Down to Earth

5

Sam Yeager sighed. He’d drafted his son to feed Mickey and Donald breakfast, and Jonathan often gave the Lizard hatchlings supper, too. For their lunch, though, the kid was at school. That meant Sam needed to do the job himself.

Well, he could have given it to Barbara, but his pride prevented that. President Warren had assigned him the job of raising the baby Lizards, so he couldn’t very well palm all of it off on his family. Besides, the critters were interesting. “I’ve been in the Army too long, he said as he stood in the kitchen slicing ham. “Even if it’s fun, I don’t want to do anything I have to.”

“What did you say, honey?” Barbara called from their bedroom, which was at the other end of the house.

“Nothing, really-just grousing,” he answered, a little embarrassed that she’d heard him. He looked at how much meat he’d cut. Just after the Lizards hatched, it would have kept them going for a couple of days. Now it was just one meal, or would be after he put a couple of more slices on the plate. Donald and Mickey were almost five months old now, and a lot bigger than when they’d fought their way out of their eggshells.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The screen went dark. After a moment, a message appeared: CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN. Disgustedly, he whacked the computer. That happened all too often with it. “Miserable half-assed piece of junk,” he growled.

Few men in the history of the world-no, of the solar system-had enjoyed the view Glen Johnson had now. There was Ceres below him: mostly dust-covered rock, with a little ice here and there. It was the biggest asteroid in the whole damn belt, but not big enough to be perfectly round; it looked more like a roundish potato than anything else. The landscape put Johnson in mind of the heavily cratered parts of the moon. Rocks of all sizes had been slamming into Ceres for as long as it had been out there.

Colonel Walter Stone had a different way of looking at things. “That’s the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“Yeah, any kid with that many zits wouldn’t like high school a whole hell of a lot,” Johnson agreed.

“None of the other asteroids can tease Ceres, though,” his mentor observed. “They’re all just as ugly and just as pockmarked-or if there are any that aren’t, we haven’t found ’em yet. Still, no matter how ugly it is, we’re in business here, and that’s what counts.”

“We’ve been in business for a while, too,” Johnson observed. “I can’t believe how fast we got here.”

“Just a couple of months.” Stone sounded as complacent as if he’d got out behind the Lewis and Clark and pushed. “You have to remember, Glen old boy”-he put on a British accent too fruity to be real-“this isn’t one of those old-fashioned rocket ships. They’re as out of date as buggy whips, don’t you know.”

“And we could have been a little faster, too, if we hadn’t swung wide to keep from coming too close to the sun.” Johnson shook his head in slow wonder. “I wouldn’t have believed how quick we could get here if I hadn’t done the math-well, had the math done for me, anyhow.”

“And if we hadn’t been hanging around here in orbit for the past three and a half months,” Stone added. “Except we’re not really hanging around. We’re going exploring. That’s what it’s all about.”

“Finding that big chunk of ice only a few hundred miles away was a lucky break,” Johnson remarked.

“That’s not a chunk of ice-it’s an asteroid,” Walter Stone said. “And it was only part luck. There are lots of chunks of-uh, icy asteroids floating around here. The first exploration team saw that. No reason why one of ’em shouldn’t be someplace where we can get at it.”

Lieutenant Colonel Mickey Flynn, a large, solidly built fellow who let nothing faze him, floated into the control room. “I’m here a couple of minutes early out of the goodness of my heart,” the Lewis and Clark ’s second pilot said, “so you poor peasants can get an early start on supper. I expect nothing in return, mind you. Worship isn’t necessary. Even simple adoration seems excessive.”

“You’re what seems excessive,” Stone said with a snort. Being senior to Flynn, he could sass him with, if not impunity, at least something close. “And why should we trust anybody who’s named after a knockout drop?”

“That’s Finn, my cousin,” Flynn said in dignified tones. “Sassenachs, the both of you. And Sassenachs wasting their time getting out of here by giving a hard time to a son of Erin who never did ’em any harm.”

Johnson undid his harness. “I’ll go to supper,” he said, unsnapping his safety belt. Now that the Lewis and Clark was in orbit around Ceres, he didn’t even have.01g to hold him in his seat. He pushed off, grabbed the nearest handhold, and then swung onto the next. Still snorting, Stone followed him.

