Homeward Bound

18

A shuttlecraft from the Empire had brought Karen Yeager and the other Americans down from the Admiral Peary. Now another one would take them up to the Commodore Perry. That probably suited her father-in-law’s taste for irony. The Americans weren’t heading back to Earth, not yet. They were traveling as a group to try to persuade their younger countrymen to let Sam Yeager go back.

“Are all you Tosevites strapped in?” asked the shuttlecraft pilot, a dark-skinned Rabotev named Pellakrenk. One by one, the Americans said they were. Pellakrenk made the affirmative gesture. “Good,” he-she? — said. “The launch corridor rapidly nears.”

Humans would have spoken of a launch window. The image in the Race’s language worked just as well. It made Karen think of the shuttlecraft flying along a hallway connecting Sitneff to the Commodore Perry.

“I commence countdown,” Pellakrenk announced, and did. When the Rabotev got to zero, the shuttlecraft roared away from the field. Karen felt as if several large, unfriendly people were sitting on her chest. Each breath was a struggle.

Through the roar of the rocket motor, Jonathan asked, “You okay, Dad?”

“Yeah,” Sam Yeager answered-as much a grunt of effort as a word. After a pause for breath, he asked a question of his own: “How you doing, Melanie?”

“One gravity… was bad enough,” Melanie Blanchard said. “This… is worse.”

“Soon no gravity at all,” Pellakrenk said in fair English. Unlike the Rabotev who’d brought the first load of Americans down to Home, this one didn’t pretend ignorance of the humans’ language.

When acceleration cut out, Karen gulped. She sternly told her stomach to behave itself. It did, after a few unpleasant minutes when she wondered whether it would listen. She wouldn’t have wanted to go weightless if she had morning sickness. That thought made her sympathize with Kassquit, which wasn’t something she did every day.

“Everybody okay?” Dr. Blanchard asked. “I’ve got airsick bags if you need ’em. Don’t be shy. Speak up. We don’t want the nice folks who’re giving us a ride to have to clean up this shuttlecraft.”

“What you mean?” Pellakrenk asked. Maybe Rabotevs didn’t suffer from nausea in weightlessness. It troubled the Race much less than it did humans.

Nobody answered the pilot. Nobody asked Dr. Blanchard for an airsick bag, either. Frank Coffey and Jonathan kept gulping for a while after Karen’s stomach settled down, but all they did was gulp. Karen turned her head and looked out a window. The sky had turned black. She could see the curve of Home if she craned her neck a little. Columbus was right, she thought. Planets are round.

“Commodore Perry calling the shuttlecraft from Sitneff. Do you read me, shuttlecraft from Sitneff?” The voice, that of a human speaking the language of the Race, crackled from the speaker near Pellakrenk’s head.

“This is the shuttlecraft from Sitneff,” the pilot answered. “Your signal is loud and clear.”

“Good,” the human said. “Your trajectory looks fine. Let me speak to Ambassador Yeager, if you would be so kind.”

“It shall be done,” Pellakrenk said, and passed Sam Yeager the microphone.

“I’m here. We’re all here,” Karen’s father-in-law said in English. “Nice of you to want to talk to me.” Pellakrenk probably wouldn’t notice the jab there. Karen did. She was sure the other Americans on the shuttlecraft did, too.

If the radioman on the Commodore Perry did, it didn’t faze him. “Glad to hear it,” was all he said. Karen had trouble figuring out what was bothering him. If the shuttlecraft carried explosives instead of passengers, it could get past the starship’s defenses, yes. But the little ship could carry explosives and passengers without any trouble. If the Empire wanted to start a war, it wouldn’t worry about the lives of the diplomats who’d been in Sitneff.

Docking was smooth. The Rabotev’s odd hands danced over the controls for the maneuvering jets. The shuttlecraft’s docking collar engaged with the air lock on the Commodore Perry with a smooth click. “We are here,” Pellakrenk announced. “I shall wait for you. If your plans change and you decide not to return with me, I trust you will let me know of this.”

“It shall be done, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” Karen promised.

The outer airlock door, to which the docking collar was connected, swung inward. One by one, the Americans unstrapped and glided into the air lock. When they’d all left the shuttlecraft, the door closed behind them. Tom de la Rosa said, “My God! The air’s the right temperature.” And it was. For the first time since going down to Sitneff, Karen wasn’t too damn hot.

When the inner airlock door opened, a blond woman in coveralls with a captain’s bars on the shoulders floated just inside. “Hello,” she said politely. “I’m Captain Benn. Please follow me to Lieutenant General Chesneau’s office.”

“No guided tour?” Jonathan asked.

Captain Benn just shook her head. “No,” she answered.

What Karen saw on the way to the commandant’s office were… corridors. They looked a lot like the corridors in the Admiral Peary. They were painted light green instead of gray, but so what? They had handholds so people could pull themselves along while weightless. They had convex mirrors at intersections to help prevent collisions. They had doors set into them. All the doors were closed. The Americans up from Sitneff saw not another living soul besides Captain Benn.

“Have we got the plague?” Karen asked.

“We’re only following orders,” Captain Benn answered, which probably meant yes.

An open doorway was a surprise. Stenciled on the door were the words OFFICE OF THE COMMANDANT. “Oh, boy,” Sam Yeager said. “We’re here.”

They went in. Another surprise was the appearance of Lieutenant General Chesneau. Karen had expected a J. Edgar Hoover-jowled bulldog of a man, stamped from the mold that had produced Lieutenant General Healey. But Chesneau was small and thin-faced and didn’t look as if he bit nails in half for fun. His voice was a light tenor, not a bass growl. Mildly enough, he said, “Hello. Pleased to meet all of you. So you’re the people who’ve made my life so much fun since I got here, are you?”

He couldn’t have been more disarming if he’d tried-and he no doubt was trying. Sam Yeager said, “Well, General, no offense, but you’ve made my life a whole lot of fun since you got here, too.”

Chesneau looked pained. When he said, “Ambassador, I am sorry about that,” he sounded as if he meant it. But he went on, “You wore the uniform for a long time, sir. I’m sure you understand the need to follow orders.”

“He also understands when not to follow them,” Karen said. “Do you?”

“In that sense, I hope so,” the commandant answered, not raising his voice at all. Yes, he was trying to be disarming. “Whether that sense applies here may be a different question. And it’s because the ambassador chose not to follow them on one particular occasion that I have the orders I do.” Something tightened in his jawline. However soft he sounded, steel lay underneath.

“I did it. I’ll stand by it,” Sam Yeager said. “Here’s a question for you, General. Suppose, back in the 1960s, that the Lizards found out we’d done what we’d done to them without finding out any of us gave a damn about it. What do you think they would have done to us? You ask me, the answer is, whatever they wanted to. Back then, we weren’t strong enough to stop them. Slow them down, maybe, but not stop them.”

Will Chesneau believe that? Karen wondered. The commandant was somewhere around fifty, which meant he’d been born in the early 1980s. He’d grown up with the USA pulling ahead of the Race, not struggling desperately to get even. Did he understand what things had been like twenty years after the conquest fleet arrived?

