Homeward Bound

15

Sam Yeager had faced plenty of frustrations on Home. He’d been ready for most of them-he knew what the Lizards were like and what they were likely to do as well as any mere human could. That (along with the Doctor’s bad luck) was why he was the American ambassador today.

But one frustration he hadn’t expected was having the Race know more about what was happening back on Earth than he did.

Things had worked out that way, though. Physicists back on the home planet seemed to be dancing a buck-and-wing about something. (Did anybody back on Earth dance a buck-and-wing about anything any more? Sometimes the phrases that popped into Sam’s head made him feel like an antique even to himself.) The Race had a pretty good idea of what it was. None of the Americans on Home had even a clue.

His own ignorance made Sam call Lieutenant General Healey one more time. He relished that about as much as he would have a visit to the proctologist’s. Sometimes, though, he had to bend over. And sometimes he had to talk to the Admiral Peary ’s commandant. He consoled himself by remembering Healey liked him no better than he liked Healey.

“What’s on your mind, Ambassador?” Healey growled when the connection went through. Then came the inevitable question: “And is this call secure?”

“As far as I can tell, it is,” Yeager answered after checking the electronics in his room one more time.

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Here’s what I want to know: has the ship picked up any transmissions from the Lizards on Earth about human physicists’ recent experiments, whatever they are? And have the Lizards here on Home been blabbing about that kind of thing anywhere you can monitor them? I’d like to find out what’s going on if I can.”

“I don’t remember anything like that.” By the way Healey said it, it couldn’t have happened if he didn’t remember it.

More often than not, Sam would have accepted that just to give himself an excuse to get off the phone with a man he couldn’t stand. That he didn’t now was a measure of how urgent he thought this was. “Could you please check, General? Could you please check as carefully as possible? It’s liable to be very important.”

“How important is very important?” Healey asked scornfully.

“Peace or war important. I don’t think it gets any more important than that. Do you?”

The commandant didn’t answer, not for some little while. Yeager started to wonder if he really did think something else was more important. With Healey, you never could tell. At last, though, he said, “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Thanks,” Yeager said. Again, Healey didn’t answer. A glance at the electronics told Sam the commandant had hung up on him. He laughed. The man was consistent. Yeah, he’s consistently a son of a bitch, jeered the little voice inside Sam’s head.

Talks with Atvar faltered. It was as if both the fleetlord and Sam were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sam wasn’t even sure what the other shoe was, but he had to wait-and he had to seem to know more than he did. At one point, Atvar said, “It would be better for all concerned if this turned out to be a dead end.”

“Do you truly think so?” Yeager said, wondering what this was. “Our belief is that knowledge is never wasted.”

“Yes, I understand that,” the fleetlord answered. “You have this notion of what you call progress, of change as improvement. We think differently. When we think of change, we think of all the things that can go wrong, all the things that will need fixing. We are more realistic than you.”

Sam made the negative gesture. “Meaning no disrespect, but I do not think so. The Race and Tosevites have different histories, that is all. You gained your technology slowly, one piece at a time, and that made you notice the disruptions it caused. We got ours over a couple of long lifetimes. It made things much better for us in spite of the disruptions.”

“Did it?” Atvar asked. “Would the Jews the Deutsche exterminated agree with you? Without your newly advanced technology-railroads, poisons, and so on-the Deutsche could not have done as they did. This is not the only example. Will you deny it?”

“I wish I could,” Sam answered. But that was not what Atvar had asked. Sam Yeager sighed. “No, I will not deny it. It is a truth. But you ignore, for example, the medical advances that allow most of us to live out our full spans without fear of the diseases that killed so many of us not long ago.”

“I do not ignore them,” Atvar said. Yeager thought he meant they also had a black side, as in the experiments Nazi doctors had undertaken while they were getting rid of Jews. But the fleetlord went down a different road: “Will your agriculture keep up with population growth? Will you regulate the number of hatchlings you are allowed to produce? Or will you simply start to starve because you do not think of difficulties until it is too late?”

Those were good questions. Sam had answers for none of them. All he could say was, “Tosevites have also predicted these disasters, but they have not happened yet. If progress continues, perhaps none of them will.”

Atvar’s mouth fell open. He knew Sam well enough to know he would not offend him by laughing at him. “There is such a thing as optimism, Ambassador, and there is such a thing as what we call drooling optimism.”

“We would say wild-eyed optimism,” Sam replied. “But you see optimism in general turning into that kind of optimism sooner than we do.”

“No doubt you have come out with another truth,” Atvar said. “As for me, I can speak only as a male of the Race. And one of the things I have to say is this: from the Race’s perspective, your optimism leads to arrogance. You think you can ask for anything you want and everything will somehow turn out all right. I must tell you that that is not a truth, nor will it ever be.” He added an emphatic cough.

“When you brought the conquest fleet to Tosev 3, you expected to find a bunch of sword-swinging barbarians,” Sam said.

“Truth. We did,” Atvar said. “I do not disagree. This is so.”

“Forgive me, Fleetlord, but I have not finished,” Sam said. “Instead of being sword-swinging barbarians, we were as you found us-”

“Barbarians with aircraft and landcruisers,” Atvar broke in.

That stung. It also held some truth, more than Sam Yeager really cared to acknowledge. Refusing to acknowledge it, he went on as he had intended: “We were advanced enough to fight you to a standstill. You recognized some of us as equals, but you never truly meant it, not down in your livers, not even when we began to get ahead of you technologically. As long as we could not get out of our own solar system, you had some justification for this. But since we are talking here in Sitneff…”

“Everything you have said is a truth. It makes you more dangerous, not less. Why should we not try to rid ourselves of you while we still have the chance? If we do not, how long will it be before you try to get rid of us?”

There was the rub. The Race had always seen humans as nuisances. Now it saw them as dangerous nuisances. “We will fight to defend ourselves,” Sam warned.

“That is not the issue,” Atvar said. “Any species will fight to defend itself. You will fight to aggrandize yourselves. You will, but you will not do it at our expense.”

“Was the conquest fleet fighting in self-defense?” Sam asked acidly.

“In the end, it certainly was,” the fleetlord said, and Sam laughed in surprise. Atvar went on, “We had-and we paid for-a mistaken notion of where you Tosevites were in terms of technology. We knew as much before we landed on your planet. But if you had been what we thought you were, would you not agree you would have been better off if we had conquered you?”

Had the Lizards brought Earth from the twelfth century to the late twentieth in a couple of generations… “Materially, no one could possibly say we would not have been,” Sam answered.

“There. You see?” Atvar said.

Sam held up a hand. “Excuse me, Fleetlord, but again I had not finished. The one thing you would have taken away from us forever is our freedom. Some of us would say that is too high a price to pay.”

“Then some of you are fools,” Atvar said with acid of his own. “You had freedom to murder one another, starve, and die of diseases you did not know how to cure. It is easy to speak of freedom when your belly is full and you are healthy. When you are starving and full of parasites, it is only a word, and one without much meaning.”