Because of the banter they’d traded with their relief, the mess hall was already crowded when they got to it. Then the banter started up again. A woman called, “If you’re here, who’s flying the damn ship?”

“Nobody,” Johnson shot back. “And if you don’t believe me, go ask Flynn. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

“No, he’d say that was going on during the shift before his,” somebody else returned. Walter Stone said something pungent. Johnson mimed being wounded. In spite of that, he was grinning. When he first involuntarily came aboard the Lewis and Clark, people wouldn’t give him the time of day. They treated him like a spy. A lot of people had thought he was a spy.

Now he was one of the crew. He might not have helped build the spaceship, but he’d helped fly her. And even if he was a spy, he couldn’t very well telephone whoever he was spying for, not from a quarter of a billion miles away he couldn’t. What he could do, better than Stone or Flynn or anybody else, was fly the little hydrogen-burning rockets the Lewis and Clark used to explore the asteroids in Ceres’ neighborhood. They weren’t just like Peregrine, the upper stage he’d flown countless times in Earth orbit, but they weren’t very far removed, either. He understood them, the way his grandfather had understood horses.

He didn’t fully understand the dynamics of chow lines in weightlessness, not yet. At last, though, he drifted up in front of the assistant dietitian, who gave him chicken and potatoes that had been frozen and dried out and were now reconstituted with water. They tasted like ghosts of their former selves.

With them, he got a squeeze bulb full of water and a lidded plastic cup full of pills: vitamins and calcium supplements and God only knew what all else. “I think we carry more of these than we do of reaction mass,” he said, shaking the pills.

The assistant dietitian gave him a dirty look. “What if we do?” she said. “If we get here but can’t finish the mission because we’re malnourished, what’s the point of coming at all?”

“Well, you’ve got me there,” Glen said, and drifted away. There weren’t any tables or chairs-they were no good in weightlessness, or even in.01g. Instead, he snagged a handhold and started gossiping with some people who looked interesting-which was to say, at least in part, some people who were female.

More women had come along in the Lewis and Clark than he’d expected when he came aboard: they made up something close to a third of the crew. Very few of them were married to male crew members, either. Come to that, very few of the men were married. Johnson was divorced, Walter Stone a widower, Mickey Flynn a bachelor, and they were pretty typical of the crew.

And military rules about fraternization were a dead letter. The Lewis and Clark wasn’t going home again. More people might come out, but nobody here was going back. People had to do the best they could with their lives out here, and to hell with Mrs. Grundy. So far as Johnson knew, nobody’d got pregnant yet, but that wasn’t through lack of effort.

“Hi, Glen,” said the mineralogist, a brunette named Lucy Vegetti. She was on the plump side, but he liked her smile. He liked any woman’s smile these days. She went on, “Have you heard about the latest samples up from Ceres?”

He shook his head. “Nope, sure haven’t. What’s the new news?”

“Plenty of aluminum, plenty of magnesium, plenty of all the light metals,” she said. “All we need is energy, and we can get them out of the rocks.”

“We’ve got energy, by God-we’ve got more energy than you can shake a stick at,” Johnson answered, pointing back toward the engine on its boom at the rear of the Lewis and Clark. “Just have to worry about getting it out.” He was also worrying about getting it in, but not to the point where it made him stupid. Any man who lived by himself and didn’t take advantage of the five-finger discount was a damn fool, as far as he was concerned.

One of the ship’s three doctors-everything aboard the Lewis and Clark was as redundant as anybody could figure out how to make it-said, “But we can’t build everything we’ll need for the project out of aluminum and magnesium.”

Johnson listened to Miriam Rosen with careful attention. He told himself he would have listened to her the same way even if she weren’t a redhead who wasn’t half bad-looking. Sometimes, for little stretches of time, he even believed it.

Lucy Vegetti said, “No, we can’t build everything, but we can sure build a heck of a lot.” She doubled in brass as an engineer, and was learning more about that part of her business every day. Redundancy again. Johnson was just glad he had one skill anybody aboard found useful. If he hadn’t, he might have gone out the air lock instead of coming along for the ride.

