Aftershocks

16

Kassquit stooped slightly to look at herself in the mirror. She made the affirmative gesture. Maybe the wild Tosevites weren’t so daft to let their hair grow after all. She liked the way it framed her face. True, it did make her look less like a female of the Race, but she worried less about that than she had before she started meeting wild Big Uglies. She no longer saw any point to denying her biological heritage. It was part of her, no matter how much she still sometimes regretted that.

She looked down at herself. She was also growing hair under her arms and at the joining of her legs. That last patch still perplexed her. In long-ago days, had such little tufts of hair helped Tosevites’ semi-intelligent ancestors find one another’s reproductive organs? Animals both on Home and here on Tosev 3 often used such displays. Maybe this was another one. Kassquit couldn’t think of any other purpose the hair might serve.

The telephone hissed, distracting her. “Junior Researcher Kassquit speaking,” she said. “I greet you.” She sometimes startled callers who knew she was an expert on Big Uglies but were unaware she was of Tosevite descent herself.

But this time the startlement went the other way. The image that appeared in her monitor was that of a Big Ugly-and not just any Big Ugly. “And I greet you, superior female,” Jonathan Yeager said formally. Then he twisted his face into the Tosevite expression of amiability and went on, “Hello, Kassquit. How are you? It is good to see you again.”

Her own face showed little. By the nature of things, it couldn’t show much. Considering how she felt, that was probably just as well. Her voice, however, was another matter. She made it as cold as she could: “What do you want?”

“I wanted to say hello,” he answered. “I wanted to say it face to face. I fear I made you unhappy when I told you I was going to enter into a permanent mating arrangement-to get married, we say in English-with Karen Culpepper. I arranged this call from the Race’s consulate here in Los Angeles to apologize to you.”

Sudden hope leaped in her. “To apologize for entering into this arrangement with the Tosevite female?”

“No,” Jonathan Yeager answered. “I am not sorry about that. But I am sorry if I did make you unhappy. I hope you will believe me when I say I did not intend to.” He paused, then pointed at her from the screen. “You have let your hair grow since I was up in the starship with you.”

“Yes.” Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She forgot-well, almost forgot-to be angry at him as she asked, “What do you think?” The opinions of members of the Race about her appearance meant little to her: they had no proper standards of comparison. Jonathan Yeager, on the other fork of the tongue, did.

“I like it,” he said now, and used an emphatic cough. “Hair does usually seem to add to the attractiveness of a female-even though you were attractive before.”

“But not so attractive as to keep you from seeking a permanent mating arrangement with this other female.” Kassquit could not-and did not bother to-hide her bitterness.

The American Big Ugly who had been her mating partner sighed. “I have known Karen Culpepper for many years. We grew to maturity together. We come from the same culture.”

Kassquit, of course, hadn’t grown to maturity with anybody. She had no idea what doing so would mean. She suspected she was missing something because of that, but she couldn’t do anything about it. For that matter, she sometimes suspected that the way she’d been raised left her missing all sorts of social and emotional development most Big Uglies took for granted, but she couldn’t do anything about that, either.

She said, “Would you have found it impossible to stay up here and spend all your time with me?” She hadn’t asked him that while he was aboard the starship. She hadn’t known how much his leaving would hurt till he’d gone-and then it was too late.

“I am afraid I would,” he answered. “Would you have found it impossible to come down to Tosev 3 and spend all your time here?”

“I do not know,” she said. “How can I know? I have never experienced the surface of Tosev 3.” She sighed. “But I do understand the comparison you are making. It could be that you are speaking a truth.”

“I thank you for that,” Jonathan Yeager said. “You were, I think, always honest with me. And I did try to be honest with you.”

Maybe he had. Back then, though, she hadn’t understood everything he’d meant, not down in her liver she hadn’t. Did she now? How could she be sure? She couldn’t, and knew it. But she understood more now than she had then. She was sure of that. With another sigh, she said, “You will do as you will do, and I shall do as I shall do. That is all I can tell you right now.”

“It is a truth,” the American Big Ugly said, nodding as his kind did to agree. “I wish you well, Kassquit. Please believe that.”

“And I… wish you well,” she replied. That was more true than otherwise-the most she would say about it. She took a deep breath. “Have we anything more to say to each other?”

“I do not think so,” Jonathan Yeager said.

“Neither do I.” Kassquit broke the connection. Jonathan Yeager’s image vanished from her monitor. She sat staring at the screen, waiting for a storm of tears to come. They didn’t. Not weeping seemed somehow worse than weeping would have. After a moment, she realized why: she had finally accepted that Jonathan Yeager wouldn’t be coming back.

I have to go on, she thought. Whatever I do, it will have to be in that context. If I seek another wild Big Ugly for sexual pleasure, I shall have to respond to him, not to my memories of Jonathan Yeager. She wondered how she could do that. She wondered if she could do it. Of course you can. You have to. You just figured that out for yourself. Have you already started to forget?

She probably had. Emotional issues arising from sexual matters were far more complex, and far more intense, than any she’d known before Jonathan Yeager came into her life. That, she feared, was also part of her biological heritage. She’d done her best to pretend that heritage didn’t exist. Now-she ran a hand across her hairy scalp-she was beginning to accept it. She wondered if that would result in any improvement. All she could do was see what happened next.

What happened next was that the telephone hissed again. “Junior Researcher Kassquit speaking,” she said again, seating herself in front of the monitor. “I greet you.”

“And I greet you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said. “How are you today?”

“Oh, hello, superior sir.” Kassquit did a token job of assuming the position of respect-no more was needed while she was sitting down. Ttomalss might have asked the question as a polite commonplace, but she gave it serious consideration before answering, “All things considered, I am pretty well.”

“I am glad to hear it,” Ttomalss said. “I was listening to your conversation with Jonathan Yeager. I think you handled it with an emotional maturity to which many wild Big Uglies could only hope to aspire.”

“I thank you,” Kassquit said. Then, once the words were out of her mouth, she wasn’t so sure she thanked him after all. This time, she spoke with considerable care: “Superior sir, I understand why you monitored my life so closely when I was a hatchling and an adolescent: I was, after all, an experimental subject. But have I not proved your experiment largely successful?”