That held some truth-more, again, than Yeager cared to admit. But just because it held some truth did not mean it was a truth. Sam said, “The Greeks invented democracy-snoutcounting, if you like-more than fifteen hundred of our years before your probe came to Tosev 3: more than three thousand of yours. They were full of diseases. They were hungry a lot of the time. They fought among themselves. But they did it anyway. They believed-and a lot of us have always believed since-that no one has the right to tell anyone else what to do just because of who his sire was.”

“Snoutcounting.” As usual, Atvar filled the word with scorn. “My opinion remains unchanged: it is nothing to be proud of. And is this vaunted freedom of yours worth having when it is only the freedom to starve or to die or to impose your superstition on others by force?”

“Who brought reverence for the spirits of Emperors past to Tosev 3?” Yeager inquired.

“That is not superstition. That is truth,” Atvar said primly, sounding as certain as a missionary evangelizing an islander in the South Seas.

“Evidence would be nice,” Sam said.

The fleetlord winced, but he answered, “We at least have the evidence of a long and prosperous history. Your superstitions have nothing whatever-nothing but fanaticism, I should say.”

“We are a stubborn lot,” Sam admitted.

“You are indeed.” Atvar used an emphatic cough.

Sam said, “What you do not seem to understand is that we are also stubborn in the cause of freedom. Suppose you had sent the conquest fleet right after your probe and conquered us. You could have done it. No one would say anything else, not for a moment. Suppose you had, as I say. Do you not think that, once we learned about modern technology from you, we would have risen to regain our independence?”

He had often seen Atvar angry and sardonic. He had hardly ever seen him horrified. This was one of those times. The fleetlord recoiled like a well-bred woman who saw a mouse (which reminded Sam that the Lizards had yet to exterminate the escaped rats). Visibly gathering himself, Atvar said, “What a dreadful idea!” He used another emphatic cough. “You realize you may not have done your species a favor with this suggestion?”

He could only mean Sam had made humans seem more dangerous, which made a preventive war more likely. Sam wanted to scowl; that wasn’t what he’d had in mind. He held his face steady. Atvar had probably had enough experience with humans to be able to read expressions. Picking his words with care, Sam said, “Whatever happens to us is also likely to happen to you. You know this is a truth, Fleetlord.”

“I know that whatever happens now is likely to be better than what would happen in a hundred years, and much better than what would happen in two hundred.” Atvar sighed. “I am sorry, Ambassador, but that is how things look out of my eye turrets.”

“I am sorry, too.” Sam used an emphatic cough of his own.

“Will it be war?” Jonathan Yeager asked his father.

Sam Yeager shrugged. “I don’t know yet. But that’s about as much as I can tell you.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not right. I can tell you one other thing: it doesn’t look good right now.”

“Everything seemed so fine when we got here,” Jonathan said mournfully.

“I know,” his father said. “But that we got here… It’s just made the Lizards more nervous the longer they think about it. Now we can reach them. We can hit them where they live-literally. They’re starting to figure that if they don’t move to get rid of us now, they’ll never have another chance. They worry we’ll have the drop on them if they wait.”

Jonathan looked out the window of his father’s room. There was Sitneff, the town he’d come to take for granted, with the greenish-blue sky and the dry hills out beyond the boxy buildings. It had been a comfortable place for Lizards to live since the Pleistocene, since before modern humans replaced Neanderthals. A female of the Race from those days wouldn’t have much trouble fitting into the city as it was now. A Neanderthal woman dropped into Los Angeles might have rather more.

With a distinct effort of will, Jonathan pulled back to the business at hand, saying, “They may be right.”

“Yeah, I know. It doesn’t do us any good-just the opposite, in fact,” his father said. “But if they do attack us, Earth isn’t the only planet that’ll suffer. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

“Do you know for a fact that we’ve sent ships to Rabotev 2 and Halless 1?” As he usually did, Jonathan used the Race’s names for the stars humans called Epsilon Eridani and Epsilon Indi. “Do you know that we’ve sent more ships here?”

“Know for a fact? No.” Sam Yeager shook his head again. “The Admiral Peary hasn’t got news of any other launchings except the Molotov. If the Lizards have, they aren’t talking. But…” He sighed heavily, then repeated it: “But…” The one ominous word seemed a complete sentence. “If we did launch warships, we’d be damn fools to let the Lizards know we’d done it. If war does start, they’re liable to get some horrendous surprises. And I have no idea-none at all-what the Russians and the Japanese and even the Germans might be able to do by now. There may be a fleet behind the Molotov. I just don’t know.”

“Madness,” Jonathan said. “After you had your audience with the Emperor, I thought everything was going to fall into place. We’d have peace, and nobody would have to worry about things for a while.” He chuckled unhappily. “Naive, wasn’t I?”

“Well, if you were, you weren’t the only one, because I felt the same way,” his father said. “And I really don’t know what queered the deal.”

“That experiment back on Earth, whatever it was?”

“I guess so,” his father said. “I’d like things a lot better if I knew what was going on there, though. The Lizards who do aren’t talking.” He paused to make sure the Race’s listening devices were suppressed, then spoke in a low voice: “The Emperor wouldn’t even tell Kassquit.”

Jonathan whistled softly. “Kassquit is as loyal to the Empire as the day is long. Or do the Lizards think she’ll spill everything she knows to Frank in pillow talk?” He threw his hands in the air to show how unlikely he thought that was.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know, dammit,” Sam Yeager said. “That’s possible-if the Lizards know us well enough to know what pillow talk is. But they do know we can bug their phone lines here, remember. That may be why Risson kept quiet. I can’t say for sure. Nobody human on Home can say for sure. That worries me, too.”

“Do they have any ideas on the Admiral Peary?” Jonathan asked.

“I asked Lieutenant General Healey.” His father’s mouth twisted, as if to say he considered that above and beyond the call of duty. “He hasn’t found anything yet, but there’s a hell of a lot of Lizard signal traffic between Earth and Home to sift through and sometimes try to decrypt, so who knows what he’ll come up with once he does some real digging?”

“And in the meantime…”

“In the meantime, he’s sending a war warning back to the USA,” his father said grimly. “Whatever the Lizards do, they won’t pull a Jap on us.”

“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said. That was a phrase from Sam Yeager’s generation. Jonathan understood it, though he wouldn’t have used it himself. He wondered how many Americans living right now would have any idea what it meant. Not many, he suspected.

“Wish I had better news for you, son,” his father said.

“So do I,” Jonathan said. “If I can do anything, you sing out, you hear?”

“I will,” his father promised. “That’s what you’re along for, after all. Right now, though, I have to tell you I don’t know what it would be. That’s not a knock on you. I don’t know what more I can do myself. I wish to hell I did.” Sam Yeager had always been a vigorous man who looked and acted younger than his years. But now the weight of worry made him seem suddenly old.

Jonathan walked over and set a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Something will turn up.”

“I hope so.” His father sounded bleak. “I’ll be damned if I know what it is, though. Of course, I would have said the same thing back in 1942, when the Lizards were knocking the crap out of us. Nobody had any idea what to do about them, either, not at first.”

“That’s what I hear,” Jonathan agreed. “Of course, I wasn’t around then. You were.”

“If I hadn’t been, you wouldn’t be around now.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan said.