“Can we really do this?” he asked. “Or will we all die of old age out here before it happens?”

For a little while, silence reigned around him. He grimaced. He’d asked the question too bluntly, and stuck his foot in it. People knew they were never going to see Earth again, but they didn’t like to think about that when they didn’t have to. Just when the pause threatened to become really awkward, Dr. Rosen said, “We’ll probably find plenty of things besides old age to die of.”

That produced another silence, but not one aimed at Johnson. He smiled his thanks toward her. She didn’t smile back. He’d got to know she was like that: she spoke the truth as she saw it.

“I think we can do it,” Lucy Vegetti said. “I really do. Oh, we’ll need more help from back home, but we’ll get that. The Lewis and Clark showed that we could make constant-boost ships. The next one that comes out will be better. We’ll have a good start on things by then, too. Pretty soon, we’ll be mining a good stretch of the asteroid belt. I think we’ll find most of the metals we need, sooner or later.”

“What about uranium?” Miriam Rosen asked. “Not likely we’ll find much of that here, is it?”

Lucy shook her head. “We’d have to get lucky, I think. The asteroids aren’t as dense as rocks back on Earth, which means there are fewer heavy metals around. But you never can tell.”

Was she looking at Johnson when she said “get lucky”? He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to foul up a chance for later by messing up now. The rules on the Lewis and Clark hadn’t fully shaken out yet, but one thing was already clear: the ladies did the choosing. Maybe things would have been different if there’d been two gals for every guy, but there weren’t.

A couple of other male optimists came floating up to join the conversation. Johnson took his squeeze bags and lidded cup now empty of pills back to the assistant dietitian. Nothing got thrown away on the Lewis and Clark; everything was cleaned and reused. That included bodily waste water: one more thing the crew preferred not to think about. A spaceship beat even a nuclear-powered submarine as a self-contained environment.

Swinging out of the galley, Johnson went to the gymnasium. He logged in, strapped himself onto an exercise bicycle, and grimly began pedaling away. That helped keep calcium in his bones. He wondered why he was bothering. If he wasn’t going back to Earth and Earth’s gravity, who cared if his bones were made of calcium or rubber bands?

But orders prescribed at least half an hour of exercise every day. He’d been in the Army too long to think orders had to make sense. They were just there, and they had to be obeyed. On he pedaled, going nowhere.

In his time in Lodz, Mordechai Anielewicz had heard a lot of strange noises coming from alleys. Once, he’d foiled a robbery, though he hadn’t caught the robber: the fellow had leaped over a wall-an Olympic-quality jump-and got away. Once, he’d surprised a couple making love standing up in a doorway. He’d felt like leaping over a wall himself then; Bertha still didn’t know about that.

More often than not, though, noises down alleys meant animal fights: dog-dog, cat-cat, cat-dog. These furious snarls were of that sort, and under most circumstances Mordechai would have paid them no special attention. But, as he walked past the mouth of the alley, some of the noises proved to have a stridency the likes of which he’d never heard before. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he craned his neck to see what the devil was going on.

He was surprised enough to stop in midstride, one foot off the ground, till he noticed and made it come down. The alley was just an alley: cobblestones, weeds pushing up among them, a couple of dead vodka bottles. One of the beasts down it was a cat, sure enough; it was clawing at its foe like a lioness ripping the guts out of a zebra. But that foe…

“Gevalt, what is that thing?” Mordechai exclaimed, and hurried past a battered trash barrel toward the fight to find out. Whatever it was, he’d never seen anything like it. It was clawing at the cat, too, but it was also biting, and it had a very big mouth full of sharp teeth. Pretty plainly, it was getting the better of the fight, for the cat’s claws and even its needle-sharp canines had trouble piercing its scaly hide.

Anielewicz stooped and grabbed a stick-always handy to have when breaking up a fight between animals-before advancing on the cat and the… thing. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps toward the beasts when the cat decided it had had enough. It broke free of the fight and levitated up a wooden fence, leaving only bloodstains behind to prove it had been there.

The other animal was bleeding, too, though not so badly. Now that Mordechai got a good look at it, he saw it was smaller than the cat it had just mauled. It stuck out a long, forked tongue and licked a couple of its worst wounds. It was looking at him, too; while it tended to itself, one turreted eye swung in his direction to make sure he didn’t mean trouble.