All he said now was, “Maybe.” He looked at the people from the Admiral Peary one after another, then spoke to Sam Yeager: “You must inspire tremendous loyalty in those who know you, Ambassador. It’s not a small gift.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here,” Karen’s father-in-law answered. “What’s going on is, your orders are such a bad mistake, everybody can see it but you.”

“No offense, sir, but the ambassador’s right,” Frank Coffey told Lieutenant General Chesneau. “What he’s done here is plenty to earn him a ticket back home all by itself. Those other things a long time ago… You can argue about them. I admit that-you can. But for one thing, arguing means there’s lots to be said on both sides. And for another, nobody can argue about what he’s done here. The Race was thinking hard about a preventive war against us. It might have started by the time you got here if not for him. Meaning no disrespect to the Doctor, but I don’t think he could have held it off as long as Sam Yeager did.”

Chesneau pursed his lips. “We did not expect that we would find Colonel Yeager holding the position he does,” he admitted. Then his jawline tightened again. “So-you say you’ll all stay on Home if the ambassador doesn’t go back to Earth? I am going to tell you, this is your one and only chance to change your minds. Anybody?”

He waited. He very visibly waited. Karen knew she and Jonathan weren’t going to say anything. Coffey? The de la Rosas? Dr. Blanchard? How could you be sure? How could you blame anybody who didn’t want to die on Home?

But no one said a word. Chesneau’s jaw tightened once more, this time, Karen judged, as a bulwark against astonishment. The commandant inclined his head to Sam Yeager. “What I told you before still holds, Ambassador-double, I’d say.”

“Thanks.” Yeager’s voice was husky. He nodded to his colleagues. “Thanks,” he repeated, more huskily still.

“You did the right thing,” Karen said. “We should be able to do the same.”

“Touching,” Lieutenant General Chesneau said dryly. “Last chance, people. Going once… Going twice… Gone.”

“If Dad’s not going anywhere, we’re not going anywhere, either,” Jonathan said. One by one, the men and women who’d come down from the Admiral Peary nodded.

Lieutenant General Chesneau eyed them in bemusement. Sam Yeager said, “Just for the record, you ought to know this wasn’t my idea.”

“Truth,” Karen said in the Lizards’ language, and added an emphatic cough. Her colleagues made the affirmative gesture. She eyed Chesneau. Plainly, he did understand the word, the cough, and the gesture. That was something, anyhow.

He let out a long sigh. “You are a bunch of obstreperous hooligans.”

“Truth,” Karen repeated, with another emphatic cough. The rest of the Americans used the affirmative gesture again. By their grins, they took it for a compliment, just as she did.

Chesneau saw that, too. “If you think you can blackmail me…” He paused and grimaced and finally started to laugh. “It’s possible you’re right. If I showed up in the Solar System without any of you, I suspect I would get some fairly sharp questions. So would the administration that sent me out-and unlike you, I can’t go into cold sleep and outlast it.” Karen’s hopes soared. Chesneau eyed her father-in-law. “Well, Ambassador, are you willing to go back to a country where you may not be especially welcome?”

“No, I’m not willing,” Sam Yeager answered. Karen stared. But then he went on, “I’m eager, General. What I’m willing to do is take my chances.”

“All right, then,” Chesneau said. “I’ll use altered circumstances here on Home as justification for disregarding my orders-and we’ll see which of us ends up in more trouble.” He started to add something, but found he couldn’t: the old-timers crowding his office were clapping and cheering too loud for anybody to hear another word he said.

As the American Tosevites from the Admiral Peary got ready to return to Tosev 3, Ttomalss waited for Kassquit to come wailing to him. She’d done it before, when Jonathan Yeager returned to the United States from her starship orbiting Tosev 3. Now she was losing not only a mate but the sire of the hatchling growing inside her. And Frank Coffey wasn’t just traveling down through the atmosphere. He would be light-years away.

But Kassquit did nothing of the sort. She began striking up acquaintances with the wild Big Uglies the Commodore Perry was leaving behind. The new physician seemed surprised to have a gravid patient, but also seemed confident he would be able to cope with whatever difficulties arose.

Finally, Ttomalss’ curiosity got the better of him. He came up to Kassquit in the hotel refectory one morning and said, “May I join you?”

She made the affirmative gesture. “Of course, superior sir… provided my nausea does not make me leave more quickly than I would like.”

A server came up and offered Ttomalss a printout. He declined; after so long, he had the refectory’s choices graven on his liver, and needed no reminders. He ordered. The server sketched the posture of respect and skittered away. Ttomalss swung his eye turrets toward Kassquit. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“About the same as before,” she answered. “The wild Big Uglies assure me these symptoms are nothing out of the ordinary. I have to believe them.”

“That is not exactly what I meant,” Ttomalss said. “How do you feel about losing your mating partner?”

“He may come back to Home one day, or I may visit Tosev 3,” Kassquit said. “With the new ships, such journeys will not be impossible. I am sad he will go. I am sad, yes, but I am not devastated. Losing a mating partner was harder the first time I did it. I had no standard of comparison then, and no prospect of staying in contact with any other Big Uglies. Things are different now.”

“I see.” Ttomalss broke off, for the server brought in Kassquit’s order just then. After the male left, the psychologist resumed: “You are more mature now than you were then.”

“Maybe I am.” Kassquit began to eat fried zisuili and fungi. “This is an excellent breakfast,” she said, plainly trying to deflect his questions.

“I am glad you like it.” Ttomalss wondered what tone to take with her. No usual one was right, and he knew it. He could not speak to her as one friend did to another among the Race. Too much lay between them for that. Except for not physically siring and bearing her, he had been her parent, in the full, ghastly Tosevite sense of the word. And yet, as he’d said himself just now, she was more mature than she had been-too mature to take kindly to his using the sort of authority he’d had when she was a hatchling.

His mouth fell open in a sour laugh. Did Big Uglies ever know these ambiguities? Or did they understand instinctively how such things were supposed to work? He supposed they had to. If they didn’t, wouldn’t their whole society come tumbling down?

“Is something wrong, superior sir?” Kassquit asked. She must have noticed how unhappy his laugh was. He wouldn’t have thought a Big Ugly could. But, as he was the Race’s leading student of matters Tosevite, so Kassquit knew the Race more intimately than any other Big Ugly, even Sam Yeager.

“No, nothing is really wrong, ” he replied. “I was thinking about how you respond to stress now, as opposed to how you did when you were younger.”

“You said it yourself, superior sir: I am more mature than I used to be,” Kassquit replied. “I am also more used to the idea of belonging to two worlds than I was. Before, I desperately wanted to be part of the Race, and if that meant abandoning my biological heritage, well then, it did, and that was all there was to it. But I have discovered that I cannot abandon my biology-and I have also discovered I do not want to.”

“You will find your counterpart’s autobiography interesting,” Ttomalss said. “So will I. I look forward to the day the translation reaches Home.”

“Truth.” Kassquit used the affirmative gesture. The server brought Ttomalss his food. As he began to eat, she went on, “I would give a great deal to meet Mickey and Donald. I have already told the Tosevites as much. Those two of all people should understand some of what I have experienced-though they at least had each other.”

Ttomalss crunched a plump roasted grub between his teeth. He said, “There are times when I feel guilty because of what I have done to you. You are not a normal Tosevite, and you never can be. But you may not be worse off on account of that. The lot of a normal Tosevite, especially at the time when I, ah, found you, all too often proved unfortunate.”

