Aftershocks

4

With a shriek of decelerating jet engines, the Japanese airliner rolled to a stop on the runway just outside of Edmonton. The pilot spoke over the intercom, first in his own language and then in English hardly more comprehensible. “What the hell is he talking about?” Penny Summers asked.

“One from column A, two from column B,” Rance Auerbach guessed. Penny gave him a dirty look. He ignored it and went on, “It would have been a lot faster and a lot cheaper to fly a U.S. airliner out of Tahiti.”

“And it would have made stops in the States, too,” Penny pointed out. “I didn’t want to take the chance.”

“Well, okay,” Auerbach said with a sigh. “But I’ll tell you something: there aren’t a hell of a lot of places left where we can go without somebody wanting to take a shot at us as soon as we get there. That gets old, you know what I mean?”

“Things ought to be pretty peaceful for the layover here.” Penny sighed, too. Rance knew what that meant. Whenever she came to someplace peaceful, she got bored. When she got bored, she started turning things on their ear. He’d had enough of things’ getting turned on their ear. Telling her so wouldn’t do him any good. He knew as much. He didn’t think she started stirring things up on purpose-which didn’t mean they didn’t get stirred up.

Groundcrew men wheeled a deplaning ladder up to the airliner’s front door. Rance grunted even more painfully than usual as he heaved himself upright. Except for a couple of trips back to the head, he’d been trapped in a none-too-spacious seat ever since Midway Island. He hadn’t been sitting here forever-he couldn’t have been-but it sure as hell felt that way.

“Baggage and customs and passport control through Gate Four,” a groundcrew man bawled, again and again. “Gate Four!” He pointed toward the airport terminal, as if none of the deplaning passengers could possibly have noticed the big red 4 above the nearest gate without his help.

“Well, well, what have we here?” a Canadian customs man said, examining their documents with considerable interest. “Papers from the Race, valid for South Africa only-rather emphatically valid for South Africa only, I might add. Then all these endorsements from Free France, a Japanese transit visa, and a transit visa for the Dominion here. Fascinating. You don’t see things like this every day.”

“You see anything wrong?” Rance put a little challenge in his raspy, ruined voice.

“And you, sir, do not sound like a South African,” the customs man said. “You sound like an American from the South.”

“Doesn’t matter what I sound like,” Auerbach said. “Only thing that matters is, my papers are in order.”

“That’s right,” Penny agreed. A lot of places, they could have made things go smoothly by greasing the functionary’s palm. There were parts of the USA where that would have worked like a charm. Eyeing this customs man, Auerbach thought a bribe would only get him in deeper. He kept his hand away from his billfold.

“I think we had better have a look at your baggage,” the Canadian official said. “A good, thorough look.”

He and his pals spent the next hour examining the baggage not only by eye but with a fluoroscope. A customs man patted Rance down. A police matron took Penny off into another room. When she came back, steam was coming out of her ears. But the matron shrugged to the customs men, so Penny had passed the test.

“You see?” Rance said. “We’re clean.” He was awfully glad neither he nor Penny had tried to sneak a gun through the Dominion. Canadians didn’t like that sort of thing at all.

The lead customs agent glared at him. “You have close to fifty pounds of ginger in your suitcases,” he pointed out.

“It’s not illegal.” Rance and Penny spoke together.

“That’s so.” The customs man didn’t sound happy about it, but couldn’t deny it. “Still, I strongly suggest you would be very wise to keep your noses clean while you are in Edmonton. Give me those preposterous papers.” With quite unnecessary force, he applied the stamps that cleared them for entry.

Because Auerbach wasn’t up to carrying much, they rented a little cart to get all the luggage to the cab rank. Fortunately, the first waiting cabby drove an enormous Oldsmobile whose equally enormous trunk devoured all the suitcases with the greatest of ease.

“Four Seasons Hotel,” Penny told him as he held the door open for her and Rance.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “Best hotel in town.” His accent wasn’t that far removed from her Midwestern tones. Next best thing to being back in the States, Auerbach thought.

He hadn’t known what to expect from the hotel; choosing one from thousands of miles away couldn’t be anything but a gamble. But this gamble paid off. “Not bad,” Penny said as bellmen all but fought over their suitcases.

“How long do you expect to be staying, sir?” the desk clerk asked Rance.

“Only a few days,” Rance answered. With luck, they’d sell their ginger here and then head on to France with a nice stash. Without luck, they’d have to try to smuggle the ginger past the noses of the Race’s French chums, and probably past the Lizards’ own snouts, too. Rance didn’t like thinking about all the things that could happen without luck.

“Phew!” Penny said when they finally made it to their room.

“Yeah.” Rance hobbled over to the bed, let his stick fall to the thickly carpeted floor, and stretched out at full length on the mattress. His back made little crackling noises. “Jesus, that feels good!” he said. “I feel like I was stuffed into a sardine can for the last month.”

“I know what you mean.” Penny lay down beside him. “The Japs make seats and spaces between seats that suit them, but they’re too damn cramped for Americans. I’m not a great big gal, but I’m not teeny-tiny like that, either.”

He reached out and let his hand rest, almost as if by accident, on her leg. One thing led to another, and then to another after that: both of them, worn out by long travel and other, happier exertions, fell asleep on that big, comfortable bed. When Rance woke up, he heard the shower going. It stopped a couple of minutes later. Penny came out, wrapped in a white hotel towel. “Oh, good,” she said when she saw his eyes were open. “Now I don’t have to shake you.”

“You’d better not.” Sitting up made Rance’s ruined shoulder yelp, but he did it anyhow. “What time is it?” Asking her was easier than looking at the clock on the nightstand.

“Half past six,” she answered. “Why don’t you spruce up, too? Then we can go downstairs and get ourselves some supper.” As if to spur him out of bed, she let the towel drop.

“Okay,” he said, groping for his stick when he would sooner have been groping her. But soap and hot water were good in their own way. After endless hours in that airplane, he felt filmed with grime. Scraping sandy, gray-streaked stubble off his chin and cheeks made him look less like a stumblebum and more like an up-and-coming ginger dealer.

Everybody in the Vintage Room, the Four Seasons’ restaurant, looked like somebody, whether he was or not. Whiskies arrived with commendable speed. The steaks Rance and Penny ordered took a lot longer, though. The service was courteous and attentive, but it was slow. After Japanese food on the airliner, Auerbach’s stomach seemed empty as outer space. He finally lost patience. When his waiter walked by, he growled, “What are you doing, waiting for the calf to grow up so you can butcher it?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” The waiter didn’t sound more than professionally sorry. “I’m sure your supper will be ready before too very long.” Off he went. The restaurant wasn’t crowded, but things didn’t move very fast even so.

A couple of tables over, a fellow with a splendid graying handlebar mustache waved for his own waiter. “I say,” he boomed in tones unmistakably upper-crust British, “has everyone in your kitchen died of old age?”

“Oh, good,” Penny said with a laugh. “We’re not the only ones who can’t get fed.”

“Not the only ones starving to death, you mean,” Rance grumbled. He studied the Englishman. After a moment, he grunted softly. “God damn me to hell and throw me in a frying pan if that’s not Basil Roundbush. I haven’t seen him in years, but that’s got to be him. Couldn’t be anybody else, by Jesus.”

“That ginger smuggler you have connections with?” Penny asked.