His father looked back across the years. “And if your mother hadn’t been carrying you,” he said, as much to himself as to Jonathan, “I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”

Jonathan raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sam Yeager blinked. He seemed to realize what he’d just said. A long sigh escaped him. “You know your mother was married to another guy before she met me.”

“Oh, sure,” Jonathan said. “He got killed when the Lizards invaded, right?”

“Well, yeah.” His father was staring into the past again. He looked… embarrassed? “It’s-a little more complicated than we ever talked about, though.”

“Whatever it is, I think you’d better spit it out, Dad,” Jonathan said. “Do I have to come ten light-years to get all the old family scandals?”

“Well, it looks like you probably do.” Sam Yeager not only looked embarrassed, he sounded embarrassed, too. “When your mother and I got married in beautiful, romantic Chugwater, Wyoming, we both thought her first husband was dead. That’s the God’s truth. We did.”

“But he wasn’t?” Jonathan said slowly. He didn’t know how to take that. It was news to him.

His father nodded. “He sure wasn’t. He was a physicist on our atomic-bomb project. Barbara-your mom-found out she was pregnant with you, and then she found out she wasn’t a widow-bang! like that.” Sam Yeager snapped his fingers.

“Jesus! You never told me any of this,” Jonathan said.

“It’s not exactly something we were proud of,” his father answered, which was probably the understatement of the year. “I always figured that, if she hadn’t had a bun in the oven, she would have gone back to the other guy-Jens, his name was. I never asked her-you’d better believe I didn’t! — but that’s what I figure. She did, though, and so she ended up choosing me… and the rest is history.”

“Christ!” Jonathan exclaimed. “Any other skeletons in the closet, as long as you’re in a confessing mood?”

“I don’t think so,” his father answered. “I guess I should have told you this a long time ago.”

“I guess you should have,” Jonathan said feelingly. “What the hell happened to this other guy? Do you even know?”

“Yeah. I know.” Sam Yeager’s face went even more somber than it had been. “He kind of went off the deep end after that, and who can blame him? He shot a couple of people before they finally got him. And sometimes I wonder what I would have done…” His voice trailed away.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Dad!” Jonathan said. “You wouldn’t have done anything that nutty. It’s not your style, and you know it.”

His father only shrugged. “How can you tell till something happens? You can’t. Losing your mom screwed up the other guy’s whole life. It sure wouldn’t have done me any good. She was… something special.” Now his voice broke.

For him, Barbara Yeager hadn’t been dead long at all. He’d gone into cold sleep not long after she passed away. Jonathan had waited another seventeen years. He had scar tissue over the wound his father didn’t. But the other things his old man had told him… “Why did you sit on all this stuff for so long? Didn’t you think I had a right to know?”

Sam Yeager coughed a couple of times. “Well, part of it was that your mother never wanted to talk about it much. She always did her best to act as though it hadn’t happened. I think she felt bad about the way things turned out for the other guy. I know I would have in her shoes. How could you help it? It wasn’t even that she didn’t love him, or hadn’t loved him. That probably made it worse. Just-one of those things. She didn’t have any perfect choices. She made the one she made, and then she had to live with it. We all had to live with it.”

Except the other guy had turned out not to be able to. Jonathan had always thought his mother’s first husband was off the stage before she met his father. Nobody’d ever said so. It was just what he’d assumed, what his folks had wanted him to assume. He saw why they’d want him to-it was safe and conventional. The real story seemed anything but.

“Why tell me now?” he asked harshly.

“It’s the truth. I figured you ought to know.” His father’s mouth tightened. “And I have no idea what the odds of our coming through all this are. We may not have a whole lot of time.”

A deathbed confession? Not quite, but maybe not so far removed from one, either. Jonathan picked his words with care: “It must have been a crazy time, back when we were fighting the conquest fleet.”

His father nodded. “You can say that again. We didn’t know if we’d make it, or if we’d all get blown to hell and gone the next week or the next day or sometimes the next minute. A lot of us just… grabbed what we could, and didn’t give a damn about tomorrow. Why, I remember-”

“Remember what?” Jonathan asked when his father broke off.

But Sam Yeager only said, “Never mind. That really isn’t any of your business. I’m the only one left alive whose business it is, and I’ll take it to the grave with me.”

“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said, surprised by his father’s vehemence. But that was just one surprise piled on top of a ton of others. He tried to imagine his father and mother falling in love, falling into bed, her thinking she was a widow… He tried, and felt himself failing. The picture refused to form. They were his parents. They were so much older than he was.

His father wasn’t so much older than he was as he had been before cold sleep. And once upon a time, long before cold sleep, his father had been younger still-and so had his mother. He still couldn’t imagine it.

He couldn’t imagine war with the Lizards, either. But that was liable to be every bit as real as his parents’ sex life.

Kassquit asked Frank Coffey, “Do you know what sort of experiments you Tosevites are carrying out on your home planet?”

“No.” The dark-skinned American Big Ugly made the negative gesture. “I know there are some, and I know the Race is worried about them. I was hoping you could tell me more.”

She let her mouth fall open in a silent laugh. “I went up to the Emperor himself, and he would not tell me. And if I knew, I would hurt the Empire by telling you.”

“If I knew, I might be hurting my not-empire by telling you,” Coffey said. “And yet we both keep trying to find out. Either we are both spies, or we have become very good friends.”

“Or both,” Kassquit said.

The American Tosevite laughed, though she hadn’t been joking. They lay on the sleeping mat in her room, both of them naked. They’d made love a while ago, but Frank Coffey hadn’t shown any interest in putting his wrappings on again. When even an air-conditioned room on Home was warmer than Tosevites found comfortable, wrappings made no sense to Kassquit. She knew wild Big Uglies had strong prohibitions against shedding their wrappings in public. She knew, but she did not understand. However irrational they were, the prohibitions seemed too strong to overcome. She’d given up trying.

“Will it be war?” she asked. The question was being asked more and more often in the hotel in Sitneff, by more and more Tosevites and members of the Race.

“I cannot tell you that,” Coffey answered. “I can tell you that the United States will not start a war against the Race. For us to start a war would make no sense. If the Race starts a war…” He shrugged. “We will fight back. We will fight back as hard as we can. You may rely on it.”

“Oh, I do,” Kassquit said. “The other part of the promise is what concerns me. The Deutsche tried a surprise attack against the Race.”

“I remember. I was a boy then,” Coffey said. That startled Kassquit for a moment. They seemed about the same age, but she’d come into adulthood when the Deutsche started the second major war between Big Uglies and the Race. Then she remembered she’d gone into cold sleep years before the American Tosevite had, and been kept in cold sleep till the Admiral Peary neared Home. Coffey went on, “They had radioactivity alerts every day. Depending on how bad the fallout was, sometimes they would not let us go out and play.”

“That sort of thing could happen here,” Kassquit said.

“Truth,” Coffey agreed. “Worse than that, much worse than that, could also happen here. And it could happen in my not-empire, too.”

Kassquit cared very little about the United States. She remembered only belatedly that Frank Coffey cared very little about the Empire. That struck her as strange. It would have struck an average member of the Race as even stranger. For more than a hundred thousand years, the Race hadn’t needed diplomatic relations with foreign empires. Those of the Rabotevs and Hallessi had fallen before earlier conquest fleets in the flick of a nictitating membrane.

