Homeward Bound

5

Though Sam Yeager had not gone to the South Pole, there were times when he wanted to see more of Home than the Race felt like showing him. Because the Lizards had insisted on him as ambassador when the Doctor didn’t wake up, they had a hard time refusing him outright. They did do their best to make matters difficult.

Guards accompanied him wherever he went. “There are many males and females here who lost young friends on Tosev 3,” one of the guards told him. “That they should seek revenge is not impossible.”

He wished he could afford to laugh at the guard. But the female had a point. Friendship ties were stronger among the Race than in mankind, family ties far weaker. Save in the imperial family, kinship was not closely noted. In a species with a mating season, that was perhaps unsurprising.

Going into a department store was not the same when you had a guard with an assault rifle on either side of you. Of course, Sam would have stood out any which way: he was the alien who was almost tall enough to bump the ceiling. But that might have made members of the Race curious had he been alone. As things were, he frightened most of them.

Their department stores frightened him-or perhaps awed would have been the better word. Everything a Lizard could want to buy was on display under one roof. The store near the hotel where the Americans were quartered was bigger than any he’d ever seen in the USA: this even though Lizards were smaller than people and even though there was no clothing section, since the Race-except for the trend setters and weirdos who imitated Big Uglies-didn’t bother with clothes. If the Lizards wanted a ball for a game of long toss, a fishing net (what they caught weren’t quite fish, but the creatures did swim in water), a new mirror for an old car, something to read, something to listen to, something to eat, something to feed their befflem or tsiongyu, a television, a stove, a pot to put on the stove, a toy for a half-grown hatchling, an ointment to cure the purple itch, a sympathy card for someone else who had the purple itch, a plant with yellow almost-flowers, potting soil to transplant it, body paint, or anything else under Tau Ceti, they could get what they needed at the department store. The proud boast outside-WITH OUR MART, YOU COULD BUILD A WALL AROUND THE WORLD-seemed perfectly true.

The clerks wore special yellow body paint, and were trained to be relentlessly cheerful and courteous. “I greet you, superior sir,” they would say over and over, or else, “superior female.” Then they would add, “How may I serve you?”

Even in the face of a wild Big Ugly flanked by guards with weapons rarely seen on Home, their training did not quite desert them. More than one did ask, “Are you a male or a female, superior Tosevite?” And a couple of them thought Sam was a Hallessi, not a human. That left him both amused and bemused.

“I am a male, and the ambassador from the not-empire of the United States,” he would answer.

That often created more confusion than it cleared up. The clerks did not recognize the archaic word. “What is an ambassador?” they would ask, and, “What is a not-empire?”

Explaining an ambassador’s job wasn’t too hard, once Sam got across the idea of a nation that didn’t belong to the Empire. Explaining what a not-empire was proved harder. “You make your choices by counting snouts?” a clerk asked him. “What if the side with the most is wrong?”

“Then we try to fix it later,” Sam answered. “What do you do if the Emperor makes a mistake?”

He horrified not only the clerk but also his guards with that. “How could the Emperor make a mistake?” the clerk demanded, twisting his eye turrets down to the ground as he mentioned his sovereign. “He is the Emperor!” He looked down again.

“We think he made a mistake when he tried conquering Tosev 3,” Sam said. “This caused many, many deaths, both among the Race and among us Tosevites. And the Empire has gained very little because of it.”

“It must have been for the best, or the spirits of Emperors past would not have allowed it,” the clerk insisted.

Again, the guards showed they agreed. Sam only shrugged and said, “Well, I am a stranger here. Maybe you are right.” The Lizards seemed pleased. They thought he had admitted the clerk was right. He knew he’d done no such thing. But, more than a hundred years before, while he was growing up on a Nebraska farm, his father had always loudly insisted there was no point to arguing about religion, because nobody could prove a damned thing. The Race had believed what it believed for a lot longer than mankind had clung to any of its faiths-which again proved exactly nothing.

When he and the guards left the department store, one of them asked, “Where would you like to go now, superior Tosevite? Back to your hotel?” He sounded quite humanly hopeful.

Sam made the negative hand gesture. He stood out in the middle of the vast parking lot surrounding the department store. Lizards driving in to shop would almost have accidents because they were turning their eye turrets to gape at him instead of watching where they were going. The weather was-surprise! — hot and dry, about like an August day in Los Angeles. He didn’t mind the heat, or not too much. It felt good on his old bones and made him feel more limber than he really was.

“Well, superior Tosevite, if you do not want to go back to the hotel, where would you like to go?” the guard asked with exaggerated patience. Plainly, the Lizard thought Sam would have no good answer.

But he did: “If you would be so kind, would you take me to a place that sells old books and periodicals?”

His guards put their heads together. Then one of them pulled out a little gadget that reminded Sam of a Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio, but that they insisted on calling a telephone. It did more than any telephone Yeager had ever imagined; they could even use it to consult the Race’s Home-spanning electronic network.

Here, the Lizard simply used it as a phone, then put it away. “Very well, superior Tosevite. It shall be done,” she said. “Come with us.”

His official vehicle had been-somewhat-adapted to his presence. It had almost enough leg room for him, and its seat didn’t make his posterior too uncomfortable. Still, he wasn’t sorry whenever he got out of it. The guards had taken him to an older part of Sitneff. How old did that make the buildings here? As old as the Declaration of Independence? The discovery of America? The Norman conquest? There were towns in Europe with buildings that old. But had these been around for the time of Christ? The erection of Stonehenge? Of the Pyramids? Lord, had they been around since the domestication of the dog? Since the last Ice Age? If the guards had said so, Sam would have been in no position to contradict them. He saw old, old sidewalks and weathered brick fronts on the buildings. How long would the brickwork have taken to get to look like that? He had not the faintest idea.

The sign above the door said SSTRAVO‘S USED BOOKS OF ALL PERIODS. That certainly sounded promising. Sam had to duck to get through the doorway, but he was just about used to that. An electronic hiss did duty for the bell that would have chimed at a shop in the United States.

An old Lizard fiddled around behind the counter. On Earth, Sam hadn’t seen really old Lizards. The males of the conquest fleet and males and females of the colonization fleet had almost all been young or in their prime. Even their highest officers hadn’t been elderly, though Atvar and some others had long since left youth behind. But this male creaked. His back was bent. He moved stiffly. His scales were dull, while his hide hung loose on his bones.