“Yes, Frank Coffey has pointed out the same thing to me,” Kassquit said. Because her room was electronically monitored, Ttomalss knew that. He also knew better than to show he knew. Kassquit went on, “I still think I would rather have been as I would have been, if you take my meaning.”

“I think so,” Ttomalss said. “Of course, you have not experienced the disease and the hard labor you would have known had I chosen another Tosevite hatchling. You are comparing what you have now against some ideal existence, not against the reality you would have known.”

“Perhaps,” Kassquit said. “I have certainly learned more of bodily infirmity since become gravid than I ever knew before. These are lessons I do not care to expand upon further.” She looked at her almost empty plate. “This morning, things seem willing to stay down.”

“I am glad to hear it,” Ttomalss said. “I gather your gravidity has persuaded you not to travel on the Commodore Perry?”

Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. “None of the wild Tosevites seemed to think it was a good idea. No one knows how traveling faster than light affects developing hatchlings, and no one seems to want to find out by experiment. I do not care for this conclusion, but I must say it makes sense.”

“I agree.” Ttomalss bit down on a ripe ippa fruit. Tart juice and pulp flooded into his mouth. “There will be time enough for such things later.”

“I hope so,” Kassquit said. “This is one of the occasions, though, when I notice that your likely span is longer than mine.” She shrugged. “It cannot be helped. If you will excuse me, superior sir…” She rose and left the refectory.

As Ttomalss finished breakfast, he wondered what his likely span was. Kassquit meant that an average member of the Race lived longer than an average Big Ugly. She was right about that, of course. But it held true only in times of peace, of stability. If the missiles started flying, if the hydrogen bombs started bursting, no one of any species was likely to live very long.

The Race and the Big Uglies hadn’t blown Tosev 3 sky-high. They’d come close when the Deutsche reached for something they weren’t big enough to grab. They’d come close, but they hadn’t quite done it. Both sides there had got used to the idea that they were living on the edge of a volcano.

Now all the worlds of the Empire were living by the same crater. Most males and females on Home didn’t realize it yet, but it was true. Rabotev 2 and Halless 1 were blissfully unaware of it… or were they? Had Tosevite faster-than-light starships appeared out of nowhere in their skies? For that matter, had the Big Uglies bombarded or conquered the other two planets in the Empire? If they had, Home wouldn’t find out about it for years-unless more Tosevite starships brought the news.

That thought reminded Ttomalss just what a predicament the Race found itself in. The Big Uglies could know things sooner than his own species could, and could act more quickly on what they knew. For years, the Race had tried to decide whether Tosevites were enough of a menace to be worth destroying, and had never quite made up its mind. Even if it had, doing anything would have taken years and years.

If the American Big Uglies decided the Race was still enough of a menace to be worth destroying, how long would they take to act on their decision? Not long at all, both because they were generally quicker to act than the Race and because they now had the technology to match their speed of thought.

Involuntarily, Ttomalss’ eye turrets looked up toward the ceiling. Even if he could have looked up through the ceiling, he couldn’t have seen the Commodore Perry in orbit around Home, not in daylight. If the starship launched missiles, he would never know about it till too late.

One eye turret swung down to the grubs and fruit he’d been eating. He was glad he’d just about finished his meal before such thoughts occurred to him. They would have robbed him of his appetite.

After he left the refectory, he thought about going out into Sitneff to call Pesskrag and see how her research team was coming. He’d taken several steps toward the door before he stopped and made the negative gesture. What good would that do? She’d said the research would take years. Asking her about it mere days after he’d last spoken to her wouldn’t gain him any new information. He would just be tugging at her tailstump, annoying her for no good reason.

But he wanted reassurance. He laughed, not that it was particularly funny. Back when Kassquit was a hatchling, he’d constantly had to reassure her that everything was all right, that he would go on taking care of her, that she was a good little female. Sometimes it had almost driven him mad. Hatchlings of the Race, being more independent from their earliest days, didn’t need that constant reinforcement. He’d probably been ill-equipped to give it. Whatever psychological problems Kassquit had were in no small measure of his making.

And now he understood Kassquit in a way he hadn’t while he was raising her. In the huge, frightening world of interspecies rivalries and new technologies, what was he but a tiny hatchling calling out for someone, anyone, to help make him feel safe?

He didn’t think Pesskrag could do for him what he’d once done for Kassquit. He didn’t think anyone could-not Atvar, not even the 37th Emperor Risson himself. He suspected they were all looking for reassurance in the same way he was, and for the same reasons. That didn’t make him crave it any less.

Change was here. For millennia, the Race had insulated itself against such misfortunes. Everyone had praised that as wisdom. Countless generations had lived peaceful, secure, happy lives because of it.

Now, though, like it or not, change was hissing at the door. If the Race couldn’t change… If the Race couldn’t change, then in a certain ultimate sense those hundred thousand years of peace and stability might not matter at all.

Ttomalss shivered. Few males or females had ever bumped snouts with the extinction of their species. That was what he saw now. Maybe it was nothing but panic over the arrival of the Commodore Perry. On the other hand, maybe panic was what the arrival of the Commodore Perry demanded. However much he wished it didn’t, the second seemed more likely than the first.

The wild Big Uglies hadn’t panicked when the conquest fleet arrived. They’d fought back more ferociously and more ingeniously than the Race dreamt they could. Now the Race had to respond in turn. Could it? Ttomalss shivered again. He just didn’t know.

There was Home, spinning by as it had ever since the Admiral Peary went into orbit around it. The sight had raised goose bumps in Glen Johnson. Here he was, eyeing the scenery as his spacecraft circled a world circling another sun. The Admiral Peary was still doing the same thing it had always done-but the starship had gone from history-maker to historical afterthought in the blink of an eye.

When Johnson said that out loud, Walter Stone shook his head. “Not quite yet,” he said. “We still have another few weeks of serious duties to perform. Till the Commodore Perry goes to Earth and then comes back here, we’re the ones on the spot. Up to us to keep the Lizards from doing something everybody would regret.”

He was right. He usually was. And yet, his being right suddenly seemed to matter very little. “Yes, sir,” Johnson said. “Sorry about that. We’re not a historical afterthought right this minute. But we will be any day now.”

Stone gave him a fishy stare. “You never have had the right attitude, have you?”

Johnson shrugged, there in the control room. “The right attitude? I don’t know anything about that. All I know is, we’re about the most obsolete set of spacemen God ever made. We spent all those years weightless, and now we can’t be anything else. And we made a fine, successful crew for a cold-sleep starship-the only problem being that they won’t make any more of those. Buggy whips, slide rules-and us. What do the Russians call it? The ash-heap of history, that’s what it is. And that’s where we’re at.”

Brigadier General Stone’s gaze got fishier yet. “If we are, Johnson, you’re still a pain in the ash.”

“Aiii!” Johnson looked back reproachfully. “And here I thought you were you, and not Mickey Flynn.”

“Is someone taking my name in vain?” Flynn asked from the corridor that led into the interior of the Admiral Peary. He came out into the control room a moment later. “How did I get into trouble without even being here?”

“Native talent?” Johnson suggested.

