#straha

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.”

“Wait for me,” he told the driver as the motorcar pulled to a stop in front of Major Yeager’s home. He knew it was an unnecessary order as soon as he gave it, but, though he commanded no one any more, he still liked to see things clawed down tight.

“It shall be done,” the driver said, and took out a paperbound book. The cover showed an intelligent being unlike any with which Straha was familiar. Seeing Straha’s eye turrets turn toward it, the driver remarked, “Science fiction.” In the language of the Race, it would have been a contradiction in terms. But Straha remembered that Yeager was also addicted to the stuff, and claimed it had helped give him his unmatched insight into the way the Race thought. Straha reckoned that one more proof of how strange the Big Uglies were.

“I greet you, Shiplord,” Yeager said as Straha came to the door. “The two emissaries from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army will be coming in an hour or so. I hope you do not mind.”

“Would it matter if I did?” Straha asked before remembering his manners: “I greet you, Major Yeager.”

Not directly answering the exile’s bitter question, Yeager said, “I hoped you might be able to tell them useful things about how the Race conducts itself, things they could take back to their homeland with them. They will be returning soon.”

“It is possible,” Straha said. “I do not claim it is likely, but it is possible. And what shall we discuss before these other Big Uglies arrive?”

“Come into the study,” Yeager said obliquely. “Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you alcohol? Can I get you ginger?”

“Alcohol, please—rum.” Straha used an English word. “Ginger later, perhaps. I have been trying to cut back on my tasting lately.” He hadn’t succeeded, but he had been trying.

“Rum. It shall be done.” Yeager attended to it. He had some himself, with cubes of ice in it. Straha did not care for drinks so cold. After they had both sipped, the Tosevite asked, “And have you heard anything new about who might have attacked the ships of the colonization fleet?”

“I have not,” Straha answered, “and, I admit, this perplexes me. You Big Uglies are not usually so astute in such matters. The incentive here, of course, is larger than it would be in other cases.”

“Yes, I would say so,” Yeager agreed. “Whoever did it, the Race will punish—and whoever did it deserves to be punished, too. I wonder if your contacts with males—maybe even with females now, for all I know—in the occupied parts of Tosev 3 had brought you any new information.”

“As far as who the culprit may be, no,” Straha said. “I have learned that one of the ships destroyed carried most of the specialists in imperial administration. Whether the guilty party knew this in advance or not, I cannot say. My sources cannot say, either. I would be inclined to doubt it, but am without strong evidence for my doubt.”

“I think you are right. The attack came too soon for Tosevites to have known such details about the colonization fleet—I believe,” Major Yeager said. “But it is an interesting datum, and not one I had met before. I thank you, Shiplord.”

“You are welcome.” Straha drank more rum. Another minor treachery to his kind. After so many larger acts of treason, one more was hardly noticeable.

Yeager did not scorn him as a traitor, not where it showed. He did not think Yeager scorned him at any deeper level. The Big Ugly was too interested in the Race in general to do anything of that sort: one more part of his character that made him so unusual.

Before too long, the Chinese Tosevites came. Yeager introduced them as Liu Han and Liu Mei. They spoke the language of the Race fairly well, with an accent different from the American’s. Straha noted that Yeager’s son, who had paid little attention to his own arrival despite fascination with the Race, joined the group and made polite conversation for a time after the new Big Uglies arrived.

From their voices, both of them were female. Did Jonathan Yeager find one of them sexually attractive? If so, which? After a while, Straha remembered that Liu Mei was Liu Han’s daughter. Since Jonathan was younger than Sam Yeager, that made him more likely to be interested in Liu Mei—or so Straha thought. The subtleties of Tosevite behavior patterns were lost on him, and he knew it.

Presently, Sam Yeager spoke in English: “Enough chitchat—time to talk turkey.” Straha didn’t follow the idiom, but Jonathan evidently did, for he left. Liu Mei stayed. Maybe that meant she didn’t find him attractive. Maybe it meant she put duty above desire, which Straha found admirable. Or maybe it just meant the exiled shiplord didn’t fully grasp the situation.

Liu Han said, “Shiplord, how do we best use ginger against the Race?”

“Give it to females, obviously,” Straha answered. “The more females in season, the more addled males become.”

“I understand this,” the Chinese female said—was that impatience in her voice? “How to give ginger to females over and over to keep males addled all the time?”

“Ah,” Straha said. Liu Han did see the obvious, then; the ex-shiplord hadn’t been sure. He went on, “Introducing it into food or drink would do the job, I think. They might not even know they were tasting.... No, they would, because they would come into their season.”

“Truth,” Liu Han said. “This endangers those who prepare food for the Race; they would naturally be suspect.”

“Ah,” Straha said again. “Yes, that is so.” He hadn’t thought the Big Uglies would care; they hadn’t seemed to worry much about spending lives during the fighting.

“If we could get enough females and males excited at the same time, it might be worth the risk,” Liu Mei said: maybe the Tosevites, or some of them, retained their ruthlessness after all.

Jonathan Yeager came back into the study. Did the younger female’s voice draw him, as pheromones would have drawn a male of the Race? “That could get a lot of people hurt,” he observed. He might be interested in Liu Mei, but was not addled by her; Straha heard reproof in his voice.

“It is war,” Liu Mei said simply. “Here, the fighting is over. You Americans have won your freedom. In China, the struggle against the imperialism of the Race goes on. The People’s Liberation Army shall free my not-empire, too.”

“And make it as free as the SSSR?” Straha inquired with sarcasm he thoroughly enjoyed. “That is the model the People’s Liberation Army uses, is it not?”