“There are times when I think you have,” her mentor answered. “Then again, there are other times when I think I may have failed despite my best efforts. When I see you imitating wild Tosevites, I do wonder whether environment plays any role at all in shaping an individual’s personality.”

“I am a Tosevite. It cannot be helped,” Kassquit said with a shrug. “I am having to come to terms with that myself. But have we not established that I am also a citizen of the Empire, and able to provide important and useful services for the Race? In fact, can I not provide some of those services precisely because I am at the same time a citizen of the Empire and a Big Ugly?”

She waited anxiously to hear how he would respond to that, and felt like cheering when he made the affirmative gesture. “Truth hatches from every word you speak,” he replied. “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to discover how seriously you take your obligations as a citizen of the Empire.”

“Of course I take them seriously,” Kassquit said. “Unlike a good many members of the Race-if I may speak from what I have seen-I take them seriously because I do not take them for granted.”

“That is well said,” Ttomalss told her. He used an emphatic cough. “Your words could be an example and an inspiration for many males and females of the Race.”

“Again, superior sir, I thank you,” Kassquit said. “And I am also pleased to have the privileges that come with citizenship in the Empire.”

She waited once more. Ttomalss said, “And well you might be. Say what you will for the wild Big Uglies, but you are part of an older, larger, wiser, more sophisticated society than any of theirs.”

“I agree, superior sir.” Kassquit couldn’t smile so that her face knew about it, as a wild Big Ugly could, but she was smiling inside. “And would you not agree, superior sir, that one of the privileges of citizenship is freedom from being arbitrarily spied upon?”

Ttomalss opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again: “You are not an ordinary citizen of the Empire, you know.”

“Am I less than ordinary?” Kassquit asked. “If I am, how am I a citizen at all?”

“No, you are not less than ordinary,” Ttomalss said.

Before he could add anything to that, Kassquit pounced: “Then why do you have the right to continue to listen to my conversations?”

“Because you are different from an ordinary citizen of the Empire,” Ttomalss answered. “You can hardly deny that difference.”

“I do not deny it,” she said. “But I do think the time is coming, if it has not already come, when it will not outweigh my need to be able to lead my life as I see fit, not as you reckon best for me.”

“Here you are, trying to wound me again,” Ttomalss said.

“By no means.” Kassquit used the negative gesture. “You are the male who raised me. You have taught me most of what I know. But I have hatched from the egg of immaturity now. If I am a citizen, if I am an adult, I have the right to some life of my own.”

“But think of the data the Race would lose!” Ttomalss exclaimed in dismay.

“Am I important to you as an individual, or because of the data you can gain from me?” Even as Kassquit asked the question, she wondered if she wanted to hear the answer.

“Both,” Ttomalss replied, and she reflected that he could have said something considerably worse. But even that wasn’t good enough, not any more.

“Superior sir,” she said, “unless we can reach an understanding, I am going to take a citizen’s privilege and seek to gain my privacy, or more of it, through legal means. And, should I learn I am in truth more nearly experimental animal than citizen, I shall have other choices to make. Is that not a truth?” She ended the conversation before Ttomalss could tell her whether he thought it was a truth or not.

“I think we’re in business,” Glen Johnson said. “By God, I really do think we’re in business. We got away with it clean as a whistle.”

“Congratulations,” Mickey Flynn said. “You’ve just squeezed maximum mileage from a series of one case.”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Johnson said.

“I have a great deal of faith-faith in the capacity of things to go wrong at the worst possible moment,” Flynn replied. “Always remember, O’Reilly insisted that Murphy was an optimist.”

“He usually is,” Johnson agreed. “Usually, but not always.”

Flynn shrugged. “If you think you’re going to make me give way to unbridled optimism, you can think again. Either that, or you can put on a bridle and go horse around somewhere else.”

With a snort more than a little horselike, Johnson said, “I wonder what will happen when the Lizards do find out.”

“That depends,” Mickey Flynn said gravely.

“Thank you so much.” Johnson tacked on not an emphatic cough but another snort. “And on what, pray tell, does it depend, O sage of the age?”

“Vocative case,” the other pilot said in something like wonder. “I haven’t heard a vocative case, a real, living, breathing vocative case, since I escaped my last Latin class lo these many years ago.” Johnson had never heard of the vocative case, but he was damned if he would admit it. Flynn went on, “Well, it could depend on a lot of different things.”

“Really? I never would have guessed.”

“Hush.” Flynn brushed aside his sarcasm like an adult brushing off a five-year-old. He started ticking points off on his fingers: “First off, it depends on how soon the Race does figure out what’s going on.”

“Okay. That makes sense.” Johnson nodded. “If they work that out day after tomorrow, they have a better chance of doing something about it than if they work it out year after next.”

“Exactly.” Flynn beamed. “You can see after all.”

Now Johnson ignored him, persisting in his own train of thought: “And things will be different depending on whether they find out on their own or if we have to rub their snouts in it.”

“This is also true,” Flynn agreed. “If the latter, they will probably be trying to rub our noses in things at the same time. That creates the need for a lot of face-washing, or else a mudbath-I mean, a bloodbath. See, for example, the late, not particularly lamented Greater German Reich.”

Johnson shivered, though the temperature in the Lewis and Clark never changed. He felt as if a goose had walked over his grave. “What happened to the Hermann Goring could have happened to us this past summer, too. The Lizards made damn sure the Nazis weren’t going to get themselves a toehold in the asteroid belt.”

“It didn’t happen to us because it happened to Indianapolis,” Mickey Flynn said. “Thanksgiving is coming before long. Do we give thanks for that, or not?”

“Damned if I know,” Johnson said. “But I’ll tell you something I heard. Don’t know whether it’s true, but I’ll pass it along anyhow.”

“Speak,” Flynn urged. “Give forth.”

