wrote, I have to leave now—time for my evening meal. I will be in touch by message and by telephone—if you care to talk with me—and I hope to see you in person before too long. Goodbye.

Goodbye, Kassquit answered. She got up from her seat in front of the computer, took off the artificial fingerclaws one by one, and set them in a storage drawer near the keyboard. It wasn’t time for her evening meal, or anywhere close to it. All the ships in the conquest fleet—and now in the colonization fleet, too—kept the same time, independent of where in their orbit around Tosev 3 they happened to be. Intellectually, Kassquit understood how time on the surface of a world was tied to its sun’s apparent position, but it had never mattered to her.

She hoped she would hear from Sam Yeager again soon. Such hope surprised her; she remembered how frightened she’d been at first of the idea of communicating with a wild Big Ugly. But he looked at the world in a way so different from the Race, he gave her something new and different to think about in almost every message. Not even Ttomalss did that.

And Sam Yeager, just because he was a Big Ugly, knew her and knew her reactions, or some of them, better than even Ttomalss could. In some ways, Kassquit suspected Sam Yeager knew her better than she knew herself. She made the negative hand gesture. No. He knows what I would be, were I an ordinary Big Ugly.

“She sounded sensible enough,” his father said. “She doesn’t know what being a human is like. What bothers her most, I think, is that she can’t be as much like the Race—like the rest of the Race, she’d probably say—as she’d like.”

“If that’s not crazy, what is?” his mother returned. His father took another sip of beer, in much the same way as Jonathan had eaten those mashed potatoes.

“We ought to set her free,” Jonathan exclaimed: the idea blazed in him. “We—the United States, I mean—ought to tell the fleetlord we know they’ve got her and they have to let her go.”

He expected his mother and father to catch fire, too. Instead, they looked at each other and then at him. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Jonathan,” his mother said after a moment.

“What? Why not?” he demanded. “If I’d been living up there all this time, I’d sure want to be free.”

“No.” His father shook his head in a way that could only mean he was ready to lock horns on this one. “If you’d been living up there all this time, you’d want what Kassquit wants: to be more like a Lizard. You play games about imitating the Race. With her, it’s not a game. It’s the real thing.”

Jonathan started to get angry at that. A couple of years earlier, he would have for sure. His old man had a lot of damn nerve saying his study of the Race was only a game. But, he had to admit, trying to live like the Lizards wasn’t the same as never having seen, never even having talked to, another human being in his life. “Well, maybe,” he said grudgingly—from him, a large concession.

His father must have seen that he’d been on the point of blowing up, because he leaned across the kitchen table and set a hand on Jonathan’s for a moment. “You’re growing up,” he said, which almost caused trouble again, because Jonathan was convinced he’d already grown up. But then his dad said something that distracted him: “Besides, if you look at it the right way, Kassquit’s our ace in the hole.”

“Huh?” Jonathan said.

“I don’t follow that, either,” his mother added. With a pointed look at Jonathan, she went on, “I’m more polite about the way I say it, though.”

His father grinned. He always did when he put one over on Jonathan’s mom, not least because he didn’t do that very often. He said, “Suppose the Race finds out we’ve got Mickey and Donald. What will the fleetlord do? Scream his head off, that’s what, and probably tell us to give ’em back before he sends in the Lizard Marines.”

“Oh, I get it!” Jonathan said excitedly. “I get it! That’s hot, Dad! If he says, ‘Give ’em back,’ we can answer, ‘Why should I? You’ve had this girl for years.’ ” His old man could be sneaky, no two ways about it.

But Jonathan’s mother said, “I don’t like that, Sam. It turns the girl into nothing but a pawn.”

“Hon, we both just told Jonathan that Kassquit’s never, ever going to have a normal life or anything close to it,” his father said. “She’s been the Lizards’ pawn ever since they got hold of her. If she turns out to be our pawn, too, what’s so bad about that?”

“I don’t know,” his mother answered. Her gaze went down the hail toward Mickey and Donald’s room. “It’s different somehow, thinking of that being done to a human being rather than a Lizard.”

“That’s what the Race would say, too, Mom, except they’d put it the other way round,” Jonathan said.

“He’s not wrong, hon,” his father said. His mother still didn’t look happy, but she finally nodded. His father went on, “And speaking of Mickey and Donald...” He got up from the table and put his dishes in the sink, then pulled a knife from the drawer next to it and opened the refrigerator. “Time they had their supper, too.”

Jonathan also got up. “I’ll feed ’em, Dad, if you want me to.”

“Thanks.” His father nodded. “I’m glad you help with the chores around here, believe me I am, but I’ll take care of this. I was the one who got ordered to raise them, after all, so I will.”

“Well, I’ll come along, if that’s okay,” Jonathan said. “I like Lizards, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He tapped himself on the chest. With the weather warm, he didn’t bother wearing a shirt. This week, his body paint declared him an electronic instruments repairmale.

His father paused while slicing corned beef. (Jonathan sometimes thought the hatchlings ate better than he did. But then, the government paid for all their food, while his folks had to shell out for what went down his throat.) “Sure. Come right ahead. Be good for the little guys to know people visit sometimes, that we aren’t just the gravy train.”

As they walked down the hall toward the Lizards’ room, Jonathan asked, “Aren’t you going to shut that door?”