Flynn shook his head. His jowls wobbled. “Can’t be that.”

“Why not?” Stone asked. “It makes sense to me.”

“As if that proved anything,” Flynn said with dignity. He pointed to the planet they were circling. “How can I be native talent in this solar system?”

“He’s got a point,” Johnson said.

Stone shrugged this time. “Well, what if he does?” Without waiting for an answer, he pushed off, slid gracefully past Flynn, and vanished down that corridor.

“Was it something I said?” Flynn wondered.

“Nope. He just doesn’t care to be last year’s model, but he can’t do anything about it,” Johnson answered.

“Anybody who can remember when rockets to the Moon were the province of pulp magazines is not going to be right up to date,” Flynn observed. “For that matter, neither is anybody who can remember pulp magazines.”

“That’s true,” Johnson said. “I was never on the Moon. Were you? And here we are in orbit around Home. It’s pretty peculiar, when you think about it.”

“The Moon’s not worth going to. This place is,” Flynn said.

He wasn’t wrong about that, either. The Lizards had been amused when humans flew to the Moon. Since the Race was used to flying between the stars, that first human journey to another world must have seemed like the smallest of baby steps. And when people went to Mars, the Lizards were just plain perplexed. Why bother? The place obviously wasn’t worth anything.

“Heck,” Johnson said, “they didn’t even get all that hot and bothered when we went out to the asteroid belt in the Lewis and Clark. ”

“At least they were curious then,” Flynn said. “We had a constant-boost ship. That made them sit up and take notice. And they wondered what the dickens we were up to. Those spy machines of theirs…”

Johnson laughed. “Oh, yeah. I remember spoofing one of them when I was in a scooter. I signaled to it just the same way as I had to some of the bases we’d set up on the rocks close by the ship.”

“That should have given some Lizard monitoring the signals the spy machine was picking up a case of the hives,” Flynn said.

“Well, I hope so. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know for sure, though,” Johnson said. “What I do know for sure is, it gave our dearly beloved commandant a case of the hives. He called me into his lair, uh, office to grill me on the weird signal I’d sent. Somehow, he never appreciated my sense of humor.”

“He probably thought it lacked that quality of mirth known as being funny,” Flynn said.

“Thanks a hell of a lot, Mickey. I’ll remember you in my nightmares.” Johnson wished he could have left the control room in a display of at least medium dudgeon, the way Walter Stone had. But it was still his shift. He did everything required of him. He always had. He always would, for as long as he was physically able to. He was damned and double-damned if he would give Lieutenant General Healey the excuse to come down on him for something small like that.

He laughed out loud. “Are you attempting to contradict me?” Flynn inquired in moderately aggrieved tones. “How can I know whether something is funny unless you tell me the joke?”

Johnson explained, finishing, “Of course Healey doesn’t come down on me for the small stuff. He comes down on me for big stuff instead.”

After grave consideration, Flynn shook his head. “I don’t think you’d make Bob Hope quake in his boots, or Jack Benny, either.”

“I should say not,” Johnson replied. “They’re dead.”

“I don’t even think you’d get them worried enough to start spinning in their graves,” Flynn said imperturbably. “Neither would that Lizard called Donald, the one who runs the quiz show.”

“How’s he going to spin in his grave? He’s still alive,” Johnson said. “And so is that gal called Rita-oh, yeah.” Recordings of You’d Better Believe It had made it to the Admiral Peary. Some people found Donald funny. Johnson didn’t, or not especially. But, like every other male on the ship, he… admired the lovely Rita’s fashion statements. “One more reason to be sorry I’m not going back to Earth.”

“Two more reasons, I’d say.” Mickey Flynn paused to let that sink in, then went on, “However much you might like looking at her, you don’t suppose she’d look at you, do you? You were not born yesterday, mon vieux. ”

Except for the minor detail that gravity would quickly kill him, Johnson was in reasonably good shape for his age, which was about the same as Flynn‘s. But the other pilot wasn’t wrong; neither one of them had been born yesterday, even subtracting cold sleep. After some thought, Johnson said, “I’ve been accruing pay since the 1960s, and I haven’t had a goddamn thing to spend it on. I may not be pretty, but I might do for a sugar daddy.”

“Maybe you would-if they still have sugar daddies back on Earth,” Flynn said.

“They will. That, I’m not worried about.” Johnson spoke with great conviction. “As long as old guys have more money than they know what to do with, pretty girls’ll give ’em ideas.”

“Hmm. On those grounds, I might even qualify for sugar daddyhood myself,” Flynn said. “I’ve been accruing pay longer than you have, since I joined the crew of the Lewis and Clark on the up and up instead of stowing away, and I’ve been a bird colonel longer than you have. I could outbid you.” He seemed to like the idea.

Johnson laughed at him. “If we’re back on Earth-or in orbit around it, anyway-there’ll be enough girls to go around. You get one, I’ll get another one. Hell, get more than one if you want to.”

“An embarrassment of riches. And, probably, a richness of embarrassments,” Flynn said. “But then, a richness of embarrassments is what sugar daddies are for. I should endeavor to give satisfaction.”

How did he mean that? Johnson refused to give him the satisfaction of asking. Instead, he said, “It’s pretty good weightless, from what I remember. Of course, it’s pretty damn good any which way.”

“There, for once, I find I cannot disagree with you.” Flynn looked aggrieved. “What an unfortunate development. Who could have imagined it?”

Johnson patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. It won’t last.” Flynn seemed suitably relieved.

When Johnson’s shift ended, he went down to the refectory. A couple of doctors were in there, talking while they ate about how they could reacquaint themselves with the state of the art once they got back to Earth. They’d been weightless only since reviving aboard the Admiral Peary. Johnson was jealous of them; he couldn’t go all the way home again.

He got himself a chopped-meat sandwich and a squeeze bottle full of rhubarb juice. The juice wasn’t bad-was damn good, in fact. He wouldn’t have been surprised if somebody on the starship were fermenting it. The meat was full of pepper and cumin and other spices. That helped keep people from thinking about what it was: rat or guinea pig. The Admiral Peary hadn’t brought along any regular domestic animals, and the frozen beef and pork and lamb was long gone. The rodents could live-could thrive-on the vegetable waste from the hydroponic farm. Better just to contemplate them as… meat.

In came Lieutenant General Healey. That did more to spoil Johnson’s appetite than remembering that he was eating a rat sandwich. How many steaks could you carve off of Healey? Or would he prove inedibly tough? That was Johnson’s guess.

The commandant hadn’t missed any meals. His face was full. His body was round. If what he ate ever bothered him, he didn’t let it show. Johnson eyed him again, in a different way this time. Healey was bound to have even more pay saved up than Mickey Flynn did. But with that scowl on the commandant’s face, all the money in the world wouldn’t turn him into a sugar daddy.

Johnson quickly looked away when Healey’s radar gaze swung toward him. Not quickly enough, though-the commandant got his food and then glided toward a handhold near the one Johnson was using. “Well?” Healey asked. “Why are you staring at me? Is my fly unzipped?”

“No, sir,” Johnson said tonelessly. The trousers they wore didn’t have flies.