Realization smote him. “It must be from the Lizards’world!” he exclaimed: either that, or he was hallucinating. He shook his head; he couldn’t have imagined anything so funny-looking. And he did remember hearing that the colonization fleet had brought along some of the Lizards’ domesticated creatures. He hadn’t expected his first meeting with one to be in an alley, though.

Now that it wasn’t fighting, the Lizardy thing-he didn’t know what else to call it-seemed to relax. When Mordechai didn’t wave the stick or do anything else untoward, the animal turned both eye turrets toward him and let out an absurdly friendly squeak.

He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. Snarls and hisses were one thing. He would have expected noises like those from a small creature that could take on a cat and win. He hadn’t expected the thing to sound like a rubber squeeze toy.

Whatever he thought of the noises the animal made, it didn’t like the ones he made. It streaked past him, nimble as a champion footballer getting past a midfielder who only stepped onto a soccer pitch as a weekend amusement. It was, he thought, even faster and more agile than a cat, though it had shown no signs of being able to climb.

Out on the street, someone exclaimed in surprise: “What was that?” “What was what?” somebody else-a woman-said. “I didn’t see anything.”

Anielewicz laughed again as he threw down the stick and walked out of the alley. Some people were always unlucky enough to miss things. He wondered if this lady would ever have another chance to see an animal from another planet.

He also wondered, in a different and more urgent way this time, what an animal from another planet was doing in an alley in Lodz (besides fighting a cat, that is). He hadn’t intended to go by the Bialut Market Square-Bertha was reluctant to let him anywhere near the place, too, after his fiasco with the peasant woman selling eggs-but Bunim’s headquarters looked out onto it. He didn’t suppose the Lizards would mind talking about the animals they’d brought to Earth.

As he started for the market square, he laughed again. He wasn’t likely to have much immediate interest in animals from Home, and neither was any other Polish Jew. How likely were they to divide the hoof and chew a cud? Not very, which put them beyond the pale as far as he was concerned.

People and a few Lizards crowded the square. Since Mordechai wasn’t shopping, he ignored the frantic haggling in Yiddish and Polish and, every now and then, the hisses and pops of the language of the Race. He strode up to the building from which the Lizards administered this stretch of Poland-along with the shadow governments of the Jews and Poles. The guards in front of the building were alert, as they had reason to be. “What do you want?” one of them asked in passable Polish.

The male didn’t recognize him. Well, that was all right; he had trouble telling one Lizard from another. “I just saw an animal…” he began, also sticking to Polish-he could do a better job of describing the creature in that tongue than in the Race’s.

“Ah,” the guard said when he was through. “That is a beffel. They will run wild. ‘Crazy as a beffel on a leash’ is a saying in our language.”

“A beffel,” Mordechai repeated-now he had a name for the beast. “What good is it? Do you eat it, or is it just a pet?”

“Eat a beffel? What an ignorant Tosevite you are.” The guard’s mouth dropped open in amusement. So did his partner’s. “No. It is only a pet, as you say.”

“All right. I am ignorant-I’d never seen one till now. It was fighting a cat,” Anielewicz said. “Are they going to start running loose all over the place now?”

“I would not be surprised,” the guard replied. “They get to be nuisances back on Home. So do tsiongyu.”

“What’s a tsiongi?” Mordechai asked.

“Another kind of pet, larger,” the guard said. “You speak some of our language, to know the singular when you hear the plural.”

“Truth,” Anielewicz answered, shifting to the language of the Race. “So: are we to be overrun with animals from Home?”

“If we so choose,” the Lizard replied. “We rule this part of Tosev 3. We have the right to bring in the beasts on which we feed-and we are doing that, too-and the beasts that are our friends. What business do you have to say otherwise?”

That was a pretty good question, although the male sounded arrogant even for one of his kind. Mordechai didn’t try to answer it. Instead, he asked a question of his own: “How will your animals like the winters here in Poland?”

By the way both guards winced, he knew he’d struck a nerve. “We cannot know that until we find out by experiment,” said the one who was doing the talking. “The hope is that they will do well. I certainly hope this. Our beasts are better eating than your Tosevite animals.”