Here as in everything else, the Big Uglies were different.

“If there is a war, Tosev 3 may not survive it,” Kassquit said. “What would you do then?”

“Personally? I am not sure,” Coffey answered. “I would not know the worst had happened for many years. That is something of a relief. But the question may be academic. The Admiral Peary and whatever other starships the United States is flying by then would do their best to make sure that whatever happened to Tosev 3 also happened to Home and the other worlds of the Empire.”

Was he speaking as someone who was simply concerned, or as an American military officer who wanted to make sure the Race’s military officers heard his words? He had to be sure Kassquit’s room was monitored. Kassquit was sure of it herself. She hated it, but didn’t know what she could do about it.

“How much damage could Tosevite starships do?” she asked, partly as a concerned citizen of the Empire and partly to make sure the Race’s military officers heard his reply.

What he said, though, wasn’t very informative: “How can I know for certain? I have been in cold sleep a long time. The state of the art back on Tosev 3 will have changed. I could not begin to guess the capabilities of the United States right now-or those of the other independent Tosevite empires and not-empires.”

Or maybe that wasn’t so uninformative after all. He’d managed to remind the Race it might not be fighting the United States alone. That was something military officers needed to think about, all right.

“If this war comes, it will be the worst anyone has ever known,” Kassquit said.

“No one could possibly say that is not a truth,” Coffey agreed gravely.

“Then why fight it?” Kassquit exclaimed.

“I speak for myself and for the United States when I say we do not want to fight it.” Frank Coffey used an emphatic cough. “But I also have to say again that, if the Race attacks us, we will fight back, and fight back as hard as we can.” He added another one.

“Where is the sense to it?” Kassquit asked.

“As for myself, I do not see that sense anywhere,” the American Big Ugly said. “But I can tell you where I think the Race sees it.”

“Where?”

“The Race fears that, no matter how bad the war would be if they fought it now, it would be even worse if they waited till later,” Coffey answered. “This is a mistaken attitude. The United States is completely happy to be a good neighbor to the Empire-as long as the Empire stays a good neighbor to us.”

That sounded both logical and reasonable. If Coffey meant it, if the United States meant it, the Empire and the Tosevites’ snoutcounting not-empire could live side by side. If. One thing history had taught the Race, though, was that Big Uglies were least reliable when they sounded most reasonable and logical. They left it there. Where else could they take it?

After supper that evening in the refectory, Kassquit went over to Ttomalss and said, “Excuse me, superior sir, but may I speak with you for a little while?”

“Certainly,” Ttomalss answered. “Will you come to my room?”

Kassquit made the negative gesture. “I thank you, but no. Do you not think it would be more pleasant to go outside and talk in the cool evening breezes?”

To her, those breezes were anything but cool. When she used the Race’s language, though, she necessarily used the Race’s thought patterns, too. And, by the way Ttomalss’ eye turrets swung sharply toward her face, he had no trouble figuring out what she really meant: if they talked outside the hotel, they would not-or at least might not-be talking into someone’s hearing diaphragm.

The psychologist replied naturally enough: “We can do that if you like. Maybe the evening sevod are still calling. They are pleasant to hear-do you not think so?”

“Yes, very,” Kassquit said.

They walked out of the hotel, Kassquit towering over the male who had raised her from a hatchling. Home’s sun had set not long before. Twilight deepened, the western sky gradually fading toward the blue-black of night. The evening sevod were still twittering in the bushes around the building, though they sounded sleepier with each passing moment.

One by one, stars came out of the sky. The lights of Sitneff drowned out the dimmer ones, but the brighter ones still shaped the outlines of the constellations. Kassquit had often watched stars from the starship in orbit around Tosev 3. She’d had to get used to seeing them twinkle here; from space, of course, their light was hard and unwinking.

She stared and then pointed. “Is that not the star Tosev, superior sir?”

Ttomalss’ eye turrets moved in the direction of her finger. He made the affirmative gesture. “Yes, I think so. Strange to see it as just another star, is it not?”

“Truth,” Kassquit said, and then, “I ask you again: what sort of experiments are the wild Big Uglies working on there?”

“Ah,” Ttomalss said. “I wondered why you wanted to speak behind the sand dune, as it were.” He sounded more amused than annoyed. “If the Emperor did not tell you, why did you think I would?”

“You… know what his Majesty said to me?” Kassquit said slowly.

“I have a good notion of what he said, anyhow,” Ttomalss replied. “You would have rubbed my snout in it had he told you. Will you not believe that if I had not been the one to bring this to the notice of those in authority here on Home, I would not be authorized to know of it, either?”

“What can possibly be as important as that?” Kassquit asked. “Everyone makes it sound as if the sun will go nova tomorrow on account of it.”

“Anything I say right now would only be speculation on my part,” Ttomalss told her. “Until the physicists have spoken, I can tell you nothing. Until then, as a matter of fact, there really is nothing to tell.”

Kassquit made the negative gesture. “I would not say that, superior sir. For instance, you could tell me what sort of experiments the physicists are working on.”

Ttomalss used the negative gesture, too. “I could, but, as I say, I may not. The work is important and it is secret. If I were not directly involved in it, I repeat that I would be as ignorant as you. I wish I were.”

The last four words made Kassquit eye him thoughtfully. She knew Ttomalss better than she knew anyone else alive. “Whatever the wild Big Uglies have found, you do not think we will be able to reproduce it.”

“I never said that!” Ttomalss jerked as if she’d jabbed a pin under his scales. “I never said that, and I do not say it now. You have no right, none whatsoever, to make such assumptions.”

As was the way of such things, the more he protested, the more he convinced Kassquit she was right. She consoled him as best she could: “Whatever they do, superior sir, is bound to be limited to their own solar system for many years to come. The star Tosev is a long way away.” She pointed up into the sky. Tosev seemed brighter now. That was an illusion, of course. Twilight had faded, and the sky around the star had grown darker. Kassquit had had to get used to that, too. In space, the sky was always black.

What she’d intended for consolation seemed to have the opposite effect. Ttomalss twitched again. Then he spun and hurried back into the hotel, leaving her alone in the darkness outside. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so rude. He was worried about something, all right-something to do with the Big Uglies and their experiments.

Whatever it was, Kassquit realized she probably wouldn’t find out any time soon. If Ttomalss wouldn’t give her the information, no one would. She thought she was entitled to it. If higher-ups in the Race disagreed with her, what could she do about it? Nothing she could see.

She followed Ttomalss back into the hotel. He wasn’t waiting in the lobby for her. He’d gone upstairs-probably to report on her curiosity to some of those higher-ups. Kassquit shrugged. She couldn’t do anything about that, either.

Ttomalss peered out of his hotel window into the night. That was not the ideal way to look at the stars. In a crowded town like Sitneff, there was no ideal way to look at them. Even for an urban setting, pressing your snout against some none-too-clean glass was less than optimal.

But Tosev was bright enough for him to spot in spite of everything. Just a sparkling point of light… Strange to think how something that small and lovely could cause so much trouble.