“The very same,” Auerbach said. “Now what the devil is he doing here? I hadn’t heard that he’d given up on England.” He paused. “For that matter, with the Nazis down for the count, there’s no point in giving up on England, you know?” His eyes narrowed. “Maybe he’s here on business.”

“Yeah.” Penny’s eyes lit up. “Maybe we could do some business if he is. Finding somebody like that-we wouldn’t need to chase around after locals with connections. It could save us a lot of time.”

“You’re right. Money, too.” Rance grabbed his stick and used it to get to his feet. He limped over to the table where Basil Roundbush was sitting and sketched a salute. “Long as you’re not getting fed, either, want to not get fed along with my lady friend and me?”

Roundbush’s gaze swung toward him. The Englishman was so handsome, Rance wondered if he ought to let him anywhere near Penny. But it was done now. And, no slower than if he’d seen Rance day before yesterday, Roundbush said, “Auerbach, as I live and breathe.” He sprang to his feet and shook Rance’s hand. “What are you doing in this benighted Land Without Supper?”

“This and that. We can talk about it, if you want to,” Auerbach said. “And I might ask you the same question. I will ask you the same question, when you get over there.”

“I hope my waiter eventually realizes where I’ve gone-or even that I’ve gone.” But Roundbush grabbed his own drink and followed Rance back to his table. He bowed over Penny’s hand and kissed it. She did everything but giggle like a schoolgirl. Auerbach had known she would. Sourly, he waved to his waiter for another drink. Roundbush’s waiter came by the empty table and stared in blank dismay. More handwaving got that straightened out. The dinners did eventually arrive.

Over what even a Texan had to admit was pretty good beef, Rance asked, “And what are you doing in Canada?”

“Taking care of a nasty little spot of business,” Basil Roundbush answered. “Chap named David Goldfarb-fellow wouldn’t do what he was supposed to. Can’t have that go on: bad for business, don’t you know?”

“Goldfarb?” Rance’s ears pricked up. “Not the fellow you sent down to Marseille?”

“Why, yes. How the devil could you know that?” Before Auerbach spoke, Roundbush answered his own question: “Don’t tell me you were the people the Lizards had involved in that fiasco. Small world, isn’t it?”

“Too damn small, sometimes,” Rance said.

“It could be, it could be.” Basil Roundbush waved airily. “In any case, the bloke’s not wanted anything to do with us since. He knows rather more than he should, and so…” He shrugged. “Unfortunate, but that’s how life is sometimes.”

“You ask me, you ought to leave him alone,” Rance said. “You asked for trouble, sending a Jew down into the Reich. I’d give you what-for, too, you tried that on me.”

Penny kicked him under the table. He wondered why, till he remembered they might be able to sell Roundbush their ginger. Well, that was water over the dam now. The Englishman gave him a frosty stare. “I’m afraid your opinion doesn’t much concern me, old man. I intend doing what suits me, not what suits you.”

Rance’s temper kindled. He didn’t care who the limey was, or how big a wheel. Nobody brushed him off like that. Nobody. “You can goddamn well leave him alone, mister, or you’ll answer to me.”

Penny kicked him again, harder. He ignored that, too. He’d thought she would make trouble here, and now he was doing it. Roundbush didn’t laugh in his face, but he came close. He said, “If you think your foolish words will do the slightest thing toward changing my mind, old man, I must tell you you’re mistaken.”

“If you think I’m just talking, old man, you’re full of shit,” Rance replied. Penny did her best to take his leg off at the ankle. The Lizards had done their best to take it off at the thigh. He wasn’t afraid of anything, not any more, not even-maybe especially not-of dying. It gave him an odd sort of freedom. He intended to make the most of it.

Whenever the telephone rang these days, whether at home or at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works, David Goldfarb answered it with a certain amount of apprehension. He also answered it with pencil and paper handy, to record the phone numbers of callers. That wouldn’t do him any good with Basil Roundbush, of course, but it might help with local hired muscle, if the Englishman chose to use any. Goldfarb had no way of guessing how many scrambler sets Roundbush had brought along.

“Saskatchewan River Widgets,” he said now, pencil poised. “David Goldfarb speaking.”

“Hello, Goldfarb. We met once upon a time, a long ways away from here. Do you remember?” It wasn’t Roundbush’s voice. It wasn’t a British voice at all. That accent was American, with an odd twang. The fellow on the other end of the line also spoke in a harsh rasp, as if he hadn’t had a cigarette out of his mouth for five minutes since the day he was born.

More than anything else, that rasp reminded David Goldfarb of who the caller had to be. “Marseille,” he blurted, and then, “You’re one of the Yanks the Lizards used to try to nab Pierre Dutourd.”

“That’s right,” the American said. “Name’s Rance Auerbach, in case you don’t recollect. You ought to be interested in hearing I had supper with that fellow called Roundbush last night.”

Goldfarb already had his number written down. He could pass it on to the police with no trouble at all. Voice tight, he said, “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re the one who plans on finishing me off.” Anything more he could pass on to the police would be welcome, too.

But this Auerbach said, “Christ, no, you damn fool. I just wanted to make sure you knew old Basil was gunning for you. I told him to leave you the hell alone, and he told me to piss up a rope. So I’m on your side, son.”

Nobody’d been on Goldfarb’s side for a long time. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Without Jerome Jones’ help, he never would have been able to emigrate from Britain at all, and without George Bagnall, he might still be languishing in bureaucratic limbo in Ottawa. But Roundbush and his chums seemed much more determined to do him harm than anybody was to do him good. He said, “I know dear Basil is in Edmonton, thanks.”

“That’s nice,” Auerbach said. “Do you know he intends to do you in, too?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” David answered. Talking about it felt surprisingly good. “I’m taking what precautions I can.” Those were pitifully few. And he could do even less for Naomi and the children than he could for himself.

“I told the son of a bitch he’d answer to me if he tried any nasty business on you,” Rance Auerbach said. “He didn’t cotton to hearing that, but I told him anyhow. After he sent you to France, he can damn well leave you alone now.”

“Did you?” Goldfarb was frankly amazed, and no doubt showed it. In an absent way, he wondered what sort of name Rance was; the Yanks could come up with some strange ones. But that didn’t matter. He went on, “And what did he say to that? Nothing too kind, is my guess.”

“Right the first time.” Auerbach coughed, then muttered, “Damn!” He drew in a breath whose wheezing Goldfarb could hear over the telephone before continuing, “No, he wasn’t too happy. But then, he doesn’t think I can do much.”

Remembering how physically damaged the American was, Goldfarb feared his former RAF superior was right. He didn’t want to say that. What he did say was, “What can you do?”

“Less than I’d like, dammit, on account of I’m not gonna be here real long. But I’ve already talked to some of the cops here,” Auerbach answered. “For some reason or other, Canadians take things like death threats a lot more seriously than we do down in the States.”

Was that supposed to be funny? Goldfarb couldn’t tell. He said, “You’re supposed to take things like that seriously, aren’t you?”

Auerbach laughed. Then he coughed again. Then he cursed again. He said, “Only goes to show you’ve never lived in Texas.” After another round of coughs and another round of soft curses, he went on, “Listen, you know where you can get your hands on a pistol without filling out forms from here to next week?”

“No,” Goldfarb answered. He’d been advised-hell, he’d been told-to leave his service weapon behind when he came to Canada. He’d done it, too, and spent the time since Basil Roundbush first called wishing he hadn’t.