“Truth.” The other guard proved he could talk.

Anielewicz wondered if he needed to go inside and talk with Bunim. He decided he didn’t. He’d learned everything he needed to know from the regional subadministrator’s guards. Bunim wouldn’t stop bringing his kinds of animals into Poland just because Mordechai asked him to. Europeans had brought cows and pigs and dogs and cats to America and Australia. Why wouldn’t the Race bring its creatures to Earth? The Lizards had come to stay, after all.

And the Poles probably wouldn’t mind the new domestic animals one bit. They didn’t have to worry about keeping kosher. Mordechai chuckled, wondering how soon some strange meat would start turning up in Polish farmwives’ pots and how soon Polish leather makers would start tanning new kinds of hide. Sooner than the Lizards expect, he thought. Yes, the Poles were very likely to turn into-what did the Westerns imported from the United States call cattle thieves? Rustlers, that was it. And an old joke about the recipe for chicken stew floated through his mind. First, steal a chicken.

“Do you need anything else?” the first guard asked.

If that wasn’t a hint for Anielewicz to clear out, he’d never heard one. “No. I thank you for your time,” he said, and made his way back across the Bialut Market Square. These days, he was always in the habit of keeping an eye open for possible assassins: amazing what a burst of submachine-gun fire through the door would do. Now, though, he also kept an eye out for befflem and tsiongyu. He wouldn’t have known a tsiongi if it walked up and bit him, not really, but any sort of alien animal that wasn’t a beffel would do for one till he knew better.

No doubt because he was on the lookout for the Race’s pets, he saw none as he went back to the flat. All the way there, though, he kept thinking about how the beffel had laid up that cat. Cats were tough; not many Earthly animals their size could take them on and win. What did that say about how rugged other beasts from Home were liable to be? Did it say anything at all? Nobody could predict a cow from a cat, so why was he trying to figure out what the Race’s equivalent of a cow would be like from extremely brief acquaintance with a beffel?

Then he paused, smiling in spite of himself. The Lizardy creature had squeaked most endearingly. He wondered what sort of pet a beffel would make for a human being. Would it accept a person as a master, or would it think he was a large, fearsome wild animal?

His son Heinrich would like to know the answer to that question, too. Heinrich couldn’t see a stray dog without saying, “Can we keep it?” The answer, in a flat none too big for the people who lived in it, was inevitably no, but that didn’t keep him from asking.

Over supper-chicken soup with dumplings-Mordechai talked about the beffel. Sure enough, Heinrich exclaimed, “What a great-sounding animal! I want one! Can we get one, Father?”

Before Anielewicz could answer, Heinrich’s older sister Miriam said, “A thing that looks like a little Lizard? That’s disgusting! I don’t want anything that looks like a Lizard here.” She made a horrible face.

“A beffel looks about as much like a Lizard as a cat or a dog looks like a person. It’s about so long”-Mordechai held his hands thirty or forty centimeters apart-“and goes on all fours.”

“Like a regular lizard-not like one of the Race, I mean?” His daughter sounded no happier. “That’s even worse.”

“No, not like a regular lizard, either,” Anielewicz said. “Sort of like what a dog or a cat would be if a dog or a cat had scales and eye turrets.” Predictably, that entranced Heinrich and even interested his older brother David, but left Miriam cold.

“There’s no point in worrying about these creatures now,” Bertha Anielewicz said, spreading warning looks all around. “We don’t have them, and as far as we know, we can’t get them. We don’t even know”-she eyed Heinrich-“if we’d want one.”

“I know!” her younger son exclaimed.

“You’ve never even seen one,” Bertha said.

But that was the wrong way to go about things, and Mordechai knew it. “For now, I don’t think people can have befflem, so there’s nothing we can do about that,” he told Heinrich. “Anyhow, I just saw this one by luck. I don’t know if I’ll ever see another one, so there’s no point worrying about it, is there?”

“If I find one, can I keep it?” Heinrich asked.

“I don’t think you’re going to,” his mother said, “but all right.” Heinrich grinned from ear to ear. Bertha looked confident. Mordechai wished she would have given him the chance to speak first. But she hadn’t, and now they were both stuck with her answer.