“I’ve heard,” Glen Johnson said in low, conspiratorial tones, “I’ve heard that the Christopher Columbus has some turkeys in the deep freeze, to cook up for a proper Thanksgiving. Turkey.” His gaze went reverently heavenward-which gave him nothing but a glimpse of the light fixtures and aluminum paneling on the ceiling of the Lewis and Clark’s control room. “Do you remember what it tastes like? I think I do.”

“I think I do, too, but I wouldn’t mind testing my hypothesis experimentally.” Flynn raised an eyebrow at Johnson. “If you’d known you’d spend the rest of your days eating beans and beets and barley, you wouldn’t have been so eager to stow away, would you?”

“I didn’t intend to stow away, God damn it,” Johnson said, for about the five hundredth time. “All I wanted to do was get my upper stage repaired and go home, and our beloved commandant hijacked me.” He stuck to his story like glue.

“Anyone would think he’d had some reason to be concerned about security,” Flynn said. “A preposterous notion, on the face of it.”

“I wasn’t going to tell anybody, for Christ’s sake.” That was also part of Johnson’s story, and might even have been true.

“Brigadier General Healey, in his infinite wisdom, thought otherwise,” Flynn replied. “Who am I, a mere mortal, to imagine that the commandant could ever be mistaken?”

“Who are you, one Irishman, to give another one a hard time?” Johnson shot back.

“Shows what you know,” Flynn said. “Quarreling among ourselves is the Irish national sport. Of course, we have been known to put it by-every now and again, mind-when a Sassenach comes along.” He fixed Johnson with a mild and speculative gaze, then sighed. “And we’ve also been known not to put it by when a Sassenach comes along. If it weren’t for that, I suspect the history of Ireland would have been a good deal happier. A good deal more Irish, too, and less English.”

Johnson didn’t know much about the history of Ireland or, for that matter, the history of England. He knew the history of the United States from the patriotic lessons drilled into him in high school and from reading in military history since. He said, “The Irish aren’t the only ones to quarrel among themselves. My great-grandfathers wore blue. You listen to some of the folks here from Texas or the Carolinas and you’ll think the Civil War ended week before last.”

“My great-grandfathers wore blue, too,” Flynn said. “The Army was the only place that would give them anything close to a fair shake in those days. But over the past hundred years, America’s been a dull place. Every time we’ve fought, it’s been against somebody else.”

Before Johnson could answer that, the intercom started blaring his name:

“Lieutenant Colonel Johnson! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson! Report to the commandant’s office immediately!”

“There, you see?” he said, unstrapping himself. “Healey’s been spying on us again.” He thought he was joking, but he wasn’t quite sure.

After swinging his way through the corridors of the Lewis and Clark and gliding past Brigadier General Healey’s adjutant, he caught himself on the chair across from the commandant’s desk, saluted, and said, “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Yes.” Healey’s bulldog countenance seldom looked as if it approved of anything. So far as Johnson could remember, the commandant had never looked as if he approved of him. Healey went on, “Have you ever heard of an officer named Sam Yeager?”

“Yes, sir,” Johnson answered. “He’s the fellow who pretty much wrote the book on the Lizards, isn’t he?”

“That’s the man.” Brigadier General Healey nodded. He leaned forward and glowered at Johnson. “Did you ever meet him?”

“No, sir,” Johnson answered. “What’s this about, if you don’t mind my asking?”

His own bump of curiosity itched. He’d never met Yeager, no, but he’d spoken with him on the phone. Yeager was another loose cannon, a man with a yen to know. Johnson had sometimes wondered if the Lizard expert had tried finding out who’d attacked the ships of the colonization fleet. He said zero, zip, zilch about that to Healey.

“That man is a troublemaker,” the commandant said. “You’re a troublemaker, too. Birds of a feather, if you know what I mean.”

“Sir, that’s not birds of a feather,” Johnson said. “That’s a wild-goose chase.”

“Is it?” Healey said. “I wonder. What would you have done, Lieutenant Colonel, if you’d found out that we were the ones who’d attacked the Lizards’ colonization fleet?”

“I can’t tell you, sir, because I really don’t know,” Johnson replied.

“That’s the wrong answer,” Brigadier General Healey growled, spearing him with the perpetually angry gaze. “The right answer is, ‘Sir, I wouldn’t have said a goddamn thing, not till hell froze over.’ ”

“What if I’d found out the Russians or the Germans did it, sir?” Johnson asked. “Wouldn’t I sing out then?”

“That’s different,” the commandant said. Before Johnson could ask how it was different, Healey spelled it out: “That’s them. This is us. Whoever spilled the beans to the Race has got Indianapolis’ blood on his hands, and President Warren’s blood, too. If I knew who it was…” He’d been out in weightlessness a long time. He could probably never go back to gravity again. If he could, he would without a doubt be permanently weakened. Somehow, none of that seemed to matter much. If he caught the bean-spiller, he would do horrible things to him.

“Sir…” Johnson said slowly, “are you telling me you think this Yeager was the one who told the Lizards we’d done it?” That fit in with his own speculations unpleasantly well. And Healey had access to a lot more secret information than he did.

“I don’t know, “the commandant answered, his voice a furious, frustrated rumble. “I just don’t know, goddammit. Nobody knows-or if anybody does, he’s not talking. But plenty of people want to find out-you can bet your bottom dollar on that. Yeager’s a loose cannon. I know that for a fact. He was trying to find out about this place, for instance. I know that for a fact, too.”

“Was he?” Johnson knew damn well Yeager was, or had been. He wondered if Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay had raked Yeager over the coals, too. He could hardly ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there were the befflem. They’d got farther from the Mexican border and raised more kinds of hell than all the Race’s meat animals put together. They killed cats. They killed some dogs, too. They raided henhouses. They stole from garbage cans. They bit people. They ran very fast for creatures with such stumpy legs, and their armored carcasses made them tough to harm.

“What will be interesting,” Sam said when he returned to Colonel Webster’s office, “will be seeing how all these animals-and the plants that are spreading, too-come through the winter. My guess is that cold weather will limit the northern range for most of them, but it’s only a guess.”