“I greet you,” he said to Sam Yeager, as if Yeager were an ordinary customer. “What can I show you today?”

“You are Sstravo?” Sam asked.

“I am,” the old male replied. “And you are a Big Ugly. You must be able to read our language, or you would not be here. So what can I show you? Would you like to see a copy of the report our probe sent back from your planet? I have one.”

That report went back almost nine hundred years now. Was it a recent reprint, or did the Race’s paper outlast most of its Earthly equivalents? Despite some curiosity, Sam made the negative gesture. “No, thank you. I have seen most of that report in electronic form on Tosev 3. Can you show me some older books that are unlikely to have made the journey from your world to mine? They can be history or fiction. I am looking for things to help me understand the Race better.”

“We often do not understand ourselves. How a Big Ugly can hope to do so is beyond me,” Sstravo said. “But you are brave-though perhaps foolish-to make the effort. Let me see what I can find for you.” He doddered over to a shelf full of books with spines and titles so faded Sam could not make them out and pulled one volume off it. “Here. You might try this.”

“What is it called?” Sam asked.

“Gone with the Wind,” Sstravo answered.

Sam burst out laughing. Sstravo stared at him. That loud, raucous sound had surely never been heard in this shop before. “I apologize,” Sam said. “But that is also the title of a famous piece of fiction in my world.”

“Ours dates from seventy-three thousand years ago,” Sstravo said. “How old is yours?”

Even dividing by two to turn the number into terrestrial years, that was a hell of an old book. “Ours is less than two hundred of your years old,” Sam admitted.

“Modern art, is it? I have never been partial to modern art. But ours may interest you,” Sstravo said.

“So it may,” Sam said. “But since I only know your language as it is used now, will I be able to understand this?”

“You will find some strange words, a few odd turns of phrase,” the bookseller said. “Most of it, though, you will follow without much trouble. Our language does not change quickly. Nothing about us changes quickly. But our speech has mostly stayed the same since sound and video recording carved the preferred forms in stone.”

“All right, then,” Sam said. “What is the story about?”

“Friends who separate over time,” Sstravo answered. One of the guards made the affirmative gesture, so maybe she’d read the book. Sam kept thinking of Clark Gable. Sstravo went on, “What else would one find to write about? What else is there to write about?”

“We Tosevites feel that way about the attraction between male and female,” Sam said. Sstravo and the guards laughed. Sam might have known-he had known-they would think that was funny. He held up the copy of Gone with the Wind that owed nothing to Margaret Mitchell. Cro-Magnons hadn’t finished replacing Neanderthals when this was written. “I will take this. How do I make arrangements to pay you?”

“I will do it,” one guard said. “I shall be reimbursed.”

“I thank you,” Sam said. The guard gave Sstravo a credit card. The bookseller rang up the purchase on a register that might have been as old as the novel. It worked, though. “Gone with the Wind,” Sam murmured. He started laughing all over again.

Jonathan Yeager hadn’t seen his father for seventeen years. For all practical purposes, his father might as well have been dead. Now he was back, and he hadn’t changed a bit in all that time. Jonathan, meanwhile, had gone from a young man into middle age. Cold sleep had a way of complicating relationships just this side of adultery.

At least his father also recognized the difficulty. “You’ve changed while I wasn’t looking,” he said to Jonathan one evening as they sat in the elder Yeager’s inadequately air-conditioned room.

“That’s what you get for going to sleep while I stayed awake,” Jonathan answered. He sipped at a drink. The Lizards had given them pure ethyl alcohol. Cut with water, it did duty for vodka. The Race didn’t use ice cubes, though, and seemed horrified at the idea.

His old man had a drink on the low round metal table beside him, too. After a nip from it, he nodded. “Well, I was encouraged to do that. They didn’t come right out and say so, but I got the notion it was good for my life expectancy.” He shook his head in wonder. “Since I’m heading toward a hundred and twenty-five now, I guess it must have been-assuming I ever woke up again, of course.”

“Yeah. Assuming,” Jonathan said. He’d got used to not having his father around, to standing on the front line in the war against Father Time. Now he had some cover again. If his father was still around, he couldn’t be too far over the hill himself, could he? Of course, his father had stood still for a while, even as he’d kept going over that hill himself.

“They wanted to get rid of me, and they did,” his dad said. “They might have made sure I had an ‘accident’ instead, if they could have sneaked it past the Race. If I hadn’t taken cold sleep, they probably would have tried that. But after Gordon tried to blow my head off and didn’t quite make it, the warning they got from the Lizards must have made them leery of doing it if they didn’t have to.”

“So here you are, and you’re in charge of things,” Jonathan said. “That ought to make them start tearing their hair out when they hear about it ten-plus years from now.”

“I thought so, too, when I woke up and the Doctor didn’t,” his father replied. “But now I doubt it. I doubt it like hell, as a matter of fact. They’ll be into the 2040s by the time word of that gets back to Earth. By then, it will have been more than sixty years since I went into cold sleep and more than seventy-five since I made a real nuisance of myself. Hardly anybody will remember who I am. If I do a decent job of dealing with the Lizards, that’s all that’ll matter. Time heals all wounds.”

Jonathan thought it over, then slowly nodded. “Well, maybe you’re right. I sure hope so. But I still remember what happened in the 1960s, even if nobody back there will. What they did to you wasn’t right.”

“It was a long time ago-for everybody except me,” his father said. “Even for me, it wasn’t yesterday.” He finished his drink, then got up and fixed himself another. “See? You’ve got a lush for an old man.”

“You’re no lush,” Jonathan said.

“Well… not like that,” Sam Yeager admitted. “When I was playing ball… Sweet Jesus Christ, some of those guys could put the sauce away. Some of ’em drank so much, it screwed them out of a chance to make the big leagues. And some of ’em knew they weren’t ever going to make the big leagues because they just weren’t good enough, and they drank even harder so they wouldn’t have to think about that.”

“You weren’t going to,” Jonathan said incautiously.

“And I drank some,” his father answered. “I might have made it to the top if I hadn’t torn up my ankle. That cost me most of a season and most of my speed. Hell, I might have made it if the Lizards hadn’t come. I could still swing the bat some, and I was 4-F as could be-they wouldn’t draft me with full upper and lower plates. But even if it was the bush leagues, I liked what I was doing. The only other thing I knew how to do then was farm, and playing ball beat the crap out of that.”