Kassquit was as happy as the anomalous combination of her birth and her upbringing let her be. She hadn’t fully realized how much she missed Ttomalss till he returned from the Greater German Reich. Of all the males of the Race, he came closer to understanding her than any other. Having him around, having him here to talk to, was far better than staying in touch by telephone and electronic message.

“In a way, though,” he said as they sat down together in the starship’s refectory, “my absence may well have helped you mature. You might not have confronted Tessrek had I been here, for instance; instead, you would have left the disagreeable task to me. But you did it, and did it well.”

“Only because I had to,” answered Kassquit, who would indeed have preferred not to confront a male of superior years and rank.

“Exactly my point.” Ttomalss picked up his tray. “And now I hope you will excuse me. I have many reports to organize and write. My stay among the Deutsche proved most informative, if not always very pleasant.”

“I understand, superior sir.” Kassquit did her best to hide her disappointment. She was not a hatchling any more, and could not hope to monopolize Ttomalss’ time as she had when she was smaller and more nearly helpless. She could not hope to, but she could wish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kassquit wondered what the Big Ugly looked like.

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

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

He is a relation, she thought. In a way, he is the closest relation with whom I have ever spoken. She shivered, though the air in her chamber was not cold, or even cool: it was adjusted to the warmth the Race found comfortable. She’d never known air of a different temperature. She’d never known anyone but males and females of the Race, either-not till now, she hadn’t. She shivered again.

Over lamb chops and carrots and mashed potatoes, Jonathan Yeager listened to his father in fascination. “That’s amazing,” he said. “They’re holding her prisoner up there, and she doesn’t even know she is one.”

His father shook his head. “Are Mickey and Donald prisoners?”

“No,” Jonathan said. “We’re raising them to see how much like people they’ll turn into. They’re guinea pigs, I guess, but they’re not…” Shoveling in another forkful of potatoes let him make the pause less awkward than it might have been otherwise. “Okay. I see where you’re going.”

“The girl up there is a guinea pig, too,” his mother said.

“That’s right.” Now his father nodded. “Twenty years ago, the Lizards started doing what we’re doing now. I wonder what sort of experiments they’ve run on her.” He sipped from a glass of Lucky Lager. “Makes me think twice about what we’re doing with the baby Lizards-seeing the shoe on the other foot, I mean.”

“It certainly does,” Jonathan’s mother said. “That poor girl-brought up to be as much like a Lizard as she could?” She shuddered. “If she’s not completely out of her mind, it’s God’s own miracle.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh?” Jonathan said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bye-bye,” Jonathan said to them, and waved. His father echoed him with word and gesture. And, a little tentatively, a little awkwardly, the hatchlings waved back. Even a couple of weeks before, they hadn’t known to do that. Excitement tingled through Jonathan. The Lizards couldn’t talk. Heaven only knew when they would. But they’d started to communicate without words.

“Slowly,” Ttomalss said. “Tell me slowly about the conversation you had with this Big Ugly.” He was most careful not to say, with this other Big Ugly.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Kassquit said, but a moment later she was babbling again, her words falling over one another in their eagerness to come forth. Ttomalss tried to decide whether that eagerness sprang from glee at surviving the encounter or from Kassquit’s desire to talk with the Tosevite-the other Tosevite- again as soon as she got the chance. He couldn’t.

I shall have to check the recording of the conversation myself, the researcher thought. Kassquit didn’t know her telephone was constantly monitored. Ttomalss knew he would have to take care not to reveal any undue knowledge. That would destroy Kassquit’s spontaneity and lessen her value as an experimental subject.

When she finally slowed down, Ttomalss asked her, “And how do you feel about this encounter?”

Her face, unlike those of Big Uglies raised by their own kind, revealed little of what she thought. That made her seem a little less alien to Ttomalss. After a pause for thought, she said, “I do not precisely know, superior sir. In some ways, he seemed to understand me remarkably well.”

Like calls to like, Ttomalss thought. But he did not say it, for fear of putting thoughts in Kassquit’s mind that she hadn’t had for herself. What he did say was more cautious: “In some ways, you say? But not in all?”