The psychologist made the negative gesture. It wasn’t Tosev’s fault. It was that of the annoying creatures infesting the star’s third planet. If not for them, if not for that miserable world, Tosev would be… just another star, brighter than most but not bright enough to seem really special.

If. If not. But things were as they were. One way or another, the Race was going to have to deal with the Big Uglies. If that meant exterminating them, then it did. If the Race didn’t exterminate the Big Uglies, weren’t the Tosevites likely to do it to them first?

A star moving across the sky… But that wasn’t a star, only a warning light on an airplane. It was deep in the red to Ttomalss’ eyes. The Big Uglies might not have been able to see it at all. Their eyes could sense hues past deep blue, but did not reach as far into the red as the Race’s did. Tosev was a hotter, brighter star than the sun. Tosevites were adapted to its light, as the Race was adapted to that of the sun. Hallessi, now, had names for colors at the red end of the spectrum that the Race could not see. Their star was cooler and redder than the sun, let alone Tosev.

With a sorrowful hiss, Ttomalss looked away from the window. The authorities on Tosev 3 had put him into cold sleep and sent him back to Home to work toward peace with the wild Big Uglies. He’d done everything he could toward that end, too. And what had it got him? Only the growing certainty that war was on the way.

He’d seen war on Tosev 3, and from orbit around the Big Uglies’ home world. He tried to imagine that coming to the surface of Home. Peace had prevailed here since the planet was unified under the Empire: for more than a hundred thousand years. Males and females of the Race took it for granted. So did Rabotevs and Hallessi; they’d been freed from war since their worlds were brought into the Empire.

But if war was unimaginable to citizens of the Empire, it was anything but to the Big Uglies. They took it as much for granted as members of the Race took peace. And, because they did, responsible members of the Race also had to.

If war came now, it would ruin Tosev 3 and probably devastate the worlds of the Empire. What could be worse than that? The trouble was, Ttomalss feared he knew the answer. If war came later, it might only devastate Tosev 3 while ruining the worlds of the Empire.

How fast were the Big Uglies progressing? What did they know that Pesskrag and her colleagues were trying so hard to find out? Even more to the point, what did they know that Felless and other members of the Race on Tosev 3 didn’t know they knew? Whatever it was, was it enough to tip the balance of power between the Empire and the independent Tosevites? If it wasn’t now, would it be in a few years? In a few hundred years? What were the odds?

Would the independent Tosevites go to war with one another, and not with the Race? They’d been fighting one another when the conquest fleet arrived. Since then, the Race had seemed a bigger threat to them than they had to one another. But that wasn’t necessarily a permanent condition. With the Big Uglies, no condition was necessarily permanent.

That went a long way toward making them as dangerous as they were.

So many questions. So few answers. Or maybe the answers were there on Tosev 3, but light’s laggard speed simply hadn’t brought them Home yet. Ttomalss let out another unhappy hiss. There were times when he wished Felless had never passed on the information she’d found.

The American Big Uglies had a saying: if stupidity is happiness, it is foolish to be intelligent. That was how it went in the language of the Race, anyhow; Ttomalss suspected it lost something in the translation. Whatever truth it held depended on the status of the first clause-which suddenly seemed truer to the psychologist than it ever had before.

Ttomalss started to telephone Pesskrag, then stopped and made the negative gesture. He had almost been stupid, to say nothing of unintelligent, himself. The American Tosevites had shown they could monitor telephone calls inside the hotel. He didn’t want them listening to anything he had to say to the physicist. He used an emphatic cough by itself, which showed how upset he was. No, he didn’t want that at all.

He rode down to the lobby, and then went out into the night. His mouth fell open in a laugh. He did not have to worry about any of the Big Uglies sneaking after him. They would be as inconspicuous as an azwaca in a temple dedicated to the spirits of Emperors past. No, more so-an azwaca, at least, would belong to this world.

Ttomalss relished being one ordinary male among many ordinary males and females. This was where he belonged. These other members of the Race-even the occasional less than ordinary ones wearing false hair or wrappings-were his own kind. He might have spent many years studying the Big Uglies, but he knew them only intellectually. His liver belonged with his own.

He found a public telephone by a market whose sign boasted it was open all night. Passersby might hear snatches of his conversation. So what, though? Those snatches would mean nothing to them. If the Tosevites listened to everything he said… He made the negative gesture. They wouldn’t. They couldn’t, not now.

Before he could place the call, a skinny female sidled up to him. “Do you want to buy some ginger?” she asked.

He made the negative gesture. “No. Go away.”

“You do not need to get huffy about it. Do you want to buy me some ginger? Then you can smell my pheromones and mate with me.”

“No! Go away!” This time, Ttomalss used an emphatic cough.

“ ‘No! Go away!’ ” the female echoed mockingly. “You can stuff that right on up your cloaca, too, pal.” She skittered down the street.

He found himself quivering with anger. Ginger was a problem back on Tosev 3, certainly. That was where the stuff came from, so the scope of the problem there wasn’t so surprising. To get his snout rubbed in it here on Home, though, when he’d just stepped away from the hotel for a little while… Maybe we really ought to slag the Big Uglies’ home planet. Then we would not have to worry about the herb any more.

Or was that a truth? Wouldn’t clever chemists start synthesizing the active ingredient? Getting rid of the trouble Tosevites caused might be even harder than getting rid of the Tosevites themselves. Somehow, that seemed altogether fitting to Ttomalss.

His fingerclaws poked in Pesskrag’s number. He more than half expected to have to leave a message, but the physicist’s image appeared on the screen. She said, “This is Pesskrag. I greet you.”

“And I greet you. This is Ttomalss.”

“Oh, hello, Senior Researcher. Good to hear from you. I was just thinking of you not long ago, as a matter of fact. What can I do for you?”

“Are you in a place where you can speak without being overheard?”

“Actually, I have had all my calls forwarded here to the laboratory. Some of my colleagues may hear what I say, but without their work I would not be able to tell you nearly so much as I can.”

“All right. That will do.” Ttomalss was impressed that she was working into the night. She recognized how important this research was, then. Good. The psychologist said, “I was wondering if you had gained any better idea of how long it might take to translate these new discoveries into real-world engineering.”

“Well, I still cannot tell you I am certain about that,” Pesskrag answered. “I presume you are asking based on the notion that speed counts for more than safety, and that the usual checks and reviews will be abandoned or ignored?”

“Yes, that is right,” Ttomalss agreed.

“My opinion is that it will still be a matter of years, and more of them rather than fewer. No one will walk confidently on this sand. There will be errors and misfortunes, and they will lead to delays. I do not see how they can help leading to delays.”

That only proved she’d never watched Big Uglies in action. They charged right past errors and misfortunes. If those left dead or maimed individuals in their wake-well, so what? To the Tosevites, results counted for more than the process used to obtain them.

Asking the Race to imitate that sort of behavior was probably useless. No, it was bound to be useless. The Race simply did not and could not operate the way the Big Uglies did. Most of the time, Ttomalss thanked the spirits of Emperors past for that. Every once in a while, as now, it made him want to curse.

“Years, you say?” he persisted. “Not centuries?”