Jonathan took another pull at his glass. It didn’t taste like much, but it was plenty strong. He said, “You like what you’re doing now.”

“You bet I do.” His father dropped an emphatic cough into English. “There hasn’t been a really big war with the Lizards since the first round ended the year after you were born. The Germans were damn fools to take ’em on alone in the 1960s, but then, the Nazis were damn fools. If there’s another fight, it won’t just take out Earth. Home will get it, too.”

“And the other worlds in the Empire,” Jonathan said. “We wouldn’t leave them out.”

His father nodded. “No, I don’t suppose we would. They could hit back if we did. That’s a lot of people and Lizards and Rabotevs and Hallessi dead. And for what? For what, goddammit?” Every once in a while, he still cussed like the ballplayer he had been. “For nothing but pride and fear, far as I can see. If I can do something to stop that, you’d better believe I will.”

“What do you think the odds are?” Jonathan asked.

Instead of answering straight out, his father said, “If anything happens to me here, the Lizards are liable to ask for you to take over as our ambassador. Are you ready for that, just in case?”

“I’m not qualified, if that’s what you mean,” Jonathan answered. “I’m not telling you any big secrets; you know it as well as I do. The only reason they might think of me is that I’m your kid.”

“Not the only reason, I’d say.” His father drank another slug of ersatz vodka. “I’ve been studying ever since they revived me, trying to catch up on all the stuff that happened after I went into cold sleep. From everything I’ve been able to find out, you were doing a hell of a job as Lizard contact man. They wouldn’t have asked you to come on the Admiral Peary if you and Karen weren’t good.”

“Oh, we are.” The hooch had left Jonathan with very little modesty, false or otherwise. “We’re damn good. And all those years of dealing with Mickey and Donald gave us a feel for the Race I don’t think anybody could get any other way. But neither one of us is as good as you are.”

That wasn’t modesty. That was simple truth, and Jonathan knew it even if he didn’t like it. He and Karen and most human experts on the Race learned more and more over years about how Lizards thought and behaved. No doubt his old man had done that, too. But his father, somehow, wasn’t just an expert on the Race, though he was that. Sam Yeager had the uncanny ability to think like a Lizard, to become a Lizard in all ways except looks and accent. People noticed it. So did members of the Race. So had Kassquit, who was at the same time both and neither.

He had the ability. Jonathan didn’t. Neither did Karen. They were both outstanding at what they did. That only illustrated the difference between being outstanding and being a genius.

With a wry chuckle, the genius-at thinking like a Lizard, anyhow-who was Jonathan’s father said, “That’s what I get for reading too much science fiction. Nothing like it to kill time on a train ride or a bus between one bush-league town and the next.” He’d said that many times before. He claimed the stuff had loosened up his mind and helped him think like a Lizard.

But Jonathan shook his head. “I used to believe that was what did it for you, too. But I read the stuff. I started younger than you, ’cause we had it in the house and I knew ever since I was little what I wanted to do. I liked it, too. It was fun. And I got to study the Race in college, where you had to learn everything from scratch. You’re still better at it than I am-better than anybody else, too.”

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be Babe Ruth,” his father said. “The only times I ever got into a big-league ballpark, I had to pay my own way. You’re playing in the majors, son, and you’re a star. That’s not bad.”

“Yeah. I know.” Jonathan had his own fair share of the gray, middle-aged knowledge that told him he’d fallen somewhat short of the place he’d aimed at when he was younger. That was somewhat mitigated because he hadn’t fallen as far short as a lot of people did. But that his father held the place he’d aimed for and couldn’t quite reach… “I do wonder how Babe Ruth’s kid would have turned out if he’d tried to be a ballplayer. Even if he were a good one, would it have been enough?”

“I think Ruth had girls,” his father said.

Jonathan sent him an angry look. How could he misunderstand what I was saying like that? he wondered. And then, catching the gleam behind his old man’s bifocals, Jonathan realized he hadn’t misunderstood at all. He’d just chosen to be difficult. “Damn you, Dad,” he said.

His father laughed. “I’ve got to keep you on your toes somehow, don’t I? And if Babe Ruth’s son turned out to be Joe DiMaggio, he wouldn’t have one goddamn thing to be ashamed of. Do you hear me?”

“I suppose so,” Jonathan said. In a way, being very good at what he’d always wanted to do was not only enough but an embarrassment of riches. He’d been good enough-and so had Karen-to get chosen to come to Home, as his father‘d said. But that wasn’t all of what he’d wanted. He’d wanted to be the best.

And there was his father, sitting in this cramped little Lizard-sized room with him, slightly pie-eyed from all that almost-vodka he’d poured down, and he was the best. No doubt about it, they’d broken the mold once they made Sam Yeager.

How many human ballplayers had sons who couldn’t measure up to what they’d done? A good many. Most of them you never even heard about, because their kids couldn’t make the majors at all. How many had had sons who were better than they were? Few. Damn few.

His father said, “When it comes to this stuff, I can’t help being what I am, any more than you can help being what you are. We both put in a lot of hard work. I know what all you did while I was awake to see it. I don’t know everything you did while I was in cold sleep, but you couldn’t have been asleep at the switch. You’re here, for heaven’s sake.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan said in what he hoped wasn’t too hollow a voice. “I’m here.” He was an expert on the Race. He had busted his hump in the seventeen years after Dad went into cold sleep. And if expertise didn’t quite make up for genius, he couldn’t help it. His father was right about that.

“I’m going to ask you one thing before I throw you out and flop,” Sam Yeager said, finishing his drink and standing up on legs that didn’t seem to want to hold him. “If you want to blame fate or God or the luck of the draw for the way things are, that’s fine. What I want to ask you is, don’t blame me. Please? Okay?”

He really sounded anxious. Maybe that was the booze talking through him. Or maybe he understood just what Jonathan was thinking. After all, he’d had to deal with failure a lot larger than Jonathan‘s.

What would he have done if the Lizards hadn’t come? For all his brave talk, odds were he wouldn’t have made the big leagues. Then what? Played bush-league ball as long as he could, probably. And after that? If he was lucky, he might have hooked on as a coach somewhere, or a minor-league manager. More likely, he would have had to look for ordinary work wherever he happened to be when he couldn’t get around on a fastball any more.