“Too bad,” the American said. “The trouble with guys like good old Basil and his pals is, they don’t play by the rules. If you do, you’re liable to end up a dead duck.”

“I know,” David said unhappily. “But what can you do about all this? What can I do about it, for that matter?”

“Well, making sure you don’t get killed would be a good start,” Auerbach answered.

“I quite agree,” David Goldfarb said. “I’ve been trying to do that myself for quite some time now. What can you do about it?”

“I don’t right know. I wish I were gonna be here longer,” the American said. “I’ve got a marker or two I may be able to call in, but God only knows if they’re still worth anything. Finding out will take a little bit of doing: I haven’t tried to get ahold of these people in a long time. And I won’t be able to tell them everything about this business even if they aren’t pushing up lilies somewhere.”

David pondered that. It could add up to any number of different things, but he saw one that looked more likely than any of the others. “You know Germans?” he asked, and wondered if he really wanted to find out the answer.

For close to half a minute, he didn’t. At last, Auerbach said, “Well, you’re nobody’s fool, are you?”

“I like to think not, anyhow,” Goldfarb said. “Of course, people like to think all sorts of things that others might find unlikely.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Rance Auerbach said. “Okay, hang in there, Goldfarb. I’ll see what I can do.” He hung up.

From the next desk over, Hal Walsh said, “I hope that wasn’t trouble, David,” as Goldfarb set his own phone back in its cradle.

“I don’t…think so,” David told his boss. Walsh nodded, not entirely convinced. Since Goldfarb wasn’t entirely convinced, either, he just shrugged and went back to work. He had to look down at the drawings in front of him for a while before he could remember what the hell he’d been trying to do.

He spent the rest of the day at half speed. He couldn’t keep his mind fully on the latest project Hal Walsh had set him. His eyes kept drifting toward the telephone. When it rang half an hour later, he jumped. But it was only Naomi, asking him to stop at the grocery for a few things on the way home from work.

“I can do that,” he said.

“I should hope so,” his wife answered. “It’s not that hard, especially now when you have sensible money to deal with.” Though she’d lived in Britain for the larger part of her life, she’d never quite come to terms with pence and shillings and pounds. Canadian dollars and cents made her much happier than the traditional currency ever had.

Goldfarb left the office about half an hour later than he might have otherwise; he was doing his best to make up for being distracted. As usual when the weather was even close to decent, he walked home: his flat was less than a mile from the Widget Works. That kept the beginnings of a middle-aged potbelly from becoming too much more than a beginning.

With a choice of several grocer’s shops on the way, he intended to stop at the one closest to his block of flats. Walking was all very well, but walking with a paper sack was something else again.

He was halfway across the street on whose far side stood the grocer’s when he heard the roar of a racing automobile engine and a couple of shouts of, “Look out!” His head whipped around. A big Chevy-an enormous auto, for one used to British motorcars-was bearing down on him, and the driver plainly had not the slightest intention of stopping.

Had he panicked, he would have died right there. He waited as long as he thought he possibly could-perhaps a whole second-then dashed forward. The Chevy’s driver couldn’t react quite fast enough. The edge of his mudguard (no, they called them fenders on this side of the Atlantic) touched Goldfarb’s jacket, but then he was past.

And then that driver had to slam on the brakes to keep from smashing into the cars stopped at the light at the next corner. He couldn’t do that quite fast enough, either, not at the speed he was going. It had been a while since David heard the crash of crumpling metal and shattering glass, but the sound was unmistakable.

Goldfarb sprinted toward the Chevy that had come to grief. He hoped the driver had gone straight through the windscreen-it never for a moment occurred to him to doubt that the fellow had tried to run him down on purpose. And if the bastard hadn’t got himself a face full of plate glass, Goldfarb wanted answers from him. Maybe the local constabulary could get them. Or maybe he’d start bouncing the bugger’s head off the pavement till he sang.

But the driver hadn’t gone through the windscreen (no, windshield here). He managed to get his door open and started to run. “Stop him!” Goldfarb shouted. “Stop that man!”

In Britain, a crowd would have taken off after the man. He didn’t know what would happen in Canada. He found out: a crowd took off after the fellow, a crowd led by the man with whose car the driver had just collided. A younger fellow brought the fleeing driver down with a tackle that would have earned him pats on the back in a rugby scrum.

“He almost killed you, buddy,” somebody said to Goldfarb. “It was like he didn’t see you at all.”

“Oh, he saw me, all right,” David said grimly. “He’s just sorry he missed.” The other man stared at him and tried to laugh, thinking he’d made a joke. When he didn’t laugh back, the other fellow went off shaking his head.

Goldfarb didn’t care, because a police car screeched around the corner and stopped. The men who piled out were dressed more like American cops than British bobbies, but that didn’t matter much. They took efficient charge of the miscreant. “He tried to kill me,” Goldfarb told one of them. “Before he smashed into that other motorcar, he almost ran me down while I was crossing the street.”

“Probably drunk,” the policeman said.

“No, I mean it literally,” David insisted. “He did try to kill me. He swerved towards me, but I managed to dodge.”

Both policemen looked at him. One of them said, “Maybe you’d better come to the station, then, sir, and give a statement.”

“I’d be glad to, if you’ll let me ring my wife when we get there, so she knows I’m all right and I’ll be late,” Goldfarb answered. The policemen nodded. He rode to the station in the front seat, the man who’d tried to run him down in the back. They didn’t say a word to each other all the way there.

Sweating in his coveralls, Johannes Drucker waited for a Lizard to open the door to his cubicle aboard the starship he’d tried to destroy. At precisely the appointed moment, the door slid open. The male-Drucker presumed it was a male-who stood in the doorway said, “Come with me.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Drucker answered.

The Lizard’s mouth fell open: the gesture the Race used for laughter. “I am a female,” she said. “My name is Nesseref. Now come. My shuttlecraft is waiting at the rotation hub of this ship.”

“It shall be done, superior female,” Drucker said, both stressing the word and adding an emphatic cough. That made Nesseref laugh again.

When Drucker strode out into the corridor, he found two armed Lizards waiting to make sure he didn’t go anywhere he wasn’t supposed to. Now that they were finally releasing him, the German spaceman had no intention of doing that, but he would have mistrusted one of them were their roles reversed. He wished those roles had been reversed.

He followed Nesseref toward the hub of the starship. The guards followed him. With every deck they went inward, they got lighter. By the time they reached the rotation hub, they weighed nothing at all.

Nesseref entered her shuttlecraft first, then called, “Come in. I have an acceleration couch shaped for a Tosevite.”

“I thank you,” Drucker said, and obeyed. The couch looked to be of American manufacture. He strapped himself in. Nesseref wasted no time in using her maneuvering jets to get free of the starship. Drucker watched her work in silent fascination. At last, he broke the silence: “Your ship has far more in the way of computer-aided controls than the upper stage I flew.”

“A good thing, too,” the Lizard replied. “I think you Tosevites have to be addled to come up into space in your inadequate machines.”

“We used what we had,” Drucker answered with a shrug. He spoke in the past tense: the Reich would not be going into space again any time soon. If the Race had its way-and that was all too likely-Germans would never go into space again. He asked, “Now that I am returning to Tosev 3, where in Deutschland will you land me?”

“By the city called Nuremberg,” Nesseref answered. “Such are my orders.”