“There will be places where they can thrive year-round, though,” Webster said. “This is one of them.” He tapped his desk as if expecting a herd of ssefenji to come trampling across it.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Sam agreed. “Unless I’m wrong, we’ll have to learn to live with them as best we can.”

“What do we do if their plants start crowding out our crops?” Webster asked.

“Sir, I haven’t got any good answers for that,” Yeager said. “I don’t think anyone else does, either. Maybe the pesticide people will come up with something that kills plants from Home but leaves our stuff alone. Something like that’s liable to be our best chance.”

Colonel Webster eyed him with more than a little respect. “I happen to know that that’s being worked on right now. I don’t know when results will come, or even if they’ll come, but it is being worked on.”

“Stands to reason,” Sam said. “But do you know what I think the real trouble spot could be?” He waited for Webster to shake his head, then went on, “Befflem. They’re liable to be as much of a nuisance as rats and wild cats put together, and they don’t seem to have any natural enemies here.”

“Cold weather, like you said,” Webster suggested.

Sam shrugged. “Maybe. But I’ve looked at a couple of reports there that talk about finding them in dens with nests, so maybe cold won’t bother them as much as it would some other beasts from Home.”

Webster scrawled a note. “I’m glad I called you in, Yeager. I don’t think anybody else has mentioned that.” He paused, scratching his head. “The Lizards keep befflem for pets, don’t they? Maybe we could do the same.”

“We keep cats for pets, too-or they keep us for pets, one,” Yeager answered. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t a nuisance plenty of places.” He managed a lopsided grin. “Of course, as far as the Lizards are concerned, we’re nothing but nuisances ourselves, so I don’t think we’ll get much sympathy from them.”

“Too goddamn bad,” Webster said. Sam’s grin got wider. He nodded.

“No.” Johannes Drucker shook his head. “I don’t think we can go back to Greifswald. There’s a good-sized Lizard garrison there, and that male called Gorppet knows me much too well. We’d be under a microscope if we tried.”

“Too bad.” Both of his sons and his daughter spoke at the same time.

But his wife nodded. “I’d just as soon stay here in Neu Strelitz, or else go someplace where nobody has any idea at all who we are and start over there. Too many people back in Greifswald know why they took me away for a while.”

Drucker watched his older son. That Heinrich had joined the band of holdouts in Stargard had probably saved Drucker’s own neck; the major who commanded them had changed his mind about shooting him. But those holdouts were at least as fanatical about Party ideology as any 55 men. If they ever found out Heinrich Drucker’s mother was, or might have been, a quarter Jewish…

Very visibly, Heinrich figured that out for himself. He walked over and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go somewhere it’s safe for you.”

Letting out a small, silent sigh of relief didn’t show, and sigh Drucker did. The Nazis made heroes of children who turned in their parents. He hadn’t thought Heinrich would fall for such nonsense, but you couldn’t be sure till things actually started happening.

Claudia turned to him and asked, “Father, if you can’t fly into space any more, what will you do for a living?”

That was a good question. It was, in fact, the good question. Drucker wished he had a better answer for it. As things were, he said, “I don’t know. Something will turn up. Something always does, if you’re willing to work. I can be a mechanic, I suppose. I can make an engine sit up and do as it’s told.”

“A mechanic?” Claudia didn’t sound very happy at that. The social difference between a Wehrmacht officer’s daughter and a mechanic’s could be measured only in light-years.

“Honest work is honest work,” Drucker insisted, “and mechanics make pretty good money.” Claudia looked anything but convinced.

Before he could say anything else, somebody knocked on the front door to Kathe’s uncle Lothar’s house. The Druckers crowded it to the bursting point, but Lothar, a widower, didn’t seem to mind. He was Kathe’s father’s brother, and didn’t let on that he knew anything about the possibility of Jewish blood on the other side of her family tree. Nobody talked about that where Uncle Lothar could overhear-better safe than sorry summed up everyone’s attitude.

He came into the back bedroom now with a frown on his face: a big, raw-boned man in his sixties, still physically strong but, like so many others, badly at sea in this new, diminished Reich. Nodding to Drucker, he said, “Hans, there’s a soldier out front wants to speak to you.”

“A soldier?” Suspicion roughened Drucker’s voice. “What kind of soldier? Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS?” He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to meet an SS man without an assault rifle in his hands.

But Kathe’s uncle answered, “A Wehrmacht lieutenant, just barely old enough to shave.”

“I’ll see him,” Drucker said with a sigh. “I wonder what he’ll make of me.” He wore one of Lothar’s old shirts, which was too big on him, and denim trousers that had seen better days. He hadn’t shaved this morning.

Sure as the devil, that wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant didn’t look as if he believed his eyes. “You are Colonel Johannes Drucker?” He seemed to have to remind himself to come to attention and salute.

Drucker returned the salute, though he wasn’t at all sure he remained in the Wehrmacht himself. “That’s right, sonny,” he answered, no doubt further scandalizing the lieutenant. “What can I do for you today?”

Visibly holding in his anger, the young officer spoke with exquisite politeness: “Sir, I am ordered to bring you to a secure telephone line and connect you to the Fuhrer in Flensburg.” Every line of his body screamed that he hadn’t the faintest idea why Walter Dornberger would want to speak with such a derelict.

“A secure phone line?” Drucker said, and the lieutenant nodded. “Secure from the Lizards?” he persisted, and the kid nodded again. Drucker hadn’t known such lines survived anywhere in the Reich, let alone in sleepy Neu Strelitz. Maybe he wouldn’t have to be a mechanic after all. “I’ll come.”

He’d expected to be taken either to the telephone exchange or to the Burgomeister’s hall. Instead, the lieutenant led him to a fire station where men playing draughts looked up without much curiosity as he walked by.

The secure telephone looked like an ordinary instrument. But another Wehrmacht officer was in charge of it. He gave Drucker a fishy stare, too. When the lieutenant confirmed Drucker’s identity, the other officer made the call. It took a couple of minutes to go through. When it did, the officer thrust the handset at Drucker and said, “Go ahead.”

“Johannes Drucker speaking,” Drucker said, feeling like an idiot.