“Hmm? Oh. Yeah.” His dad did, but then said, “It won’t be too long, or I hope it won’t, before we don’t have to do that any more. We’ll be able to start letting them loose in the house. I hope we will, anyhow.”

“You don’t think they’ll rip the furniture to ribbons?” Jonathan said. “Mom won’t be real happy if they do.”

“Well, neither will I—we’ve talked about that,” his father answered as he opened the door to Mickey and Donald’s room. “But heck, you can teach a cat to use a scratching post—most of the time, anyhow—so I figure we can probably teach these guys to do the same thing. They’re smarter than cats, that’s for darn sure.”

The hatchlings had been playing some sort of game with a red rubber ball—an active one, by the way they stopped and stood there panting when Jonathan and his father came in. The ball was about golf-ball size. A human baby would have stuck it in his mouth and likely choked to death. Jonathan wouldn’t have known something like that for himself, but his parents both insisted it was true. Mickey and Donald were different, though. Unlike human babies, they knew from the very beginning what was food and what wasn’t; at need, they could catch their own.

Donald did something with the ball no cat could: he picked it up and threw it at Jonathan. Jonathan tried to catch it, but it bounced off his hand and away. Both Donald and Mickey sprang after it. His father clicked his tongue between his store-bought teeth. “Have to score that one an error, son.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jonathan said in mild annoyance. He was sure that, had the baby Lizard thrown the ball at his father, he would have caught it even though he had only one free hand. Jonathan was stronger than his dad these days, but he still wasn’t half the ballplayer his father was. That got under his skin when he let himself think about it.

But he preferred thinking about Mickey and Donald. “Come and get it,” his father told them, and they didn’t waste much time abandoning the ball for corned beef. He and Jonathan both talked to them, and with each other. Letting them get used to the idea of language, Jonathan’s dad always called that. Turning to Jonathan, he remarked, “They aren’t stupid—they’re just different.”

“Uh-huh.” Jonathan could get away with grunts and even split infinitives around his father, where his mother would come down on him like a ton of bricks. He sometimes wondered if his dad found talking around his mom hard, too. But that wasn’t anything he could ask. Instead, he pointed to Mickey, who had a little shred of corned beef hanging from one corner of his mouth, and said, “You’re a little pig, you know that?”

One of the hatchling’s eye turrets swung to follow his pointing finger: it might have been danger, or so evolution warned. Mickey’s other eye kept watching Jonathan’s father, who at the moment emphatically was the source of all blessing. Sure enough, he offered Mickey another strip of corned beef, and the little Lizard leaped forward to take it.

“I wonder what he and Donald will be like in twenty years,” Jonathan’s father said, and then, more than half to himself, “I wonder if I’ll be around to see it.”

Jonathan had no idea how to respond to that last sentence, and so he didn’t. He said, “I wonder what that—Kassquit, was that her name?—is like now. She’d be somewhere close to my age, wouldn’t she?”

“Maybe a little younger—she said the Lizards got her after the fighting stopped,” his father answered. “She’s smart—no two ways around that. But as for the rest... I just don’t know. Pretty strange. She can’t help that.”

“I’d like to talk with her myself,” Jonathan said. “It would be interesting.” He used an emphatic cough, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to do that around Mickey and Donald.

“Don’t know if I could arrange it,” his father said, in tones suggesting he had no intention of trying. But then his gaze sharpened. “You know, it might not be so bad if I could, though, especially with the video hooked up. You look like a Lizard, you know what I mean?—or as much as a person can.”

“That might make her feel easier,” Jonathan agreed, and then, “What does she look like?”

His father laughed. “I don’t know. She didn’t have her video on, either.”

“Okay, okay. I just asked, that’s all.” But Jonathan was glad Karen hadn’t been around to hear that question. She wouldn’t have taken it the right way. He was sure of that. Women are so unreasonable, he thought, and never stopped to wonder how he would have felt had she asked whether some man was good-looking.

Donald and Mickey were both looking at his father. “Sorry, boys,” Sam Yeager told them. “That’s all there is—there ain’t no more.” He winked at Jonathan, as if to say he knew he was putting one over on Jonathan’s mother by using bad grammar behind her back. The baby Lizards didn’t understand anything about that, but they’d put away enough corned beef that they weren’t too disappointed not to get any more.

After Ttomalss left, she finished her meal in a hurry. She did not enjoy the company of large numbers of the Race; seeing so many males and females together always acutely reminded her of how different she was. Back inside her cubicle, she was simply herself, and did not need to make comparisons.

She was simply herself on the electronic network, too. What she looked like, what she sounded like, didn’t matter there. Only her wit mattered—and that, she had seen, was a match for those of most males and females. No wonder she spent so much time in front of the screen, then.

She was heading toward the area where males and females discussed the new generation of the Race that had been hatched on Tosev 3 when the telephone attachment hissed for attention. With a sigh, she arrested her progress on the network and activated the phone connection. “Kassquit speaking. I greet you.”

“And I greet you, superior female.” No image appeared on the screen; the conversations remained voice-only. The male on the other end of the line—a male with a voice of odd timbre—went on, “I needed to do a little of this and a little of that before I was able to call you, but I managed.”

“Who is this?” Kassquit asked in some annoyance. Whoever he was, he had a very strange voice: not only deeper than it had any business being, but also mushy, as if he were talking with his mouth full.