“Well, then? I’m not Lana Turner, either.” Healey hopelessly dated himself with that crack. Johnson, also hopelessly dated, got it with no trouble. Did anyone on the Commodore Perry even know who Lana Turner was? They leered at the lovely Rita these days-not that she wasn’t worth leering at herself.

“No, sir,” Johnson said again. Leering at Healey for any reason was a really scary thought.

“Then keep your eyes to yourself,” the commandant snapped. “The only other reason you’d stare at me that way is to figure out where to stick the knife.” He took a big bite of his sandwich.

But Johnson shook his head. “Oh, no, sir.”

“Ha!” Healey jeered. “A likely story.”

“It’s true, sir,” Johnson insisted. “I don’t need to figure it out. I’ve known for a long time.” They eyed each other in perfect mutual loathing.

No matter what Kassquit had told Ttomalss about her emotional state, she clung to Frank Coffey now. “I hope you come back!” she said, and used an emphatic cough.

“So do I,” he answered, and used one of his own. “I will do everything I can. I want to see you again, and I want to see our hatchling. And if I have trouble coming back for any reason, perhaps you and the hatchling can come to Tosev 3. You and that little male or female are bridges between the Empire and Tosevites.”

“Truth,” Kassquit said. Tears ran down her cheeks. “I wish you were not going!”

“We both knew I would, sooner or later,” Coffey said. “The coming of the Commodore Perry has made it sooner, that is all.” He shook his head. “I did not think I would be leaving as a sire, though. I will say that. It makes things more difficult… Do something for me?”

“If I can,” she said. “What is it?”

“Try not to hate me after I am gone.”

“I would not do that!” she said.

“I hope not,” he said. “Sometimes, though, after these things end, it happens. It is a way of telling yourself, He is gone, so he could not have been any good while he was here. ”

Remembering how she’d felt after Jonathan Yeager returned to the surface of Tosev 3, and especially after he formed his permanent mating alliance with Karen, Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She saw how doing as Frank Coffey said might make her feel better. In a small voice, she told him, “I will try not to.”

“Good,” Coffey said. “And one other thing. When the hatchling comes, try to let it get to know both members of the Race and wild Tosevites. There will be a good many males and females from the Commodore Perry here. Their physician no doubt did not expect to take care of a hatchling, but I think he will do a good job. He probably knows more than Dr. Blanchard does, just because the state of the art has moved forward since she went into cold sleep.”

He said such things as if they were as natural as sunrise or as stars coming out at night. (Even as Kassquit had that thought, she made the negative gesture. She’d grown up in space. There, the stars were always out. She’d had to get used to their being gone during the day.) To the wild Big Uglies, change and technical advances were natural. Were that untrue, they never would have built the Commodore Perry. For a whole swarm of reasons, Kassquit wished they hadn’t.

“I will do that,” she said. “The hatchling will be a citizen of the Empire, but it will know more of its biological heritage than I ever did. And I will do my best to make sure that it does not become an experimental animal, the way I did.” She added an emphatic cough to her words.

“Good.” Frank Coffey caressed her and kissed her. “Believe me, I like your biological heritage.” He had a way of showing enthusiasm without an emphatic cough. They lay down together. The last time, Kassquit thought. She did her best to make the most of it.

The next morning, the American Tosevites from the Admiral Peary got into the bus that would take them to the shuttlecraft port. Atvar got on the bus, too; he was going to Tosev 3 as final proof that the Commodore Perry was what the wild big Uglies claimed it was. No one on Home really doubted it any more. The Tosevites on the new starship already knew about things speed-of-light transmission from Tosev 3 was just now revealing here. But the Race wanted to see for itself, and the Big Uglies had agreed.

Shiplord Straha and Shuttlecraft Pilot Nesseref also boarded the bus. They would not be going back to Tosev 3. They were colonists no more. The American Tosevites could not be sure they would not deliver a message ordering Kirel and Reffet to start a last desperate war.

And Kassquit got on, too. Up till the last moment, she had not been sure whether she would. But she did. She would stretch things out to the very end. If that made the hurt that would follow worse, then it did, that was all.

Much of the talk aboard the bus was in English. Even Straha spoke the language well. I should have learned it, Kassquit thought once more. My hatchling will learn it. A Tosevite should know a Tosevite language.

After a little while, Frank Coffey told her, “I am sorry. This must be boring for you.”

“I wish it were boring,” Kassquit said. “I do not understand what you are saying, but that is not the same thing. I do not know how long it will be before I see you again. I do not know if I will ever see you again. It is hard, but it is not boring.”

“I am sorry,” he repeated. “This is a chance to go home again.”

“I understand,” Kassquit said. “I do understand. But it is not easy for me whether I understand or not.”

Atvar and Straha got into a shouting match, which distracted everyone else. They seemed to be trying to decide which of them was the bigger idiot. By the way they were behaving, it was a contest they both wanted to lose. Atvar had made it very plain he did not like Straha. Straha seemed to be doing his best to show it was mutual.

“Enough!” Nesseref exclaimed after a while. “You will scandalize the Big Uglies!”

“Truth,” Atvar said with such dignity as he could muster. “It is enough, Straha.”

Straha only laughed at that-a huge, rude, tongue-wagging laugh. “You say that because you know you are in the wrong. There is no other reason. If you thought you were right, you would tell me so.”

“I do think I am right, and in a moment I will put my toeclaws up your cloaca to prove it,” Atvar retorted.

“I am not afraid of you,” Straha said.

“Enough!” That wasn’t Nesseref-it was Sam Yeager. “Both of you are my friends, and both of you are acting like hatchlings.”

The two prominent males hadn’t really listened to the shuttlecraft pilot, any more than they’d listened to each other. They did heed the departing American ambassador. Straha said, “Perhaps this is not the ideal time or place.”

“Perhaps it is not,” Atvar agreed. “After I return…”

“After you return, I will be at your service,” Straha said. “When you get to Tosev 3, you will also see the other ways the wild Big Uglies have got ahead of us. If we had only done as I wanted-”

“Enough!” This time, all the American Tosevites shouted it together. A volley of emphatic coughs rang out.

When they got to the shuttlecraft port, the row threatened to break out anew. The American Tosevites got between the two angry males of the Race. Jonathan Yeager spoke to Atvar. “I am bigger than you are, Exalted Fleetlord, and my sire is bigger than the shiplord. Between the two of us, I hope we can keep the two of you from disgracing yourselves and the Race.”

“I think you have just called us barbarians,” Atvar said mournfully.

“What have you been acting like?” Jonathan Yeager asked.

After that, Atvar and Straha really did subside. Embarrassment was a weapon more potent than many. Females and males in the body paint of Security examined everything that would be going up on the shuttlecraft. “We cannot be too careful,” they said, over and over.

A dark-scaled Rabotev pilot awaited them, eyestalks turning this way and that. Nesseref went up to him-or perhaps her-and started talking shop. Kassquit turned to Frank Coffey. “Do you see? They still worry that a member of the Race might smuggle ginger.”

He found it less funny than she did. “If lots of our ships are going to come from Tosev 3 to Home, they are going to have to worry about it. Either that, or they will have to start to accept ginger, the way the Race has on Tosev 3.”

“More changes,” Kassquit said sadly.

“More changes,” Coffey agreed.