“Hello, Hans. Good to hear from you.” That was Walter Dornberger’s voice, all right.

“Hello, sir,” As soon as Drucker spoke, he knew he should have called Dornberger mein Fuhrer. Now that the former commander at Peenemunde had the job, how seriously did he take it? Would he be offended if he didn’t get the respect he thought he deserved? Drucker plowed ahead, trying to hide his gaffe: “What can I do for you? I thought I was retired.”

“Nobody who’s still breathing is retired,” Dornberger answered. “If you’re breathing, you can still serve the Reich. That’s why I was so glad to hear you’d turned up in Neu Strelitz. I can use you, by God.”

“How?” Drucker asked in real confusion. “The Lizards won’t let us get back into space. Unless…” He paused, then shook his head. With radar watching every square centimeter of the Reich, clandestine launches were impossible. Weren’t they? Hoping he was wrong, he waited for the new Fuhrer’s reply.

“That’s true-they won’t,” Dornberger said, which nipped his hope before it was truly born. The Fuhrer went on, “But that doesn’t mean I don’t need you closer to home. I’m going to order you here to Flensburg, Hans. You’ve got no idea what a small cadre I have of men I can really trust.”

“Sir…” Drucker’s voice trailed away. Dornberger had him by the short hairs, and he knew it. Of course the Reich’s new leader could trust him. Dornberger knew why the Gestapo had seized Kathe. If Drucker gave him any trouble, the blackshirts could always grab her again.

“I’ll have a car there for you-for all of you-in a couple of days,” Dornberger said. He didn’t mention the sword he’d hung over Drucker’s head. Why would he? Smoother not to, smoother by far. The Fuhrer continued, “You’ll be doing important work here-don’t kid yourself for a moment about that. And you’ll have the rank to go with it, too. Major general sounds about right, at least for starters.”

“Major general?” Now Drucker’s voice was a disbelieving squeak. The young lieutenant who’d brought him to the fire station stared at him. He didn’t look as if he believed it, either.

But Walter Dornberger repeated, “For starters. We’ll see how you shape in the job when you get here. I hope to see you soon-and your whole family.” He hung up. The line went dead.

“Sir…” The lieutenant spoke with considerably more respect than he’d given Drucker up till then. “Sir, shall I escort you back to your house?”

“No, never mind.” Drucker walked back to his wife’s uncle’s in something of a daze. He didn’t know what he’d thought Dornberger would have to say to him. Whatever it was, it didn’t come close to matching the real conversation.

When he went into the house, the children, Kathe, and her uncle Lothar all pounced on him. The children exclaimed in pride and delight when he gave them the news. Lothar slapped him on the back. Kathe congratulated him, too, but he saw the worry in her eyes. She knew the grip Dornberger had on him through her. He shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about it but hope things would work out all right. He wished he could think of some-thing else, but what else was there?

The motorcar that came for them was an immense Mercedes limousine. People up and down the street stared as they piled into it. Drucker hoped it wouldn’t tempt some ambitious band of holdouts into trying a hijacking. It purred away from Neu Strelitz in almost ghostly silence.

A few hours later, they were in Flensburg, in Schleswig-Holstein hard by the Danish border. “It’s like another world,” Kathe breathed as the motorcar pulled to a stop in front of the Flensborg-Hus, the hotel where the Reich was putting them up till they found permanent lodgings. And so it was: a world that hadn’t seen war. In the Reich, that made it almost unique. It was the main reason Walter Dornberger had chosen the town at the west end of the Flensburger Forde, an arm of the Baltic projecting into the neck of land that led up to Denmark.

Some of the people at the hotel spoke more Danish than German. The monogram of Frederick IV of Denmark stood above the gate: he’d built the Flensborg-Hus as an orphanage in 1725.

A major general’s uniform waited in the room to which the bellboy led Drucker. He put it on with a growing feeling of unreality. After he’d adjusted the high-peaked cap to the proper jaunty angle, Heinrich’s arm shot out in salute. “You look very handsome,” Kathe said loyally. If her heart wasn’t in the words, how could he blame her?

The next morning, a lieutenant who might have been brother to the one back in Neu Strelitz took him to the Fuhrer. Walter Dornberger was working out of another hotel not far from the downtown maritime museum. A servant brought Drucker pickled herring and lager beer. After he’d eaten and drunk, he asked, “What will you have me doing, sir?”

“We’ve got to rebuild,” Dornberger said. “We have to conceal as much as we can from the Lizards. And we have to take full control of the country, put down the outlaw bands or at least bring them under government control. Until we’ve done all those things, we’re hideously vulnerable. I’m going to put you to work at concealment. The more weapons we can keep from turning over to the Lizards, the better.”

“What have we got left?” Drucker asked. “Explosive-metal bombs? Poison gas?” Dornberger just smiled and said nothing. Drucker found another question: “What do I do if the Lizards find some of it?”

“Give it up, of course,” Walter Dornberger answered. “We can’t afford to do anything else-not yet we can’t. One of these days, though…”

“If the Lizards are patient, we have to be patient, too,” Drucker said.

“Just so.” Dornberger beamed at him. “You will do very well here, I think.”

By God, maybe I will, Drucker thought.

“Well, well.” Gorppet looked up from a listing of new appointments by the Deutsch government. “This may be interesting.”

“What have you found?” Hozzanet asked.

“Remember that male named Johannes Drucker, with whom I had some dealings because he was associated with Anielewicz?” Gorppet waited for his superior to make the affirmative gesture, then went on, “He has turned up in Flensburg with a promotion of two grades.”

“That is interesting,” Hozzanet agreed. “What is he doing there, to earn such a sudden, sharp advance?”

“His title, translated, is ‘commandant of recovery services,’ ” Gorppet replied after checking the monitor. “That is so vague, it could mean anything.”

“I always mistrust vague titles,” Hozzanet said. “They usually mean the Big Uglies are trying to hide something.”

“We already know the Deutsche are trying to hide as much as they can from us,” Gorppet said.

“Really? I never would have noticed,” Hozzanet said. The Race didn’t have an ironic cough to set beside the emphatic and the interrogative. Had it possessed such a cough, Hozzanet would have used one then.