“What?” he said, and somehow managed to make his interrogative cough sound sarcastic. “You mean you do not recognize the voice of your old not-quite-friend, the senior tube inspector?”

Ice and fire chased each other through Kassquit. “Oh, by the Emperor,” she whispered, and cast down her eyes. “You are a Tosevite.” She was talking with a wild Big Ugly. Somehow, he’d found her telephone code and arranged access to a phone connected to the Race’s communication system.

“I sure am,” answered the Big Ugly male she thought of as Regeya. “I bet you could tell the instant I opened my mouth. I cannot make some of your sounds the way...” His voice trailed off. With dull horror, Kassquit knew what was coming next. Regeya was no fool. He’d heard her speak. She reached for the recessed key that would break the connection, but her hand faltered and stopped. The tongue was out of the mouth any which way. If the worst was coming, she might as well hear it. And it was. In slow wonder, Regeya went on, “You have trouble with the same sounds I do. Are you by any chance a Tosevite yourself, Kassquit?”

Kassquit thought she spoke much better than the wild Big Ugly. Not only did he have trouble with some of the pops and special hisses of the Race’s tongue, but he also spoke it with an odd syntax and accent: shadows, no doubt, of his own Tosevite language. But that had nothing to do with anything. “I am a full citizen of the Empire,” she answered proudly.

Despite the pride, it was an evasion, and Regeya recognized as much. “You did not answer my question,” he said. “Are you a Tosevite?” He answered it himself: “You must be. But how did it happen? What made you throw in your lot with the Race?”

He thought she was a Tosevite traitor, as some males of the Race from the conquest fleet had turned traitor after the Big Uglies captured them. She proceeded to disabuse him of the notion. “I would not be anything but a citizen of the Empire,” she declared. “The Race has raised me since earliest hatchlinghood.”

Regeya said something in his own language that she didn’t understand, then let out several barking yips of Tosevite laughter. When at last he returned to the language of the Race, his only comment was, “Is that a fact?”

“Yes, it is a fact,” Kassquit said with more than a little irritation. “Why in the name of the Emperor”—calling on him made her feel more secure—“would I waste my time lying to you? You are on the surface of Tosev 3, while I orbit above it. Since you must remain there, what can you possibly do to me?”

She’d nipped the Big Ugly’s pride, but not quite as she’d expected. “I have been farther from Tosev 3 than you,” he answered, “for I have walked on the surface of the moon. So I might visit you one day.”

I hope not, was the first thought that went through Kassquit’s mind. The idea of coming face to face with a wild Big Ugly terrified and horrified her. Nor would she tolerate Regeya’s scoring points off her. “You may have gone from Tosev 3 to its moon,” she said, “but the Race has come from its sun to the star Tosev.”

“Well, that is a truth,” the Big Ugly admitted. “Pretty proud of the Empire, eh?” That last grunt was almost an interrogative cough in its own right.

“I am part of it. Why should I not feel pride in it?” Kassquit said.

“All right—something to that, too,” Regeya said. “How old are you, Kassquit? How old were you when the Race took you from the female who bore you?”

“I was taken away when I was newly hatched,” Kassquit answered. “Had I been brought up as a Big Ugly, even in part, I would have had more trouble becoming as fully a part of the Race as I have. The male who raised me began the project not long after the fighting stopped.”

“So you would be close to twenty now?” Regeya said, half to himself. Kassquit began to correct him, but then realized he naturally reckoned by Tosevite years rather than those of the Race. Laughing again, he went on, “Well, well, quite a head start.” Kassquit didn’t know what that meant. Regeya was still talking: “Did the male who raised you tell you that you were not his first attempt?”

“Oh, yes,” Kassquit replied at once. “He had to return one hatchling to the Tosevites because of political considerations, and was kidnapped while seeking to obtain another. With me, however, he succeeded.” As much as he could, as much as anyone could, she thought. But she would not let the Big Ugly see what lay in her mind.

“He was honest with you, at any rate. That is something,” Regeya said. “And you may be interested to know that I have met the Tosevite whom your male released. She is a normal young adult female in most ways, except that her face has no motion in it to speak of.”

“Neither has mine,” Kassquit said. “Here among the Race, that is of small account.”

“Yes, I suppose it would be,” Regeya said. “It is different among us Big Uglies.” He wasn’t shy about using the Race’s nickname for his—and Kassquit’s—kind. “You may also be interested to know that she—this other female—is one of the leaders in the rebellion against the Race in China.”

“No, that does not interest me at all,” Kassquit answered. “In the long run, rebellions will not matter. All of Tosev 3 will become part of the Empire. Males and females will be proud citizens, as I am.”

“That is possible,” the Big Ugly on the other end of the line said, which surprised her. He went on, “But I do not think it is certain. Our kind”—by which, to Kassquit’s annoyance, he had to mean his and hers—“is different from the Race in important ways. For instance, we are sexually receptive all the time, and the Race is not. Do you not agree that that is an important difference? How do you deal with it, there by yourself?”

“None of your business,” Kassquit snapped. She felt blood rising to her face, as it did when she was embarrassed. Having continuous sexuality among beings who did not was extremely embarrassing. She had learned that stroking her private parts brought relief from the tension that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her, but she’d been humiliated to find out Ttomalss knew what she did, even if he intellectually understood her need. She wished she were like the Race in that regard, but she wasn’t.

