Homeward Bound

13

Ttomalss had stopped stalking around Sitneff looking for befflem to boot. Kassquit would do whatever she did. If it brought her emotional and physical satisfaction, well and good. If it brought her emotional travail… she was an adult, and would have to cope with it as best she could.

So the psychologist told himself, anyhow. If a small, mean part of him rather hoped his former ward ran into emotional travail, he had the grace to be ashamed of that part. He did his best not to let it affect his thinking or his actions.

It wasn’t as if he had nothing else on his mind. One morning-early one morning-Pesskrag telephoned him and said, “I hope you know you are responsible for commencing the unraveling of work thought to be truth for tens of millennia.”

“Am I?” Ttomalss said around a yawn. “And how should I feel about this-besides sleepy, I mean?”

“You are-you and that other psychologist back on Tosev 3, that Felless,” Pesskrag said. “If you two had not brought the Big Uglies’ research to our attention, we might have remained ignorant of these developments… forever.”

“Now that you know of them, what can you do with them?” Ttomalss’ eye turrets were beginning to decide they would work together after all. Once he got some breakfast, he probably would be capable of rational thought. He wouldn’t have bet on that when the telephone first hissed for his attention.

“That is why my colleagues and I have been experimenting so diligently: to begin to find out what we can do,” the physicist answered. She went on, “We are not altogether sure we believe what we are finding.”

“I have asked you before-just what is so startling about these Tosevite discoveries?” Ttomalss said. “Are you in a better position to tell me than you were the last time we spoke?”

“We may see more change in the next two to five hundred years than we have seen at any time in our history since Home was unified,” Pesskrag said.

“What sort of change?” Ttomalss demanded. “How will things be different?” He hoped for concrete answers.

Pesskrag remained resolutely abstract. “Senior Researcher, at present I have no idea. But, as we evaluate each experiment, it will suggest others, and we will probably have a much better notion of exactly where we are going in a few more years.”

“There are times when I believe you are doing your best to addle me with frustration,” Ttomalss said. Pesskrag laughed and made the negative gesture. Ttomalss made the affirmative one. “Yes, I do believe that. Will you not give me at least some idea of how much you have learned since we last spoke?”

Laughing still, the physicist replied, “It shall be done, superior sir. Last time we spoke, I believe I said our knowledge was like a new hatchling, still wet with the juices from its egg. We have indeed advanced from that point. Now, in my opinion, our knowledge is like a new hatchling on which the sun has dried the juices from its egg.”

“I thank you so very much.” Ttomalss’ pungent sarcasm set Pesskrag laughing all over again. Ttomalss stubbornly persisted: “How far is the gap from fascinating experiment to workable new technology?”

“I am very sorry, Senior Researcher, but I have no way to judge that,” Pesskrag replied. “It will be a while. Technology that induces such major changes will have to be investigated with unusual care. That will slow its implementation. We will need a good many lifetimes before we can fully evaluate it.”

She’d said that before, too. “Suppose we were reckless. Suppose we were reckless to the point of being addled.” Ttomalss tried to force on her a mental exercise he’d used before. “Suppose we knew whatever it is you now think we know. Suppose we cared nothing for consequences, only for getting the maximum use from this new knowledge. How soon after your discoveries could we have workable new technology?”

He had to give Pesskrag credit. She did try to imagine that, though it was alien to all her thinking patterns. “We would have to be completely addled to work in that way,” she said. “You do understand as much?”

Ttomalss used the affirmative gesture. “Oh, yes. That is part of the assumption I am asking you to make.”

“Very well.” Pesskrag’s eye turrets both turned up toward the ceiling. Ttomalss had seen that gesture in many males and females who were thinking hard. He used it himself, in fact. After a little while, the physicist’s eyes swung toward him again. “You understand my estimate is highly provisional?”

Now Ttomalss had all he could do not to laugh. However wild Pesskrag was trying to be, she remained a typical, conservative female of the Race. He could not hold it against her. “Yes, I understand that,” he said gently. “I am only looking for an estimate, not a statement of fact.”

“Very well,” she said. “Always bearing that in mind, if I were as wild as a wild Big Ugly-for that is what you have in mind, is it not? — I might find something useful within, oh, a hundred fifty years. This assumes no disasters in the engineering and no major setbacks.”

“I see. I thank you.” Ttomalss was willing to bet the Tosevites would be faster than that. The question was, how much faster than that would they be? Pesskrag was pretending to a wildness she did not have. The Big Uglies did not have a great many things, but they had never lacked for wildness. She’d given Ttomalss an upper limit. He had to figure out the lower limit for himself.

She said, “I thought I would shock you. I see I do not.”

“No, you do not,” Ttomalss agreed. “Your expertise is in physics. Mine is in matters pertaining to the wild Big Uglies. I admit the field lacks the quantitative rigor yours enjoys. Even so, what I do know of the Tosevites persuades me that your answer is believable.”

“That is truly frightening,” Pesskrag said. “I have trouble taking my own estimate seriously, and yet it fazes you not at all.”

“Oh, it fazes me, but not quite in the way you mean,” Ttomalss said. How long had the Big Uglies been working on this line of experiments before Felless noticed they were doing it? How much of their research had never got into the published literature for fear of drawing the Race’s notice-or, come to that, for fear of drawing rival Tosevites’ notice? Those were all relevant questions. He had answers to none of them. He found another question for Pesskrag: “If the Big Uglies do succeed within the timeframe you outline, could we quickly match them?”

“Maybe.” Her voice was troubled. “If so, though, we would have to abandon the caution and restraint we have come to take for granted. That would produce even more change than I have outlined.”

“I know,” Ttomalss said.

Pesskrag said, “If we are forced to change as rapidly as the Big Uglies, will we become as unstable as they are?”

“I doubt it. I doubt we could. But we would have to become more changeable than we are, I think. To some degree, this has already happened with the colonists on Tosev 3,” Ttomalss answered.

“As far as I am concerned, that is not a recommendation,” Pesskrag said. “I have read of the colonists’ strange perversions inspired by Tosevite drugs. I have even read that some of them prefer living among the wild Big Uglies to staying with their own kind. Can such things be true?”

“They can. They are,” Ttomalss said. “As is often true when examining social phenomena, though, causation is more complex than it is in the purely physical world.”

“I do not care,” Pesskrag said stoutly. “Why would any sensible male or female want to live among alien barbarians? Anyone who does such a thing cannot possibly be worthwhile, in my opinion.”

“Why? Some males and females who were good friends beforehand become addicted to ginger together. They formed mating bonds like those common among the Big Uglies,” Ttomalss said. Pesskrag let out a disgusted hiss. Ttomalss shrugged. “Like them or not, these things have happened on Tosev 3. For a long time, we reckoned such mated pairs perverts, as you say, and were glad to see them go-”

“As well we should have been!” Pesskrag broke in.

“Perhaps. We certainly thought so when these pairs first came to our attention,” Ttomalss said. “But ginger is widespread on Tosev 3, and a surprising number of close friends of opposite sexes have become more or less permanent mating partners: so many that we saw we were losing valuable males and females to the Big Uglies by driving all such pairs into exile. These days, there is a sort of tacit tolerance for them on Tosev 3, as long as they do not behave too blatantly in public.”