A male whose body paint proclaimed him a security chief bawled, “Final check! All boarding the shuttlecraft, form a line here!” He pointed, reveling in his petty power. Along with Atvar, all the Tosevites except Kassquit formed a line there. The security male’s eye turrets swung toward her. “What about you?”

“I am not going. I am a citizen of the Empire,” she answered. The male started to challenge her, but Atvar spoke quietly to him. He hissed in irritation. Then he shrugged, one of the few gestures the Race and Tosevites shared.

Frank Coffey stepped out of line. The security male hissed again. Coffey ignored him. He came up to Kassquit for one last embrace. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “I will be back if I possibly can.”

“I know. I believe you,” Kassquit said. In a way, she was lucky. She had no idea how many Tosevite males had made that same promise to gravid Tosevite females without the slightest intention of keeping it. Some, of course, did, but not all. She added, “I hope everything goes well for you.”

“So do I,” he said, and smiled what even she recognized as a tight little smile. Here he was-here all the American Big Uglies were-trusting to a technology that was anything but proved. The Race was more sensible, and would never have allowed anything so risky. That was one reason the Big Uglies now had faster-than-light travel, while the Race had never even looked for it very hard. The rest of the Americans and Atvar started out of the terminal building and toward the shuttlecraft. Frank Coffey let Kassquit go. “I have to leave.”

“I know,” she said again. I will not cry in front of him. That was her last determination. She managed to hold on to it as he let the security male wave a metal-detecting wand around him one more time. Then he hurried after the rest of the wild Big Uglies. The door to the field closed, and Kassquit dissolved in tears. The males and females of the Race in the terminal stared at her. They had no idea what to make of the display, or what to do about it.

She wished for a soft cloth to wipe her snout. It always dripped mucus when she cried; the plumbing between it and her eyes was cross-connected in some strange way. Here, the back of her forearm had to do, as it did for her eyes. When her vision finally cleared, she found Straha standing in front of her. She started to bend into the posture of respect.

Straha made the negative gesture. “No need to bother with that foolishness, not for me,” he said. “I am only a writer these days, not a shiplord. I just wanted to tell you that you have turned out better than those who took you have any right to expect.”

Kassquit did not feel better. She felt worse. She’d known she would, but knowing didn’t help. She tried to think of something that might make her less miserable. To her surprise, she did: “When you were on Tosev 3, superior sir, did you ever meet the males called, uh, Donald and Mickey?” She pronounced the strange names with care.

Now Straha used the affirmative gesture. “I did. I can see why you would want to know. They are also luckier than they might have been, but they make very strange males of the Race. Their mouthparts can form all the sounds our language uses, but they have accents anyway-they are used to speaking English. They know of you, by the way. I have heard them say they would like to meet you.”

“I would like to meet them, too,” Kassquit said. “That is why I asked.” The shuttlecraft took off, riding an almost colorless plume of hydrogen flame. Despite the soundproofing, a dull roar filled the terminal. Misery filled Kassquit’s liver. She burst into tears again.

The chamber Sam Yeager got aboard the Commodore Perry was cramped but comfortable. The starship accelerated out of Home’s solar system at a tenth of a g, so he didn’t have to get used to weightlessness again. “We’re heading off to where space flattens out,” one of the crew, a woman, told him casually. That was evidently supposed to mean something, but it didn’t, not to him.

He liked the little bit of weight he had. It was enough to keep his feet on the floor and liquids in glasses, though they’d slop out if he raised or lowered them too suddenly. It also made him feel light and quick, which was something he hadn’t felt for years-maybe not since that broken ankle ruined his chances of making the big leagues.

Even better than the low weight was the lower temperature. He’d spent too long in air that never got below the eighties and was often a lot warmer than that. As Southern Californians were fond of saying, it was a dry heat. That made it more tolerable than its Alabama equivalent would have been. Even so, there was a difference between tolerable and pleasant.

He rediscovered long pants and long sleeves aboard the Commodore Perry. He also thanked God that he wasn’t a nineteenth-century British diplomat, doomed to wear full Victorian formal finery no matter what tropical hellhole (Washington, D.C., for instance) he found himself in. Those nineteenth-century British diplomats had died like flies. He suspected the Americans on Home would have done the same if they’d gone around in tuxedo jackets and heavy wool trousers.

The most he ever said to any of the crew was, “It could be worse. If you don’t believe me, ask your colleagues on Home when you get back there.” He didn’t even add an emphatic cough.

He reveled in fried chicken and real hen’s eggs and orange juice and pineapple and ice cream and string beans and carrots and pork chops and mashed potatoes and coffee and Coca-Cola and all the other familiar things he’d done without for too long. Quite a bit of what he’d eaten on Home had been tolerable. Some of it had been pretty good. But all of it had been exotic-literally so, in that it and he had evolved separately for several billion years. Part of him knew that every time he took a bite.

Little by little, he began to realize he was almost as alien to the crew of the Commodore Perry as smoked zisuili ribs were to his taste buds and digestive tract. That wasn’t just because of what he’d done in the 1960s and what had happened to Indianapolis, either. Some of them thought he was an ogre for that. Others didn’t: like him, they saw Lizards, no less than human beings, as people.

But he remembered the days before the conquest fleet came to Earth. He not only remembered them, he’d been shaped by them. To the crew of the Commodore Perry, that made him a Neanderthal. The very language they spoke was subtly different from his. He’d started noticing that with Major Nichols. Oh, the crew understood what he said, but the way he said it often made them smile. And he mostly understood what they said, too-but only because he was also fluent in the Race’s language. A lot of it wouldn’t have been English when he went into cold sleep.

Such changes had already started before he went on ice. People had begun peppering their sentences with emphatic and interrogative coughs and using them by themselves-something the Lizards always found barbarous. But they’d gone further since. Words and phrases from the Race’s language got treated as if they were English. By all the signs, they were English now. Even word order occasionally shifted.

The Commodore Perry ’s crew didn’t notice they were doing anything out of the ordinary. “We just talk,” one of them said. As far as she was concerned, the emphatic cough she added was as much a part of the language as the words that had gone before it.

Little by little, Sam realized he was the one who was out of the ordinary. Had Shakespeare read Hemingway, the Bard would have felt the same jolt. He would obviously have been reading English. He would have been able to make sense of most of it. Just as obviously, it wouldn’t have been the language he was used to using. Most of the time, people didn’t notice how language changed around them, because they got the changes one by one, piece by piece. They all fell in Sam’s lap at once; he didn’t have the time he needed to get used to them.

He wasn’t the only one from the Admiral Peary to feel the same way. “It’s a good thing we didn’t have to go back into cold sleep,” Dr. Blanchard said at supper one evening. “We’d be like ancient Romans trying to deal with Italian.”

Sam suspected they might be like Romans trying to deal with the modern world in other ways, too. He didn’t even try to use some of the controls in his room because he couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to do. One of Caesar’s legionaries behind the wheel of a Chevy could have been no more confused.

When he said as much, Jonathan asked, “Why haven’t you asked one of the crew about them?”

“Because I don’t want to look like a rube,” Sam answered. “Have you asked? What is that button with the gold star? What does it do? Does it change the air conditioning, or is it the emergency switch? There’s no label on it. You’re just supposed to know, and I don’t.”