To her relief, Regeya did not press her. He said, “I am going to go now. I am using a telephone at the Race’s consulate in Los Angeles, and it is expensive for me. If you want to get in touch with me again, my name is Sam Yeager. I decided to call just to say hello. I tell you the truth when I say that I had no idea would be speaking with another Tosevite.”

“I am not a Tosevite, not in the same sense you are,” Kassquit said, once more with considerable pride. “As I told you, I am a citizen of the Empire, and glad of it.” Now she broke the connection. She did not think it would offend the Big Ugly—the other Big Ugly—for Sam Yeager (not Regeya) had already said he was going.

A wild Tosevite... Her hand moved in the gesture of negation. The two of them might be similar genetically, but in no other way. His accent, his alien way of looking at things, made that perfectly clear.

But, in some ways, genetics and genetic predispositions did matter. Regeya had, for instance, unerringly focused on her sexuality as an important difference between herself and the Race. Ttomalss, looking at the issue from the other side of the divide, had proved far less perceptive.

Kassquit wondered what the Big Ugly looked like.

It does not matter, she told herself. He probably had hair all over his head, which would make him even uglier than Tosevites had to be. His face would be snoutless, his skin scaleless. He could not help being ugly, given all that. But she remained curious about the details.

On the telephone, he seemed much as he did in his electronic messages: clever, and possessed of a quirky wit very different from the way males and females of the Race thought. She should have despised him for being what he was. She tried, but could not do it. He intrigued her too much.

He took the plate piled high with ham down the hail to the Lizards’ room. They still liked to bolt whenever they got the chance, so he shut the door at the end of the hall before opening theirs. These days, they didn’t quite make the mad dash for freedom they had when they were smaller. It seemed more a game of the sort puppies or kittens might play. No matter what it was, though, he didn’t feel like running after them, not at his age he didn’t.

When he did open the door to their room, he found them rolling on the floor clawing and snapping at each other. They rarely did any damage: again, they could have been a couple of squabbling puppies. From what he’d learned on the Race’s computer network, these brawls were normal for hatchlings of their age. He didn’t give his leather gauntlets a workout by pulling them apart, the way he had the first few times he’d caught them tangling.

Even though he didn’t try to separate them, they sprang apart when he stepped inside. “You know I don’t like you doing that, don’t you?” he said to them. He talked to them whenever he fed them—whenever he had anything to do with them at all. They didn’t pick up language and meaning as readily as human babies did. But he’d already seen they were a lot smarter than dogs or cats. That did make sense. By the time they grew up, they’d be at least as smart as he was, maybe smarter.

For the time being, they were more interested in him as the dinner wagon than in him as a person. Their eye turrets focused on the plate of sliced ham to the exclusion of everything else. They let out little excited hisses and snorts. Maybe it was Sam’s imagination, but he thought he caught some humanlike sounds among their noises. Were they trying to imitate him and his family? He supposed he would have to listen to a comparison recording of the noises of Lizard-raised hatchlings to be certain.

“Come and get it, boys,” he said, though Mickey and Donald might have been girls for all he knew. He crooked his finger in the come-here gesture people used.

It wasn’t a normal Lizard gesture. When they wanted to tell someone to come, they used a twist of the eye turret to get the message across. But Yeager watched Mickey crook one of his skinny, scaly, claw-tipped tiny fingers in just the same way as he hurried forward to get his lunch.

Sam felt like cheering. Instead, he gave Mickey the first piece of ham. That usually went to Donald, who was a little larger and a little quicker. Mickey made the ham disappear in a couple of quick snaps. He cocked his head to one side and turned an eye turret up at Yeager, who was feeding Donald his first slice of meat.

What wheels were spinning inside Mickey’s head? Sam had wondered that since the day the Lizard hatched. Lizards thought as well as people, but they didn’t think like people in a lot of ways. And did hatchlings, could hatchlings, really think at all in the strict sense of the word when they had no words with which to think?

Quite deliberately, Mickey bent his finger into that purely human come-here gesture again. “You little son of a gun!” Yeager exclaimed. “You figured out that that means you get extra, didn’t you?” He rewarded the hatchling with another piece of ham.

Donald had one eye turret on Sam, the other on Mickey. He saw the reward his—brother? sister?—had got. When he crooked his finger, he was imitating Mickey, not Yeager.

“No, you fellows aren’t dumb at all,” Sam said, and gave Donald some meat. From then on, both Lizards kept making come-hither gestures till Yeager ran out of ham. “Sorry, boys, that’s all there is,” he told them. They didn’t understand that, any more than puppies or kittens would have. But their little bellies bulged, so they weren’t in imminent danger of starving to death. He looked from one of them to the other. “I don’t know. I have the feeling you guys may start talking sooner than you would if you were around a bunch of other Lizards. What have you got to say about that?”

They didn’t have anything to say about that. Jonathan wouldn’t have had anything to say about it at five months old, either. Physically, the Lizards were a long way ahead of where Jonathan had been at their age—he couldn’t even sit up unsupported then, let alone run and jump and fight. Yeager had always thought they were developing more slowly when it came to mental processes.

Now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure. All right: maybe they wouldn’t talk as fast as a human baby would. But, plainly, a lot was going on inside their heads. It might not come out in words. One way or another, though, it looked as if it would come out.