“Here, however, we are in an unusual position, because this Drucker speaks our language fairly well and has interacted with us in ways that are not hostile,” Gorppet persisted. “We have some hope of getting him to see reason and cooperate with us.”

“Really?” Hozzanet repeated, still sounding anything but convinced. “Is this Drucker not the male who refused to tell you anything whatsoever about how the male who drove him to, ah, Neu Strelitz ended up dead something less than halfway there?”

“Well, yes,” Gorppet said. “But that was an individual matter. This one pertains to the survival of his not-empire. If he sees he will endanger the Reich by refusing to cooperate, I think he will tell us at least some of what we need to know.”

“My opinion is that you are far too optimistic, if not utterly addled,” Hozzanet said. “But I can see you do not intend to listen to me. Go ahead, then: call this Drucker. I will warn you of one thing, though-accept none of his denials without proof. Distrust them even with thorough proof.”

“You may believe otherwise if you like, superior sir, but I really must assure you that I did not hatch from my eggshell yesterday,” Gorppet said stiffly. “I do know that Big Uglies will lie whenever it suits their interest to do so-and sometimes, I think, just for the sport of it. And…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t go on with whatever he’d been on the point of saying. Whatever it was, in fact, he forgot all about it. He started to laugh instead.

“And what is so funny?” Hozzanet asked. “Give me something to make me laugh, too, if you would be so kind. I could use a good laugh, by the Emperor.” He cast down his eye turrets.

So did Gorppet, who then answered, “It shall be done, superior sir. It just occurred to me: I believe I have the proper tool for persuading this particular Tosevite to listen to me and to do my bidding, or some of it.”

“Tell me,” Hozzanet urged. “Such a claim is usually all the better for proof. I do not think this likely to prove an exception to the rule.”

“I agree, superior sir,” Gorppet said. “Consider, though. When we first met Drucker, in whose company was he? In whose friendly company was he? Why, that of Mordechai Anielewicz.” He pronounced the Tosevite name with care. “And who is Mordechai Anielewicz? A leader of the members of the Jewish superstition in the subregion called Poland. The ideology of Drucker’s superiors requires permanent hatred for members of the Jewish superstition. If those superiors were to learn from us that he had violated their fundamental rule…”

He waited for Hozzanet’s judgment. If he’d missed something obvious, the other male would take sardonic pleasure in letting him know about it. But Hozzanet bent into the posture of respect, a very sizable compliment when from superior to inferior. “That is good. That is quite good,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “By all means, make your telephone call. We may realize considerable profit from it. Blackmail is liable to prove more effective than friendship. This is Tosev 3, after all.”

“I thank you, superior sir,” Gorppet said. He had no trouble telephoning Flensburg. The Race often needed to do so, to tell Deutsch officials what to do. Even though he spoke none of the local Big Uglies’ language, he was quickly connected to Johannes Drucker: plenty of Deutsche, especially those involved with communication, could use the language of the Race. The line was voice-only, but he didn’t mind that; he was not good at interpreting Tosevite facial expressions.

“I greet you, superior sir,” Drucker said once the connection went through. “How may I help you?”

He doubtless meant, How may I hinder you? Big Uglies were not immune to polite hypocrisy. Gorppet said, “I congratulate you on your promotion. And I believe I should also congratulate you on recovering your mate and hatchlings. Is that not a truth?”

“Yes, that is a truth,” the Tosevite replied. “No harm in admitting it now.”

“I hope they are all well?” Gorppet said.

“Yes,” Drucker said again. “I thank you for asking.”

“I suppose you want them to stay well?” Gorppet said. “You must, after searching so long and hard to find them.”

This time, Drucker paused before answering. Gorppet had not thought him a fool. When he did speak again, what he said was, “I do not care for the way this conversation is going. What is your point?”

“My point is that I hope I will not have to tell anyone about your recent friendship with Mordechai Anielewicz,” Gorppet replied. “I believe that would be unfortunate for all concerned. Do you not agree?”

Silence stretched a good deal longer now. At last, Drucker said, “In the language of the Race, I cannot call you all the vile names I am thinking in my own language. I wish I could. What do you want from me in exchange for your silence?”

He caught on quickly, all right. Gorppet said, “Is it not a truth that your government seeks to conceal weapons that should have been surrendered to the Race?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” the Big Ugly said.

“No? That will probably mean I shall have to make some other telephone calls,” Gorppet said.

Drucker spoke in his own language. Gorppet didn’t understand a word, but it sounded impassioned. Then Drucker returned to the language of the Race: “You will want me to betray my own not-empire. That is very hard for me to do.”

“The choice is yours,” Gorppet said.

Another long silence. “You will hear from me from time to time,” Drucker said, breaking it. “You will not hear from me very often, or I would give myself away.”

“I understand,” Gorppet said. “I think we may have a bargain. Do not forget your obligation, or the bargain will come undone. I warn you now. I do not intend to warn you again.”

“I understand,” Drucker said, and broke the connection with what struck Gorppet as altogether unnecessary violence.

But that was neither here nor there. Turning to Hozzanet, Gorppet said, “I believe he is recruited. The true test, of course, will be in what he reveals. If he fails us…” He shrugged. “If he fails us, he will pay the price.”

“He will deserve it, too,” Hozzanet said.

Before Gorppet could reply, his telephone hissed. It was another voice-only connection with a Tosevite on the other end. “I greet you,” the Big Ugly said. “Mordechai Anielewicz speaking here.”

“And I greet you,” Gorppet said in some surprise. “I was just talking about you, as a matter of fact. How may I help you?”

“You need to know something has gone missing,” the Jewish leader answered.

“Do I?” Gorppet thought for a moment. “In that case, I probably also need to know what has gone missing-is that not a truth?”

“Yes,” Anielewicz said. “That is a truth.” He used an emphatic cough.

When the Big Ugly didn’t say anything more, Gorppet realized he would have to prompt him. He did: “Will you tell me what has gone missing, or did you put this telephone call through to tantalize me?”