“Disgusting!” Pesskrag added an emphatic cough. “Bad enough that the Big Uglies have revolting habits. But they are as they have evolved to be, and so I suppose they cannot help it. If our own males and females on that planet are no longer fit to associate with decent members of the Race, though, we have a real problem.”

“Tosev 3 has presented us with nothing but problems ever since the conquest fleet got there,” Ttomalss said. “And yes, I think our society on that world will be different from the way it is elsewhere in the Empire-unless ginger becomes so widespread here and on our other worlds that we begin to match patterns first seen there.”

“I hope with all my liver that this does not happen,” Pesskrag said.

“So do I. I am a conservative myself, as any sensible male past his middle years should be,” Ttomalss said. “But you were the one who said we would see change in the relatively near future. Is it a surprise that some of this change would be social as well as technological?”

“I understand technological change. I understand how to manage it,” Pesskrag said. “I am not sure anyone knows how to manage social change. Why should anyone? The Race has little experience with it, and has not had any to speak of since Home was unified.”

“Do you know who has experience managing social change?” Ttomalss asked.

Pesskrag made the negative gesture, but then said, “The colonists on Tosev 3?”

“That is astute, but it is not quite what I meant. Close, but not quite,” the psychologist said. “As a matter of fact, I had in mind the Tosevites themselves. Their whole history over the past thousand of our years has involved managing major social changes. They have gone from slave-owning agrarians to possessors of a technical civilization that rivals our own, and they have not destroyed themselves in the process.”

“Too bad,” the physicist said.

“You may be right. If we had stayed away for another few hundred years, they might have solved our problem for us,” Ttomalss said. “Then again, if we had stayed away for another few hundred years, they might have come to Home anyway. In that case, all the problems we have with them now would seem trivial by comparison.”

“All the problems we have now, yes,” Pesskrag said. “The problems on the horizon are not small. Believe me, superior sir-they are not.”

“Please give me a written report, in language as nontechnical as you can make it,” Ttomalss said.

“As things are, I would rather not put any of this in writing until my colleagues and I are ready to publish,” the physicist said.

“Do you believe others will steal your work? I am sure we can discourage that,” Ttomalss said.

“Until we know more, I am afraid to let this information out at all,” Pesskrag said, and Ttomalss could not make her change her mind.

“Excuse me.” The Lizard who spoke to Jonathan Yeager in the lobby of the hotel in Sitneff was not one he had seen before. The male was evidently unfamiliar with his kind, too, continuing, “You would be one of the creatures called Big Uglies, would you not?”

“Yes, that is a truth.” Jonathan’s amusement faded as he got a look at the Lizard’s rather sloppily applied body paint. “And you would be a police officer, would you not?”

“Yes, that is also a truth.” The Lizard had a quiet, almost hangdog air. He seemed embarrassed to make the affirmative gesture. “I am Inspector Second Grade Garanpo. I have a few questions to ask you, if you would be so kind.”

“Questions about what?” Jonathan asked.

“Well, about the ginger trade, superior sir, if you really want to know,” Garanpo answered. “Ginger comes from your world, does it not?”

“Yes, of course it does,” Jonathan said. “But I do not know why you need to ask me about it. I have been here ever since the American diplomatic party came down to the surface of Home. We had no ginger with us then, and we have none now.”

“Which of the Tosevites would you be? Meaning no offense, but you all look alike to me,” the inspector said. Jonathan gave his name. Garanpo sketched the posture of respect without fully assuming it. “I thank you. I want to know because when there is ginger, one naturally thinks of you Tosevites.”

“Why?” Jonathan asked. “Unless I am mistaken, there has been ginger on Home for many years. It must have been brought here by males and females of the Race, because this is the first Tosevite starship to come here. Perhaps you should be looking closer to home, so to speak, than you are.”

“Perhaps we should. Perhaps we are. You are a very clever fellow, to make a joke in our language.” Garanpo’s mouth dropped open in what was obviously a polite laugh. “But perhaps we should also come to the source, you might say.”

“Why?” Jonathan asked again. “Whatever your latest problem with ginger is, why do you think it has anything to do with me?”

“With you personally, superior sir? I never said a thing about that,” Garanpo said. “I never said it, and I do not mean it. But I think it does have something to do with you Big Uglies, and that is a truth.”

“For the third time, Inspector, what is your evidence?”

“Oh, my evidence? I thank you for reminding me.” The police officer made as if to assume the posture of respect again, then checked himself. “Well, my evidence is that the price of ginger on the streets lately has fallen right on its snout, if you understand what I am saying.”

“I understand what you mean, yes, Inspector,” Jonathan answered. “I do not understand why you think this has anything to do with us Big Uglies, though. One of your starships is much more likely to have done the smuggling.”

“But we did not have any new ships come in from Tosev 3 just before the price of the herb tumbled,” Garanpo said.

Damn, Jonathan thought. But he said, “You have not had any new Tosevite ships come in, either. Why blame the Admiral Peary? Our ship has been peacefully orbiting Home for some time now.”

“There was recently contact between your ship and one of ours. This was shortly before the price change in ginger,” Garanpo said. “No one has found ginger on the Horned Akiss — which is the name of our ship-and no one can prove it got from the Horned Akiss to the surface of Home, but that is the way things look. No one can prove it yet, I should say. Yes, I should say that. But we are working on it, which is also a truth.”

Damn, Jonathan thought again. This time, he said, “I think you had better tell my sire, the ambassador, what you have just told me. I think you had better tell him the abridged version of it, too.”

“Do you know, superior Tosevite, my supervisor often says the very same thing to me,” the Lizard replied. “ ‘Abridge it, Garanpo,’ he says, and so I do my best, but somehow I find myself pining for the details. Have you ever had that feeling, where you are pining to tell all you know because some little part of it may turn out to be the important part? And of course you never know which part ahead of time, so…”

He went on for some time. The feeling Jonathan had was guilt at inflicting him on his father. However unpleasant that might be, though, he feared it was necessary. Garanpo had some circumstantial evidence, anyhow.

“Your sire, you tell me?” Garanpo said as he and Jonathan rode up the elevator together. “Now that is interesting, very interesting. I cannot think of many members of the Race who could name their own sires. I am sure I cannot. Are you sure you can?”

He doesn’t know he’s just insulted me and my mother, Jonathan reminded himself. He made the affirmative gesture and said, “Yes, Inspector, I am sure. Our mating customs differ from yours.”

“Well, they must,” Garanpo said. “I do not know much about you Big Uglies, I admit.” If he was like any human cop Jonathan had ever met, he was sandbagging like a mad bastard. He went on, “Do you really choose your leaders by snoutcounting? It does not strike me as a very efficient system.”

“We really do. It seems to work for us,” Jonathan answered. The elevator stopped. The door slid open. Jonathan got out. Without being told, Garanpo turned left, the direction in which Sam Yeager’s room lay. Jonathan nodded to himself. Yes, the Lizard knew a good deal more than he was letting on.

After a couple of strides, Garanpo seemed to realize Jonathan wasn’t following. One of his eye turrets swung back toward the American. “I do need you to show me the way, you know,” he said testily.