“Oh, no, superior sir, not in all,” Kassquit answered. “How could that be possible? I have been raised among the Race, while he is only a wild Big Ugly.”

Unmistakable pride rang in her voice. Ttomalss understood that; he wouldn’t have wanted to be a wild Big Ugly, either. He asked, “Are you interested in holding further conversations with this-what did you say the Tosevite’s name was?”

“Sam Yeager.” Kassquit, naturally, pronounced the alien syllables more clearly than Ttomalss could have done. “Yes, superior sir, I think I am-or willing, at any rate. You have spoken of me as a link between the Race and the Tosevites. I know the Race’s side of this link well. Except for my biology, though, I know next to nothing about the Tosevite side.”

Her ignorance was deliberate on Ttomalss’ part; he’d wanted to integrate her as fully into the Race as he could. Now it was time to see how well he’d done. But something else sprang to mind first. “Sam Yeager?” he said, knowing he was botching the name but wanting to bring it out as well as he could. “That is somehow familiar. Why is it somehow familiar?”

“I do not know, superior sir,” Kassquit answered. “It was not familiar to me.”

But Ttomalss hadn’t asked the question of her, not really; he’d been talking to himself. He went over to his computer terminal and keyed in the name. The answer came back almost at once. “I thought so!” he exclaimed, skimming through the information on the screen. “This Yeager is one of the Big Uglies’ leading experts on the Race, and has done considerable writing and speaking on the subject.”

“As if the Big Uglies could have experts on the Race!” Kassquit said scornfully.

“They seek to learn about us, as we seek to learn about them,” Ttomalss answered. “I am, in some measure, an expert on Tosevites, so this Big Ugly may be my counterpart in the not-empire known as the United States.”

After some thought, Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. “It could be so,” she said. “He appeared on our computer network for some time without drawing suspicion. No one with only a little familiarity with the Race could have done that.”

“Truth,” Ttomalss said; he would not have cared to try to impersonate a Big Ugly, even if only electronically. “In his way, then, he too may be a link between the Tosevites and the Race. Perhaps further conversations between you may indeed be of value. I am glad you are willing to hold them.”

“I suppose I am,” Kassquit agreed. “We must make arrangements before we can do that, of course. His telephone is not fully integrated into our network; he came to our consulate in his city to call me. I can exchange messages with him by computer, but that is not quite the same thing.”

“No-it lacks immediacy,” Ttomalss agreed. “But it will do to set up a time for another conversation. Feel free to make those arrangements.”

“Very well, superior sir.” Kassquit assumed the posture of respect. “I depart.” She left his compartment, ducking her head a little to get out through the doorway.

Ttomalss wondered if he ought to get in touch with this Yeager himself. After the Deutsche, a Tosevite who showed some understanding of the Race would prove a refreshing change. In the end, though, he refrained. Let Kassquit handle it, he thought. Best to learn how she will fare in this new situation. She had the right of it; he had brought her up as a link between the wild Tosevites and the Empire, between Tosev 3’s past and its future. An unused link was useless.

And it was very interesting indeed that the Big Uglies were developing links of their own to the Race. Ttomalss spoke into the computer: “The Tosevites consistently demonstrate coping skills far superior to those the Rabotevs and the Hallessi showed after their initial contact with the Race. This no doubt hatches from the intense competition among groups of Big Uglies prior to the arrival of the Race. The Tosevites have come to view us as if we were one more of their not-empires: dangerous to them, but not necessarily of overwhelming superiority.”

He stabbed out a fingerclaw and turned off the recording mechanism. Nevertheless, he continued speaking out loud. It helped him put his thoughts in order: “And how do the Tosevites’ coping skills compare to those of the Race? Unless I am badly mistaken, they outdo us to the same degree as they do the Rabotevs and Hallessi. They are used to dealing with powerful rivals and to adapting themselves to changing circumstances. Both these things are unfamiliar to us, or were unfamiliar to us before we came to Tosev 3.”

He sighed. That was, if anything, an understatement. Back on Home and throughout the Empire, the Race viewed change with active suspicion. It occurred slowly, over centuries, so that it was rarely visible in the course of a male or female’s lifetime. Things weren’t like that on Tosev 3-another understatement.