And the world never would have found out the one great talent he had in him. He would have gone through life-well, not quite ordinary, because not everybody could play ball even at his level, but unfulfilled in a certain ultimate sense. Jonathan couldn’t say that about himself, and he knew it. He nodded. He smiled, too, and it didn’t take too much extra effort. “Okay, Dad,” he said. “Sure.”

Although Ttomalss had gone into cold sleep after all the Big Uglies who’d come to Home, he’d been awake longer than they had. His starship had traveled from Tosev 3 to Home faster than their less advanced craft. He called up an image of their ramshackle ship on his computer monitor. It looked as if it would fall apart if anyone breathed on it hard. That wasn’t so, of course. It had got here. It might even get back to Tosev’s solar system.

The psychologist made the image go away. Looking at it only wasted his time. What really mattered wasn’t the ship that had brought the Tosevites here. What mattered was that they were here-and everything that had happened back on Tosev 3 since they left.

He still didn’t know everything, of course-didn’t and wouldn’t. Radio took all those years to travel between Tosev’s system and this one. But, in the communications both Fleetlord Reffet, who led the colonization fleet, and Shiplord Kirel, who headed what was left of the conquest fleet after Atvar’s recall, sent back to Home, Ttomalss found a rising note of alarm.

It had been obvious even to Ttomalss, back during his time on Tosev 3, that the Big Uglies were catching up with the Race in both technology and knowledge. He’d assumed the Tosevites’ progress would plateau as time went on and they finally did pull close to even with the Race. He’d assumed, in other words, that the Race knew everything, or almost everything, there was to know.

That was turning out not to be true. Reports from both Reffet and Kirel talked about Tosevite scientific advances that had the psychologist wondering whether he fully understood the news coming from Tosev 3. He also began to wonder whether Reffet and Kirel and the males and females working under them fully understood what was happening on Tosev 3.

When he said as much to Atvar, the former fleetlord of the conquest fleet responded with the scorn Ttomalss had expected from him: “Reffet never has understood anything. He never will understand anything, and he never can understand anything. He has not got the brains of a retarded azwaca turd.”

“And Kirel?” Ttomalss asked.

“Kirel is capable enough. But Kirel is stodgy,” Atvar said. “Kirel has brains enough. What Kirel lacks is imagination. I have seen kamamadia nuts with more.” He rolled out one striking phrase after another that morning.

“What would you do, were you still in command on Tosev 3?” Ttomalss asked.

Atvar swung both eye turrets toward him. They were sitting in one of the small conference rooms in the hotel where the Big Uglies were staying. How many other conference rooms all across Home were just like this one, with its sound-absorbing ceiling tiles, its greenish brown walls-walls not far from the color of skin for the Race, a soothing color-its writing board and screen and connection to the planetwide computer network, its stout tables and not quite comfortable chairs? Only the fact that some of the chairs now accommodated Tosevite posteriors-not quite comfortably, from what the Big Uglies said-hinted at anything out of the ordinary.

After a pause, Atvar said, “Why do you not come for a walk with me? It is a nice enough day.”

“A walk?” Ttomalss responded as if he’d never heard the words before. Atvar made the affirmative gesture. With a shrug, the researcher said, “Well, why not?”

Out they went. It was a nice enough day. Atvar let out what sounded like a sigh of relief. “We were certain to be recorded in there,” he said. “Now that I am no longer in charge on Tosev 3, I do not wish to be quoted on what to do about it by anyone who could substantiate the record.”

“I see,” Ttomalss said. “Well, since I am not in a position to do that, what is your opinion on what to do in aid of Tosev 3?”

“That Reffet and Kirel are cowards.” Atvar’s voice went harsh and hard. “The Big Uglies are gaining an advantage on us. You know this is true. So do I. So does everyone else with eyes in his eye turrets. But the males allegedly leading on Tosev 3 have not the courage to draw the proper conclusion.”

“Which is?”

“You were there. You already know my view. We cannot afford to let the Big Uglies get ahead of us. They are already here with one ship. That is bad enough, but tolerable. All this ship can do is hurt us. If they send fleets to all our solar systems, though, they can destroy us. They can, and they might. We attacked them without warning. If they have the chance, why should they not return the favor? And so, as I proposed many years ago, our best course is to destroy them first.”

“That would also mean destroying our own colony,” Ttomalss said.

“Better a part than the whole.” Atvar used an emphatic cough. “Far better.”

“I gather Reffet and Kirel do not agree?”

“They certainly do not.” Atvar spoke with fine contempt. “They fail to see the difference between the purple itch, for which a soothing salve is all the treatment needed, and a malignancy that requires the knife.”

“You are outspoken,” Ttomalss observed.

“By the spirits of Emperors past, Senior Researcher, I feel here what Straha must have felt back on Tosev 3 before he tried to oust me,” Atvar exclaimed.

Ttomalss hissed in astonishment. Shiplord Straha had been so disgusted over the way the conquest fleet was being run that, after his attempt to supplant Atvar failed, he’d defected to the American Big Uglies. He’d later returned to the Race with news from Sam Yeager that the Americans had been the ones to attack the colonization fleet. Nothing less than news like that could have restored him to the fleetlord’s good graces, or even to a semblance of them.

Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “By the spirits of Emperors past, it is a truth. During the fighting, Straha saw how genuinely dangerous the Big Uglies were, and wanted to use radical measures against them. I, in my infinite wisdom, decided this was inappropriate-and so we did not completely defeat them. Now I am the one who sees the danger, and no one here on Home or on Tosev 3 appears willing to turn an eye turret in its direction.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, you are not the only one who sees it,” Ttomalss said. “Looking at the reports coming from Tosev 3, what strikes me is their ever more frightened tone.”

“Another truth,” Atvar said. “All the more reason for us to eliminate the menace, would you not agree? I have had an audience with the Emperor. Even he realizes we have to find some way to deal with the Big Uglies.”

“Some years ago, I think, annihilating the Big Uglies might well have been the appropriate thing to do,” Ttomalss replied. Atvar hissed angrily. He liked hearing disagreement no better than he ever had. Ttomalss said, “Listen to me, if you please.”

“Go on.” Atvar did not sound like a male who was going to listen patiently and give a reasoned judgment on what he heard. He sounded much more as if he intended to tear Ttomalss limb from limb.