Mordechai Anielewicz sighed, a sound much like that a male of the Race might have made. “I will tell you. You will have heard, I suppose, that the Jews of Poland possess an explosive-metal bomb captured from the Deutsche years ago, at the end of the first round of fighting.”

“I have heard this, yes,” Gorppet replied. “I do not know whether it is a truth or not, but I have heard it.” His tailstump lashed in sudden alarm. “Wait. Are you telling me-?”

“I am telling you that we do indeed possess this bomb,” Anielewicz said. “Or rather, I am telling you that we did possess it. At the moment, we do not. By we here, I mean the organized group of Jewish fighters who have held it for all these years.”

Gorppet’s head started to ache. “Do you mean to say than an explosive-metal bomb has been stolen?” That got Hozzanet’s complete, and horrified, attention. “If you do not have it, who does?” That seemed a good question with which to start.

“There is no sign of violence in the place where it was kept,” the Tosevite replied. “This leads me to believe some of my fellow Jews have taken it, and not Poles or Russians or Deutsche.”

“I see,” Gorppet said. “And what would Jewish hijackers be likely to do with an explosive-metal bomb?” He answered that for himself: “They would be likely to bring it here, into the Reich, and try to use it against the Deutsche, against whom they have strong motivation for seeking vengeance.”

“That is also my belief,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “If the Deutsche still have any explosive-metal weapons of their own hidden away, they might be provoked into using them against you-and against us in Poland-if such a bomb destroyed one of their cities without warning.”

“So they might,” Gorppet said unhappily.

“I am sorry for the inconvenience,” the Big Ugly said. “I do not know for a fact that the bomb can still burst. But I do not know for a fact that it cannot, either. We have tried to maintain it over the years. It is large and heavy. In my measure, it weighs about ten tonnes.” He translated that into the Race’s units.

Gorppet thought he must have made a mistake. “Are you sure?” he asked. “That seems an impossibly large weight.”

But Anielewicz answered, “Yes, I am sure. Tosevite technology with these weapons was primitive in those days. We have improved since. That is our way, you will recall.”

“Yes. I do recall,” Gorppet said tonelessly. A hopeful thought occurred to him: “You Tosevites have many different languages. Would Jews in the Reich give themselves away by how they speak?”

“No,” Anielewicz said. “I am sorry, but no. Yiddish, our tongue, is close to the Deutsch language as is, and many Jews are fluent in that language itself.”

“Splendid.” Gorppet turned an eye turret toward Hozzanet. “By the spirits of Emperors past, superior sir, what do we do now?”

“They let someone wander off with an explosive-metal bomb?” Atvar spoke in tones of extravagant disbelief. Extravagant disbelief was exactly what he felt. Even for Big Uglies, that struck him as excessive. “They do not know who? They do not know when? They do not know where? They do not know how?”

“It must have happened during the fighting in Poland, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing replied. “Things were chaotic then, you must admit.”

“Whose side are you on?” Atvar snarled. “I would not mind so much if another Deutsch city vanished from the map, but I fear the Deutsch Big Uglies could still retaliate against us. No matter what they claim, I find it unlikely that they have surrendered all of their explosive-metal weapons.”

“Another round of fighting would leave the Deutsche extinct,” his adjutant remarked.

“I wish they were extinct now,” Atvar said. “But they have been damaged enough not to be dangerous at the moment, and the one set of reasonably reliable Tosevite allies we have had, the Jews of Poland, have turned on us.”

“They did not mean to do so,” Pshing said.

“I do not care what they meant to do.” The fleetlord was in a perfect fury of temper. “They are letting their own private, trivial feuds influence the policy of the Race. That is intolerable-intolerable, do you hear me, Pshing?”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing answered. “But what will you do? What can we do?”

That was a different sort of question. It painfully reminded the fleetlord that the intolerable was all too often commonplace on Tosev 3, and that the Race’s policies here had to pay far more notice to the Big Uglies’ whims and superstitions than anyone would have imagined possible before the conquest fleet set out from Home. “We have to try to get the bomb back,” Atvar answered. “That much is obvious, but if we fail there, we also have to convince the Deutsche that we did not detonate it.”

“That will be difficult,” his adjutant said. “It also may not help much. The Deutsche dislike the Jews as much as the Jews dislike them.”

“Both those points, unfortunately, are truths,” Atvar said. “And the not-emperor of the Deutsche is sure to blame us for anything the Jews do.” The Big Ugly named Dornberger would have reason to do so, too, but the fleetlord chose not to dwell on that.

“Will you warn the Deutsche this bomb may be on their territory?” Pshing asked. “I gather from the reports that the weapon is anything but inconspicuous.”

“Until we have more definite information, I believe I will keep quiet,” the fleetlord answered. “One more truth is that I would not be altogether dismayed to see the Deutsche punished further, so long as they fail to avenge themselves on us. It is not as if they fail to deserve it.”

“The variable being whether we can escape their vengeance in the aftermath,” Pshing said.

“Yes. The variable,” Atvar agreed. That was a nice, bloodless way to ponder whether thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of members of the Race might become radioactive dust on account of the reckless actions of a handful of headstrong Big Uglies. He sighed. No male since the unification of the Empire had had worries even remotely like his.

He skimmed the report again. The occupiers were doing what they could in secret to help the Jews find their missing bomb. How much was that? How secret was it? The report didn’t say. The fleetlord took that as a bad sign.

And then the telephone hissed. “If that is Fleetlord Reffet, tell him I just jumped out the window,” Atvar said to Pshing. “Tell him I have joined the Muslim superstition and am at prayer so I cannot be disturbed. Tell him anything. I do not wish to talk to him now.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said, and went off to do it. Atvar was one of the few members of the Race prominent enough to have another individual to block nuisances from him. Most males and females had to make do with electronics. He let out a self-satisfied hiss, enjoying the privilege.

But it turned out not to be the fleetlord of the colonization fleet. Pshing’s image appeared on Atvar’s monitor. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is Senior Science Officer Tsalas,” Atvar’s adjutant said. “He maintains that the matter about which he would speak to you is of some urgency. Shall I put him through?”