“Nuremberg?” Drucker sighed. He’d been warned, but still… “That is in the far south of the land, and my home is in the north. Could you not have picked a closer shuttlecraft port?”

“There are no closer functioning shuttlecraft ports,” Nesseref answered. “In fact, I am given to understand that that is at the moment the only functioning shuttlecraft port in the subregion. Had no one told you of this?”

“Well, yes,” Johannes Drucker admitted unhappily. “But it still presents great difficulties for me. How am I to travel from Nuremberg to my home? Will the railroads be working? Will folk on the ground give me money to travel?”

“I know nothing of any of this.” Nesseref’s voice held nothing but indifference. “My orders are to put you on the ground at the shuttlecraft port outside Nuremberg. I shall obey them.”

Obey them she did, with an efficiency that outdid anything merely Teutonic. A single neat burn took the shuttlecraft out of Earth orbit. After that, she hardly even had to adjust the machine’s course. Another burn halted the shuttlecraft above the tarmac of the port and let its legs kiss the ground with hardly a jar.

Nesseref opened the hatch. The mild air of German summer mingled with the hot, dry stuff the Race preferred. “Get out,” she told Drucker. “I do not want any more radioactive contamination than I can help getting.”

“It shall be done.” Drucker scrambled down the ladder and let himself drop to the soil of the Vaterland.

No one, Lizard or human, came across the tarmac to greet him. Now that he was here, he was on his own. He looked toward what had been the famous skyline of Nuremberg. No more: that skyline had been truncated, abridged. Some of the massive buildings were simply gone, others were wreckage half as tall as they had been. He shook his head and let out a soft, sad whistle. No matter how harshly the Reich had used him and his family, it was still his country. Seeing it brought low like this tore at him.

I shouldn’t have bothered attacking that starship, he thought. The war was already lost by then. I should have landed the upper stage of my A-45 in some neutral country-the USA, maybe England-and let myself be interned.

Too late now. Too late for everything now. He’d expected to go out in a blaze of glory when he made the attack run on the Lizard ship. No such luck. Now he had to deal with the consequences of living longer than he’d thought he would.

He glanced around the tarmac again. No, nobody cared he was here. He didn’t have ten pfennigs in his pocket: what point to taking money into space? Where would he spend it? But he faced different questions here: how would he get along without it? Where would he find his next meal? If he did find a meal, how would he pay for it?

Where would he find his next meal? Somewhere to the north, that was all he knew. As the crow flew, Greifswald was about five hundred kilometers from Nuremberg. He wasn’t a crow, and he didn’t think he’d do much in the way of flying any time soon. He’d be walking, and likely walking a lot more than five hundred kilometers.

Who was it who’d said, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step? Somebody Chinese, he thought. He took the first step on the way back toward Greifswald. Before long, he was off the tarmac of the shuttlecraft port. He soon discovered the Lizards had machine-gun and artillery and missile emplacements around it. None of the males-he presumed they were males, though he’d been wrong with the shuttlecraft pilot-paid him any attention. He was authorized to be there. He didn’t care to think what would have happened if he hadn’t been.

Before long, he came on a road leading northeast. He started tramping along it. That was the direction in which he wanted to go. Pretty soon, he’d either come to a village or farmhouse or he’d pass a stream or a pond. Any which way, he’d get himself a drink.

He wondered how much radioactivity he’d take in from the local water. For that matter, he wondered how much he was taking in every time he inhaled. However much it was, he couldn’t do anything about it.

And he wondered why he saw no motor traffic on the road. He didn’t need long to find the answer to that: the Lizards had cratered it with dozens of little bomblets. He remembered those weapons from the earlier round of fighting. He’d driven panzers then, and hadn’t worried so much about roads. But wheeled vehicles couldn’t go anywhere without them.

After a couple of kilometers, he came upon a gang filling in craters the bomblets had left behind. No bulldozers, no tractors, no powered equipment of any kind. Just men with shovels and picks and mattocks and crowbars, slowly and methodically getting rid of one hole after another. By their clothes, some were local farmers, others demobilized Wehrmacht men still in grimy field-gray. It was hard to tell which group seemed more weary and dejected.

A soldier picked up a bucket and raised it to his mouth. That was all Drucker needed to see. He waved and broke into a shambling trot and called, “Hey, can I have a swig out of that bucket?”

“Who the devil are you?” asked the fellow who’d just drunk. Water dribbled down his poorly shaved chin. He pointed. “And what kind of crazy getup is that?”

Drucker glanced down at his coveralls. The Reich had had a thousand different dress and undress uniforms, almost as many as the Race had different styles of body paint. Nobody could keep track of all of them. Drucker gave his name, adding, “Lieutenant colonel, Reichs Rocket Force. I was captured out in space; the Lizards just turned me loose. Tell you the truth, I’m trying to figure out what to do next.”

“Rocket Force, huh?” The Wehrmacht man paused to wipe his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. “Fat lot of good you buggers did anybody.” But he picked up the bucket and handed it to Drucker. The water was barely cool, but went down like dark beer. When Drucker set down the bucket, the fellow who’d given it to him asked, “So where are you headed, Herr Rocket Man?”

“Greifswald,” Drucker answered. He saw that meant nothing to anyone but him, so he made things plainer. “It’s up near Peenemunde, by the Baltic.”

“Ach, so. ” The demobilized soldier raised an eyebrow. “If it’s up near Peenemunde, is anything left of it?”

“I don’t know,” Drucker said bleakly. “I’ve got-I had, anyway-a wife and three kids. I have to see if I can track them down.”

“Good luck,” said the fellow who’d given him water. He sounded as if he thought Drucker would need luck better than merely good. Drucker was afraid he thought the same thing. After a moment, the ex-soldier remarked, “Hell of a long way from the Baltic to here. How do you propose to get there?”

“Walk, if I have to,” Drucker replied. “I’m getting an idea of what the roads are like. Are any trains running?”

“A few,” the former Wehrmacht man said. The rest of the laborers, who seemed happy to get a break, nodded. When he continued, “Not bloody many, though,” they nodded again. He waved. “And you see what the highways are like. It’s not just this one, either. They’re all the same. The stinking Lizards paralyzed us. We’ve got people starving because there’s no way to get food from here to there.”

“And everything you can get costs ten times too much,” another laborer added. “The Reichsmark isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on any more.”

“Ouch.” Drucker winced. “We went through that after the First World War. Do we have to do it again?”

The ex-soldier said, “If everybody’s got money and there’s nothing to buy, prices are going to go through the roof. That’s life.” He spat. “I’ll worry about all that Scheisse later, when I’ve got the time. Right now, I’m just glad I’m still breathing. A hell of a lot of people in the Reich aren’t.”

“Hey, Karl,” one of the other laborers said. Several men put their heads together and talked in voices too low for Drucker to make out what they were saying. They passed something back and forth among themselves. He couldn’t tell what they were doing there, either.

He was almost on the point of wondering whether he ought to turn and run like hell when they broke apart. The former Wehrmacht man-Karl-turned toward him and held out a moderately fat wad of banknotes. “Here you go, Colonel,” he said. “This’ll keep you eating for a couple-three days, anyhow.”

“Thank you very much!” Drucker exclaimed. From what he could see, none of the laborers had enough to be able to spare much. But they knew he had nothing at all, and so they’d reached into their pockets. He nodded. “Thanks from the bottom of my heart.”