“Yes, of course, Inspector,” Jonathan said. If Garanpo didn’t know his father’s room number-and probably his hat size, too-he would have been amazed.

“Hello, son,” Sam Yeager said in English after he let Jonathan and Garanpo in. He switched to the language of the Race to ask, “Who is your friend?” Jonathan introduced the policemale. His father said, “I greet you, Inspector. I am pleased to meet you. And what can I do for you today?”

Garanpo did a better job of summing up the ginger situation than Jonathan had thought he could. He finished, “And so, your, uh, Ambassadorship-that is a funny word, is it not? — now you know why I think some of the Big Uglies up in space may have been involved in all this.”

“I can see why you think so, yes,” Sam Yeager replied. “I can also see that you have nothing resembling proof. Members of the Race out in space might have held ginger to release it at a time when the price was to their liking, too, you know.”

“Oh, yes. That is a truth, your Ambassadorship,” Garanpo said. “They might have. But they might not have, too. The timing makes me think they did not. And if they did not, what do you propose to do about it?”

“I am not going to answer a hypothetical question. If you have proof Tosevites are involved in this business, by all means come and see me again,” Jonathan’s father said. “I do want to point out, though, that possession and sale of ginger are not illegal for us. Among Tosevites, it is only a spice, not a drug.”

“Is conspiracy illegal?” Garanpo asked, and then waved away his own question. “Never mind. Forget I said that. I will do just what you say, your Ambassadorship, and I thank you for your time. A pleasure to meet you as well, Jonathan Yeager.” He sketched the posture of respect to both Americans-a little more deeply to Jonathan’s father-and left the room.

“What do you think, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

“I don’t know.” Sam Yeager checked the antibugging gadgetry on the table between them, then nodded to himself. “Okay. Inspector Garanpo didn’t manage to plant anything new in here. That’s a relief. I guess we can talk pretty freely. What do I think? I think somebody upstairs screwed up. I think whoever it is better not screw up again, or we’ll have trouble diplomatic immunity won’t even start to get us out of. What do you think?”

“I’ve got the feeling you’re right,” Jonathan said in a troubled voice. “I’d be surprised if the Admiral Peary didn’t have ginger along.”

“I’d be amazed if the Admiral Peary didn’t have ginger along,” his father agreed. “It’s not just a weapon-it’s a can opener, too. It can help us find out all kinds of things we wouldn’t know about otherwise.”

“It can get us into all kinds of trouble we wouldn’t know about otherwise, too,” Jonathan said.

“Oh, you bet it can.” His father added an emphatic cough even though they were speaking English. “It can, and I’d say it just has.”

“What are we going to do about it?” Jonathan asked.

Sam Yeager made a sour face. “Only one thing I can think of to do: I’ve got to have a little heart-to-heart with Lieutenant General Healey. All things considered, I’d rather have a drunk tree surgeon yank my appendix without anesthetic.”

Jonathan winced. He couldn’t help himself. “You don’t like Lieutenant General Healey, do you?”

“What gave you that impression?” his father said. They grinned at each other. Sam Yeager went on, “Why, I think the commander is a Swell Old Boy.” The capital letters thudded into place. He dropped his voice. When he muttered, “Brass hat,” Jonathan wasn’t sure he was supposed to hear. But evidently he was, for his father continued, “Healey’s the sort of guy who would have cheered his head off when we blew up Lizard colonists in cold sleep. He’s the sort of guy who-” He broke off.

By his expression, though, Jonathan had a good notion of what was in his mind. His father probably figured Healey was the sort of guy who would have locked him up and lost the key after he let the Lizards know what the USA had done. There were a lot of people like that. Quite a few of them, understandably, held high military rank.

With a sigh, Sam Yeager said, “Well, it’s just got to be done. I don’t think the Race can unscramble our communications. Our gear was state of the art in 1994, and better than anything they had on Earth. I wonder what we’ve got now. Probably walks the message up to the ship and whispers in Healey’s ear.”

“I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you do talk to him,” Jonathan said.

“Nope. No flies. This has got to be between him and me,” his father said. “Officially, I don’t know anything. Officially, I don’t even suspect anything. I’m just calling to check. That’s how it’s got to be… officially. The rest is… officially… off the record.”

There were times, Jonathan knew, when arguing with his father was useless. He could tell this was one of those times. Since his hint hadn’t worked, he just said, “Okay, Dad. You know what you’re doing.” He hoped his father would let him know how things had gone somewhere later on.

Sam Yeager sent him a look of mingled surprise and gratitude. He thought I was going to squawk, Jonathan realized. And Jonathan might well have squawked if he were the age he had been when his father went into cold sleep. But he’d done some growing and changing of his own in the seventeen years till they put him on ice.

He set a hand on his father’s shoulder. “It really is okay. I’ll just stay tuned for the next exciting episode, that’s all. We’ll find out who done it then, right?”

“Well, sure,” his father answered. “Right before the last commercial break. That’s how it always works, isn’t it?” They both smiled. Jonathan wished life really were so simple. Who didn’t? Who wouldn’t?

He went back down to the lobby. He more than half expected to find Inspector Garanpo poking around there, looking for signs of ginger. But the Lizard had left. Garanpo had a disorganized air that was also disarming. Jonathan had the feeling a keen brain lurked behind that unimpressive facade.

With a sigh, he went into the refectory. He couldn’t do anything about whatever Garanpo found out. He hoped his father could. Whether anyone up on the Admiral Peary would pay attention to the American ambassador was an interesting question. Sam Yeager was a civilian these days, while the starship was a military vessel. Would Lieutenant General Healey remember he was supposed to take orders from civilians? If he didn’t, what could Dad do about it?

Frank Coffey was sitting in the refectory talking with Kassquit. Jonathan would have liked to hash out some of his worries with the major, but he couldn’t now. What he would have to say wasn’t for Kassquit’s ears. Jonathan hoped Coffey did remember not to tell his new lady friend too much. Then he laughed at himself. He’d assured Karen that that couldn’t possibly happen, and now he was worrying about it.

Kassquit and Frank Coffey laughed. They had not a care in the world-not a care in more than one world. Jonathan envied them more than he’d thought he could. He had worries, sure enough. So did Coffey, as a matter of fact. The only difference was, he didn’t know it yet.

How stupid had they been, up on the Admiral Peary?

When Sam Yeager had a long conversation with Lieutenant General Healey, nobody aboard the Admiral Peary except the commandant officially knew what they talked about. That didn’t keep rumors from flying, of course. If anything, it made them fly faster than ever. As soon as Glen Johnson heard a rumor involving Healey and ginger, he just nodded to himself.

Sure as hell, the scooter hadn’t performed the way it should have when he took it over to the Horned Akiss. Sure as hell, it had seemed as if the little rocketship was heavier than usual. It had been heavier than usual. Somebody must have figured out a way to pack it full of ginger while fooling the Race’s sensors-or maybe the Lizards using those sensors had been well paid not to notice anything out of the ordinary. Such arrangements were common enough on Earth; no doubt they could be cooked up here, too.

Johnson felt like kicking himself because he hadn’t figured out what was going on before he delivered the scooter. He didn’t like thinking of himself as a chump or a jerk. What choice did he have, though? Not much.