“See you later,” Sam told them, and waved goodbye. To his disappointment, they didn’t try to imitate that. Of course, it didn’t have food attached to its meaning. Maybe the big difference between the way they thought and the way people thought was just that they were a lot more practical.

He went back to the kitchen, washed the plate, and set it in the dish drainer. Then he went back to the bedroom. “Those little guys are getting smarter,” he told Barbara, and explained what the hatchlings had done.

“That is interesting,” she said. “I think you’re right. Something is definitely going on inside their heads—more than I would have expected, since they don’t have words with which to form concepts.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Sam answered: not surprising, considering that they were married and considering that he’d learned from her a lot of what he knew about the way languages worked. Something else was on his mind. “When do you suppose we can start letting them go around the house more?”

“When we can teach them not to tear up the furniture so much,” Barbara replied promptly, as if she were talking about a couple of kittens that enjoyed sharpening their claws on the sofa. She went on, “If you’re right, though, we really might be able to start trying to teach them.”

“Might be worth doing. They’d enjoy it.” Yeager was about to say something more, but paused, hearing footsteps on the front porch. If he could hear them, whoever was making them could hear him. A moment later, the mail slot in the front door opened. Envelopes landed on the rug. The footsteps went away. Sam said, “Let’s see... to whom we owe money today.” He wagged a finger under Barbara’s nose. “You were going to nail me if I said, ‘who we owe money to today.’ ”

“Of course I was,” she answered. “That kind of grammar deserves it.” But she was laughing; she didn’t take herself too seriously, and didn’t mind teasing about what she admitted to be her obsession. They went out together to check the mail.

“No bills,” Yeager said with some relief, shuffling the envelopes. “Just ads and political junk.”

“I won’t be sorry to see the primary come,” Barbara said. “It’s still six weeks away, and look at everything we’re getting. ‘Junk’ is right.”

Yeager held up a flyer extolling the virtues of President Warren. “I don’t know why his people bother to mail this stuff. He’s going to get reelected in a walk, let alone renominated. Christ, I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Democratic primary, too.”

“He’s done a good job,” Barbara agreed.

“I’ll vote for him again, no doubt about it,” Sam said. “And one of the reasons I’ll vote for him again is that he doesn’t take a lot of chances—which is probably why he has his people send this stuff out in carload lots.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Barbara said. “But, since we already know what we’re going to do...” She took the political flyers and the advertising circulars into the kitchen and pitched them in the trash.

“Good for you,” Sam called after her. She was death on traveling salesmen, too. If they didn’t back away in a hurry, they’d get their noses smashed when she slammed the door in their faces. Having grown up on a farm, where such visitors were always made welcome, Sam liked to chat with them. Half the time, he’d buy things from them, too. Barbara and he didn’t have many arguments, but that could touch one off.

He went into the study and turned on the human-built computer that shared desk space with—and used more of it than—the Lizards’ machine he preferred. But the Lizards didn’t have access to the rather fragmentary network that had grown up in the United States over the past few years. He certainly hoped they didn’t, anyhow. Still, if he could sneak around through their electronic playground, they were bound to be trying to sneak around through the USA’s.

Waiting for the screen to come to life (which also took longer than it did in the Lizard-built computer), he wondered how good his country’s electronic security really was. He’d got in Dutch when he poked his nose in where it didn’t belong—he’d bought himself a royal chewing-out from a three-star general when he tried to find out what was going on with the Lewis and Clark before the United States was ready to let anybody know the answer.

With any luck at all, the Race would have as much trouble. But he hadn’t tried to be sneaky. He supposed the Lizards would. And they’d been using computers as long as people had been counting on their fingers. How sneaky could they be if they put their minds to it?

That wasn’t his problem. No: it was his problem, but he couldn’t do anything about solving it. He had other things on his mind, anyway. In his spare time—a concept ever more mythical, now that Mickey and Donald were around—he kept poking around, trying to find leads that would show either the Reich or the USSR had blown up the ships from the colonization fleet. If he ever did find anything, he intended to pass it on to the Lizards. As far as he was concerned, that attack had been murder, and could have touched off a nuclear war. He wouldn’t shed a tear if the Nazis or the Reds got hammered on account of it.

Thanks to his dealings with the Race, he had a security clearance that let him go almost anywhere on the U.S. network (not quite, as he’d found out when he went snooping after data on the Lewis and Clark). He’d found a couple of interesting archives of signals received just after the orbiting weapon, whosever it was, launched its warheads at the orbiting ships of the colonization fleet.

Once inside, she went over to the computer terminal and sat down in front of it. Before she began to use it, she took a set of artificial fingerclaws from a drawer below the keyboard and put them on. She could not use voice commands; as she’d seen time and again, the machine stubbornly refused to understand her.

A glance at her reflection in the computer screen told her why, as if she hadn’t known. No way around it: though Ttomalss had raised her as a hatchling and then as a female of the Race, she was a Big Ugly. The computer knew—it couldn’t follow the mushy way in which she pronounced the language of the Race. It was the only language she knew, and she couldn’t speak it properly. That struck her as most unfair.

She shaved the hair on her head. Since her body matured, she’d shaved the hair under her arms and between her legs, too. Having the stuff at all disgusted her. Getting rid of it didn’t make her soft, smooth hide much like the scaly skin a female of the Race should have had. Even her color was wrong: she was golden, not a proper greenish brown.