“I still say it should be centuries,” Pesskrag replied. “It probably will not be, not with everyone pushing for speed at the expense of quality and safety, but it should be. There are too many variables we do not understand well. There are too many variables we do not understand at all.”

“Very well. I thank you.” Ttomalss broke the connection. He felt slightly reassured, but only slightly. Whatever the Race could do, the Tosevites were bound to be able to do faster. How much faster? That much faster? He despised the idea of preventive war, but…

All of a sudden, he stopped worrying about preventive war. That ginger-peddling female was on her way back. She had two large, unfriendly-looking males with her, one of them particularly bizarre with a mane of yellow hair that had never sprouted from his skin. Ttomalss did not wait to find out if their personalities belied their appearance. He left, in a hurry.

“Hey, buddy, wait! We want to talk to you!” the male with the wig shouted after him.

Ttomalss didn’t wait. He was sure the males-and that unpleasant female-wanted to do something to him. He was just as sure talking wasn’t it. He swung one eye turret back toward them. To his enormous relief, the males weren’t coming after him. The female wasn’t relieved at that. She was furious. She clawed the male with the yellow false hair. He knocked her to the sidewalk. They started fighting.

My own people, Ttomalss thought sadly. How are they any better than Big Uglies when they act like this? But the answer to that was plain enough. They were his. Like them or not, he understood them. He understood them even if they wanted to hit him over the head and steal his valuables.

If the Big Uglies hit him over the head and stole his valuables, they weren’t just robbers. They were alien robbers, which made them a hundred times worse.

And the Big Uglies wanted to hit the whole Race over the head and steal its valuables. Things had been peaceful and stable on Home for so long. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last, not any more. Maybe, once the Tosevites were gone for good, peace and stability would return… if anything was left of the Empire afterwards.

Existence or not-that is the question. So some Tosevite writer had put it. He’d been dead for hundreds of years, maybe even a thousand; Ttomalss didn’t know as much as he would have liked about Tosevite chronology before the conquest fleet came. But that Big Ugly had got right to the liver of things. If existence for the Race and the Empire seemed more likely after a preventive war, then preventive war there should be. If not, not. Ttomalss feared he knew what the answer was.

Karen Yeager nodded politely to Trir. “I greet you,” she told the tour guide.

“And I greet you,” Trir said, also politely. The female had acted friendly enough lately; it wasn’t close to mating season. Her eye turrets traveled up and down Karen’s length. “I had thought there might be some future in escorting you Tosevites when you come to visit Home. Now I see that is unlikely to be so.”

The hotel lobby was as warm as ever. Looking out through the big plate-glass windows, Karen could see the sun-blasted hills out beyond Sitneff. Despite all that, a chill ran through her. She hoped she was wrong as she asked, “What do you mean?”

“Why, that you Big Uglies probably will not be coming to Home any more, and that I cannot expect to see shiploads of students and travelers. We are going to have to put you in your place, or so everyone says.” Trir took the answer for granted.

More ice walked up Karen’s back. “Who told you that, if I may ask? And what do you mean by putting us in our place?”

“We shall have to make certain you cannot threaten the Race and the Empire.” By Trir’s tone, that would be not only simple but bloodless. She had lived in peace all her life. Home had lived in peace since the Pleistocene. Males and females here had no idea what anything else was like.

Karen did. For better and for worse-more often than not, for worse-Earth’s history was different from Home‘s. And the Race’s soldiers had played no small part in that history since the conquest fleet arrived. “You are talking about a war, about millions-more likely, billions-dying,” Karen said slowly. “I ask you again: who told you war was coming? Please tell me. It may be important.” She used an emphatic cough.

“Everyone around here except maybe you Tosevites seems to think it will come,” Trir replied. “And I do not think it will be as bad as you make it sound. After all, it will be happening a long way away.”

You idiot! Karen didn’t scream that at the Lizard, though she wanted to. She contented herself with making the negative gesture instead. “For one thing, war is no better when it happens to someone else than when it happens to you,” she said, though she knew plenty of humans would have felt otherwise. “For another, I must tell you that you are mistaken.”

“In what way?” Trir asked.

“This war, if there is a war, will ravage the Empire’s worlds as well as Tosev 3. That is a truth.” Karen added another emphatic cough.

“That would be barbaric!” Trir exclaimed, with an emphatic cough of her own.

“Why would it be more barbaric than the other?” Karen asked.

“Because this is the Empire, of course,” Trir answered.

“I see.” Karen hoped the Lizard could hear the acid dripping from her voice. “If you do it to someone else who is far away, it is fine, but it is barbaric if someone else presumes to do it to you right here.”

“I did not say that. I did not mean that. You are confusing things,” Trir said.

“I do not know what you meant. Only you can know that, down deep in the bottom of your liver,” Karen replied. “But I know what you said. I know what I said. And I know one other thing-I know which of us is confused. Please believe me: I am not the one.”

Trir’s tailstump quivered with anger. “I think you have it coming, for telling lies if nothing else.” She stalked away.

Karen felt like throwing something at her. That would have been undiplomatic, no matter how satisfying it might also have been. Karen thought hard about flipping Trir the bird. That would have been undiplomatic, too. She might have got away with it, simply because nobody here was likely to understand what the gesture meant.

And then, in spite of herself, she started to laugh. Could you flip somebody the bird here on Home? Wouldn’t you have to flip her (or even him) the pterodactyl instead?

However much she wanted it to, the laughter wouldn’t stick. That Trir seemed happy war would come was bad enough. That she seemed so sure was worse. And Karen muttered a curse under her breath. She hadn’t got the guide to tell her who among the Lizard higher-ups was so certain war was on the way.

Did that matter? Weren’t all the Lizards acting that way these days? She knew too well that they were. And if they acted that way, they were much more likely to bring it on.

An elevator opened, silently and smoothly. Everything the Race did was silent, smooth, efficient. Next to the Lizards, humans were a bunch of noisy, clumsy barbarians. But if they went down, they’d go down swinging, and the Empire would remember them for a long time-or else go down into blackness with them.

Kassquit came out of the elevator. She waved when she saw Karen in the lobby. She not only waved, she came over to her, saying, “I greet you.”

“And I greet you,” Karen answered cautiously. She and Kassquit still didn’t usually get along. “What can I do for you today?” Would Kassquit be gloating at the prospect of war, too? She never got tired of bragging how she was a citizen of the Empire. As far as Karen was concerned, that was one of the things that made her less than human. She didn’t want to be human, and wished she weren’t.

But now Kassquit said, “If you know any way to keep the peace between your not-empire and the Empire, please speak of it to Sam Yeager and to Fleetlord Atvar. We must do whatever we can to prevent a war.”

“I completely agree with you,” Karen said-and if that wasn’t a surprise, it was close enough for government work. Government work is exactly the problem here, she thought. She went on, “From my perspective, the problem is that the Race thinks war would be more to its advantage than peace.” And how would Kassquit take that?

Kassquit used the affirmative gesture. “Truth. And a truth I do not know how to get around. My superiors are convinced they will have to fight later if they do not fight now, and they will be at a greater disadvantage the longer they delay. By the spirits of Emperors past, they must be addled!”