Sam Yeager whistled softly. Straha had learned Big Uglies sometimes did that when they thought someone had made a good point. But Liu Han said, “We would be freer under our own kind at their worst than the Race at their best, for we did not choose to have the Race come here and try to set itself over us.”

Straha leaned forward. “Now there is a topic on which we could have considerable debate,” he said, anticipating that debate. “If you believe that—”

Several loud pops resounded outside, followed by a fierce, ripping roar. Straha was slower to recognize the noise than he should have been; as shiplord, he’d had no experience with close combat. Before he could react, Sam Yeager spoke in English: “That’s gunfire. Everybody down!”

Straha dove for the floor. Yeager did not follow his own order. He grabbed a pistol from a desk drawer in the study and hurried out toward the front of the house. “Be careful, Sam,” his wife called from the next room.

More gunfire sounded from the direction of the street. A window—or maybe more than one—shattered. Yeager’s pistol resounded, the noise shockingly loud indoors. Liu Han came as close to taking the shots calmly as anyone could—closer than Straha was doing, for that matter. Liu Mei never seemed to get excited about anything. And Jonathan Yeager, though he had no weapon, hurried to his father’s aid.

“It’s over,” Sam Yeager called from the front room. “I think it’s over, anyhow. Barbara, call the cops, not that half the neighborhood hasn’t already. Jesus, I can’t afford new window glass, but we sure as hell need it.”

Barbara Yeager came in and picked up the telephone. Straha went out into the front room to see what had happened. His driver was coming toward the house, an automatic weapon in his hand. “Is the shiplord all right?” he shouted.

“I am well,” Straha answered.

“He’s fine,” Yeager said at the same time. “What the devil happened out there?”

“I was sitting in the car, reading my book,” the driver answered. “The guy who drives for the Chinese women was in the car behind me, doing whatever he was doing. A car came by. A couple of guys leaned out the window and started blazing away. Lousy technique. I think I may have nailed one of them. Thanks for the backup, Yeager.”

“Any time,” Sam Yeager said. “You okay?”

“Right as rain,” Straha’s driver answered. “The Chinese guy, though, he took one right in the ear, poor bastard. Never knew what hit him, anyway.”

Through the howls that Tosevite constabulary vehicles used to warn others out of their way, Yeager said, “Whom were they after? The shiplord? The Chinese women? Could have been either one.”

Someone trying to kill me? Straha thought. He hadn’t imagined Atvar could sink so low. Assassination was a Tosevite ploy, not one the Race used. No, he thought. Not one the Race had used. Maybe Atvar was able to learn some unpleasant things from the Tosevites after all.

“Either one’s possible,” his driver said. “And how about you, Major? Got any people who aren’t fond of you?”

“I didn’t think so,” Yeager said slowly. “It’d be a real kick in the teeth finding out I was wrong. The shiplord and the Red Chinese are a lot more important targets than I’ll ever be, though.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Straha’s driver agreed, adding, “No offense.”

He regretted saying that a moment later, for the Big Ugly asked the same question all the others had: “Which not-empire do you think attacked the colonization fleet, and why?”

Having answered, How should I know, when I am not a Tosevite? any number of times already, Straha felt mischief stir in him. Had his character not had that streak, he wouldn’t have tried to overthrow Atvar and he likely wouldn’t have fled from the conquest fleet to the Tosevites. And I would be better off today, he thought, but not till after he had answered, “Why, this one, of course—the United States.”

“Really?” Herter said. “Why do you think that?”

“It stands to reason,” Straha answered. “Your not-empire could hurt the Race more easily than either the Reich or the Soviet Union, because fewer folk would expect you to try it.”

He heard faint scratching sounds as the reporter wrote that down; recorders were less common here than among the Race. “Really?” the Big Ugly repeated. “Well, that is something, by the Emperor! That will give me a front-page headline every other newspaper in the not-empire will envy. Let me ask you some more questions about this. Why—?”

“Wait,” Straha said. He did not care to hear the reporter swearing by the Emperor. The Tosevite cared nothing about the Emperor, and was probably using the only oath in the language of the Race he knew—and the Emperor assuredly cared nothing about the Tosevite. But that was only a detail. Straha asked, “You would print this in your newspaper?”

“Of course,” Herter answered. “This will be the biggest story since the attack on the fleet.”

“But I have accused the government of this not-empire of perpetrating that attack,” Straha said, wondering if the Big Ugly could speak the language of the Race himself but had trouble understanding what he heard in it. Straha’s English was sometimes like that.

But Herter did understand him. “Oh, yes,” the reporter said brightly. “That is what makes it such a big story. Now my next question is—”

“Wait,” Straha said again. “The government of this not-empire would never allow you to print such a story.”

“Of course they will,” Herter said. “This is not the Reich. This is not the Soviet Union. Here, we have freedom of the press.”

The phrase was in the language of the Race, but alien to it in spirit. Straha had heard it before, of course, but never in such a context as this: “Your not-emperor would allow you to print a story that criticizes him? I find it hard to believe.”

“It is truth,” Herter said with an emphatic cough. “We are a free not-empire. We are almost the only free not-empire left on the face of this planet. We have no censors telling us what goes in the newspapers and what does not.”

“None?” Straha had not really imagined the American passion for doing exactly as one pleased went so far as that.

“None,” the reporter answered. “We did during the fighting, but we got rid of them again after that.”

“Why would your government let ordinary males and females criticize it?” Straha asked in honest bewilderment. “What good does it do? What good do you imagine it does?” He could see none, not even turning both mental eye turrets in the direction of the problem.

But Calvin Herter could, and did: “How better to make sure the government does what the males and females of the United States want it to do than by giving them the right to criticize freely?”

“Governments do not do what males and females want them to do.” Straha spoke as if quoting a law of nature. As far as he was concerned, he was quoting a law of nature. “Governments do what governments want to do. How could it be otherwise, when they hold the power?”