“It’s nothing,” Karl said. “We all know what you’re going through. We’re all going through it, too-except for the ones who’ve been through it already. They’re trying to come out the other side. Hope you make it up to Greifswald. Hope you find your family, too.”

“Thanks,” Drucker said again. And if he didn’t find his family, he’d have to… to try to come out the other side, too. The phrase struck him as all too apt. With a last nod, he started walking again, heading north, heading home.

After the Nazis occupied Poland, they’d built an enormous death factory at Treblinka. They’d been building an even bigger one outside Oswiecim-Auschwitz, they’d called it in German-when the Lizards came. Mordechai Anielewicz had longed for revenge against the tormentors of the Jews for a generation. Now he had it. And now, having it, he discovered the folly of such wishes.

He could go anywhere he chose in the much-reduced Greater German Reich. As a leader among the Polish Jews who’d fought side by side with the Lizards against the Nazis in two wars now-and as a man who’d made sure his friends among the Lizards helped all they could-he had the backing of the Race. Before entering Germany, he’d got a document from the Race’s authorities in Poland authorizing him to call on the males occupying the Reich for assistance. He also had documents in German, to overawe burgomeisters and other functionaries.

What hadn’t occurred to him was how few German functionaries were left to overawe. The Lizards had done a truly astonishing job of pounding flat the part of Germany just west of Poland. He’d known that in the abstract. The Wehrmacht’s assault on Poland had petered out not least because the Germans couldn’t keep their invading army supplied. As he entered Germany, he saw exactly what that pounding had done.

Kreuz, where Mordechai entered the Reich, had taken an explosive-metal bomb. The center of the city had simply ceased to be, except for one church spire and most of a factory chimney, which still reached toward the heavens like the skeletal fingers of a dead man. Fused, shiny glass gradually gave way to rubble outside the center of town.

This is what the Nazis did to Lodz, Anielewicz thought. This is what they did to Warsaw, and to as many other cities as they could hit. But they’d taken worse than they’d given: that was dreadfully clear. He asked a Lizard officer, “How many Deutsch cities did the Race bomb with explosive-metal weapons?”

“I do not know, not precisely,” the male answered. “Many tens of them, without a doubt. Hundreds, very possibly. The Deutsche were stubborn. They should have yielded long before they did. They had no hope of defeating us, and merely inflicted more suffering on their own population by refusing to give up the futile fight.”

Many tens. Hundreds, very possibly. The answer was horrifying enough to Mordechai when he first heard it. It became far more so when he got to the makeshift hospital on the far side of what had been Kreuz. Tents and shacks housed people maimed or blinded or horribly burned by the explosive-metal bomb. The handful of doctors and nurses and civilian volunteers were desperately overworked and had next to nothing with which to treat their patients.

Mordechai multiplied that improvised hospital by tens, hundreds very possibly. He shivered, though the day was fine, even warm. What sort of miracle was it that any Germans survived at all?

A bespectacled doctor in a long, none too clean white coat came up to him. “You are a person of some influence with the Lizards,” he stated, his voice brooking no argument. “You must be, to be clean and well fed and traveling so.”

“What if I am?” Mordechai asked.

“You will try to obtain for us more medical supplies,” the doctor said, again as if stating a law of nature. “You see what we lack.”

Humility, Anielewicz thought. Aloud, he said, “You’d ask this of me even though I’m a Jew?” He let the German he had used slide into Yiddish. If the doctor-the Nazi doctor, he thought-couldn’t follow, too bad.

But the man only shrugged. “I would ask it if you were Satan himself,” he answered. “I need these things. My patients need these things.”

“You aren’t the only ones who do,” Anielewicz observed.

“That does not make my need any less urgent,” the doctor said.

From his point of view, he might even have been right. Germans in torment suffered no less than Jews in torment. Anielewicz wished he could deny that. If he did, though, what would he be but the mirror image of a Nazi? Roughly, he said, “I’ll do what I can.”

By the way the doctor looked at him, the man thought he was lying. But he spoke of the matter with the first Lizard officer he encountered, a couple of kilometers farther outside of Kreuz. The male responded, “I understand the physician’s difficulties, but the number of injured Deutsche far outstrips our ability to provide all physicians with all required medicaments. We shall do what we can. It may not be much and it may not be timely, but we shall make the effort.”

“I thank you,” Mordechai answered. There, he told his conscience. Relax. I’ve made the effort, too.

Every time he went into a village, he asked about soldiers bringing Jews back into Germany from Poland. Most of the time, he got only blank stares by way of reply. A few people glared at him. Nazi teachings had sunk deep. Those Germans eyed a Jew-maybe the first they’d ever seen in the flesh, surely the first they’d seen for years-as if he were Satan incarnate.

More Germans, though, groveled before him. He needed a little while to realize that was a residue of Nazi teachings, too. He had authority: therefore, he was to be obeyed. If he weren’t obeyed, something dreadful would befall the villagers. They seemed convinced of it. At times, he wished it were true.

None of the Germans he questioned knew anything about his wife and sons and daughter. None of them had seen a beffel. He made a point of asking about Pancer; the alien pet might have stuck in people’s minds where a few Jews wouldn’t have registered. The logic was good, but he had no luck with it.

He pedaled into a little town called Arnswalde as the sun was setting for the brief summer night of northern Germany. With the beating the Reichsmark had taken since the Nazis surrendered, the Polish zlotys in his wallet seemed good as gold-better. He got himself an excellent roast duck, an enormous mound of red cabbage, and all the fine lager he could drink for the price of a couple of apples back in Poland.

The fellow who served him the feast was one of those who fawned on the occupiers. “Take the leftovers with you, sir,” he said. “They’ll make you a fine breakfast, see if they don’t.”

“All right, I will. Thanks,” Mordechai said. “Do you have enough for yourself here, though?”

“Ach, ja,” the German answered with a chuckle that might have been jolly or might have been nervous. “When did you ever hear of a tavern keeper who starved to death?”

He didn’t look as if he were in any imminent danger of starving (he looked plump, as a matter of fact), so Anielewicz took the duck and some cabbage without a qualm. He even let the tavern keeper give him an old, beat-up pot in which to carry them. Either the man was generous by nature or he was a fool or the zloty was worth even more than Mordechai had thought.

Twilight lay over Arnswalde when he came out of the tavern. He’d just climbed onto his bicycle when a young blond woman walked up to him. Pointing to the pot, she came straight to the point: “You have food in there?”

“Yes,” he said, eyeing her. Not too long before, she’d probably been very pretty-a perfect Aryan princess, he thought. Now her hair was tangled and matted, her face and legs-she was wearing a short skirt, so he could see quite a lot of them-scrawny rather than pleasantly rounded. His nose wrinkled. She hadn’t bathed in a long time.

Again, she didn’t beat around the bush, saying, “Feed me and you can have me.”

“Here.” He gave her the pot. “Take it. I don’t want you, not for that. I’m looking for my wife and children.”

She snatched the pot out of his hands as if afraid he would change his mind. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re one of the decent ones. There are a few, but only a few, believe me.” She turned her head in the direction of the tavern and spat. “Not him-he takes it all out in trade, believe me.”

Mordechai sighed. Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. The German girl, after all, had no zlotys to pay for roast duck.

She said, “Who are your people? Maybe I know them.”