Her eyes were too small and too narrow and did not lie in moving turrets. She had no proper snout. She had no tailstump, either, and when she stood, she stood far too erect. She’d tried leaning forward all the time like a proper member of the Race, but it made her back hurt. She’d had to give it up.

“I am not a proper member of the Race,” she said, rubbing it in. “I am very ugly. But I am civilized. I would rather be what I am—and what I almost am—than a wild Big Ugly down on Tosev 3.”

As she turned on the computer and colors filled the screen, she let out a sigh of relief. For one thing, those colors made her own reflection harder to see, which made it easier to imagine she really was a female of the Race. For another, the computer gave her access to the Race’s information and opinion network. There, she might as well have been a female of the Race. No one could tell otherwise, not by the way she wrote. Her views were worth as much as anyone else’s—sometimes more than someone else’s, if she could argue better.

She wondered what males and females of the Race would think if they knew the person who challenged their views was in fact an overtall, overstraight, soft-skinned, small-eyed Big Ugly. Actually, she didn’t wonder. She knew. Whatever respect she’d earned for her brains would vanish, dissolved in the scorn and suspicion the Race felt toward Tosevites.

She felt the same scorn and suspicion toward Tosevites herself. She’d learned it from Ttomalss, who’d raised her since hatchlinghood; from every other male—and, since the coming of the colonization fleet, female—of the Race she’d met in person; and from every bit of video and writing the Race had produced about Tosev 3.

But having it aimed at her hurt almost too much to bear.

She checked for new comments and speculations about which independent Tosevite not-empire had attacked and destroyed more than ten ships from the colonization fleet not long after they took up their orbits around this world. The Race had delivered token punishments to each of the three suspects—the SSSR, the USA, and the Reich—because it could not prove which of them had done the murderous deed. That didn’t stop males and females from speculating endlessly, but the speculations, as far as Kassquit could see, had reached the point of diminishing returns. And the less the speculators knew, the more strident they were about advancing their ill-informed claims.

With more than a little relief, she escaped that area and went to one nearby: one where the Race discussed the American spacecraft known, for no reason she could fathom, as the Lewis and Flark. No. She corrected herself: the Lewis and Clark. Changing the name made it no more meaningful to her.

Here, too, discussion had died down. The Lewis and Clark had been a mystery when the American Big Uglies were fitting out their former space station to travel through this solar system. They’d done so in such ostentatious secrecy that they’d aroused everyone’s suspicion and alarm. Most males and females had feared they were turning it into some immense, and immensely dangerous, orbital fortress.

It had even aroused the Big Uglies’ suspicions. Somehow or other, a Tosevite going by the name of Regeya had wormed his way onto the Race’s network, to learn what he could of what the Race thought and had learned about the space station. No one had recognized him for what he was till Kassquit did.

I should be proud of that, she thought. I got him expelled from areas of the network where he had no right to go.

With a sigh, Kassquit made the negative hand gesture. She was proud... but then again, she wasn’t. The Tosevite who called himself Regeya had had a more interesting way of looking at things and expressing himself than most of the males and females with whose opinions she’d become all too familiar. The network was a duller place without him on it.

It is a more secure place without him on it, Kassquit told herself. That consoled the part of her which devoted itself to duty: a very large part, thanks to Ttomalss’ training. But it wasn’t all of her. The rest craved fun and amusement. She sometimes wished it wouldn’t, but it did.

Some of the curious part of her also wished Regeya remained on the network. Before she’d recognized him as a Big Ugly, he’d come close to doing the same in reverse. She didn’t know how; her command of the Race’s written language was perfect, which his wasn’t quite. But he had. He’d asked to talk to her by telephone. She couldn’t do that, not without giving away what she was.

“Fun,” she said aloud. “Amusement.” She went to a new area on the network, one that offered both of those: the area devoted to discussion of the best ways to nurture hatchlings. The conquest fleet had been all-male; not till the colonization fleet arrived did that area become necessary.

How do you make hatchlings not bite when you feed them? someone—a harassed someone—had written since Kassquit last checked there.

Someone else, evidently a voice of experience, had given a three-word reply to that: You do not. The responder had also added the Race’s conventional symbol for an emphatic cough.

The next message was a glyph of an open mouth, the conventional symbol for laughter. Kassquit’s mouth fell open, too. She laughed like that when she remembered to. Sometimes, though, amusement made her yip the way a Big Ugly was biologically programmed to do.

A few messages further on, someone named Maargyees wrote, This is my very first clutch of eggs. I wish I had never laid them. Not being able to talk to the hatchlings is driving me out of my scales. What do I do about that?

Live with it, answered the cynic who’d replied to the earlier message.

We all do, someone else added. Sooner or later, they turn into civilized beings. We did, you know.

Maargyees wasn’t easily quelled. Sure seems like later to me, she wrote.

How is it that you are so ignorant of hatchlings and their ways? a male asked.

Me? Maargyees answered. I was hatched in a barn myself I do not know anything. Know? I do not even suspect anything.

That sent several laughter signs up onto the computer screen. Kassquit added one of her own. Maargyees had a flippant, irreverent way of looking at the world, very different from the endless run of boring comments from most males and females. Kassquit hadn’t seen anything like it for quite a while. She hadn’t seen anything like it, as a matter of fact, since...

She paused with her artificial fingerclaws poised above the keyboard. “Since Regeya,” she said aloud. And she knew only too well who, or rather what, Regeya had turned out to be.