All the same, the psychologist continued, “Unless I am altogether mistaken in my reading of the reports from Tosev 3, I think one reason Reffet and Kirel hesitate to apply your strategy is that they fear it will not work, and it will provoke the independent Tosevites.”

“What do you mean, it will not work?” Atvar demanded. “If we smash the not-empires, they will stay smashed. The Empire will no longer have to worry about them-and a good thing, too.”

“It might well be a good thing, if we could be sure of doing it,” Ttomalss said. “By the latest reports from Tosev 3, though, the Big Uglies are now ahead of us technologically in many areas, ahead of us to the point where Reffet and Kirel are close to despair. We are not innovators, not in the same way the Tosevites are. And we have only a small scientific community on Tosev 3 in any case. It is a colonial world. The center of the Empire is still Home. At the moment, unless I am badly mistaken, the Big Uglies could beat back any attack we might try. Whether we could do the same if they attacked us is a different question, and likely one with a different answer.”

“Has it come to that so soon?” Atvar said. “I would have believed we had more time.”

“I am not certain, but I think it has,” Ttomalss said. “I am also not certain the Big Uglies fully realize their superiority. If they were to defeat an attack from the Race…”

“They would become sure of something they now only suspect? Is that what you are saying?”

Ttomalss paused till a female wearing blue false hair between her eye turrets got too far away to hear. Then, unhappily, he used the affirmative gesture and said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I am afraid it is. If not, then I am misreading the reports beamed here from Tosev 3.”

“I have been reading those same reports,” Atvar said. “I did not have that impression. And yet…” He paused, then strode out ahead of Ttomalss, his tailstump twitching in agitation. The psychologist hurried to catch up with him. Atvar swung one eye turret back toward Ttomalss. With obvious reluctance, the fleetlord slowed. When Ttomalss came up beside him once more, he asked, “Have you also been reading translations of the reports the American Big Uglies have sent this way for the benefit of their starship and its crew?”

“I have seen some of those translations,” Ttomalss said cautiously. “I do not know how reliable they are.”

“Well, that is always a concern,” the fleetlord admitted. “We have sent back an enormous amount of data on Tosev 3, including video and audio. But none of the so-called experts here has ever seen a real live Big Ugly before now except possibly Kassquit, the irony being that she speaks only the language of the Race.”

“Kassquit is… what she is. I often marvel that she has as much stability as she does,” Ttomalss said. “Hoping for more would no doubt be excessive. But I am sorry. You were saying?”

“I was saying that, having read the translations, I was struck by how confident the American Big Uglies seem,” Atvar said. “They appear to respect the Race’s power on Tosev 3-as who not utterly addled would not? — but they do not appear to be in the least afraid of it.” His tailstump trembled some more. “This may support your view.”

“Are any officials who have never been to Tosev 3 aware of these concerns?” Ttomalss asked. “The ones pertaining to conditions on the planet, I mean, not those involving the American Big Uglies here.”

Atvar’s mouth fell open in a laugh. He waggled his lower jaw back and forth, which meant the laugh was sardonic. “Officials here who have never been to Tosev 3 are not aware of anything, Senior Researcher,” he said. “Anything, do you hear me? Why do you suppose they have you and me and even Kassquit negotiating with the wild Big Uglies? They are not competent.”

“At least they know that much,” Ttomalss said. As reassurances went, that one fell remarkably flat.

Colonel Glen Johnson floated in the Admiral Peary ’s control room, watching Home go round below him. That was an illusion, of course; the starship revolved around the planet, not the reverse. But his habits and his way of thinking were shaped by a language that had reached maturity hundreds of years before anyone who spoke it knew about or even imagined spaceflight.

He shared the control room with Mickey Flynn. “Exciting, isn’t it?” Flynn remarked. He yawned to show just how exciting it was.

“Now that you mention it, no.” Johnson peered out through the coated glass. There might have been nothing between him and the surface of Home. The Lizards’ world had less in the way of cloud cover than Earth, too, so he could see much more of the surface. Grasslands, mountains, forests, seas, and lots and lots of what looked like desert to a merely human eye rolled past. On the night side of the planet, the Race’s cities shone like patches of phosphorescence. He said, “I used to love the view from up high when I was in a plane or a ship in Earth orbit. Hell, I still do. But…” He yawned, too.

“I never thought I would know how Moses felt,” Flynn said.

“Moses?” Johnson contemplated his fellow pilot instead of the ever-changing landscape down below. “I hate to tell you this, but you don’t look one goddamn bit Jewish.”

“No, eh? I’m shocked and aggrieved to hear it. But I wasn’t thinking of looks.” Flynn pointed down to Tau Ceti 2. “We’ve brought our people to the Promised Land, but we can’t go into it ourselves.”

“Oh.” Johnson thought that over, then slowly nodded. “Yeah. I’ve had that same thought myself, as a matter of fact, even though it’s been a hell of a long time since I went to Sunday school.” It was a pretty fair comparison, no matter who made it. He wondered how long he’d last under full gravity. Not long-he was sure of that. And he wouldn’t have much fun till the end finally came, either.

Mickey Flynn said, “I wonder if God reaches this far, or if the spirits of Emperors past have a monopoly here.”

“The Lizards are sure their spirits reach to Earth, so God better be paying attention here just to even things out,” Johnson said.

When he was a kid, even when he was a young man, he’d really believed in the things the preacher talked about in Sunday sermons. He wondered where that belief had gone. He didn’t quite know. All he knew was, he didn’t have it any more. Part of him missed it. The rest? The rest didn’t much care. He supposed that, had he cared more, he wouldn’t have lost his belief in the first place.

His gaze went from the ever-unrolling surface of Home to the radar screen. As always, the Lizards had a lot of traffic in orbit around their homeworld. The radar also tracked several suborbital shuttlecraft flights. Those looked a lot like missile launches, so he noticed them whenever they went off. As long as the alarm that said something was aimed at the Admiral Peary didn’t go off, though, he didn’t get too excited.

Actually, by comparison with the orbital traffic around Earth, Home was pretty tidy. The Lizards were neat and well organized. They didn’t let satellites that had worn out and gone dead stay in orbit. They cleaned up spent rocket stages, too. And they didn’t have any missile-launching satellites cunningly disguised as spent rocket stages, either. Home wasn’t nearly so well defended as Earth. The Lizards hadn’t seen the need. Why should they have seen it? They were unified and peaceful. No other species had ever paid them a call in its own starships. Till now…

“In the circus of life, do you know what we are?” Flynn said out of the blue.