Karen wondered if they were. Humans progressed faster than Lizards. Both sides could see that. But… “If we can destroy each other, what difference does it make who has the fancier weapons? Both sides will be equally dead.”

“That is also a truth.” As usual, Kassquit’s face showed nothing, but urgency throbbed in her voice. “Under such circumstances, war is madness.”

“Yes,” Karen said. “The United States has always held this view.”

“After its experience when the colonization fleet came to Tosev 3 and in the unprovoked attack by the Deutsche, the Empire is not sure that is a truth,” Kassquit said. “And, speaking of unprovoked attacks, consider the one your not-empire made against the colonization fleet not long after its ships went into orbit around your world. If you see a way to seize a victory cheaply and easily, will you not take it? This is the Race’s fear.”

“I do not know what to tell you, except that Sam Yeager is the one who made sure our unjust act would not go unpunished,” Karen said. “I do not think we would make the same mistake twice. And I cannot help seeing that you have just made a strong case for war, at least from the Empire’s point of view.”

“I know I have. Making the case for war is easy-if one does not reckon in the dangers involved,” Kassquit said. “My hope is that your not-empire has indeed changed from its previous aggressive stance. If I can persuade my superiors of that-and if you wild Tosevites work to convince them of the same thing-we may possibly avert this fight, even now.”

“Would Sam Yeager be the American ambassador to the Race if we had not changed our ways?” Karen asked.

“Sam Yeager would not be your ambassador if the Doctor had survived,” Kassquit pointed out. “The Doctor was a very able diplomat. No one would say otherwise. But no one would say he was a shining example of peace and trust, either.”

She was right about that. If you were in a dicker with the Doctor, he would have had no qualms about picking your pocket. Not only that, he would have tried to persuade you afterwards that he’d done it for your own good. That talent had made him very valuable to the United States. Whether it had made him a paragon of ethics might be a different question.

“Do what you can with your own officials,” Karen said. “I will speak to Sam Yeager. As you say, we have to try.”

Kassquit used the affirmative gesture. They might not like each other, but that had nothing to do with anything right now. Karen rode up to her father-in-law’s room and knocked on the door. When he opened it, he said, “You look like a steamroller just ran over your kitten.”

She eyed him. “You don’t look so happy yourself.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m not,” Sam Yeager said. “The small stuff is, Atvar is mad as hops because the Race found a rat-a half-grown rat-in a building a couple of miles from here. He keeps trying to make it out to be our fault, even though the cleaners let the darn things out.”

“A half-grown rat? So they’re breeding here, then,” Karen said.

“Sure looks that way,” Sam Yeager agreed. “And that’s just the small stuff. The big stuff is… Well, you know about the big stuff.”

“Yes, I know about the big stuff. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.” Karen summed up the conversations she’d just had with Trir and Kassquit. She went on, “What can we do? We have to be able to do something to convince the Lizards this war’s not worth fighting. Something-but I don’t know what.”

Sam Yeager let out a long, weary sigh. “If they’re bound and determined to go ahead and fight, I don’t know what we can do about it but hit back as hard as we can. They look to have decided that this is going to be the best chance they’ve got.” He shrugged. “They may even be right.”

“Even if they are, it’ll be a disaster!” Karen exclaimed.

Her father-in-law nodded. “I know that. I think they know it, too. If they don’t, it’s not because I haven’t told ’em. But if they think it’ll be a disaster now but maybe a catastrophe later…” He spread his hands.

“We don’t want a war with them. We just don’t, ” Karen said.

“Their attitude is, we may not want one now, but we’re a bunch of changeable Big Uglies, and sooner or later we will,” Sam Yeager said. “I don’t know how to convince them they’re wrong, either. And I’d better. If I can’t…”

“Kassquit is trying the same thing on their side.” Karen wasn’t used to talking about Kassquit with unreserved approval-or with any approval at all-but she did now.

“Good for her. I hope it helps some, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it,” Sam Yeager said. “I hope something helps some. If it doesn’t…” He paused again, and grimaced. “If it doesn’t, we’ll have a war on our hands.”

“We can see it’s madness. Kassquit can see it’s madness. The Lizards are usually more reasonable than we are. Why not now?” Karen could hear the despair in her voice.

“It’s what I told you before. They must think this is their best chance, or maybe their last chance. It doesn’t look that way to me, but I’m not Atvar or the Emperor.” Sam Yeager’s scowl grew blacker. “I’m just a scared old man. If something big doesn’t change in a hurry, four worlds are going to go up in smoke.”

In the control room these days, Glen Johnson felt more as if he were in a missile-armed upper stage in Earth orbit, or even in the cockpit of a fighter heading for action against the Lizards. Anything could happen, and probably would. He knew damn well that the Race could overwhelm the Admiral Peary. His job, and the job of everybody else on board, was to make sure they remembered they’d been in a fight.

The ship had a swarm of antimissiles that were supposed to be a hair better than the best the Race could fire. She also had close-in weapons systems-a fancy name for radar-controlled Gatling guns on steroids-to knock out anything the antimissiles missed. Put that together and it wouldn’t keep the Admiral Peary alive. It wasn’t supposed to. But it was supposed to keep her alive long enough to let her get her own licks in.

“What do you think?” Johnson asked Mickey Flynn. “Are we ready for Armageddon?”

Flynn gave that his usual grave consideration. “I can’t say for sure,” he replied at last. “But I do know that Armageddon sick and tired of worrying about it.”

Johnson groaned, as he was no doubt intended to do. Mickey Flynn looked back blandly. Johnson was sick of worrying about it, too, which didn’t mean he wasn’t doing his share and then some. “What do we do if the balloon goes up?” he said.

This time, Flynn answered right away: “Well, it will be over in a hurry, anyhow.” That was what the Lizards would have called a truth. By the way he said it, he thought Johnson was a damn fool for asking the question. After only a short pause, Johnson decided he’d been a damn fool, too.

In the background was the radio chatter among the Lizards’ spaceships and orbiting stations and shuttlecraft. Johnson didn’t know how much good monitoring that would do. Nobody was likely to give the attack order in clear language. It would be encrypted, so the Americans wouldn’t realize what it was till things hit the fan.

Even so, the traffic was often fun to listen to. Lizards-and the occasional Rabotevs and Hallessi-bickered among themselves hardly less than humans did. Their insults revolved around rotten eggs and cloacas rather than genitals, but they used them with panache.

All at once, everything stopped. For about fifteen seconds, the radio waves might have been wiped clean. “What the hell?” Johnson said, in mingled surprise and alarm. He and Mickey Flynn had been talking about Armageddon. Had they just listened to the overture for it?

But then the Lizards returned to the air. Everybody was saying the same things: “What is that?” “Do you see that?” “Where did that come from?” “How did that get there?” “What could it be?”

Flynn pointed to the radar. It showed a blip that Johnson would have sworn hadn’t been there before, about two million miles out from Home and closing rapidly. “What have we got here?” Johnson said, unconsciously echoing the Lizards all around the Admiral Peary. “Looks like it popped out of thin air.”

“Thinner vacuum,” Flynn said, and Johnson nodded-the other pilot was right.