Could the obstreperous Big Ugly, having been booted off the network once, have found a new disguise under which to return? Kassquit decided to do a little checking. No messages from anyone named Maargyees appeared anywhere until some time after Regeya had been removed. That didn’t prove anything, but it was suggestive. Maargyees sounded more like a name a Rabotev should carry than one belonging to a female of the Race, but that didn’t prove anything, either—some members of the Race hatched on Rabotev 2 had local names.

As she had for the falsely named Regeya, Kassquit checked the records. Sure enough, a Maargyees had come with the colonization fleet—a Maargyees with a personal identification number different from the one this female was using.

“Well, well,” Kassquit murmured. She knew she ought to report the wild Big Ugly’s return to the network, but had trouble bringing herself to do it. Things had been dull since Regeya vanished from the network. And Kassquit had a hard time seeing how asking questions about hatchlings constituted any sort of danger for the Race.

She could always report the Tosevite later. For now, she sent him—him, not her—an electronic message: I greet you, Maargyees. And how is the life of a senior tube technician these days? That was the fictitious occupation the equally fictitious Regeya had said he used.

If she didn’t get an answer, Kassquit vowed she would report that the Tosevite was roaming the network again. But one came back before long: I greet you, Kassquit. And how is the life of a snoopy nuisance these days? With the words, he used the symbol suggesting he didn’t intend to be taken seriously.

Very well; I thank you, Kassquit answered. And have you truly laid eggs?

Oh, yes, Regeya—so she thought of him—answered. A big square green one and a little purple one with orange spots.

Kassquit stared at the words on the screen, imagining a Big Ugly producing such a preposterous clutch. She dissolved in Tosevite-style noisy giggles. The picture was too deliciously absurd for anything else. I like you, she wrote. I really do.

“Holy smoke!” Sam put the phone back on its hook and sprang to his feet. “They’re three days early.”

“When President Warren gave them to you, he said the best guess for when they’d hatch might be ten days off either way.” Jonathan Yeager spoke with the usual impatience of youth for age. He’d turned twenty not too long before. Sam Yeager didn’t like thinking of it in those terms; it reminded him he’d turned fifty-six not too long before. Jonathan was already on his way up the hall. “Are you coming or not?” he demanded.

“If you don’t get out of the way, I’ll trample you,” Sam answered.

Jonathan laughed tolerantly. He was a couple of inches taller than his father, and wider through the shoulders. If he didn’t feel like being trampled, Sam would have had a devil of a time doing it. The overhead light gleamed off Jonathan’s shaved head and off the body paint adorning his chest and belly: by what it said, he was a landcruiser-engine mechanic. Young people all over the world imitated Lizard styles and thought their elders stodgy for clucking.

Sam’s wife Barbara was standing in front of the incubator. The new gadget made the service porch even more crowded than it had been when it held just that washing machine and drier and water heater. “One of the eggshells already has a little hole in it,” Barbara said excitedly.

“I want to see,” Sam said, though getting close to the incubator in that cramped little space wasn’t easy. He went on, “I grew up on a farm, remember. I ought to know something about how eggs work.”

“Something, maybe,” Barbara said with a distinct sniff, “but nobody—nobody on Earth, anyhow—has ever watched a Lizard egg hatch till now.”

As she often did, she left him struggling for a comeback. While he was struggling, Jonathan gave him something else to think about: “Dad, may I call Karen to come over and watch them with us?”

His girlfriend was as fascinated by the Race as he was. She wore body paint, too, often with nothing but a tiny halter top to preserve the decencies. She didn’t shave her head, though some girls did. But that wasn’t what made Yeager hesitate. He said, “You know I didn’t get these eggs to entertain you... or Karen.”

“Of course I know that,” his son said indignantly. “Do you think I’m addled or something?” That bit of slang had made it from the Lizards’ language into English.

“No, of course not,” Sam answered, doing his best to remember how touchy he’d been when he was twenty. “But it’s liable to be important not to let anyone know we have Lizard eggs—or hatchlings, which is what we’ll have pretty darn quick now.” Eighteen years of minor-league ball and twenty in the Army had given him a vocabulary that could blister paint at forty paces. Around his wife and son, he did his best not to use too much of it.

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “What are you going to do, Dad, hide them in the garage whenever people or males of the Race come over?”

“When males of the Race come over, I just might,” Sam said. But he sighed. His son had a point. His orders were to raise the baby Lizards as much like human beings as he could. How was he supposed to do that if they never met anybody but his family and him? With another sigh, he nodded. “Okay, go ahead. But when she gets here, I’m going to have to warn her she can’t blab.”

“Sure, Dad.” Jonathan was all smiles now that he’d got his way. “This is so hot!” The Race liked heat. That made it a term of approval. He sprinted for the telephone.

Worry in her voice, Barbara said, “Sooner or later, the Race is going to find out that we have these hatchlings. There’ll be trouble when that happens?’

“I expect you’re right,” Yeager said. “But it’ll be trouble for the government, not trouble for us. If we have to give them up, we have to give them up, that’s all. No point to worrying too much ahead of time, right?”

“Right,” Barbara said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

Sam didn’t know that he was convinced, either, but he forced whatever worries he had down to the bottom of his mind. “Let me have a look, will you?” he said, as he had a moment before. “I’m the only one in the house who hasn’t seen the eggs this morning.”