He wasn’t the only one on the starship to work out what had probably happened, either. When he came up to the control room to take a shift less than a day after Yeager and Healey talked, Mickey Flynn greeted him with, “And how is everyone’s favorite drug smuggler this morning?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Johnson answered. “You can’t mean me.”

“I can’t? Why not?”

“Because that would violate regulations, and I’d get a spanking if I violated them.”

“This has, of course, been your abiding concern since time out of mind.”

“Why, certainly,” Johnson said. “Would I be here if it weren’t?”

“The mind reels at the possibilities,” Flynn replied. “Even if you were smuggling drugs to the Race, though, why would you worry about it?”

That was a good question. In truth, Johnson didn’t much care how the Lizards amused themselves in their spare time. He wouldn’t have minded sending them ginger… if it had been his idea. His voice roughened as he answered, “I’ll be damned if I want that shithead in charge of us making me do his dirty work for him.”

“I’m shocked-shocked, I tell you. Anyone who didn’t know better would think you’d conceived a dislike for the man.”

What Johnson said to that had something to do with conceiving, but not much. His opinion of Lieutenant General Healey was certainly less than immaculate.

It seemed like fate, then-and not a very benign sort of fate, either-that the commandant of the Admiral Peary summoned Johnson to his office as the pilot came off his shift. Mickey Flynn said, “There, you see? He was listening all along.”

“I don’t care. He already knows what I think of him,” Johnson answered, which was true enough. But, however little he wanted to, he did have to find out why Lieutenant General Healey wanted to see him.

Healey greeted him with the usual unfriendly glare. But he said nothing about what Johnson had said in the control room. Instead, fixing him with a glare, the commandant barked, “Are you ready to fly the Lizards’ scooter back to the Horned Akiss? We’ve learned everything we’re likely to from it.”

“That depends, sir,” Johnson answered.

Healey’s bulldog glower only got angrier. “Depends on what?” he demanded, hard suspicion in his voice.

“On whether you’ve loaded it up with ginger, the way you did with ours. If you have, you can find yourself another sucker, on account of the Lizards are going to land on whoever tries to pull the same stunt twice like a ton of bricks.”

“You’re the best scooter pilot we’ve got. It’s almost the only thing you’re good for. I can order you to fly that scooter,” the commandant said.

“Yes, sir, you sure can,” Johnson agreed cheerfully. “And you can fling me in the brig for disobeying orders, too, because I won’t take it out of the air lock till you tell me the truth about it.”

“I always knew you and that Lizard-loving Yeager were two of a kind,” the commandant snarled.

That answered Johnson’s question without directly answering it. “Why don’t you send Stone, sir?” he asked in turn. “He’s always happy to do anything you say.”

“He is the senior pilot,” Healey said stiffly.

“You mean you can’t afford to lose him but you can afford to lose me?” Johnson said. “Well, sir, I’ve got news for you: I can’t afford to lose me. So when you send that scooter over, find yourself another boy to ride herd on it.”

The commandant glowered at him. Healey had come to expect insubordination from him over the years. Outright insurrection was something else again. “Consider yourself under arrest, Colonel,” Healey said. “Report to the brig at once.”

“Happy to, sir,” Johnson answered. “Only one question: where the hell is it? I haven’t gone looking for it till now. I didn’t even think we had one.”

“We do, and you have so,” Healey said. “It’s on B deck, room 227. Enjoy yourself.”

“Sir, I won’t be talking to you, so I expect it’ll be a pleasure.”

Johnson also had the pleasure of leaving before the commandant could reply. He headed straight for the brig. It proved to be a compartment like any other on the starship. The only difference was, it had a door that wouldn’t open from the inside once he closed it after himself. That could be no fun at all in case of emergency, but Johnson refused to dwell on unpleasant possibilities. He strapped himself onto the standard-issue bunk and took a nap.

Nobody bothered him. He began to wonder if Healey’d told anyone he was jugged. Then he wondered if anybody would come by and feed him. He had visions of someone finding a starved, shriveled corpse in the brig the next time Healey decided to throw someone in there, which could be years from now.

He told himself he was being silly. Stone and Flynn would notice he wasn’t showing up for his shift. They’d ask where he was… wouldn’t they? Healey would have to tell them… wouldn’t he? It all seemed logical enough. But when logic and Lieutenant General Healey collided, all bets were off.

Three hours later, the door to the cell opened. It was Major Parker, Healey’s adjutant. Johnson looked at him and said, “I want a lawyer.”

“Funny, Colonel. Funny like a crutch,” Parker answered.

“What, you think I’m kidding?” Johnson said. “My ass, pardon my French.”

“And where are you going to find a lawyer here?” the other officer asked in what he evidently intended for reasonable tones. He looked dyspeptic. Anyone who had to listen to Healey all the time had a good reason for looking dyspeptic, as far as Johnson was concerned.

He said, “Okay, fine. Screw the lawyer. Let me talk to Ambassador Yeager. That ought to do the job. By God, that ought to do it up brown.”

Parker looked as if he’d asked for the moon. “The commandant sent me here to let you out as long as you give me your word of honor you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

“Sorry.” Johnson shook his head. “No deal. He’s the one who got into this mess, and got me into it with him. He ought to be making me promises, not asking for them. I’d just as soon stay here. How long before the whole ship starts wondering why? How long before the Lizards start wondering why, too?”

“Colonel, you are deliberately being difficult,” the adjutant said, his voice starchy with disapproval.

“You noticed!” Johnson exclaimed. Parker turned red. Johnson nodded. “You bet your left nut I’m being difficult, Major. Healey still thinks this is my problem, and he’s dead wrong. It’s his, and he’d better figure that out pretty damn quick.”

“I’ll be back.” Parker made it sound like a threat. “The commandant won’t be very happy with you.”

“Well, I’m not very happy with him, either,” Johnson said, but he didn’t think the other officer heard him.

Another two hours went by. They were not the most exciting time Glen Johnson had ever spent. He wondered if Healey knew how potent a weapon boredom could be. Leave him in here long enough and he’d start counting the rows of thread in his socks for want of anything more interesting to do. Maybe he should have agreed when Parker offered him the deal.

No, goddammit, he thought. Healey had played him for a patsy. He wouldn’t be the commandant’s good little boy now.

The door opened again. There floated Parker, his face as screwed up as if he’d bitten into a persimmon before it was ripe. He jerked a thumb toward the corridor behind him. “Go on,” he said. “Get out.”

Johnson didn’t move. “What’s the hitch?” he asked.

“No hitch,” Parker said. “Your arrest is rescinded. Officially, it never happened. You’re restored to regular duty, effective immediately. What more do you want, egg in your beer?”

“An apology might be nice,” Johnson said. If he was going to be difficult, why not be as difficult as he could?

Healey’s adjutant laughed in his face. “You’ll wait till hell freezes over, and then twenty minutes longer. Do you want to?” He made as if to close the door once more.

“No, never mind,” Johnson said. He hadn’t actually demanded one, only suggested it. He didn’t have to back down, or not very far. He pushed off from the far wall of the brig and glided out into the corridor. “Ah! Freedom!”