His son didn’t answer him. Neither did anyone else from the Admiral Peary. Sam smiled to himself. Unless he was very much mistaken, none of the other Rip van Winkles knew what that button with the gold star was for, any more than he did. They hadn’t wanted to look like rubes, either.

He did eventually find out, but not from the brisk, polite, half-foreign young crewfolk of the Commodore Perry. Atvar happened to tell him it controlled the softness of the mattress. The Lizard hadn’t been embarrassed to ask; his countrymen hadn’t built the ship. He said, “I never have understood why so many Tosevites prefer to sleep on a raised area from which they might fall. That aside, though, the arrangement is comfortable enough.”

“I am glad you are satisfied, Fleetlord,” Sam said, hoping Atvar hadn’t figured out that he hadn’t known about the button. “Is the food to your taste?”

“Tolerable,” Atvar answered. “Of course, I ate Tosevite food before the colonization fleet brought our own domesticated animals and plants. As long as I add enough salt, it is not too bad.”

What the Race thought of as enough salt was too much by human standards. Lizards put salt on bacon. After some meals in Sitneff, Sam had felt like a piece of beef jerky. Dr. Blanchard had clucked about what all that sodium was doing not only to his blood pressure but to everybody else‘s. If the humans ate local food, though, they had no choice but to eat the salt that went with it.

“This whole starship I find fascinating,” Atvar said.

“How do you mean? Because it can go faster than light?” Sam asked.

“No-and yes,” the fleetlord replied. “The males and females here have made sure I have nothing to do with that, as is only sensible from their point of view. But our starships are all like your Admiral Peary — they are designed to take passengers in cold sleep. This one has passengers and crew who are all fully awake, and has to have facilities for feeding them and bathing them and keeping them entertained. Oh, by the way, I find your showers too weak and puny to do a proper job of cleaning, and what you call soap does not deserve the name.”

“Well, Fleetlord, when I was in Sitneff, I always wondered whether your showers or your soap would do a better job of flaying the hide off me,” Sam said. “It all depends, I suppose, on whether you have scales.”

“Any proper creature-” But Atvar caught himself. “No, that is not so. You Tosevites have taught us otherwise.” He aimed an accusing fingerclaw at Sam. “You Tosevites have taught us all sorts of things we had not known. Quite a few of them, we would have been just as glad not to learn, too.”

“You cannot always pick and choose about what you would learn and what you would not,” Yeager said.

“That too is a truth,” Atvar agreed. “Just how bitter a truth it is, we are still in the process of discovering.” He skittered down the corridor. His gait was even odder in low gravity than humans’ gliding leaps.

Sam was not given access to the Commodore Perry ’s control room. Neither was anyone else from the Admiral Peary, so he didn’t have to take that personally. He couldn’t look out into space. Instead, he had to make do with what the monitor in his chamber showed him. The image was very fine, but it wasn’t the same. Home had rapidly faded behind the starship, lost in the skirts of its sun. Tau Ceti itself went from a sun to no more than the brightest star in the black sky. But Sam could have seen the same kind of thing from the Admiral Peary as it left the Solar System if he hadn’t been in cold sleep.

When he asked the crew what going faster than light felt like, he got different answers. Most said it didn’t feel like anything. One shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’d been on duty till an hour before. I slept through it.”

A few, though… A few said things like, “It was very strange.” When he tried to press them further, he got nowhere. Whatever the experience was, it wasn’t something they could put into words.

Two of them said the same thing: “Maybe you’ll find out.” One spoke matter-of-factly, the other with a certain somber relish. Sam wondered whether he ought to hope he was one of the majority who went through whatever it was without even noticing.

He also wondered whether Lizards might feel the transition differently from humans. When he mentioned that to Atvar, though, the fleetlord said, “Straha and Nesseref made this journey without harm. Neither told me of noting anything unusual at the transition. Had the crew not informed them of it, they would not have known it had taken place.”

“I see. I thank you,” Sam said. “Well, in that case I do not suppose you have anything to worry about.”

Atvar made the negative gesture. “There I must disagree with you, Ambassador. I have a great many things to worry about. It is only that that does not happen to be one of them.”

“You are right, of course,” Yeager said. “Please forgive me.”

“No forgiveness is necessary,” Atvar replied. “I thank you for your concern.”

“I wonder what the sky will look like when we make the switch,” Sam said.

“This has also occurred to me,” Atvar said. “I would rather see it for myself than on a monitor. There, it could all too easily prove to be nothing but a special effect. But if we suddenly find ourselves in the neighborhood of Tosev 3, then that concern will fall by the wayside.”

“Do you doubt that we will?” Sam asked.

“I cannot doubt that this ship traveled from Tosev 3 to Home in the time described,” Atvar answered. “But this is Tosevite technology, which means it is bound to be inadequately tested. Can I doubt that it will work perfectly twice in a row? Oh, yes, Ambassador. I have no trouble doubting that, none at all.”

Except for the elevated bed instead of a simple sleeping mat, Atvar found nothing to complain about in the accommodations the Big Uglies had given him. They did a better job of taking care of members of the Race than the Race did for Tosevites. Of course, they’d had more practice than the Race had, too.

How long will that be so? Atvar wondered. He could easily see swarms of Big Uglies coming to Home, either simply as tourists or armed with the get-rich-quick schemes they hatched so effortlessly. If the Race didn’t learn how to take care of them, they’d take care of themselves. They probably wouldn’t try to colonize Home, not the way the Race had colonized Tosev 3. But, with their furious energy, they might end up taking big bites out of the Race’s world anyway.

Or this ship might blow up instead of doing what it is supposed to do. Atvar hadn’t been joking when he mentioned the possibility to Sam Yeager. The Big Uglies always took big bites out of things. That was a great part of what made them what they were. Sometimes, though, they bit off more than they could swallow.

Days crawled by, one after another. Then there were only tenths of a day left-or, since this was a Tosevite ship, hours. Why the Big Uglies divided days into twenty-four parts, each of those into sixty, and each of those into sixty instead of sticking to multiples of ten had always perplexed Atvar, but then, a lot of the other things they did perplexed him much more.

He waited in his cabin for the change. He did not want company, not even Sam Yeager‘s. Whatever happened would happen. He would deal with the consequences… if he lived.

He hadn’t been afraid either time he went into cold sleep. He’d been sure he would wake up again. Cold sleep, at least for the Race, had tens of thousands of years of development behind it. Going faster than light… How many times had the Big Uglies tried it? It had worked once. That was all Atvar knew.

English came out of the intercom. Someone was announcing something. Atvar hadn’t learned much English on Tosev 3, and had forgotten most of that. The American Big Uglies from the Admiral Peary spoke the Race’s language so well, he hadn’t had to worry about English with them. But now he was on an American ship. People on the Commodore Perry spoke the Race’s tongue, too, but English was the ship’s routine language.

And then, apparently for him alone, came a sentence in the language of the Race: “Transition with come in one tenth of a daytenth, so please find somewhere comfortable to sit or lie down.”

“It shall be done,” Atvar said aloud. He assumed the Big Uglies monitored his cabin. He noted no one instructed him to strap himself in. That made sense. If something went wrong here, a safety belt around his middle would do him no good.