“I doubt it.” His voice was dry. “They’re Jews. The Wehrmacht would have brought them back from Widawa, in Poland. A woman my age, a girl, two boys-and a beffel, if you know what a beffel is. One of the Lizards’ pets.”

She shook her head. “Jews,” she said in tones of wonder. “I thought there weren’t any Jews any more. I thought they were-what’s the word I want? — extinct, that’s it.”

In Germany, in all the Greater German Reich, Jews were extinct, or close enough. “You’re talking to one,” Mordechai said, not without a certain sour pride.

“How funny.” The German girl’s laugh was hard. “If you had screwed me, then I’d’ve got in trouble for sleeping with a Jew.”

“Maybe,” Anielewicz said. “Maybe not, too. The rules are liable to change now, you know.” He wondered if they would, if the Lizards would try to enforce tolerance on the Reich. He wondered if it mattered, one way or the other. The people-the peoples-the Germans would have had to learn to tolerate were dead now… extinct, as the girl had said.

“Who would have thought a Jew could be decent?” she murmured, more than half to herself. She’d learned what her teachers taught, all right.

“What would you say if I said, ‘Who would have thought a German could be decent?’ ” Mordechai didn’t know why he bothered. Maybe because he thought she might be reached. Maybe just because, despite dirt and hunger-induced leanness, she was a pretty girl, and part of him, the eternally optimistic male part, wouldn’t have minded sleeping with her at all.

She frowned. She knew he was trying to tell her something important, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what. “But Germans, Germans are decent,” she said, as if stating a law of nature.

All at once, Anielewicz wanted to snatch back the pot full of duck and cabbage. The only reason he didn’t was that it would have confirmed her in all the worst things she thought about Jews. Germans could always see when they were being maligned, but rarely noticed when they were maligning anyone else.

The girl could have no idea what was going through his mind. She said, “If you’re looking for people, the army kept falling back to the northwest during the fighting. If they had people along with them, that’s where those people would have gone.”

“Thanks,” Anielewicz said. She was trying to be decent, anyhow. “I guess I’ll go in that direction, then.”

“I hope you find them,” she said. Mordechai nodded. Maybe she could be reached. Maybe she had been reached, a little. She went on, “You can sleep in my bed tonight, if you want to. I mean, do nothing but sleep.”

He smiled. “I don’t think I’d better. If I tried, I would want to do something besides sleeping.” She smiled, too; she took it for a compliment, as he’d hoped she would. And he hadn’t even been lying. With a nod, he got the bicycle rolling and started off toward the northwest, to see what he might find.

Kassquit had known this moment would come. She’d been aware of it ever since the shuttlecraft ferried Jonathan Yeager up to her starship. Sooner or later, he would go back to the surface of Tosev 3. It had turned out to be later, because the fighting that broke out with the Deutsche made it unsafe for him to go home. Now, though, the time for his return was here. Kassquit had known it would come, yes, but she’d never imagined how much it would hurt.

“If the war had not come,” she said as he methodically packed his wrappings and other belongings into the satchel in which he’d brought them, “if the war had not come, I say, you would have been gone much sooner. That might have proved a good thing, for I do not think I would have missed you so much after a briefer acquaintance.”

“Me?” Jonathan Yeager’s expression indicated amusement or friendship or pleasure-maybe some of all three. “Superior female, I am nothing but a wild Big Ugly. How many times did you say so yourself when you were getting to know me?”

He spoke the language of the Race much more fluently than he had when he first came up to the starship. With improved fluency came an ironic slant on the world that reminded Kassquit of the electronic messages his father had posted while pretending to be a male of the Race. Could such things be inherited? Kassquit did not think so, but she knew how ignorant she was of Tosevite genetics.

In any case, such matters were far from the most urgent things on her mind. She clung to Jonathan Yeager, saying, “Do not make yourself less than you are. You are the most exciting thing that ever happened to me.” She used an emphatic cough, not that she really needed one. He knew how she felt.

His arms went around her. He stroked her. She had never imagined how stimulating the touch of another could be. Of course, no male of the Race had ever touched her intending to arouse her. But she relished Jonathan Yeager’s touch even when he wasn’t particularly intending to arouse her.

“I cannot stay here,” he said now. “You know I cannot. Your place is here; my place is down on the surface of Tosev 3. One day, if you can safely arrange it, you shall have to visit me.”

Ttomalss would not approve. Kassquit knew as much. He would cite concern about disease. He would even be sincere. But he would also be afraid to let her go because he would fear the influence of wild Big Uglies on her. And he would not admit that if she subjected him to torment.

Jonathan Yeager was subjecting her to torment by going. Tears slid from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. He turned away. That wasn’t disgust, as it would have been from a male of the Race. Kassquit had learned as much. It was embarrassment. Jonathan Yeager was emotionally vulnerable to tears to a degree she found amazing.

She said, “Before you came here, I did not realize what an important part of my personality had not fully developed. Because I did not realize that, I did not know what I was missing. Now that I do, the future looks much lonelier than it did before.”

“I am sorry, superior female,” Jonathan Yeager answered. “I did not come up here intending to cause you pain. I came up here intending to give you pleasure, to make you happy. I hope I did that, too.”

“You know you did!” Kassquit exclaimed. “But, because you made me so happy, you make me sad that you will not be making me happy any more.”

That sounded convoluted even to her, but Jonathan Yeager had no trouble sorting it out. He said, “I will always remember you. I will always be fond of you. Even if a time should come that we cannot be anything more than friends, we shall always be friends.”

“Why should a time come…?”Kassquit answered her own half-formed question: “Tosevites contract to mate exclusively with only one partner.”

“Yes, that is a truth,” the wild Big Ugly agreed.

“You think you will eventually enter into one of these contracts.” Kassquit knew she sounded grim, but couldn’t help it.

Jonathan Yeager nodded his head, then made the Race’s affirmative gesture. “It is likely. Most males and females do.”

“And at that point, you will not want to mate with me?” Kassquit asked.

The wild Tosevite coughed and looked away. “It is not that I would not want to,” he said. “But then I should not. If an exclusive mating arrangement proves not to be exclusive, complications soon follow. Tosevite sexuality is difficult enough without complications, I think.”

As far as Kassquit could see, any sexuality was difficult. Trying to meet a partner’s needs and trying to get one’s own met by a partner who lacked full understanding of one’s body because his was different were even more difficult than the certainties of stroking oneself. They were also much less lonely, though. She hadn’t understood that, not till Jonathan Yeager came aboard the starship.

And now more loneliness loomed ahead of Kassquit. Jonathan Yeager was likely to enter one of those exclusive partnerships. Even if he didn’t, mating opportunities for him would be down on the surface of Tosev 3. Kassquit wondered where she would ever find another one. She wondered if she would ever find another one. By what she knew of things, it seemed unlikely.

How much of that did Jonathan Yeager understand? He had to be intellectually aware of it; she’d explained till he was probably tired of listening. But did it mean anything to him? Sometimes Kassquit thought one thing, sometimes the other.

She got no more time to wonder now. A hiss from the door announced the presence of a visitor. And only one visitor would be coming at this time. “The shuttlecraft pilot!” Jonathan Yeager exclaimed.

“Yes, the shuttlecraft pilot,” Kassquit said dully. She put on a fingerclaw to open the door.

A male of the Race stood in the corridor. “Which of you Big Uglies is the one called Jonathan Yeager?” he asked, making a botch of the name.