“You have lived in America for a long time,” Herter said. “How have you lived here so long without getting a better idea of how the government of the United States works?”

“You count snouts,” Straha said. “Whichever side can persuade the most snouts to join it prevails. It does not have to be clever. It does not have to be wise. It only has to be popular.”

“There may be something to that,” Herter admitted. “But with any other way to run a government, a policy does not have to be clever or wise or popular. There is the drawback the Race faces—and the Nazis and Communists, too.”

Underestimating a Big Ugly’s wits rarely paid. The Tosevites were not stupid and, whatever else one said about them, were inspired argufiers. But Straha knew he was on solid ground in this dispute, and fired back: “Often policies that are clever or wise are not popular. A snoutcounting government cannot use them, because not enough snouts will line up behind them. This is the drawback the United States faces.”

“No system is perfect,” Herter said.

“Our system is perfect—for us,” Straha said. “I do not know that it would be perfect for Tosevites. But I do not know that it would not be, either. I am willing to believe—I am more than willing to believe—that Tosevites have yet to establish a social system perfect for themselves.” He let his mouth fall open at the neatness with which he had squelched Herter.

But, like so many other Big Uglies, Herter refused to stay squelched. “If we are so imperfect, Shiplord, how is it that we, with our short history, fought the Race to a standstill even though you have a long history?”

Straha started to slap him down for his insolence: his first, automatic, response, as it would have been for any self-respecting male of the Race. Before he spoke, though, he realized what most other males of the Race would not have—the Big Ugly had a point. With a sigh, he answered, “Scholars of the Race—and perhaps Tosevite scholars as well—will be studying that question for thousands of years to come. I do not believe it to be one with a simple answer.”

“You are probably right about that,” the reporter said. “Now, can we return to the question I asked you before: Why do you believe the United States was the not-empire that exploded the ships from the colonization fleet?”

He was serious. Straha would not have believed it, and still did not want to believe it. But he had no choice but to believe it. That being so, he said, “I do not really believe that. I find it highly unlikely. I wanted to place a biting pest on your tailstump, to watch you leap in the air when its proboscis pierced your skin. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“I think so,” Herter replied. “In English, we call that a practical joke.” The two key words were in his own language.

“A practical joke,” Straha repeated. Thinking back on it, he’d heard Sam Yeager use the phrase a couple of times. If anything, the Big Uglies seemed fonder of the thing than the Race was. He went on, “Yes, I suppose that is what it was. I did not imagine you would publish it, so I said it to see what you would do.”

“Not funny, Shiplord. Not funny at all,” Calvin Herter said with another emphatic cough. “You might have touched off a war between the United States and the Race. That goes too far for a practical joke.”

“I suppose so,” Straha said, at the same time wondering whether a war between the United States and the Race—one in which the Race wrecked the United States, of course—would be enough to allow him to return to the society of his own kind, assuming he survived it.

He had his doubts. As long as Atvar lived, nothing was likely to allow him to return to the society of his own kind. When the fleetlord got a grudge, he kept it.

Maybe Atvar would get killed in a war between the United States and the Race. As far as Straha was concerned, that would improve the Race’s chances of winning such a war. Atvar would have been the ideal fleetlord for the conquest of the Tosev 3 the Race thought it would find. He was careful, methodical, and probably could have completed the job without losing a male. As things were...

As things were, Straha realized Herter had said something, but he had no idea what it was. “Please repeat that,” he said. Speaking with another male of the Race, he would have been embarrassed. To a certain degree, he was embarrassed anyhow, but only to a certain degree.

“I asked whether, once the colonization fleet lands, you will be glad to have females with you once more,” the reporter said.

“In the sense that their arrival means we will be able to plant new generations of the Race on Tosev 3, yes,” Straha replied. “In the sense that we will be wild for mating, as you Tosevites might be, of course not. Our nature is different.” For which I am heartily glad, he added to himself.

“You of the Race miss a lot of the spark in life, or so it seems to me,” Herter said.

“You Tosevites let your mating habits drive you wild, or so it seems to me,” Straha replied. “I am content—more than content—to be as I am.”

“Me, too,” Herter said with an emphatic cough.

“I believe you,” Straha said. He wondered what sort of progress the Race’s scientists had made since his defection toward unraveling the connection between the Big Uglies’ sexual patterns and their society. Signals intercepts and conversations with other defectors and prisoners who had stayed in the USA did not tell him everything he wanted to know. He asked, “Have you any further questions?”

“Shiplord, I have not,” the reporter answered. “And if I did, how would I know you were telling the truth?”

Straha’s mouth fell open. “How would you know?” he echoed. “You would not. That is part of the risk you run when you speak with me.”

Exile. The word tolled mournfully in his head, just as if it were reverberating from his hearing diaphragms. In exchange for his intimate knowledge of the Race, the American Tosevites had treated him and continued to treat him as well as they knew how. Anything he asked for, they gave him. That was why he dwelt in Los Angeles these days: a climate not impossibly cold, not impossibly humid. Whenever he chose, he ate ham, which came close to a delicacy he’d known back on Home. He had video gear purchased from the Race, and electronic entertainments either purchased after the fighting or captured during it.

Exile. When he wanted it, he even had the company of other males. But they were captives, not defectors; no one could blame them for collaborating with the Big Uglies. People could blame him, could and did. However useful traitors were, no one loved them. That had proved as true among the Tosevites as it was among the Race.

Still, time had slipped past without too much unpleasantness till the colonization fleet came into Tosev’s solar system. Very soon now, in the lands that the Race ruled, it would set up a good facsimile of life on Home. And Straha would be—the Big Uglies had a phrase for it—on the outside looking in.