“Funny,” Parker said. “Har-de-har-har. You bust me up.”

“You think I was kidding?” Johnson said. “Well, you probably would.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the other man said. “I’m just as much an American as you are. I know what freedom’s worth.”

“You sure don’t act like it,” Johnson said. “And your boss wouldn’t know what it was if it piddled on his shoes.”

The two-word answer Healey’s adjutant gave was to the point, if less than sweet. Johnson laughed and blew him a kiss. That only seemed to make Parker angrier. Johnson wasn’t about to lose any sleep on account of it. He pushed off again and returned to the land of the free and, he hoped, the home of the brave.

He brachiated to the refectory. Walter Stone was there, eating a sandwich and drinking water out of a bulb. The senior pilot waved to Johnson, who glided over to him and grabbed a handhold. “I hear you’ve been naughty again,” Stone said.

“Not me.” Johnson shook his head. “It’s our beloved skipper. He told me to smuggle more ginger to the Lizards, and I’m afraid I turned him down. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

“You haven’t got the right attitude,” Stone said.

“Sorry, but I’m afraid I do,” Johnson said. “Healey wants me to give the Lizards ginger? Okay, fine. He doesn’t care if they catch me and toss me in one of their clinks for the next thirty years? That’s not fine, not by me, not when the Race knows what we’re up to. And the Lizards do know. You can’t tell me any different.”

Stone looked as if he would have liked nothing better. He didn’t, though. And if he couldn’t, Johnson thought, nobody could.

Kassquit was happy. She needed a while to recognize the feeling. She hadn’t known it for a while-a long while. She’d known satisfaction of a sort, most commonly at a job well done. Sometimes that masqueraded as happiness. Now that she’d run into the genuine article again, she recognized the masquerade for what it was.

She knew sexual satisfaction was part of her happiness. So she’d told Ttomalss-and she’d taken a different kind of satisfaction at discomfiting him. But the longer the feeling lasted, the more she noticed other things that went into it.

Chief among them was being valued for her own sake. That was something she’d seldom known among the Race. By the nature of things, it wasn’t something she could easily know in the Empire. To Ttomalss and to the other males and females who dealt with her, she was about as much experimental animal as she was person. She couldn’t be a proper female of the Race, and she couldn’t be a normal Big Ugly, either.

But Frank Coffey made her feel as if she were. He talked with her. Members of the Race had talked to her. Looking back, she thought even Jonathan Yeager had talked to her. Now she discovered the difference.

But to Frank Coffey, what she said mattered at least as much as what he said. And that held true whether they were talking about something as serious as the relations between the Empire and the United States or as foolish as why her hair was straight while his curled tightly.

“There are black Tosevites in the United States whose hair is straight,” he said one day.

“Are there?” she said, and he made the affirmative gesture. “And are there also Tosevites of my type with hair like yours?”

This time, he used the negative gesture. “No, or I have never heard of any. The black Tosevites I mentioned artificially straighten theirs.”

“Why would they want to do such a foolish thing?” Kassquit asked.

“To look more like the white Tosevites who dominate in the United States.” Coffey sounded a little-or maybe more than a little-grim.

“Oh.” Kassquit felt a sudden and altogether unexpected stab of sympathy for wild Big Uglies she’d never seen. “By the spirits of Emperors past, I understand that. I used to shave all the hair on my body to try to look more like a female of the Race. I used to be sorry I had these flaps of skin-ears — instead of hearing diaphragms, too. I even thought of having them surgically removed.”

“I am glad you did not,” he said, and leaned over to nibble on one of them. Kassquit liked that more than she’d thought she would. After a moment, Frank Coffey went on, “You know more than I do about being a minority. That is something surprising for a black American Tosevite to have to admit. But I was never a minority of one.”

“Never till now,” Kassquit pointed out.

“Well, no,” he said. “For once, though, I feel more isolated simply because I am a Tosevite than because I am a black Tosevite. That, I admit, is an unusual feeling.”

“You are not black,” Kassquit said “You are an interesting shade of brown-a good deal darker than I am, certainly, but a long way from black.” His skin tone showed up to fine advantage against the smooth white plastic of the furniture in the refectory.

“Sometimes my shade of brown has proved more interesting than I wished it would,” he said, laughing. This time, Kassquit heard no bitterness in his voice. He added, “You and I are part of the default setting for Tosevites, after all.”

“The default setting?” Kassquit wondered if she’d heard correctly, and also if Coffey had used the Race’s language correctly.

He made the affirmative gesture. He meant what he’d said, whether it was correct or not. Then he explained: “Most Tosevites have dark brown eyes and black hair. Skin color can vary from a dark pinkish-beige like Tom de la Rosa through Tosevites like you to those a little darker than I am, but the hair and eyes stay the same. The default setting, you see? Only in the northwestern part of the main continental mass did Tosevites with very pale skins, light eyes, and yellow or reddish hair evolve. They have colonized widely-they were the ones who developed technological civilization on our planet-but they hatched in a limited area.”

“The default setting.” Kassquit said it again, thoughtfully this time. “This makes me one of the majority?”

“As far as Tosevites are concerned, it certainly does.” Coffey made the affirmative gesture. “You were hatched in China, I believe, and there are more Chinese than any other kind of Tosevite.”

“I have heard this before,” Kassquit said. “When I was all alone among the Race, it did not seem to matter much. Now that I am not alone any longer, it means more.”

Now that I am not alone any longer. Those words meant more than she’d ever dreamt they could. Maybe that was the secret of her new happiness. No, not maybe-without a doubt. Except for the brief, bright segment of her life when Jonathan Yeager came board her starship, she hadn’t kept company with other Big Uglies throughout her life. She didn’t realize how much she missed that company till she had it again. Being among her own biological kind simply felt right.

Maybe that was because wild Big Uglies understood her in ways the Race couldn’t. For all she knew, it was just because Tosevites smelled subconsciously right to her. Pheromones didn’t play as obvious a role with Tosevites as they did with the Race, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

Whatever the reason, she liked it.

Quietly, Frank Coffey said, “When I set what I have gone through in my lifetime against what you have suffered, I am embarrassed that I have ever complained. Next to you, I am nothing but a beginner.”

“Most of it has not been… so bad,” Kassquit said. “When you are in a situation that never changes, you do your best to get used to it, whatever it is. Only when you have something to compare it against do you begin to see it might not have been everything you wished it would be.”

“Truth-not a small truth, either,” Coffey said. “That is probably why so many dark brown Tosevites accepted second-class status in the United States for so long.” He smiled. “You see? I said ‘dark brown.’ But they did not see anything else was possible, and so they complained less than they might have. When pale Tosevites’ attitudes about us began to change, we took as much advantage of it as quickly as we could.”

“And, as you have said yourself, you proved you deserve to be included in your Tosevite society by isolating yourself here on Home,” Kassquit said.

He shrugged. “Some things are worth the price. From what I have heard in the signals sent out from Tosev 3, relations between dark and pale Tosevites in the United States are smoother now than they were when I went into cold sleep.”

“Do you think you are responsible for that?” Kassquit asked.

“Maybe a little-a very little,” Coffey answered. “I would like to think that I have made a difference in my not-empire, even if the difference is only a small one.” He pointed to her. “You, now, you have made a difference in the Empire.”