With the recorder still off, Ttomalss continued, “And the Big Uglies have had an altogether unexpected influence on the Race. Because the Tosevites have proved so strong and so quick to change, they have forced the males of the conquest fleet to become far more changeable than is our norm. This is also proving true for the males and females of the conquest fleet, but to a lesser degree. Indeed, the difference in outlook between veterans of Tosev 3 and the far more numerous newcomers has caused considerable friction between the two groups.”

He’d seen that firsthand, not least in his dealings with Felless. She had learned a good deal since her revival, but still did not really appreciate just how changeable the Big Uglies were, because she was not very changeable herself… except when she’d tasted ginger.

“Ginger,” Ttomalss muttered. Before he said anything else, he checked to make sure he truly had turned off the recorder. Talking about ginger was nearly as dangerous as talking about explosive metal. Once he’d satisfied himself no one but he would ever hear his words, he went on, “Ginger is another change agent here on Tosev 3. That was true before the colonization fleet came, but it is even more true now, thanks to the herb’s effects on females. Tosev 3 disrupts even our sexuality, pushing us closer to Tosevite norms. This will have profound consequences for the relationship between this world and the rest of the Empire for a very long time to come.”

No, he couldn’t have said any of that in a place where it might have become public. From things he’d gathered down at the embassy to the Reich, discussions on these subjects were under way at the highest levels. If the fleetlords and shiplords and ambassadors wanted his opinions, they would ask for them. His title might be senior researcher, but he was not senior enough to offer his views unsolicited. Nor would those above him be delighted if his unsolicited views went out over the computer network.

He sighed. Hierarchy and concern for status were and always had been hallmarks of the Race. Back on Home, where everyone played by the rules, they worked fine and contributed to the stability of society. On Tosev 3… Here, Ttomalss feared they made the Race less adaptable than it should have been.

“Adaptable,” he muttered. “Coping skills.” The Race shouldn’t have had to adapt. It shouldn’t have had to cope. The Big Uglies should have been the ones doing all the coping. By now, they should have accepted the conquest. They should have been learning the language of the Race in place of their own multitude of tongues. They should have begun to venerate the Emperor, as Ttomalss did himself.

Instead, they stubbornly preferred their own superstitions. Some of them even presumed to mock the veneration of Emperors past, even if it had served the Race well for a hundred thousand years and more, and the Rabotevs and Hallessi since they were conquered. Ttomalss hissed angrily, remembering the arrogant Dr. Rascher in the Reich.

Out shot his fingerclaw again. This was for the record: “My view is that we should go forward as aggressively as possible with programs to acquaint the Big Uglies with the spiritual benefits of Emperor veneration. Bringing them to a belief system more congruent to the truth than are their own superstitions can only help in assimilating them into the Empire.”

With an emphatic cough, he turned off the recorder once more. That opinion needed to get into the Race’s data stream. He felt so strongly about it, he added an emphatic cough. The sooner fanatics like Khomeini could no longer use the local superstitions to rouse the Big Uglies against the Race, the better.

And then Ttomalss had an inspiration. He turned on the recorder for the third time. “Economic incentives,” he said, getting the main idea out, and then amplified it: “If Tosevites are taxed for the privilege of continuing to adhere to their native superstitions but not if they agree to venerate the spirits of Emperors past, the truth will be more readily propagated among them.”

Almost of itself, his hand shaped the affirmative gesture. If adhering to their superstitions cost the Tosevites under the Race’s rule money, they would be more inclined to drop those superstitions and adopt the correct usages that prevailed on the other three planets of the Empire. They would not be compelled to do so, which was apt to spark fanatical resistance. They would simply come to see it was in their own best interest to conform to standard practice.

“How splendidly devious,” Ttomalss said. What better way to get rid of superstition than to tax it out of existence?

Now he was going to have to look for males and females in positions of authority to support his scheme. He wanted to skitter with glee and excitement. He hadn’t had such a good idea since he’d decided to raise a Tosevite, hatchling among the Race.

Then he remembered what had happened to him after he took his second hatchling. He was lucky Liu Han hadn’t murdered him after his kidnapping. But surely the Big Uglies would not get so excited about taxes as they did about their own offspring.