The Lizards started sending messages toward the blip: “Strange ship, identify yourself.” “Strange ship, please begin communication.” And another one, surely transmitted by a worried member of the Race: “Strange ship, do you understand? Do you speak our language?”

Speed-of-light lag for a message to get to the strange ship-where the devil had it come from? out of nowhere? — and an answer to come back was about twenty-one and a half seconds. That, of course, assumed the answerer started talking the instant he-she? it? — heard the Lizards, which was bound to be optimistic.

“Do you think we ought to send something, too?” Johnson asked. Mickey Flynn was senior to him; it was Flynn’s baby, not his. The other pilot shook his head. Johnson waved to show he accepted the decision. He found a different question: “Do you think it’s a good thing we’re at top alert?” Just as solemnly, Flynn nodded.

Close to a minute went by before the strange ship responded. When it did, the answer was in the Lizards’ language: “We greet you, males and females of the Race.” The individual at the microphone had a mushy accent. Even as Johnson realized it was a human accent, the speaker went on, “This is the starship Commodore Perry, from the United States of America. We greet you, citizens of the Empire. And we also greet, or hope we greet, our own citizens aboard the Admiral Peary. ”

Johnson and Flynn both stabbed for the TRANSMIT button at the same time. Johnson’s finger came down on it first. That was his only moment of triumph. Flynn, as senior, did the talking: “This is the Admiral Peary, Colonel Flynn speaking. Very good to have company. We’ve been out here by ourselves for a long time.”

Again, there was a necessary wait for radio waves to travel from ship to ship. During it, Johnson wondered, What’s in a name? The Admiral Peary recalled an explorer who’d pitted himself against nature and won. The Commodore Perry was named for the man who’d gone to Japan with warships and opened the country to the outside world no matter what the Japanese thought about it. The Lizards might not notice the difference, especially since Peary and Perry were pronounced alike even if spelled differently. But Johnson did. What did it mean? This time, the person at the radio-a woman-replied in English: “Hello, Colonel Flynn. Good to hear from you. I’m Major Nichols-Nicole to my friends. We were hoping we’d find you folks here, but we weren’t sure, because of course your signals from Home hadn’t got back to Earth when we set out.”

“I hope you’ve been picking up some of them as you followed our trail from Earth to Home,” Flynn said. “And if you don’t mind my asking, when did you set out?”

That was a good question. Here on the Admiral Peary, Johnson didn’t feel like too much of an antique, even if he had been in cold sleep longer than most. But these whippersnappers might not even have been born when Dr. Blanchard put him on ice. How much of an antique would he seem to them? Do I really want to know?

He had time to wonder about that again. Then Major Nichols’ voice came back: “About five and a half weeks ago, Colonel.”

Mickey Flynn drummed his fingers on his thigh in annoyance, one of the few times Johnson had ever seen him show it. “Five and a half weeks’ subjective time, sure. But how long were you in cold sleep?” Flynn asked.

Johnson nodded: another good question. If the Commodore Perry was still slower than Lizard starships, that said one thing. If she matched their technology, that said something else-something important, too. And if she was faster, even a little bit…

The wait for radio waves to go back and forth felt maddening. After what seemed like a very long time, Major Nichols answered, “No, Colonel. No cold sleep-none. Total travel time, five and a half weeks. There’ve been some changes made.”

Johnson and Flynn stared at each other. They both mouthed the same thing: Jesus Christ! The Lizards were bound to have somebody who understood English monitoring the transmission. The second that translator figured out what Major Nichols had just said, the Race was going to start having kittens, or possibly hatchling befflem. Johnson pointed to the microphone and raised an eyebrow. Flynn gave back a gracious nod, as if to say, Be my guest.

“This is Colonel Johnson, junior pilot on the Admiral Peary, ” Johnson said, feeling much more senior than junior. “I hope you brought along some proof of that. It would be really useful. Things are… a little tense between us and the Race right now.” He almost added an emphatic cough, but held back when he realized he didn’t know how people of Major Nichols’ generation would take that. After sending the message, he turned to Mickey Flynn. “Now we twiddle our thumbs while things go back and forth.”

Flynn suited action to word. He said, “Why don’t they have faster-than-light radio?” His thumbs went round and round, round and round.

“They do, in effect,” Johnson said. “They’ve got the ships-if those are what they say they are. Einstein must be spinning in his grave.”

“Colonel Johnson?” The voice of the woman from the Commodore Perry filled the control room again. “Yes, we have proof-all sorts of things that we know and the Race will hear about as its signals come in from Earth over the next few days and weeks. And we have a couple of witnesses from the Race aboard: a shuttlecraft pilot named Nesseref and Shiplord Straha.”

“Oh, my,” Johnson said. Even imperturbable Mickey Flynn looked a trifle wall-eyed. Straha had lived in exile in the USA for years. He’d been the third-highest officer in the conquest fleet, and then the highest-ranking defector after his effort to oust Atvar for not prosecuting the war against humanity vigorously enough failed. And he’d got back into the Lizards’ good graces by delivering the data from Sam Yeager that showed the United States had launched the attack on the colonization fleet.

“I’d like to be a fly on the wall when Straha meets Atvar again,” Flynn said.

“Admiral Peary, do you read me?” Major Nichols asked. “Are you there?”

“Where else would we be?” Flynn asked reasonably. “Ah, forgive me for asking, Major, but is the Commodore Perry armed?”

“That is affirmative,” Nicole Nichols said. “We are armed.” She used an emphatic cough, which answered that. “We did not know for certain that you had arrived when we departed, and we did not know what kind of reception we would get when we entered this solar system. Can you please summarize the present political situation?”

“I do believe I would describe it as a mess,” Flynn said, a word that summed things up as well as any other for Glen Johnson. Flynn went on, “You’ll need more details than that. I can put you through to Lieutenant General Healey, our commandant, and he can patch you through to Sam Yeager, our ambassador.”

That produced a pause a good deal longer than required by speed-of-light. “Sam Yeager is your ambassador? Where is the Doctor?” Major Nichols asked. She used interrogative coughs, too.

“They couldn’t revive him from cold sleep,” Flynn said.

“I… see. How… unfortunate,” Major Nichols said. “Well, yes, please arrange the transfer, Colonel, if you’d be so kind. Whoever the man on the spot has been, we’ll have to deal through him.”

Flynn fiddled with the communications controls. Lieutenant General Healey said, “It’s about time I get to speak for myself, Colonel.” Whatever he said after that, he said to Major Nichols. Johnson and Flynn shared a look. If the commandant hadn’t liked what the pilots were saying, he could have interrupted them whenever he pleased. But what really pleased him was complaining.

“Five and a half weeks from Earth to Home. Five and a half weeks. We can go back,” Johnson said dizzily.

“Maybe we can go back,” Flynn said. “If it’s not weightless aboard the Commodore Perry, I wouldn’t want to try it.”

Johnson said something of a barnyard nature. That hadn’t occurred to him. “I wonder how they did it,” he said, and then, “I wonder whether I’d get it if they told me.” Would his own great-grandfather have understood radio and airplanes? He doubted it.

Understood or not, though, the Commodore Perry was there. The Lizards were still trying to call it, a rising note of panic in their voices. One of them must have figured out what Major Nichols had said. And how would they like that?