Now that Jonathan was gone, Barbara had a little more room to move on the service porch. As she stepped aside, Yeager lifted the lid on top of the incubator and peered down. The two eggs inside, both a good deal larger than hen’s eggs, were yellow, speckled with brown and white; he would have bet they got laid in sand. Sure enough, one shell showed a small hole. “Will you take a look at that?” he said softly.

Barbara had already taken a look at that. Her question—typical of her questions—was very much to the point: “Do you really think we’ll be able to take care of them, Sam?”

“Well, hon, we managed with Jonathan, and he turned out okay,” Yeager said.

“I see three things wrong with that as an answer,” she said crisply. She ticked them off on her fingers: “Number one, we’re twenty years older than we were then. Number two, there are two of these eggs, and there was only one of him. And number three, not to belabor the obvious, they’re Lizards. It won’t be like raising babies.”

“It’s supposed to be as much like raising babies as we can make it,” Sam replied. “That’s why we’ve got the job, not a fancy lab somewhere. But yeah, you’re right; from everything I’ve read, it won’t be the same.”

“From everything I’ve read, too.” Barbara set a hand on his arm. “Are they really going to be like little wild animals till they’re three or four years old?”

He did his best to make light of it, saying, “What, you don’t think Jonathan was?” Instead of letting her hand rest quietly on his sleeve, she started drumming her fingers there. He coughed sheepishly, then sighed. “From everything I’ve been able to pick up, that’s about right. They don’t learn to talk as fast as babies do, and they’re able to move around by themselves as soon as they hatch. If that doesn’t make them little wild animals, I don’t know what would. Except we’re supposed to do our best to turn them into little tame animals instead.”

“I wonder if we can,” Barbara said. “How many stories does the Race tell about eggs back on Home that hatched in out-of-the-way places, and about Lizards that lived like hunting beasts till they were found and civilized?”

“Lots of them,” Sam allowed. “Of course, we have stories like that, too.”

“Wild children.” Barbara nodded. “But even in those, something always helps the babies when they’re small—the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, for instance.” She had her literary references all lined up; she’d done graduate work in medieval English. “And just about all of our stories are legends—myths, really. The ones from the Lizards sound like news items; they read as if they came off the United Press International wire.”

Before Yeager could answer, Jonathan came running back onto the service porch. “Karen’s on her way,” he reported breathlessly. “She says not to let them hatch before she gets here.”

“Fine with me,” Sam said. “Did she tell you how we were supposed to manage that?” Jonathan glared at him. He’d been glared at by professionals, from managers and umpires all the way up to generals and a couple of presidents. He wasn’t about to let his son faze him. He pointed down into the incubator. “Look—the Lizard inside the other egg’s starting to poke his way out, too.”

They jockeyed for position in front of the incubator; it wasn’t easy for all of them to see at once. Sure enough, both eggshells had holes in them now. Jonathan said, “Those are more tears than cracks. The shells look kind of leathery, don’t they, not hard, like hens’ eggs are.”

“As hens’ eggs are,” Barbara said, and then, under her breath, “Honestly, I don’t know what they teach people these days.”

Having watched a lot of chicks hatching, Sam knew it didn’t happen instantly. Sure enough, the tears in the shells hadn’t got much bigger before the front doorbell rang. Jonathan dashed off to the door, and returned a moment later with Karen. “I greet you, Senior Ordnance Specialist,” Sam said in the language of the Race, eyeing her body paint. With both Barbara and Jonathan there, he conscientiously didn’t eye the skin on which the body paint was displayed. That wasn’t easy—she was a pretty redhead, and freckled all over—but he managed.

“I greet you, superior sir,” she answered in the same language. Like Jonathan, like the rest of the younger generation, she couldn’t remember a time when the Lizards hadn’t been around. She and he studied their language at UCLA the same way they studied math or chemistry. Despite aping the Race, they took Lizards more for granted than Sam or Barbara ever would.

Four people crowding around the incubator made looking in harder than ever. Karen happened to have the best view when the first Lizard’s snout poked out of the shell. “Look!” she said. “He’s got a little horn on the end of his nose.”

“It’s not a horn, it’s an egg tooth,” Sam said. “Turtles and snakes and ordinary small-l lizards have ’em, too, to help them hatch. It’ll drop off in a few days.”

Little by little, the baby Lizards (hatchlings sounded reproachfully in his mind, in the language of the Race) fought their way free of the eggs that had confined them. They were a light greenish brown, lighter than they would be as adults. Their scaly hides glistened with the last fluids from the eggs, though the lightbulbs in the incubators swiftly dried them. “Their heads look too big,” Jonathan said.

“So did yours, when you were first born,” Sam said. Barbara nodded. Jonathan looked embarrassed, though Karen’s head had undoubtedly looked too big for her body when she was a newborn, too.

Hearing voices above them, the Lizard hatchlings turned their tiny eye turrets toward the people. Sam wondered what he looked like to them. Nothing good, evidently; they skittered around the bottom of the incubator, looking for somewhere to hide. Jonathan hadn’t done that when he was a baby. And thank God, too, Sam thought.

He reached in to grab one of the Lizards. It hissed and snapped at him. Also unlike Jonathan as a newborn, it had a mouthful of sharp little teeth. He jerked his hand back. “Where are those leather gloves?” he asked.