Jonathan Yeager barked Tosevite laughter, then said, “I am.” He turned to Kassquit. “Good-bye. I hope I see you again. I know I will always remember you.”

“Good-bye,” she said, and embraced him.

The shuttlecraft pilot turned both his eye turrets away from them. “Disgusting,” he muttered in a low voice. Kassquit didn’t think she was supposed to hear it, but she did. After a moment, the shuttlecraft pilot spoke louder: “Are you ready to leave, Jonathan Yeager? The launch window will not last indefinitely, in case you are not aware of it.”

“I am aware of it.” Jonathan Yeager picked up the bag of belongings he’d brought up from the surface of Tosev 3. “I am ready.”

“Then let us go,” the shuttlecraft pilot said. And go they did. Kassquit closed the door behind them. The panel smoothly slid shut; the Race’s engineers knew their business. For many years, being alone in her cubicle had seemed a refuge, a place where she was not the strange one in a starship-in effect, in a world-where no one else was like her.

Now, suddenly, the compartment seemed a prison, a trap. When she looked over at the sleeping mat, she imagined mating there with Jonathan Yeager. All she had left now were imagination and memory. The wild Big Ugly was gone. He wouldn’t come back soon, if he ever came back at all.

“What am I going to do?” Kassquit whispered.

She knew what would have been expected of a female of the Race: to return to the way she had been, as if nothing had happened. When males and females of the Race weren’t in season, sexuality meant nothing to them. They would assume it meant nothing to her, either. She wished it didn’t. Part of her wished it didn’t, anyhow. The rest longed for it.

“What am I going to do?” she said again.

Not for the first time, she wished the Deutsche had chosen some other moment to launch their attack on the Race. Her reason for that wish, though, was undoubtedly unique. Had Jonathan Yeager not been forced to stay in the starship so long, she wouldn’t have developed this emotional attachment to him. Her life would have been simpler, in a sense purer.

But now you understand more of what being a Tosevite is truly like, she thought. Now you know you are not merely a poor copy of a female of the Race. Half of her was glad to have the knowledge. The other half would as gladly have done without it.

She sighed. She would never make a proper female of the Race. And she would never make a proper Big Ugly, either. What did that leave her? I wonder if I could become a proper Rabotev or Hallessi. She laughed at her own foolishness. Why not? No one else would have found it funny.

But laughter soon faded. What would she do now that she was by herself again? The question wouldn’t go away. No answer suggested itself, either.

Someone outside asked for attention; the speaker by the door hissed again. “Who is it?” Kassquit asked.

“I: Ttomalss. May I come in?”

“Yes, superior sir.” Kassquit opened the door for him, as she had for the shuttlecraft pilot. She bent into the posture of respect. “I greet you, superior sir.”

“And I greet you, Kassquit,” the psychological researcher said. “I came in to inquire about your feelings now that the wild Big Ugly named Jonathan Yeager is returning to the surface of Tosev 3.”

“Yes, I thought you might.” Kassquit didn’t realize how sarcastic she sounded till the words were out of her mouth.

Ttomalss let out a wounded hiss. “Your well-being is a matter of considerable concern to me, you know, not only for personal reasons but also because of what I am trying to learn about successfully integrating the Race’s cultural patterns with the limits imposed by Tosevite biology.”

Yes, I understand that, superior sir, and I apologize,” Kassquit said, on the whole sincerely. “How do I feel?” She took a deep breath. “Confused may well be the best word. Too much has happened to me emotionally, and it has happened too fast, for me to be at all certain what it means. Bereft is another word that comes to mind.”

“It was so important, then, for you to have this contact with one who was like you biologically even if so different culturally?” Ttomalss asked.

“Superior sir, at the moment I feel it was,” Kassquit said. “How I will feel in several days’ time, or in a year’s, I cannot tell you at present, but for now I feel I have been deprived of something I never knew I needed.”

Ttomalss sighed. “I feared that might be so when we began this experiment. I especially feared it might be so when Jonathan Yeager stayed longer than anticipated, solidifying your sexual and emotional bonds with him. I do take some consolation in noting that Tosevite emotions, while generally stronger than those of the Race, are also generally more transient.”

That was meant to console Kassquit, too, and should have. Instead, it somehow made her furious. “So you think my emotions will go away just because I am a Big Ugly, do you?” she shouted. “I think you had better go away, superior sir!” She turned the honorific into a curse, and used an emphatic cough afterwards. When she took a step toward the psychological researcher, he left in a very great hurry indeed.

Jonathan Yeager descended from the shuttlecraft and let his feet thump down on the concrete runway at Los Angeles International Airport. The breeze smelled of the nearby ocean. It played on him at random, not with the gentle regularity of the starship’s ventilation system. After so long, random breezes felt strange, unnatural. He laughed. Random breezes were anything but.

His teeth started to chatter. After so long aboard the Lizards’ starship, the breeze that swept across the airport also felt damn cold. Because of the sea breeze, the airport was one of the coolest spots in the L.A. basin. Jonathan knew that. He’d never known it to be so downright arctic, though.

He moved away from the shuttlecraft as trucks came up to refill its hydrogen and oxygen tanks. A car came up, too, a familiar car. There was his father behind the wheel. They waved to each other. The car stopped. Jonathan’s dad hopped out and gave him a hug. “Good to see you, son!” he said. “Good to have you home!”

“Good to be back, Dad,” Jonathan answered. “It’d be even better if I weren’t freezing to death.” He tacked on an emphatic cough. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. Except for the odd word of English here and there, he’d spoken nothing but the language of the Race for a couple of months. Going back to his native tongue felt odd: English seemed sloppy and imprecise after the Lizards’ language.

His father laughed. “It’s a nice day, if you ask me. But you’ve been up in the bake oven for a while, so you wouldn’t think so.” He went around to the passenger side of the Buick and opened the door. “Hop in and we’ll head for home. Your mom’ll be just as glad to see you as I am. She’s riding herd on Mickey and Donald right now.”

“How are they doing?” Jonathan asked. He hadn’t been able to inquire about them while he was on the starship; as far as the Race was concerned, they didn’t exist.

“They’re growing like weeds,” his father answered. “They’re only two and a half now, but they’re already something like three-quarters as big as they will be. And talking quite a bit, too. If Lizard psychologists wore hats, they’d have to eat ’em, because they say that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.”

Jonathan slid into the car. It was warmer in there than outside. “What else has been going on while I was away?” he asked, tossing his bag onto the back seat.

His father got behind the wheel and started up the hydrogen-burning engine. “Oh, this and that,” he answered. His tone was casual. Too casual? Jonathan shot him a sharp look. The elder Yeager went on, “We can talk more about that when we get home, okay?”

“Okay.” Jonathan didn’t know what else to say. The car glided up to a security gate in the chain-link fence that kept normal traffic off the runways. His dad showed a guard his ID. The guard nodded and handed his dad a clipboard. His father signed the paper it held and gave it back. The guard opened the gate. The car left the restricted area and went out into a parking lot. Jonathan found another question. With a certain amount of apprehension, he asked, “How’s Karen doing?”

“Not… too bad,” his father answered judiciously. “She comes over once or twice a week. She likes the hatchlings, you know.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan answered. “Does she… still like me?”

“She hasn’t said much.” His father paused as he left the lot and merged into traffic. “Your mother and I haven’t asked her a whole lot of questions, you know. We figured it would be best if you took care of all that yourself.”