“Oh, yes, a great difference.” Kassquit wished she weren’t being ironic, but she was. “The Race has had to figure out what to do with one Big Ugly who does not know what to do with herself.”

“Considering how you were raised, you have done very well.” The American Tosevite added an emphatic cough.

“I thank you,” Kassquit said. “I tell myself this. I have told myself this a great many times. I wish I could persuade myself it is a truth.”

“Well, it is, if my opinion is worth anything,” Coffey said. “You are highly educated and highly capable.”

“I am highly abnormal, in a great many ways.” Kassquit tacked on an emphatic cough of her own. “I know this. You will not offend me by agreeing with it. Truth is truth, with me as with anyone else.”

“Have you ever wondered what you would have been like if Ttomalss had not got you from your mother?” Coffey asked.

“Only ten thousand times!” she exclaimed. “I could have been an average Big Ugly!” Part of her, a large part, irresistibly yearned for that. Just to be someone like everyone else around her… What would that be like? It seemed wonderful, at least to one who had never known the feeling.

“You could have been an average female Chinese Big Ugly not long after the conquest fleet came,” Frank Coffey said. “This is a less delightful prospect than you may believe. You would have had only about a fifty percent chance of living past the age of five-Tosevite years, of course. You probably would not have learned to read, let alone anything more. You would have worked hard all your life, and likely would have been mated to a male who did as he pleased but would not give you the same privilege. Sex differences in social roles are much larger among us than they are in the Race.”

He spoke truths-Kassquit knew as much. Even so, she said, “I would have been myself, the self I was meant to be. Here, now, the way I am, what am I? Nothing! I cannot even speak a Tosevite language.”

“No matter what language you speak, you make yourself understood,” Coffey said. “Not only that, but you have something worth saying. What else matters?”

“I thank you again,” Kassquit said. “Whenever we speak, you make me feel good. This is a pleasure worth setting alongside the pleasure you give me when we lie together.”

The wild Big Ugly mimed the beginnings of the posture of respect, just the way a member of the Race might have done. “I thank you, ” he said. “It is mutual, you know, as such things should be. It is not just that you do not dislike me or look down on me because I have dark skin. I do not think the other Americans here do that. But it has never occurred to you that disliking or looking down on me because of my skin is even a possibility. That is not and cannot be true of them, not with society in the United States being as it was when we all went into cold sleep.”

“Do you suppose it can be true of society in your not-empire as it is now?” Kassquit asked.

“I do not think so,” Coffey answered. “More change still will have come, I suppose, by the time I get back to Tosev 3. Maybe then… and maybe not, too.”

Kassquit didn’t want to think about his leaving. She remembered how unhappy she’d been after Jonathan Yeager went back down to the surface of Tosev 3. She was happier now than she had been with him. Would she be unhappier without Frank Coffey in proportion to the degree she was happier with him? Probably. That seemed logical, even if logic didn’t always play a large role in emotional dealings.

I am happy now. By the spirits of Emperors past, I will enjoy being happy now. I will savor it. And if I am unhappy later, I suppose I will end up savoring that, too.

As if reading her thoughts, Coffey said, “I am not going anywhere for a while.”

“Good,” Kassquit said, and used one more emphatic cough.

By now, a fair number of shopkeepers in Sitneff were used to having Big Uglies drop in on them. Karen Yeager ignored her husband’s teasing about having no clothes to shop for here. She knew Jonathan wouldn’t have minded watching her or any other reasonably good-looking woman who wore body paint and nothing else.

Because she couldn’t shop for clothes (like any good teasing, Jonathan’s held a grain of truth), she had to improvise. Bookstores fascinated her, as they fascinated her father-in-law. Very often, one of her guards would pull out a transaction card and buy something for her. Sooner or later, his superiors would pay him back. Since none of the guards grumbled about how much money Karen cost, she guessed the repayment arrangements were more efficient than they would have been in the USA.

The Race’s printed lines ran from top to bottom of the page and from right to left across it. Lizards opened books at what would have been the back by American standards and worked their way forward. Other than that, their volumes were surprisingly similar to the ones humans used. They stored a lot of data electronically, but they hadn’t abandoned words on paper.

“Why should we?” a bookstore clerk responded when she remarked on that. “Books are convenient. They are cheap. They require no electronic support. Why make things more complicated than necessary?”

Back on Earth, the answer would have been, Because we can. Sometimes the Race was wise enough not to do what it had the technical ability to do. Not so many humans had that kind of wisdom.

One of her guards said, “If a beffel chews up a book, that is an annoyance. If a beffel chews up an electronic reader, that is a larger annoyance and a larger expense.”

“Befflem are nuisances,” another guard said. “I often wonder why we put up with them. They run wild and get into everything.”

He swung his eye turrets toward Karen, then looked away again a moment later. She knew what that meant. Lizards often compared humans to befflem. She didn’t think of it as an insult, though the Race often meant it that way. She liked the small, feisty creatures the Lizards kept as pets. She would have liked them even better if they hadn’t gone feral and made nuisances of themselves over such a broad part of Earth.

“Are you finished here, superior Tosevite?” the first guard asked her.

She made the affirmative gesture. “I am,” she said. “Since we have been speaking of befflem, would you be kind enough to take me to a pet store?”

“It shall be done, superior Tosevite.” Did the guard sound amused or resigned? Karen couldn’t quite tell. She would have bet on the latter, though.

She didn’t care. She enjoyed the Race’s pet shops at least as much as bookstores. The bookstores did smell better. Pet shops on Earth were often full of earthy odors. Pet shops on Home were full of unearthly odors, sharper and more ammoniacal than their equivalents back in the USA. Karen didn’t mind all that much. The odors weren’t dreadful, and after a few minutes she always got used to them.

Befflem in cages scurried around and squabbled with one another and beeped at anyone who went by and stuck out their tongues to help odors reach their scent receptors. They also beeped at the larger, more dignified tsiongyu, the Race’s other favorite pets. The tsiongyu usually ignored the befflem. Every once in a while, though, they lost their air of lordly disdain and tried to hurl themselves through the wire mesh of their cages at the low-slung, scaly beasts that annoyed them. When they did, the befflem only got more annoying. A beffel’s chief purpose in life often seemed to be getting someone or something angry at it.

Karen fascinated the befflem. Just as the odors in the pet store were alien to her, her smell was nothing they’d ever met before. They crowded to the front of their cages. Their tongues flicked in and out, in and out, tasting the strange odors of Earth. Their beeps took on a plaintive note. The befflem might almost have been asking, What are you? What are you doing here?

The tsiongyu, by contrast, pretended Karen wasn’t there. They were long-legged, elegant, and snooty. Too smart for their own good was how she thought of them. They ignored the members of the Race in the pet shop, too. They could be affectionate, once they got to know somebody. With strangers, though, it was as if they were society matrons who hadn’t been introduced.

There were also cages with evening sevod and other flying creatures in them. They stared at Karen out of turreted eyes. It wasn’t evening, so the sevod weren’t singing. The other flying animals squawked and hissed and buzzed. Karen wouldn’t have wanted anything that made noises like that in her house. By the prices on the cages, the Lizards didn’t mind the racket at all.