“The clowns?” Johnson suggested.

“You would look charming in a big red rubber nose,” the other pilot said, examining him as if to decide just how charming he would look. Flynn seemed dissatisfied-perhaps not charming enough. After that once-over, he went on with his own train of thought: “No, we are the freaks of the midway. ‘Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and see the amazing, astonishing, and altogether unique floating men! They glide! They slide! They sometimes collide! And after one touch-one slight touch-of gravity, they will have died! One thin dime, one tenth part of a dollar, to see these marvels of science perform for you!’ ” He pointed straight at Johnson.

“If I had a dime, I’d give it to you,” Johnson said. “I remember the carnival barkers back before the war. Sweet Jesus Christ, that’s more than ninety years ago now. But you sound just like ’em.”

Mickey Flynn looked pained. “ ‘Talkers.’ The word is ‘talkers,’ ” he said with what seemed exaggerated patience. “Only the marks call them ‘barkers.’ ”

“How do you know that?” Johnson asked. After so long living in each other’s pockets on the Lewis and Clark, he thought he’d heard all the other pilot’s stories. Maybe he was wrong. He hoped he was. Good stories were worth their weight in gold.

“Me?” Flynn said. “Simple enough. Until I was three years old, I was a pickled punk, living in a bottle of formaldehyde on a sideshow shelf. It gave me a unique perspective-and very bad breath.”

He spoke with the same straight-faced seriousness he would have used to report the course of a Lizard shuttlecraft. He had no other tone of voice. It left Glen Johnson very little to take hold of. “Anyone ever tell you you were out of your tree?” he asked at last.

“Oh yes. But they’re all mad save me and thee-and I have my doubts about thee,” Flynn said.

“I’ve had my doubts about you-thee-a lot longer than the other way round, I’ll bet,” Johnson said.

“Not likely,” the other pilot replied. “When you came aboard the Lewis and Clark, I doubted you would live long enough to doubt me or anything else ever again. I thought Healey would throw you right out the air lock-and keep your spacesuit.”

Since Johnson had wondered about the same thing, he couldn’t very well argue with Mickey Flynn. He did say, “Nobody believes I had electrical problems at just the wrong time.”

“Healey believed you-or he wasn’t quite sure you were lying, anyhow,” Flynn said. “If you hadn’t done such a good job of faking your troubles, he would have spaced you, and you can take that to the bank.” He eyed Johnson once more. It made his expression look odd, since they floated more or less at right angles to each other. “Don’t you think you can ’fess up now? It was more than ten light-years and almost seventy years ago.”

Johnson might have confessed to Mickey Flynn. Flynn was right; what he’d done in Earth orbit hardly mattered here in orbit around Home. But Brigadier General Walter Stone chose that moment to come into the control room. Johnson was damned if he would admit anything to the dour senior pilot. He had the feeling that Stone wouldn’t have minded spacing him, either. And so he said, “I told you-I had wiring troubles at the worst possible time, that’s all. There is such a thing as coincidence, you know.”

Stone had no trouble figuring out what the other two pilots were talking about. With a snort, he said, “There is such a thing as bullshit, too, and you’ve got it all over your shoes.”

“Thank you very much-sir.” If Johnson was going to keep up the charade of innocent curiosity, he had to act offended now. “If you will excuse me…” He reached for a handhold, found it, and pulled himself from one to another and out of the control room.

Internally, the ship was laid out like a smaller version of the Lewis and Clark. Corridors had plenty of handholds by which people could pull themselves along. Intersecting corridors had convex mirrors that covered all approaches. Johnson used them, too. He’d seen some nasty collisions-Mickey Flynn hadn’t been kidding about that-and he didn’t want to be a part of one. You could get going at quite a clip. If you didn’t happen to notice that somebody else was barreling along, too…

His cabin was a little larger than the cramped cubicle that had gone by the name in the Lewis and Clark. His bunk was nothing more than a foam mattress with straps to keep him from drifting away. In weightlessness, what more did anyone need? A few people had nightmares of falling endlessly, but most did just fine. Johnson was glad he was, for once, part of the majority.

He didn’t feel like sleeping just now, though. He put a skelkwank disk into a player and started listening to music. Skelkwank light-a coherent beam of uniform frequency-was something humanity hadn’t imagined before the Lizards came. English had borrowed the word from the language of the Race. All sorts of humans had borrowed-stolen-the technology.

Johnson remembered records. He wondered if, back on Earth, even one phonograph survived. Maybe a few stubborn antiquarians would still have them, and museums. Ordinary people? He didn’t think so.

So much of the Admiral Peary used pilfered technology. Humanity had had radar before the Lizards came. People were beginning to work on atomic energy. But even there, the Race’s technology was evolved, perfected. Stealing had let humans evade any number of mistakes they would have made on their own.

Where would we be if the Race hadn’t come? Johnson knew where he would be in this year of our Lord 2031: he would be dead. But where would people be? Would the Nazis still be around, or would the USA and the Russians and England have smashed them? He was pretty sure the Germans would have gone down the drain. They were, after all, taking on the rest of the world without much help.

But even beaten, they were a formidable people. In the real world, they’d pulled themselves together after the Race’s invasion and again after the fight they’d stupidly picked with the Lizards over Poland in the 1960s. That had been a disastrous defeat, and had cost them much of their European empire. But they’d been recovering even when Johnson went into cold sleep, and reports from Earth showed they were working hard to reestablish themselves as a power to be reckoned with.

The Lizards worked hard to keep the Reich from violating the terms of the armistice they’d forced upon it. They had kept Germany from returning to space for a long time. But the Reich had quietly rearmed to the point where pulling its teeth now would only touch off another war. The Lizards didn’t want that. The last one had hurt them even though they won it. The Germans, by acting as if they weren’t afraid to take the chance of another scrap-and maybe, given Nazi fanaticism, they weren’t-had won themselves quite a bit of freedom of action.

Bastards, Johnson thought. But tough bastards. For the time being, though, the Germans would trouble the Race only back on Earth. Things were different for the Americans. They were here. Just a few minutes before, Johnson had watched Home through the glass of the control room.