“Yes, by all means,” Atvar replied. “Tsalas is not one to start laying eggs out of mating season.” He winced after speaking. That slang expression for getting excited over nothing was perfectly good back on Home, but how much meaning would it have here on Tosev 3 in a few generations if he couldn’t suppress the ginger trade?

Pshing vanished from the screen, to be replaced by an elderly, studious-looking male. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Tsalas said.

“And I greet you, Senior Science Officer,” Atvar replied. “My adjutant tells me something urgent has come up. What is it?” He wondered if he really wanted to know. Urgent matters on Tosev 3 spelled trouble more often than not.

But Tsalas made the affirmative gesture. Atvar braced himself for the worst. It didn’t come, at least not right away. The science officer said, “You will have been advised of the large meteoric impact on Tosev 4 not long ago?”

“Oh, yes.” Atvar used the affirmative gesture, too. “This solar system, by everything I have been able to gather, is much more untidy than that of Home. It seems a fitting place to have hatched the Big Uglies.”

Tsalas laughed. “That no doubt holds a good deal of truth, Exalted Fleetlord. But there are data to suggest that this impact was not altogether the result of chance.”

“I do not understand,” Atvar said. “What else could it have been?”

“None of our probes out in the belt of minor planets between Tosev 4 and Tosev 5 noticed anything out of the ordinary among the American Big Uglies working there,” the science officer said. “But a new probe traveling toward that belt had its forward camera operating, and caught… this.”

His face vanished, to be replaced by a view of space and stars. Off to the right of the screen, a new star, not very bright, suddenly came to life. After Atvar watched it for a little while, he saw that it was moving against the stars in the background. “That is a rocket motor!” he exclaimed.

The display winked out. Tsalas reappeared. “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said. “That is a rocket motor, and one of considerable power, or the probe would not have noticed it at such a long distance. I sped up the video for you to help you grasp its nature more quickly.”

“But what motor is it?” the fleetlord asked. “It cannot belong to either of the two American spaceships now in the belt of minor planets, or the probes already there would have seen this burn. What are the Big Uglies doing?”

“I am not certain,” Tsalas replied. “No one is certain-no one not an American Tosevite, at any rate. But it seems likely that the motor accelerated a good-sized chunk of rock from its normal orbit among the minor planets and toward the more inward regions of this solar system. It seems likely, in fact, that our outbound probe happened to catch the launch of this chunk of rock toward its eventual collision with Tosev 4.”

“But Tosev 4 is an utterly worthless world,” Atvar said. “Why would anyone, even Big Uglies, be so addled as to bombard it with meteors?”

“Perhaps,” Tsalas said gently, “to give them practice in hitting other, more inherently valuable, targets.”

That needed a moment to sink in. When it did, Atvar let out a hiss of unadulterated horror. “You are telling me that they could bombard us here on Tosev 3 from out in the belt of minor planets,” he said.

“I believe so, yes, Exalted Fleetlord.” Tsalas sounded no happier than Atvar felt. “I apologize for not bringing this to your notice sooner. Connecting several apparently unrelated pieces of data took longer than it should have. On the other fork of the tongue, perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that the connection was made at all. The American Tosevites plainly intended to keep it secret from us.”

“Yes. Plainly,” Atvar said. “And we shall have to see about that, too. Indeed we shall. I thank you, Senior Science Officer. I believe you may well have done the Race a great service.” He listened with some small part of one hearing diaphragm to Tsalas’ thanks, then broke the connection and shouted, “Pshing!”

His adjutant rushed into the office. “What is it, Exalted Fleetlord?”

“Summon the American ambassador to me this instant. This instant, do you hear?” Atvar said. “I do not care what that Big Ugly is doing. I do not care if he is eating. I do not care if he is mating. I do not care if he is standing in front of a mirror and watching his hair grow. I want him here at once. No delay, no excuse, is to be tolerated. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord. It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing fled.

Henry Cabot Lodge arrived quite promptly, even if not so soon as Atvar might have wished. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said, his accent thick but understandable. “What can I do for you today? I gather from your adjutant that the business is urgent, whatever it may be.”

“You might say so,” Atvar answered. “Yes, you might say so. How does the United States dare to prepare to bombard Tosev 3 from the belt of minor planets between Tosev 4 and Tosev 5?”

He wondered if Lodge would have the nerve to deny the charge. But the Big Ugly said, “We are a free and independent not-empire. We are entitled to take whatever steps we choose to protect ourselves. So long as we are not at war with the Race, we do not have to make an accounting of our actions to you.”

“Do you recall how close you came to being at war with the Race not long ago?” the fleetlord demanded.

“Yes. And I also recall the price we paid to avoid it,” Henry Cabot Lodge replied. “It was just that we should pay it then, for we were in the wrong. But we are not in the wrong here, Exalted Fleetlord, and you have no right to protest our legitimate research in space.”

Lodge was never a male to bluster and threaten. But he sounded determined here. Even Atvar, no great expert on Tosevite intonation, could tell as much. He said, “Regardless of whatever installations you devise out there, Ambassador, the Race remains able to destroy your not-empire many times over.”

“I understand that,” the Big Ugly said steadily. “We are now able to treat with you on more fully equal terms, however.”

And that, unfortunately, was a big, ugly, unpalatable truth. “We could wreck this entire planet, if necessary, to keep you Tosevites from escaping your solar system.” Atvar had had that thought before. Now, suddenly, it seemed much more urgent-and also much harder to do. Could he give such an order, slaying all the colonists along with the Big Uglies? He wondered.

He or his successors would have to be the ones to do it, if anyone did. By the time he sent a query Home and waited for a reply at the laggard speed of light, that reply would come far, far too late to do any good. Not even the Emperors had borne such responsibility, not since before the days when Home was unified.

Henry Cabot Lodge said, “That is madness, and you know it perfectly well.”

“Truth: it is madness,” Atvar agreed. “But Tosev 3 is a world of madness, so who knows whether a mad answer might not be the best?” To that, the American Big Ugly had not a single word to say.