Farther back in the store were aquariums filled with Home’s equivalent of fish. They looked much less different from fish on Earth than land creatures here did from land creatures on Karen’s home planet. Water imposed more design constraints on evolution than air did. But the turreted, swiveling eyes went back a long, long way in the history of life on Home, for the fishy things used them, too.

One silver variety swam along just below the surface of the water. It had unusually long eye turrets. They stuck up into the air, as if they were twin periscopes on a submarine. A guard said, “When the shooter sees a ffissach or some other prey on a leaf over its stream, it spits water at it, knocks it down, and eats it.”

“Truth?” Karen said. The male made the affirmative gesture. Karen came closer and looked at the little watery creatures with new interest-till one of them, literally, spat in her eye. She jumped back in a hurry, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her T-shirt.

The guards all laughed. They thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Once Karen had dried off, she did, too. “You see, superior Tosevite?” said the guard who’d told her about shooters.

“I do see,” Karen said. “But why did the shooter spit water at me? I was not sitting on a leaf.” The guards thought that was pretty funny, too.

As they left the pet shop, the manager called, “Would you not like a beffel of your own, superior Tosevite? Life with a beffel is never dull.” Karen believed that. She didn’t rise to the sales pitch, though.

Out on the sidewalk, a Lizard came up to her and said, “Excuse me, but are you not one of the creatures called Big Uglies?”

“Yes, that is what I am,” Karen agreed. Most of the time, members of the Race used the name without even thinking it might be insulting. She wondered how often whites had said nigger the same way around Frank Coffey.

Then, suddenly, she had other things to worry about. The Lizard opened his mouth wide and bit her in the arm.

She screamed. She pounded the Lizard on the snout. She kicked him. She grabbed his arm when he tried to claw her, too. After a heartbeat of stunned surprise, the guards jumped on the Lizard and pulled him off her.

“Big Uglies killed both my best friends on Tosev 3!” he shouted. “I want revenge! I have to have revenge!”

“You are as addled as an unhatched egg abandoned in the sun,” a guard said.

Karen paid next to no attention. Lizards’ teeth were sharp and pointed. She bled from at least a dozen punctures and tears. On Earth, improvising a bandage would have been easy, for cloth was everywhere. Not so here. She pulled her T-shirt off over her head and wrapped it around her arm. Seeing her in a bra and shorts wouldn’t scandalize the Lizards. They thought she was peculiar any which way.

Two guards dragged off the Lizard who’d bitten her. The third one bent into the posture of respect, saying, “I apologize, superior Tosevite. From the depths of my liver, I apologize. That male must be deranged.”

Karen’s arm hurt too much for her to care about the Lizard’s psychiatric condition. Through clenched teeth, she said, “Take me back to the hotel. I want to have our physician look at these wounds and clean them.”

“It shall be done, superior Tosevite,” the guard said, and done it was.

Back at the hotel, both Lizards and humans exclaimed when they saw her with a bloody shirt wrapped around her arm. They exclaimed again when she told them how she’d got hurt. “Please get out of the way,” she said several times. “I need to see Dr. Blanchard.”

“Well, this is a lovely mess,” the physician said when she got a good look at Karen’s injuries. She cleaned them, which hurt. Then she disinfected them, which hurt worse. “A couple of those are going to need stitches, I’m afraid.”

“Will they get infected?” Karen asked.

“Good question,” Dr. Blanchard said. She didn’t answer right away, reaching for the novocaine instead. That hurt going in, but numbed things afterwards. Before she started suturing, though, she went on, “We haven’t seen much in the way of germs here on Home that bother us. But I’ll tell you, I wish you hadn’t picked this particular way to try the experiment.”

“So do I,” Karen said feelingly. “The Lizard must have been storing up resentment since the days of the conquest fleet-well, since the days when word from the conquest fleet got back from Home. And the first Big Ugly he saw, he just went chomp! Good thing he didn’t have a gun.”

“Probably a very good thing,” Melanie Blanchard agreed. “Um, you may not want to watch this.”

“You’re right. I may not.” Looking was making Karen woozy. “Do you think a tetanus shot would help?”

“I doubt it. They won’t have tetanus here. They’ll have something else instead,” the doctor answered, which made an unfortunate amount of sense. “I will give you a bunch of our antibiotics, though. I hope they’ll do some good, but I can’t promise you anything.”

“Why not give me some of the ones the Lizards use, too?” Karen asked.

“I would, except I think they’re more likely to poison you than help you,” Dr. Blanchard answered. “I don’t know of any that have been tested on us. I don’t think anyone ever saw the need before.”

“Oh, joy,” Karen said. “If I start breaking out in green and purple blotches-”

“If you do, all bets are off,” Melanie Blanchard said. “But I don’t want to try anything like that before I have to, because it is dangerous for you. I think I’d better consult with some of the Race’s doctors, to find out which drugs I ought to use just in case.”

“I didn’t come here intending to be a guinea pig,” Karen said.

“People hardly ever do intend to become guinea pigs,” Dr. Blanchard observed. “Sometimes it happens anyway.”

“What do you think the chances are?” Karen asked.

Dr. Blanchard sent her a severe look. “Guinea pigs don’t get to ask questions like that. They find out.” Oh, joy, Karen thought again.

When Jonathan Yeager went into cold sleep, he never thought he would have to worry about whether his wife came down with a wound infection. He’d imagined a nuclear confrontation between the Admiral Peary and the forces of the Race, but never an angry Lizard with a long-festering grudge and a nasty set of teeth. He wished he hadn’t thought of the grudge in those terms-not that he could do anything about it now.

“How are you?” he asked Karen every morning for a week.

“Sore. Nauseated, too,” she would answer-she was taking a lot of antibiotics.

At the end of the week, Jonathan’s heart began coming down from his throat. His wife seemed to be healing well. Dr. Blanchard took out the stitches. She gave a cautious thumbs-up, saying, “With luck, no more excitement.”

“I’d vote for that,” Karen said. “Excitement isn’t why I came here. And good old dull looks nice right now.”

“You’ve got apologies from everybody but the Emperor himself,” Jonathan said.

His wife shrugged. “I’d rather not have got bitten in the first place, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Well, yes, I can see that,” Jonathan said. “I’m glad you seem to be healing all right.”

“You‘re glad!” Karen exclaimed. “What about me? I was joking with the doctor about breaking out in green and purple blotches-and I was hoping I was joking, if you know what I mean.”

“Our germs don’t seem to bother the Lizards, so it’s only fair the ones on Home should leave us alone,” Jonathan said.

“That’s what Melanie told me. That’s nice and logical,” his wife replied. “When it’s your arm, though, logic kind of goes out the window.”

“The crazy Lizard could have raised an even bigger scandal,” Jonathan said.

“How? By biting your father?” Karen said. “That would have done it, all right. He’s the ambassador, after all, not just an ambassador’s flunky like yours truly.”

“Well, I’m just an ambassador’s flunky, too,” Jonathan said, a little uneasily. Comparisons with his father made him nervous. He was good enough to get here. His father was good enough to head up the American embassy. Not a lot of difference, but enough. He shook his head. That wasn’t what he wanted to think about right now. He went on, “I had something else in mind. What if the crazy Lizard had bitten Kassquit?”