He waited. A tenth of a daytenth wasn’t a long time, but he’d never known what the Big Uglies would have called fifteen minutes to pass so slowly. He kept wondering whether the time had already gone by, but glances at the watch on his wrist kept telling him the answer was no. The watch wasn’t his. The Big Uglies had given it to him. They wanted to make sure he had nothing that could signal Reffet and Kirel when he got to Tosev 3.

Here-this really was the zero moment. He felt noth… No sooner had the thought started to form in his head than he knew an instant-no more than an instant-of being mentally turned upside down and inside out. He let out a startled hiss, but the moment had passed by the time the sound escaped. It was far and away the most peculiar sensation he’d ever felt. He wondered if it was real, or if he’d just imagined it. Then he wondered if, for something like this, there was any difference.

More English came out of the intercom. Then, again for his benefit, the Big Ugly at the microphone switched to the Race’s language: “Transition was successful. We are now shaping course for Tosev 3.”

The image of the Big Uglies’ home planet appeared in the monitor, its large moon off to one side. Images in monitors proved nothing. No one knew that better than Atvar. But he also knew nothing he’d experienced before was the least bit like the moment the Tosevites called transition. He believed in his belly that the Commodore Perry had leaped across the light-years.

Someone knocked on the door to his chamber. To him, that was a Tosevite barbarism; he vastly preferred a hisser. But the Big Uglies had built this ship to please themselves, not him. When he opened the door, he found Sam Yeager standing in the corridor. “I greet you,” the white-haired American said. “Did you feel anything?”

“Yes.” Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “Not vertigo. What vertigo would feel if it felt vertigo, maybe. Yourself?”

“Something like that, I think,” Yeager answered. “You put it better than I could have. What vertigo would feel… Yes, that comes as close as anything. The funny thing is, though, I talked to several crewmales and — females as I came over here, and only one of them felt anything at all. I have no idea what that means, or whether it means anything.”

“I prefer to think it means you and I are highly superior to those insensitive louts,” Atvar said, and Sam Yeager laughed loudly. The fleetlord went on, “I do not know whether that is a truth, but I prefer to think it.”

“Fine. I will think the same thing. I do not know whether it is a truth, either, but I like it fine,” Yeager said.

“How soon will the ship go into orbit around Tosev 3?” Atvar asked.

“You are asking the wrong male, I fear,” Sam Yeager said. “I am only a passenger, and not privileged to know such things. One of the crewfolk would surely have a better idea than I do.”

“Perhaps. But I do not care to talk to them,” Atvar said.

“Well, Fleetlord, to tell you the truth, neither do I,” Sam Yeager said. “Of course, I have no doubt they feel the same way about me. They are three or four generations younger than I am, and our customs and ways of thinking have changed from my time to theirs. I do not believe all the changes are for the better, but they would disagree.”

Customs and ways of thinking had changed very little among the Race for millennia. Even something so small as the fad for a Tosevite appearance among the young had taken Atvar by surprise when he came back to Home. He knew Yeager was talking about much more important differences. He’d seen them himself.

One reason Big Uglies changed faster than members of the Race was that they didn’t live as long. That made a hundred of their years seem like a long time to them. Hardly anyone hatched at the beginning of such a span would be alive at the end of it, which was far from true among the Race. New Tosevites could quickly come to prominence, and bring new ideas with them. Atvar let free a mental sigh. Shortening the lifespan was not a solution the Empire would embrace.

“I thank you, Ambassador,” he said aloud. “I shall just have to wait and see for myself.”

Whenever he looked at it in a monitor, Tosev 3 got bigger and closer. After his long absence, he was struck again by how blue and watery the Big Uglies’ world looked. He had come to take land outweighing ocean for granted again; that was how things worked on Home and the other two worlds belonging wholly to the Empire. Not so here.

Of course, everything he was seeing could be just some clever special effect. The Race could have produced this. Atvar had no reason to doubt that the Americans could do the same. The only way he could be sure was to go down to the surface of the planet.

The crewmember he had to talk to about that was Major Nicole Nichols. He did not look forward to talking to her about anything. He wondered if she would refuse just for the fun of it. But she did not. She said, “You go right ahead, Exalted Fleetlord.” As usual, she sounded sarcastic when she used his title. “We want you to be sure you have come to Tosev 3. We do not want you to think we are trying to trick you in any way, shape, form, color, or size. Then we will send you back to Home, and you can let everyone there know that you made a round trip.”

“I thank you.” Atvar was not really feeling grateful-on the contrary. He wished the Big Uglies were trying to fool him. Then they would not have this stunning technology. But they all too plainly did.

Except for the pilot, he went down to Tosev 3 alone in the shuttlecraft. The American Tosevites from the Admiral Peary stayed behind. Going first was an honor he could have done without, especially when he saw that the shuttlecraft pilot was a Big Ugly. He told himself he’d just come light-years with a Big Ugly at the helm of the starship. Getting down from orbit to the planetary surface should be easy. Telling himself such things helped-some.

“I greet you,” the pilot told him. After that, most of what she said on the radio was in incomprehensible English. Every so often, she would use the language of the Race to talk to an orbiting ship or a ground station. The Big Uglies could have faked the responses coming back from those ships and stations-but it wouldn’t have been easy.

As the shuttlecraft came down out of orbit, deceleration pressed the fleetlord into his seat. It was made to conform to the contours of a member of the Race, and did the job… well enough. Everything seemed routine. The only difference he noted was that he would have understood more of the chatter with someone from his own species piloting. The Tosevite seemed highly capable. Tosevites were highly capable. In no small measure, that was what was wrong with them.

He watched the monitor. A large city swelled below him. There was the shuttlecraft port. Rockets fired one more time, killing the shuttlecraft’s velocity. The grounding was as smooth as any a pilot from the Race might have made. “Well, Exalted Fleetlord, here we are in Los Angeles,” the Big Ugly said.

“Yes,” Atvar said in a hollow voice. “Here we are.”

The pilot opened the hatch. Cool, moist outside air poured into the shuttlecraft. As it flowed over the scent receptors on Atvar’s tongue, he smelled odors both alien from billions of years of separate evolution and familiar because he had smelled such things before. Down deep in his liver, he knew he was on Tosev 3.

“Go on out, Exalted Fleetlord,” the pilot said.

“I thank you,” Atvar said, meaning anything but. When he poked his head out of the hatch, his eyes confirmed what logic and his scent receptors had already told him. He was on Tosev 3. The color of the sky, the shapes of the buildings and cars-this was not his world.

Big Uglies in wrappings that covered almost their entire bodies ran toward him from all directions. Some of them had guns in their hands. “Come with us, Exalted Fleetlord,” one of them called.

“Should I surrender first?” Atvar inquired.

“That will not be necessary,” the American Tosevite replied, taking him literally. “We are here for your protection.”

“I did not realize I needed so much protecting,” Atvar remarked as he came down the ladder.

Instead of answering that, the Big Ugly continued, “We are also here to make sure you do not communicate with members of the Race here before you go back to Home.”

“Do you need so many to do the job?” the fleetlord asked as his toeclaws clicked on concrete. “It seems more as if you are putting me in prison.”

“Call it whatever you please.” The Tosevite sounded altogether indifferent.