“I do not care,” he said. But that was a lie, and he knew it. If he hadn’t fled, he would have become a part of that life. Atvar would have degraded him, even arrested him, but would not have harmed him. Big Uglies sometimes enjoyed inflicting pain. The Race didn’t, and had had ever so much trouble understanding the difference.

Feeling pain, now, when it came to feeling pain, the Tosevites and the Race were very much alike. Straha opened the drawer of a wooden cabinet of a size to suit Big Uglies better than males of the Race, one with fixtures made for a Tosevite’s hands.

In the drawer, among other things, lay a well-sealed glass jar full of powdered ginger cured with lime, the Race’s favorite form of the herb. The American Big Uglies gave Straha all the ginger he wanted, too, though they were much less generous about letting their own leaders enjoy unlimited drugs.

He poured some ginger onto the fine scales covering the palm of his hand, then raised it toward his mouth. Of itself, his tongue shot out. In a couple of quick licks, the ginger disappeared.

“Ahhh!” he hissed: a long sigh of pleasure. When ginger first lifted him, he forgot he was all alone among barbarous aliens. No, that wasn’t quite true. He remembered, but he no longer cared. With ginger coursing through him, he felt taller and stronger than any Big Ugly, and more clever than all the Big Uglies and all the other males of the Race on Tosev 3. Ideas filled his long, narrow head, each of them so brilliant it dazzled him before he could fully grasp it.

He knew ginger only seemed to turn him tall and strong and brilliant. It didn’t actually make him any of those things. Males who acted as if what the ginger told them were true had a way of dying before their time. That was one reason he tried to keep his tasting within the bounds of moderation.

Descending from ecstasy was the other reason. He had not felt so low going down from the 206th Emperor Yower to the surface of Tosev 3 as he did when the drug’s exaltation began to leach out of him. The harder he tried to grasp it, the more readily it slipped through his fingers. At last it was all gone, leaving him lower than he had been before he tasted, and painfully aware of how low that was.

Sometimes, to hold the crushing depression at bay, he would taste again when the first one wore off, or even for a third time on the heels of the second. But the herb-fueled exhilaration ebbed from one taste to another right after it, while the post-tasting gloom only got worse. Unlimited ginger, however much a taster might crave such a thing, did not mean unlimited happiness.

And so, instead of taking a second taste, Straha put the ginger jar back in the drawer and slammed it shut. He picked up the telephone. Like the cabinet, it was of Tosevite manufacture, the handset made with the distance between a Big Ugly’s mouth and absurd external ear in mind, the holes in the dial designed for blunt, clawless Tosevite fingers.

Those holes served his fingerclaws well enough. The clicks and squawks of the electronics as the call went through were partly familiar, partly strange. The bell at the other end of the line was a purely Tosevite conceit; the Race would have used some sort of hiss instead.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end was Tosevite, too, the greeting the one the local Big Uglies used among themselves on the telephone. Straha had picked up some English during his long years of exile, but Big Uglies who wished to speak with him commonly used the language of the Race.

Straha used his own language now: “I greet you, Major Yeager.”

“I greet you, Shiplord,” Yeager replied, dropping English without the least hesitation. Of all the Tosevites Straha had met, he came closest to being able to think like a male of the Race. His question was very much to the point: “Feeling lonely tonight?”

“Yes.” Straha choked back an emphatic cough. His hands folded into fists, so that fingerclaws dug into his palms. Most Big Uglies would not have noticed what he hadn’t quite said. Yeager was different. Yeager heard what wasn’t said as well as what was.

“We have known each other a long time now, Shiplord,” the Tosevite said. “I remember thinking even in the early days, when your folk and mine were still fighting, how hard a road you had chosen for yourself.”

“You thought further ahead than I was thinking when I left the conquest fleet,” Straha said. “I get an itch under the scales admitting such a thing to a Tosevite, but it is truth.” The Race had got where it was by planning ahead, by always thinking of the long term. Straha hadn’t done that. He’d been paying ever since for not doing it. Exile.

As if to rub that in, Yeager said, “You always did think more like a Big Ugly than most other males of the Race I have known.” He used the Race’s slang name for his kind without taking it as an insult, the way some Tosevites did.

“I do not think like a Big Ugly,” Straha said with dignity. “I do not wish to think like a Big Ugly. I am a male of the Race. It is merely that I am not a reactionary male of the Race, as so many officers of the conquest fleet proved to be.” Venting his anger at Atvar and Kirel to a Big Ugly was demeaning—a telling measure of just how lonely he’d become—but he couldn’t help it.

Yeager let out a few barks of noisy Tosevite laughter. “I did not say you thought like a Tosevite, Shiplord. If you were one of us, you would be a hopeless reactionary. Even so, that makes you a radical among the Race.”

“Truth,” Straha said. “You understand us well. How did this happen? I know of your attachment to the wild literature your kind produced before the conquest fleet arrived, but others were attached to this literature, too, and they have not your skill in dealing with the Race.”

“In fact, Shiplord, some of our best males and females for dealing with your folk were science-fiction readers before the conquest fleet came,” Yeager replied, the key term necessarily being in English. “But I count myself lucky. I could not have stayed a paid athlete much longer, and I do not know what I would have done after that. When the conquest fleet came, it let me discover I was good at something I had not known I could do at all. Is that not strange?”

“For the Race, it would be surpassingly strange,” Straha answered. “For you Tosevites? I doubt it. So much of everything you do seems built around lucky accidents. But not all accidents are lucky. If we had come two hundred years later—a hundred of your years, I mean—we might have found this planet dead because of nuclear war.”