“Okay,” Jonathan said again, and then, after a moment, “Thanks. Uh-does she know what all I was doing up on the starship?”

“Well…” His father made another one of those judicious pauses. “Let me put it this way: I don’t think she thinks you were playing tiddlywinks up there.”

“Oh.” Jonathan thought about that. He sighed. “Has she said anything about it?”

“Not much.” His dad sounded admiring. On the farm and in the minor leagues and in the Army, keeping your mouth shut was praiseworthy. A phrase his father sometimes used when his mother couldn’t hear was, He wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. He meant it as approval.

But what was Karen not saying? Jonathan sighed. He’d have to find out. On the other hand, Karen might not want to say anything to him ever again. But if she didn’t, would she keep coming around to see Mickey and Donald? She might, dammit, he thought. She was wild to learn anything she could about Lizards. A lot of kids-maybe even most-her age and Jonathan’s were the same way.

Getting from the airport to Jonathan’s house took about half an hour. Up in the starship, he would have gone around a significant fraction of the Earth’s circumference in that time. His dad pulled into the driveway. When they got out, Jonathan noticed something he hadn’t before. He pointed to his father’s hip. “Are you wearing that pistol all the time now, Dad?”

“Every waking minute,” his father answered, dropping his right hand to the holstered.45. “And it’s always where I can grab it fast when I’m sleeping, too.”

“Are things really that bad?” Jonathan knew about the attacks on his father and the house, of course. But none of them had come to anything, so he had trouble taking them seriously.

“No.” His father’s voice belied the word. After a moment, the elder Yeager added, “They’re worse.”

Before Jonathan could respond to that, the front door opened and his mother hurried out to say hello. Between embraces and kisses, he stopped worrying about the pistol for a while. “I’m so glad to see you,” his mom said over and over. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”

She didn’t know how close that German had come to blowing the starship out of the sky. He didn’t intend to tell her, either. All he said was, “It’s great to be back.” He wondered if he meant it. Next to where he’d been, the stucco house looked like a primitive makeshift.

“I bet you’ll be glad to sleep in your own bed again,” his mother said. “From what your father tells me, a Lizard sleeping mat isn’t what you’d call comfortable.”

“My own bed sounds great, Mom.” Jonathan didn’t have to work too hard to sound enthusiastic. The sleeping mat hadn’t been all that great. But he’d be sleeping alone in his room. He’d had company, friendly company, up on the starship. His eyes slid to his father. By the way his dad was holding his mouth a little too tightly, he knew what Jonathan was thinking.

His mother said, “I wonder if the hatchlings will remember you. It’s been a good-sized part of their lives since they’ve seen you.”

“Let’s go find out,” Jonathan said. He wanted to discover if Mickey and Donald still knew who he was, too. And, if he was dealing with the hatchlings, his mom wouldn’t have the chance to harass him about how he shouldn’t have gone up to the starship in the first place or about how he shouldn’t have spent all his time up there fooling around with Kassquit.

He missed the girl the Lizards had done their best to raise as one of theirs. He couldn’t help it. He’d broken off a love affair. It never would have worked, not for life, not the way his folks’ marriage had. He could see that. But it had been intense while he was up there. With him and Kassquit closed up in one little cubicle all the time, how could it have been anything else?

When he got inside the house, he dropped his bag in the middle of the living room. His mom gave him a look. His dad murmured, “It’s okay this once, Barbara.” His mother frowned, but nodded a second later.

Mickey and Donald were in their room. When Jonathan opened the door, he gaped at how much they’d grown. Sure as hell, they were well on their way to being full-sized Lizards. But they looked funny. He needed a moment to realize why: they wore no body paint. He wanted to speak to them in the language of the Race. That wouldn’t work. They didn’t know it, any more than Kassquit knew any human tongue. As she’d been raised as a Lizard, they were being brought up as people.

“Hi, guys,” Jonathan said in English. “I’m Jonathan. Remember me?”

They came up to him, slowly, a little bit warily-he was bigger than either of his parents. Their eye turrets swiveled as they looked him up and down. Did they have any idea who he was? However much he wanted to, he couldn’t tell.

Then Mickey took another step toward him and stuck out his right hand. “Hello, Jonathan,” he said. His mouth couldn’t make all the sounds of English, any more than Jonathan’s could shape all those the Lizards’ language used. He was probably talking baby talk, too. But Jonathan understood him.

“Hello, Mickey,” he said gravely, and shook the little scaly hand. Then he nodded to Donald. “Hello, Donald. How are you?”

“Hello.” Donald was bigger and stronger than Mickey, but Mickey talked better; he-or maybe she-had always been the more clever hatchling.

Before Jonathan and the Lizards could say anything more, the telephone rang. Jonathan jumped a bit. He’d got used to hearing hisses. But then old habit took over. “I’ll get it,” he said, and hurried into the kitchen. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mr. Yeager,” said the voice on the other end of the line: Karen’s voice. “Could I-”

“I’m not my dad,” Jonathan broke in, wondering what the devil would happen next. “I’m me. I’m back. Hi.”

“Oh,” Karen said. Then there was silence-quite a bit of silence. At last, Karen went on, “Hello, Jonathan. Did you… have a good time up on the starship?” She knew what he’d been doing up there, all right. He could hear it in her voice.

“Yeah, I did.” Jonathan could hardly deny it. “I didn’t expect to stay up there so long, though. Who would have thought the Germans would really start that war? I’m awful glad to be home.” His mother would have coughed at the colloquialism, but she’d stayed down at the other end of the house. He gave it his best shot: “I’d like to see you again, if you still want to see me.”

“Well…” More silence. Karen finally continued, “I do want to go on seeing Mickey and Donald, and that’ll mean seeing you, too, won’t it? But that’s not what you meant. I know it isn’t. You were doing research, yeah, but… that kind of research?” Another pause. “Maybe when I come over there for the hatchlings, we can talk about the other stuff. That’s about the best I can do, okay?”

“Okay,” Jonathan said at once-it was as much as he’d hoped for, maybe even a little more. “Do you still want to talk to my dad?”

“No, never mind-it’ll keep,” Karen said. “Good-bye.” She hung up. So did Jonathan.

Maybe the sound of the handset going onto the cradle told his father it was safe to come into the kitchen. He glanced at Jonathan and chuckled. “You’re still in one piece, I see,” he remarked.

“Yeah.” Jonathan knew he sounded relieved. “Maybe we can work things out.”

“I hope so. She’s a nice girl.” His dad pulled a couple of bottles of Lucky Lager out of the icebox and handed one to Jonathan. “Come on out to the back yard.”

That wasn’t an invitation he usually made, but Jonathan followed. “What’s up?” he asked when they were standing on the grass.

“You asked what was new when you got into the car. I didn’t want to tell you there, or in the house. Here, I think it’s okay-who’d put a microphone on a lemon tree?”

His father sounded as weary and cynical as Jonathan had ever heard him.

“What’s up?” Jonathan asked again, swigging from the bottle of beer.

And his father told him. As he listened, his eyes got wider and wider. “That’s what I’m sitting on,” his father finished. “Do I need to remind you just how important it is not to repeat it?”

“No, sir,” Jonathan said at once, still shocked-maybe more shocked than he’d ever been in his life. “Besides, who’d believe me?”