And more American ships would be coming. The pilot was as sure of that as he was of his own name. The USA wasn’t a country that did things by halves. What would the Lizards do when almost as many American ships-and Russian ships, and maybe Japanese ships, too-as those of the Race flew back and forth between the Sun and Tau Ceti? For that matter, what would humanity do when that came true?

Ttomalss blamed his talk with Fleetlord Atvar for the worried interest with which he approached evidence of the Big Uglies’ growing scientific progress in the reports reaching Home from Tosev 3. And the more he looked, the more evidence he found. That didn’t surprise him, but didn’t leave him happy, either.

Some of the most recent reports alarmed him in a new way. When he’d stayed on Tosev 3, the worry had been that the Big Uglies were catching up with the Race in this, that, or the other field. That wasn’t what the scientists in the colonization fleet were saying now. Instead, they were writing things like, The Big Uglies are doing this, that, or the other thing, and we don’t know how. More and more often, the Race was falling behind.

Everything his own people did was refined and perfected and studied from every possible angle before it went into large-scale use. Their technology hardly ever malfunctioned. It did what it was supposed to do, and did it well. If something didn’t do what it was supposed to do, and do it all the time, they didn’t use it. They went into the unknown one fingerclaw’s width at a time.

The Big Uglies, by contrast, charged into the unknown with great headlong leaps. If something worked at all, they’d try it. If it was liable to fail and kill large numbers of the individuals who used it, they seemed to take that as part of the price of doing business. They scoffed at danger, even obviously preventable danger. When the Race came to Tosev 3, the Big Uglies had been making motor vehicles for a fair number of years. They’d made them, but they hadn’t bothered including safety belts. How many lives had that cost them? How many injuries? Whatever the number, the Tosevites hadn’t included them.

Their cold sleep followed the same pattern. It worked… most of the time. If the Tosevite called the Doctor died on the way to Home, well, that was unfortunate, but the Big Uglies hadn’t wanted to wait till the process got better. If they had waited, they wouldn’t have launched their starship in the first place.

Whenever Ttomalss found evidence of Tosevite advances beyond anything the Race could match, he passed it on to males and females in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. And those males and females, as far as he could tell, promptly forgot all about it. Whenever he asked for follow-up, they acted as if they had no idea what he was talking about. They didn’t quite laugh at him to his face. He would have bet they laughed at him behind his back.

He had spent a lot of years on Tosev 3. Maybe he’d picked up some small streak of perverse independence from the Big Uglies he’d studied for so long. Whatever the reason, he decided to forget about the males and females in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. He used the computer network to find the name and number of a physicist who taught at the local university.

Pesskrag didn’t answer the phone. Ttomalss left a message on her machine and waited to see if she would call him back. If she didn’t, he vowed to call another working scientist and, if necessary, another and another till he found somebody who would listen to him.

To his relief, the physicist did return his call the next day. When he saw her on the monitor, her youth astonished him. “I greet you, Senior Researcher,” she said. At least she wore no wig. “Do you really mean to tell me these Big Ugly things have made discoveries we have not? Excuse me, but I find that very hard to believe.”

“If you are interested, I would be pleased to send you the data to evaluate for yourself,” Ttomalss answered. “Please believe me when I tell you that you will not wring my liver if you persuade me I am worrying over nothing.”

“Send the data, by all means,” Pesskrag said. “I was amazed that these creatures could fly a starship, even a slow one. But that, after all, is something they learned from us. I will be even more surprised if they do prove to have learned anything we do not know.”

“I will send the data I presently have. More comes in all the time. Decide for yourself,” Ttomalss said. “One way or the other, I look forward to your evaluation.”

He transmitted the recent reports from Tosev 3. Technically, he probably wasn’t supposed to do that. The Imperial Office of Scientific Management had irked him enough that he didn’t care so much whether he was supposed to. He wanted answers, not proper bureaucratic procedures. Yes, the Big Uglies have corrupted me, he thought.

This time, Pesskrag did not call back for several days. Ttomalss wondered if he ought to try to get hold of the physicist again. That, he convinced himself, would show Big Ugly-style impatience. He made himself wait. He told himself he’d waited for years in cold sleep. What could a few days matter now? But when he’d lain in cold sleep, he hadn’t known he was waiting. Now he did. It made a difference.

He had just come back to his room from a negotiating session with the wild Tosevites when the telephone hissed for attention. “Senior Researcher Ttomalss. I greet you,” he said.

“And I greet you. This is Physics Professor Pesskrag.”

Excitement tingled under Ttomalss’ scales. One way or the other, he would find out. “I am glad to hear from you,” he said, and barely suppressed an emphatic cough. “Your thoughts are…?”

“My thoughts are confused. My thoughts are very nearly addled, as a matter of fact,” Pesskrag said. “I had expected you to send me a pile of sand, to be honest with you.”

“I am not a physicist myself. I have no sure way of evaluating it,” Ttomalss said. “That is why I sent it to you. All I can say is, males and females with some expertise were concerned about it on Tosev 3. Did they have reason to be?”

“Yes.” Pesskrag used an emphatic cough. “The Big Uglies are making experiments that never would have occurred to us. Some of these are large and elaborate, and will not be easy to duplicate here. Do you have more data than you provided me, by any chance?”

“I am sorry, but I do not,” Ttomalss said.

“Too bad,” the physicist told him. “Most of what you have given me is descriptive only, and not mathematical: it appears to be taken from the public press, not from professional journals. Even so, I would dearly love to see the results from some of these trials.”

“Is that a truth?” the psychologist asked.

“That is a truth.” Pesskrag used another emphatic cough.

“In that case, maybe you should see if you can duplicate these experiments here,” Ttomalss said. “Maybe you should pass this information on to other physicists you know. If you do not have the facilities to duplicate what the Big Uglies are doing, maybe a colleague will.”

“Do I have your permission to do that?”

“Mine? You certainly do.” Ttomalss did not tell the physicist his might not be the only permission required. He did say, “If they decide to attempt this research, I would appreciate it if they got word of their results back to me.”

“Yes, I can see how you might. Ah…” Pesskrag hesitated. “You do realize these experiments will not be attempted tomorrow, or even within the next quarter of a year? Colleagues will have to obtain materials and equipment, to say nothing of funding and permissions. These wings will spread slowly.”