“It could be so, Shiplord,” Yeager said. “We can never know, but it could be so. But if you had waited a little longer than that, we might have come to Home before you ever got to Tosev 3.”

Straha hissed in horror. Big Uglies played the game of what-might-have-been far more naturally, far more fluidly, than did the Race. Straha tried to imagine a conquest fleet full of bloodthirsty Tosevites descending on calm, peaceful Home. Save for conquests of other species, the Race had not fought a war in more than a hundred thousand years. Except when a conquest fleet was abuilding, no military hardware above the level the police needed even existed. The Big Uglies would have had an easy time of it.

He did not say that, for fear of giving Yeager ideas—not that any Big Ugly needed help coming up with ideas. What the exiled shiplord did say was, “One day, Big Uglies will visit Home. One day, Big Uglies will bow before the Emperor.” In spite of having abandoned the Race, Straha cast down his eyes at speaking of his sovereign.

“I wish I could visit your planet,” Yeager said. “We Tosevites aren’t very good at bowing to anyone, though. You may have noticed that.”

“Snoutcounting,” Straha said disparagingly. “How you think to rule yourselves through snoutcounting...” Nictitating membranes slid across his eyes, a sure sign he was growing sleepy. “I thank you for your time, Major Yeager. I shall rest now.”

“Rest well, Shiplord,” the Tosevite said.

“You, Sam Yeager, I think you could succeed at this,” Straha said, which made Sam feel damn good. He thought he could have gained even more fluency in the Lizards’ language if he hadn’t also had to spend time with Robert Goddard. On the other hand, he would have learned more about rockets if he hadn’t had to spend time with Straha and the other Lizard POWs.

And he would have learned more about his baby son if he hadn’t been in the Army. That would have kept Barbara happier, too; he worried about not seeing her enough. There weren’t enough hours in a day, in a year, in a lifetime, to do all the things he wanted to do. That was true all the time, but trying to keep up during a war rubbed your nose in it.

Straha touched the frequency-advance toggle. The Lizard numbers in the display showed that the radio was now monitoring a frequency a tenth of a megacycle higher (or rather, something that worked out to be about an eighth of a megacycle—the Lizards naturally used their own units rather than those of mankind). A male’s voice came out of the speaker.

Yeager leaned forward and listened intently. The Lizard was apparently in a rear area, and complaining about rockets falling nearby and disrupting resupply efforts for the troops pushing toward Denver. “That’s good news,” Sam said, scribbling notes.

“Truth,” Straha agreed. “Your ventures into uncharted technology are paying a handsome profit for your species. If the Race were so innovative, Tosev 3 would long since have been conquered—provided the Race had not blown itself to radioactive dust in innovative frenzy.”

“You think that’s what we would have done if you hadn’t invaded?” Sam asked.

“It is certainly one of the higher probabilities,” Straha said, and Yeager was hard-pressed to disagree with him. The ex-shiplord flipped to a new frequency. The Lizard talking now sounded angry as all get-out. “He is ordering the dismissal, demotion, and transfer of a local commander in a region called Illinois,” Straha said. Yeager nodded. The Lizard went on, “Where is this Illinois place?”

Sam showed him on a map. He was listening, too. “Something about letting a pack of prisoners escape or get rescued or something. The fellow who’s cursing him is really doing quite a job, isn’t he?”

“If said snout-to-snout, telling a male that someone shit in his egg before it hatched is guaranteed to start a fight,” Straha said.

“I believe it.” Sam listened to the radio some more. “They’re moving that incompetent officer to—upstate New York.” He wrote it down. “That’s worth knowing. With luck, we’ll be able to take advantage of his weaknesses over there, too.”

“Truth,” Straha said again, this time in bemused tones. “You Big Uglies aggressively exploit the intelligence you gather, and you gather great quantities of it. Do you do this in your own conflicts as well?”

“Don’t know,” Yeager answered. “I’ve never been in a war before, and I’m only a little fellow in this one.” He thought back to his ballplaying days, and to all the signs he and his teammates had stolen. Mutt Daniels was a genius at that kind of thing. He wondered how—and if—Mutt was doing these days.

Straha shifted to yet another frequency. An excited-sounding Lizard was relaying a long, involved message. “Ah, that is most interesting,” Straha said when he was done.

“I didn’t follow all of it,” Sam confessed, embarrassed at having to say that after Straha had praised his grasp of the Lizards’ tongue. “Something about ginger and calculator fraud, whatever that is.”

“Not calculator fraud—computer fraud,” Straha said. “I do not blame you for not understanding completely. You Big Uglies, while technically far more advanced than you have any business being, as yet have no real grasp of the potential of computing machines.”

“Maybe not,” Yeager said. “Sounds like we don’t have any grasp of how to commit crimes with them, either.”

Straha’s mouth dropped open in amusement. “Committing the crime is easy. Males in the payroll section diverted payments to ginger purveyors into accounts of which only they and the purveyors—and, of course, the computers—were aware. Since no one else knew these accounts existed, no one not party to the secret could access them. The computers would not announce their presence; it was, in essence, a perfect scheme.”

“We have a saying that there’s no such thing as a perfect crime,” Yeager remarked. “What went wrong with this one?”

Straha laughed again. “Nothing is accident-proof. A male in the accounting section who was not part of the miscreants’ scheme was investigating a legitimate account. But he made a mistake in entering the number of that account and found himself looking at one of the concealed ones. He recognized it at once for what it was and notflied his superiors, who began a larger investigation. Many males will find themselves in difficulties because of it.”

“Hope you won’t be angry if I tell you that doesn’t make me too unhappy,” Sam said. “Who would have thought the Race would turn out to have drug fiends? Makes you seem almost human—no offense.”

“I shall endeavor to take none,” Straha replied with dignity.