“Kassquit?” Karen thought about it, then started to giggle. “Yes, that would have been a hoot, wouldn’t it? Poor Lizard is angry at the Big Uglies because his friends got killed during the fighting, and then he would have hauled off and bitten the only Big Ugly who wishes she were a Lizard and has the citizenship to prove it? That would have been better than man bites dog.”

The Lizard’s story was pathetic, if you looked at it from his point of view. Here he’d nursed his grief and his grudge all these years-it would have been close to eighty of the Earthly variety since he got the bad news-and what had he got for it? One snap-at a human who hadn’t been more than a baby when the fighting stopped. Oh, yes: he’d got one more thing. He’d got all the trouble the Race could give him. They’d lock him up and eat the key, which was what they did instead of throwing it away.

Jonathan didn’t worry about going into Sitneff even after his wife’s unfortunate incident. His guards asked him about it once. He said, “Any male of the Race who bites me will probably come down with acute indigestion. And, in my opinion, he will deserve it, too.”

That startled the guards into laughing. One of them said, “Superior Tosevite, do you taste as bad as that?”

“Actually, I do not know,” Jonathan answered. “I have never tried to make a meal of myself.”

The guards laughed again. They didn’t try to restrict his movements, and keeping them from doing that was what he’d had in mind.

Like Karen, he prowled bookstores. He read the Race’s language even better than he spoke it. Words on a page just sat there. They could be pinned down and analyzed. In the spoken language, they were there and gone.

Since word of the conquest fleet’s arrival on Tosev 3 got back to Home, the Lizards had spent a good deal of time and ingenuity writing about humans, their customs, and the planet on which they dwelt. Much of that writing was so bad, it was almost funny. Jonathan didn’t care. He bought lots of those books. No matter how bad they were, they said a lot about what the Lizard in the street thought of Big Uglies.

The short answer seemed to be, not much. According to the Race’s writers, humans were addicted to killing one another, often for the most flimsy of reasons. Photographs from the Reich and the Soviet Union illustrated the point. They were also sexually depraved. Photographs illustrated that point, too, photographs that wouldn’t have been printable back on Earth. Here, the pictures were likelier to rouse laughter than lust. And humans were the ones who grew ginger.

Ginger had spawned a literature of its own. Most of that literature seemed intended to convince the Lizards of Home that it was dreadful stuff, a drug no self-respecting member of the Race should ever try. Some of it put Jonathan in mind of Reefer Madness and other propaganda films from before the days he was born-his father would talk about them every now and again. But there were exceptions.

One Life, One Mate was by the defiant female half of a permanently mated Lizard pair: permanently mated thanks to ginger and what it did to female pheromones. The pair was, for all practical purposes, married, except the idea hadn’t occurred to the Lizards till they got to Tosev 3. The female described all the advantages of the state and how it was superior to the ordinary friendships males and females formed. She was talking about love-but, again, that was something the Lizards hadn’t known about till they bumped into humanity.

She went on almost endlessly about how the mixture of friendship and sexual pleasure produced a happiness unlike any she’d known at Home (the ginger might have had something to do with that, too, but she didn’t mention it). Rhetorically, she asked why such an obvious good should be reserved for Big Uglies alone. She complained about the Race’s intolerance toward couples that had chosen to create such permanent bonds with ginger. The biographical summary at the back of the book (it would have been the front in one in English) said she and her mate were living in Phoenix, Arizona. Jonathan knew not all permanently mated pairs were expelled from the Race’s territory these days. The author and her partner, though, had done as so many others had before them, and found happiness as immigrants in the USA.

Jonathan’s guards had a low opinion of One Life, One Mate. “Bad enough to be a pervert,” one of them said. “Worse to brag about it.”

“Meaning no offense, superior Tosevite,” another added. “This kind of mating behavior is natural for you. We of the Race thought it was peculiar at first, but now we see that is an inescapable part of what you are. But our way is as natural for us as yours is for you. Would any Tosevites want to imitate our practices?”

Hordes of lust-crazed women not caring who joined with them, panting and eager for the first man who came along? Dryly, Jonathan said, “Some of our males might not mind so very much.”

“Well, it would be unnatural for them,” the second guard insisted. “And your way is unnatural for us. Next thing you know, this addled female will want each pair to take care of its own eggs and hatchlings, too.” His mouth fell open and his jaw waggled back and forth in derisive laughter.

“That is how we do things,” Jonathan said.

“Yes, but your hatchlings are weak and helpless when they are newly out of the egg,” the guard said, proving he’d done some-but not quite all-of his homework about Big Uglies. “Ours need much less care.”

“Truth,” the first guard said.

Was it the truth? The Race took it as gospel, but Jonathan wasn’t so sure. His folks-and then he and Karen-had raised Mickey and Donald as much as if they were human beings as possible. The little Lizards had learned to talk and to act in a fairly civilized way much faster than hatchlings seemed to do among the Race. Maybe giving them lots of attention had its advantages.

And maybe you don’t know what the devil you’re talking about, Jonathan thought. Mickey and Donald were no more normal Lizards than Kassquit was a normal human. With her example before them, the Americans had gone ahead anyway. Jonathan had been proud of that when the project first began. He wasn’t so proud of it any more. His family had done its best, but it couldn’t possibly have produced anything but a couple of warped Lizards.

He had more sympathy for Ttomalss than he’d ever dreamt he would. That was something he intended never to tell Kassquit.

“I have a question for you, superior Tosevite,” the second guard said. “Ginger is common and cheap on your world. Suppose all the males and females of the Race there fall into these perverted ways. How will we deal with them? How can we hope to deal with them, when they have such disgusting habits?”

The question was real and important. It had occurred to humans and to other members of the Race. The answer? As far as Jonathan knew, nobody had one yet. He tried his best: “I do not believe all members of the Race on Tosev 3 will change their habits. More of them use ginger there than here, yes, but not everyone there does-far from it. And those who keep to their old habits on Tosev 3 have learned to be more patient and respectful toward those who have changed their ways. Perhaps members of the Race here should learn to do the same. Sometimes different is only different, not better or worse.”

All three of his guards made the negative gesture. The one who had not spoken till now asked, “How do you Tosevites treat the perverts among you? I am sure you have some. Every species we know has some.”

“Yes, we do,” Jonathan agreed. “How do we treat them? Better than we used to, I will say that. We are more tolerant than we were. Perhaps you will find that the same thing happens to you as time goes by.”

“Perhaps we will, but I doubt it,” that third guard said. “What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong. How can we possibly put up with what anyone sensible can tell is wrong with a single swing of the eye turret?” His companions made the affirmative gesture.

“Your difficulty is, the Race’s society has not changed much for a very long time,” Jonathan said. “When anything different does come to your notice, you want to reject it without even thinking about it.”

“And why should we not? By the spirits of Emperors past, we know what is right and proper,” the guard declared. Again, his comrades plainly agreed with him. Jonathan could have gone on arguing, but he didn’t see the point. He wasn’t going to change their minds. They were sure they already had the answers-had them and liked them. He’d never thought of the Lizards as Victorian, but he did now.