Yeager kept his face straight; Straha was getting pretty good at interpreting human expressions, and he didn’t want the Lizard to see how funny he thought that was. He said, “I wonder if we have any way to use the news, maybe make some of your people think males who aren’t ginger tasters really are. Something like that, anyhow.”

“You have an evilly twisted mind, Sam Yeager,” Straha said.

“Thank you,” Sam answered, which made Straha first jerk both eye turrets toward him and then start to laugh as he understood it was a joke. Yeager went on, “You might talk with some of our propaganda people, maybe ask if they want you to broadcast about it. Who knows what kind of trouble you might stir up?”

“Who indeed?” Straha said. “I shall do that.” It wasn’t quite It shall be done, the Lizards’ equivalent for Yes, sir, but it was more deference than Sam had ever got from Straha before. Little by little, he was earning respect.

When his shift was done, he started to go upstairs to see Barbara and Jonathan, but ran into Ristin and Ullhass in the hospital lobby. Those two Lizard POWs were old buddies; he’d captured them back in the summer of 1942, when the Lizard invasion was new and looked irresistible. By now, they seemed well on the way to becoming Americans, and wore their official U.S. prisoner-of-war red-white-and-blue body paint with considerable pride. They’d also picked up pretty good English over the last couple of years.

“Hey, Sam,” Ristin said in that language. “Baseball this afternoon?”

“Yes,” Ullhass echoed. “Baseball!” He added an emphatic cough.

“Maybe later—not now,” Sam said, to which both Lizards responded with steam-whistle noises of disappointment. With their fast, skittery movements, they made surprisingly good middle infielders, and had taken to the game well. Their small size and forward-sloping posture gave them a strike zone about the size of a postage stamp, too, so they were good leadoff men—well, leadoff males—even if they seldom hit the ball hard.

“Good weather for a game,” Ristin said, doing his best to tempt Sam. A lot of soldiers played ball when they were off duty, but Ristin and Ullhass were the only Lizards who joined in. With Yeager’s endless years of bush-league experience, everybody was glad to see him out there, and people had put up with his Lizard pals for his sake. Now Ullhass and Ristin were starting to get noticed for the way they played, not for their scaly hides.

“Maybe later,” Sam repeated. “Now I want to see my wife and son. If you don’t mind too much.” The Lizards sighed in resignation. They knew families mattered to Tosevites, but it didn’t feel real to them, any more than Yeager understood in his gut how much their precious Emperor meant to them. He headed for the stairs. Ristin and Ullhass started practicing phantom double plays. Ristin, who mostly played second, had a hell of a fast pivot.

Up on the fourth floor, Jonathan was telling the world in no uncertain terms that he didn’t care for something or other it had done to him. Listening to him yowl, Sam was glad the Lizards who lived up there weren’t around to hear the racket. It sometimes drove him a little squirrely, and he was a human being.

The crying stopped, very suddenly. Sam knew what that meant: Barbara had given the baby her breast. Sam smiled as he opened the door to their room. He was fond of his wife’s breasts, too, and figured the kid took after his old man.

Barbara looked up from the chair in which she was nursing Jonathan. She didn’t seem as badly beat up as she had just after he was born, but she wasn’t what you’d call perky, either. “Hello, honey,” she said. “Shut the door quietly, would you? He may fall asleep. He’s certainly been fussing as if he was tired.”

Sam noted the precise grammar there, as he often did when his wife talked. He sometimes envied her fancy education; he’d left high school to play ball, though an insatiable curiosity had kept him reading this and finding out little fragmented pieces of that ever since. Barbara never complained about his lack of formal schooling, but it bothered him anyhow.

Sure enough, Jonathan did go to sleep. The kid was growing; he took up more room in the cradle now than he had when he was first born. As soon as Sam saw he would stay down after Barbara put him in there, he touched her on the arm and said, “I got a present for you, hon. Well, really it’s a present for both of us, but you can go first with it. I’ve been saving it all morning long, so I figure I can last a little longer.”

The buildup intrigued her. “What do you have?” she breathed.

“It’s not anything fancy,” he warned. “Not a diamond, not a convertible.” They both laughed, not quite comfortably. It would be a long time, if ever, before you could start thinking about driving a convertible. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a new corncob pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco, then handed them to her with a flourish. “Here you go.”

She stared as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. “Where did you get them?”

“This colored guy came around early this morning, selling ’em,” Sam answered. “He’s from up in the northern part of the state, where they grow some tobacco. Cost me fifty bucks, but what the heck? I don’t have a whole lot of things to spend money on, so why not?”

“It’s all right with me. It’s better than all right with me, as a matter of fact.” Barbara stuck the empty pipe in her mouth. “I never smoked one of these before. I probably look like a Southern granny.”

“Babe, you always look good to me,” Yeager said. Barbara’s expression softened. Keeping your wife happy was definitely worth doing—especially when you meant every word you said. He tapped at the tobacco pouch with his index finger. “You want me to load the pipe for you?”

“Would you, please?” she said, so he did. He had a Zippo, fueled now not by lighter fluid but by moonshine. He had no idea how he’d keep it going when he ran out of flints, but that hadn’t happened yet. He flicked the wheel with his thumb. A pale, almost invisible alcohol flame sprang into being. He held it over the bowl of the pipe.

Barbara’s cheeks hollowed as she inhaled. “Careful,” Sam warned. “Pipe tobacco’s a lot stronger than what you get in cigarettes, and—” Her eyes crossed. She coughed like somebody in the last throes of consumption. “—you haven’t smoked much of anything lately,” he finished unnecessarily.

“No kidding.” Her voice was a raspy wheeze. “Remember that bit in Tom Sawyer? ‘First Pipes—“I’ve Lost My Knife,” ’ something like that. I know just how Tom felt. That stuff is strong.”

“Let me try,” Sam said, and took the pipe from her. He drew on it cautiously. He knew about pipe tobacco, and knew what any tobacco could do to you when you hadn’t smoked for a while. Even taking all that into account, Barbara was right; what smoldered in that pipe was strong as the devil. It might have been cured and mellowed for fifteen, maybe even twenty minutes—smoking it felt like scraping coarse sandpaper over his tongue and the inside of his mouth. Spit flooded from every salivary gland he owned, including a few he hadn’t known were there. He felt dizzy, almost woozy for a second—and he knew enough not to draw much smoke down into his lungs. He coughed a couple of times himself. “Wowie!”

“Here, give it back to me,” Barbara said. She made another, much more circumspect, try, then exhaled. “God! That is to tobacco what bathtub gin was to the real stuff.”

“You’re too young to know about bathtub gin,” he said severely. Memories of some pounding headaches came back to haunt him. He puffed on the pipe again himself. It wasn’t a bad comparison.

Barbara giggled. “One of my favorite uncles was a part-time bootlegger. I had quite a high-school graduation party—from what I remember of it, anyway.” She took the pipe back from Sam. “I’m going to need a while to get used to this again.”

“Yeah, we’ll probably be there just about when that pouch goes empty,” he agreed. “God knows when that colored fellow will come through town again. If he ever does.”

They smoked the bowl empty, then filled it again. The room grew thick with smoke. Sam’s eyes watered. He felt loose and easy, the way he had after a cigarette in the good old days. That he also felt slightly nauseated and his mouth like raw meat was only a detail, as far as he was concerned.

“That’s good,” Barbara said meditatively, and punctuated her words with another set of coughs. She waved those aside. “Worth it.”

“I think so, too.” Sam started to laugh. “Know what we remind me of?” When Barbara shook her head, he answered his own question: “We’re like a couple of Lizards with their tongues in the ginger jar.”

“That’s terrible!” Barbara exclaimed. Then she thought it over. “It is terrible, but you may be right. It is kind of like a drug—tobacco, I mean.”

“You bet it is. I tried quitting a couple of times when I was playing ball—didn’t like what it was doing to my wind. I couldn’t do it. I’d get all nervous and twitchy and I don’t know what. When you can’t get any, it’s not so bad: you don’t have a choice. But stick tobacco in front of us every day and we’ll go back to it, sure enough.”

Barbara sucked on the pipe again. She made a wry face. “Ginger tastes better, that’s for certain.”

“Yeah, I think so, too—now,” Sam said. “But if I’m smoking all the time, I won’t think so for long. You know, when you get down to it, coffee tastes pretty bad, too, or we wouldn’t have to fix it up with cream and sugar. But I like what coffee used to do for me when we had it.”

“So did I,” Barbara said wistfully. She pointed toward the cradle. “With him waking up whenever he feels like it, I could really use some coffee these days.”

“Why didn’t he?” Yeager asked. “I’ve always wondered about that. The Race never seemed to want to turn up the pressure more than one notch at a time. That let us—how would I say it?—I guess adapt is the word I want.”

“Truth,” Straha said, with another emphatic cough. “One thing we did not realize until far later than we should have was how adaptable you Tosevites are. Fool that he is, Atvar always intended to come as close as he could to the campaign we would have fought had you been the preindustrial savages we expected you to be. Even his eye turrets are not entirely locked in place, and he did conclude a greater effort would be called for, but he always did his best to keep the increases to a minimum, so as to have the least possible distortion in the plan with which we came to Tosev 3.”

“Most of you Lizards are like that, aren’t you?” Sam used mankind’s disparaging name for the Race as casually as Straha used the Race’s handle for humanity. “You don’t much care for change, do you?”

“Of course not,” Straha said—and, for a Lizard, he was a radical. “If you are in a good situation where you are, why. If you have any sense, would you want to alter it? It would be only too likely to get worse. Change must be most carefully controlled, or it can devastate an entire society.”

Sam grinned at him. “How do you account for us, then?”

“Our scholars will spend thousands of years attempting to account for you,” Straha answered. “It could be that, had we not arrived, you would have destroyed yourselves in relatively short order. You were, after all, already working to develop your own atomic weapons, and with those you would have had no trouble rendering this planet uninhabitable. Almost a pity you failed to do so.”

“Thanks a lot,” Yeager said. “We really love you Lizards a whole bunch, too.” He added an emphatic cough to that, even though he wasn’t sure whether the Race used them for sardonic effect. Straha’s mouth dropped open in amusement, so maybe they did—or maybe the ex-shiplord was laughing at the way Sam mangled his language.

Straha said, “Like most males of the Race, Atvar is a minimalist .You Big Uglies, now, you are maximalists. In the long term, as I pointed out, this will probably prove disastrous for your species. I cannot imagine you Tosevites building an empire stable for a hundred thousand years. Can you?”

“Nope,” Sam admitted. The years Straha used were only about half as long as their earthly equivalents, but still—Fifty thousand years ago, people had been living in caves and worrying about mammoths and saber-tooth tigers. Yeager couldn’t begin to imagine what things would be like in another fifty years, let alone fifty thousand.

“In the short term, though, your penchant for change without warning presents us with stresses our kind has never before faced,” Straha said. “By the standards of the Race, I am a maximalist—thus I would have been well suited to lead us against your kind.” By human standards, Straha was more mossbound than a Southern Democrat with forty-five years’ seniority, but Yeager didn’t see any good way to tell him so. The Lizard went on, “I believe in taking action, not waiting until it is forced upon me, as Atvar and his clique do. When the Soviets’ nuclear bomb showed us how disastrously we’d misjudged your kind, I tried to have Atvar the fool ousted and someone more suitable, such as myself, raised to overall command. And when that failed, I took the direct action of fleeing to you Tosevites rather than waiting for Atvar to have his revenge upon me.”

“Truth,” Yeager said, and it was truth—maybe Straha really was a fireball by Lizard standards. “There’s more ‘direct action’ from you people these days, isn’t there? What are the mutineers in Siberia doing, anyhow?”

“Your radio intercepts indicate they have surrendered to the Russkis,” Straha answered. “If they are treated well, that will be a signal for other disaffected units—and there must be many—to realize they, too, can make peace with Tosevites.”

“That would be nice,” Sam said. “When will the fleetlord realize he needs to make peace with us, that he can’t conquer the whole planet, the way the Race thought it would when you set out from Home?”

Had Straha been a cat, he would have bristled at that question. Yes, he despised Atvar. Yes, he’d defected to the Americans. Somewhere down in his heart of hearts, though, he was still loyal to the Emperor back on Tau Ceti’s second planet; the idea that a scheme the Emperor had endorsed might fail gave him the galloping collywobbles.

But the shiplord countered gamely, asking in return, “When will you Big Uglies realize that you cannot exterminate us or drive us off your miserable, chilly planet?”

Now Yeager grunted in turn. When the U.S.A. had been fighting the Nazis and the Japs, everybody had figured the war would go on till the bad guys got smashed flat. That was the way wars were supposed to work, wasn’t it? Somebody won, and he took stuff away from the guys who had lost. If the Lizards came down and took part of Earth away from humanity, didn’t that mean they’d won?

When Sam said that out loud, Straha waggled both eye turrets at him, a sign of astonishment. “Truly you Big Uglies are creatures of overweening pride,” the shiplord exclaimed. “No plan of the Race has ever failed to the extent of our design for the conquest of Tosev 3 and its incorporation into the Empire. If we fail to acquire the whole of the planet. If we leave Big Ugly empires and not-empires intact and independent upon it, we suffer a humiliation whose like we have never known before.”

“Is that so?” Yeager said. “Well. If we think letting you have anything is a mistake, and if you think letting us keep anything is an even bigger mistake, how are Lizards and people ever going to get together and settle things one way or the other? Sounds to me like we’re stuck.”

“We might not be, were it not for Atvar’s stubbornness,” Straha said. “As I told you before, the only way he will consent to anything less than complete victory is to become convinced it is impossible.”

“If he hasn’t gotten that idea by now—” But Sam paused and shook his head. You had to remember the Lizards’ point of view. What looked like disastrous defeats from up close might seem only bumps in the road if considered in a thousand-year context. Men prepared for the next battle, the Lizards for the next millennium.

Straha said, “When he does get that idea—if ever he does—he will do one of two things, I think. He may fly to make peace along the lines you and I have been discussing. Or he may try to use whatever nuclear arsenal the Race has left to force you Tosevites into submission. This is what I would have done; that I proposed it may make it less likely now.”

“Good,” Yeager said sincerely. He’d been away from the American nuclear-bomb program for a while now, but he knew the infernal devices didn’t roll off the assembly line like so many De Sotos. “The other thing holding him back is your colonization fleet, isn’t it?”

“Truth,” Straha replied at once. “This consideration has inhibited our actions in the past, and continues to do so. Atvar may decide, however, that making peace with you will leave the Race less of the habitable surface of Tosev 3 than he could hope to obtain by damaging large portions of the planet on our behalf.”

“It wouldn’t keep us from fighting back, you know,” Sam said, and hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark.

Evidently Straha didn’t think he was, because the shiplord said, “We are painfully aware of this. It is one of the factors that has to this point deterred us from that course. More important, though, is our desire not to damage the planet for our colonists, as you have noted.”

“Mm-hmm,” Sam said, tasting the irony of Earth’s safety riding more on the Lizards’ concern for their own kind than on any worries about human beings. “We’ve got what, something like eighteen years, before the rest of your people get here?”

“No, twice that,” Straha answered. Then he made a noise like a bubbling teakettle. “My apologies—if you are using Tosevite years, you are correct.”

“Yeah, I was—I’m a Tosevite, after all,” Yeager said with a wry grin. “What are your colonists going to think if they come to a world that isn’t completely in your hands, the way they thought it would be when they set out from Home?”

“The starship crews will be aware of changed conditions when they intercept our signals beamed back toward Home,” Straha said. “No doubt this will fill them with consternation and confusion. Remember, we of the conquest fleet have had some time now to try to accommodate ourselves to the unanticipated conditions on Tosev 3. These will be new for them, and the Race does not adapt well. In any case, there will be little they can do. The colonization fleet is not armed; the assumption was that we of the conquest fleet would have this world all nicely pacflied before the colonists arrived. And, of course, the colonists themselves are in cold sleep and will remain ignorant of the true situation until they are revived upon the fleet’s arrival.”

“They’ll get quite a surprise, won’t they?” Sam said, chuckling.

“How many of them are there, anyhow?”

“I do not know, not in precise figures,” Straha replied. “My responsibility, after all, was with the conquest fleet. But if our practice in colonizing the worlds of the Rabotevs and Hallessi was followed back on Home—as it almost certainly would have been, given our fondness for precedent—then we are sending here something between eighty and one hundred million males and females... Those coughs mean nothing in my language, Samyeager.” He pronounced Yeager’s name as if it were one word. “Have they some signflication in yours?”

“I’m sorry, Shiplord,” Sam said when he could speak coherently again. “Must have swallowed wrong, or something.” Eighty or a hundred million colonists? “The Race doesn’t do things by halves, does it?”