“I see.” Ttomalss did, too-all too well. “Please bear in mind, though, and please have your fellow physicists also bear in mind, that these are liable to be the most important experiments they ever try. Please also bear in mind that the Big Uglies tried them years ago. The news is just now reaching us, because of light speed and because of whatever delay there was between the experiments themselves and when the Race learned of them. What you will be doing has been done on Tosev 3. Do we want to fall behind the Big Uglies? Do we dare fall behind them?”

“Until I looked at this, I would have said falling behind those preposterous creatures was impossible,” Pesskrag said. “Now I must admit this may have been an error on my part. Who would have believed that?” Amused and amazed, the physicist broke the connection.

Ttomalss was neither amused nor amazed. He knew the Big Uglies too well. He was alarmed. The natives of Tosev 3 had been bad enough when they knew less than the Race. They’d used everything they did know, and they’d had an overabundant supply of trickery, not least because, being disunited, they’d spent the last centuries of their history cheating one another whenever they saw the chance. They’d pulled even a while ago. Their current presence on Home proved that. If they ever got ahead…

If they ever get ahead, how will we catch up? Ttomalss wondered. The Big Uglies had started far behind, but they ran faster. They’d caught up. Could the Race hope to pick up its pace if the Tosevites ever got ahead? That was part of what Ttomalss was trying to find out.

What he did find out failed to encourage him. A few days after he sent the data to Pesskrag, he got an angry telephone call from a male called Kssott. Kssott worked in the Imperial Office of Scientific Management. “You have been distributing information that should have stayed confidential,” he said in accusing tones.

“Why should it stay confidential?” Ttomalss demanded. “Do you think that if you bury it in the sand it will never hatch? I can tell you that you are wrong. Among the Big Uglies, it has hatched already.”

“That is the information we most need to grasp with our fingerclaws and hold tight,” Kssott said.

“Why? It is a truth whether you admit it or not,” Ttomalss said angrily. “And if you do admit it, maybe you-we-can do something about it. If not, the Tosevites will keep on going forward, while we stay in the same place. Is that what you want?”

“We do not want to introduce unexamined changes into our own society,” Kssott said. “That could be dangerous.”

“Truth,” Ttomalss agreed sarcastically. “Much more dangerous than letting the Big Uglies discover things we have not. I have heard that the Big Uglies worry the Emperor himself. Why do they not worry you?”

Kssott said, “You are misinformed.”

“I most assuredly am not,” Ttomalss said, appending an emphatic cough. “I have that directly from a male who has it straight from the Emperor’s own mouth.”

All he got from Kssott was a shrug. “We have been what we are for a very long time. The Race is not ready for rapid change, nor capable of it. Would you disrupt our society for no good purpose?”

“No. I would disrupt it for the best of good purposes: survival,” Ttomalss said. “Would you keep it as it is so that the Big Uglies can disrupt it for us?”

“You find this a concern,” Kssott said. “The Imperial Office of Scientific Management does not. Our views will prevail. You may rest assured of that, Senior Researcher. Our views will prevail.” He sounded very certain, very imperial, very much a high-ranking male of the Race. Ttomalss wanted to kill him, but even that wouldn’t have done much good. There were too many more just like him.

As chief negotiator for the Americans, Sam Yeager sometimes had to put his foot down to be included on the junkets the other humans got to take. “I did not come here to sit in a conference room all day and talk,” he told one of the Lizards’ protocol officers. “I could do that back on Tosev 3, thank you very much. I want to see some of this world.”

“But did you not come here to negotiate?” the protocol officer asked. “I did not believe the purpose of your crossing interstellar space was tourism.”

The female had a point… of sorts. But Sam was convinced he did, too. “If Fleetlord Atvar and your other negotiators want to talk with me, I will gladly talk with them,” he said. “But let them come along on the journey, too.”

To the protocol officer, that must have seemed like heresy. But stubbornness won the day for Sam. And, once he’d won, once he was whisked off to the port city of Rizzaffi, he rapidly wished he’d let the protocol officer have her way. The prospect of visiting a seaside city on Home had seemed irresistible… till he got there.

To the Lizards, whose world was more land than water, ports were afterthoughts, not the vital centers they so often were on Earth. Rizzaffi, which lay on the shore of the Sirron Sea, proved no exception.

It also proved to have the nastiest weather Sam had ever known-and he’d played ball in Arkansas and Mississippi. Home was a hot place. The Lizards found Arabia comfortable. But most of this world was dry, which made the climate bearable for a mere human being.

Rizzaffi was a lot of things. Dry wasn’t any of them. Nigeria might have had weather like this, or the Amazon jungle, or one of the nastier suburbs of hell. You couldn’t fry an egg on the sidewalk, but you could sure poach one. Most of the buildings in the port were of highly polished stone. Things that looked like ferns sprouted from their sides anyway. Mossy, licheny growths spread across them and even grew on glass.

The Lizards routinely used air conditioning in Rizzaffi, not to cut the heat but to wring some of the water out of indoor air. That did them only so much good. Every other advertisement in the town seemed to extol a cream or a spray to get rid of skin fungi.

“You know what this place is?” Frank Coffey said after their first day of looking around.

“Tell me,” Sam said. “I’m all ears.”

“This is where athlete’s foot germs go to heaven after they die.”

“If you think I’ll argue with you, you’re nuts,” Sam said. It had never quite rained during the first day’s tour. But it had never quite not rained, either. It was always mist or drizzle or fog, the sky an ugly gray overhead.

Rizzaffi reminded him of a classic science-fiction story about the mad jungles of Venus, Stanley Weinbaum’s “Paradise Planet.” Venus wasn’t like that, of course, but Weinbaum hadn’t known it wasn’t. He’d died a few years before the Lizards came to Earth. He’d barely made it to thirty before cancer killed him. News of his death had hit Sam hard; they’d been close to the same age.

He thought about mentioning “Paradise Planet” to Coffey. After a moment, he thought again. The younger man hadn’t been born when the story came out. To Coffey, Venus had always been a world with too much atmosphere, a world with the greenhouse effect run wild, a world without a chance for life. He wouldn’t be able to see it as Weinbaum had imagined it when jungles there were not only possible but plausible. And that, to Sam, was a shame.

As he discovered the next day, even the plants in Rizzaffi’s parks were like none humanity had ever seen. The trees were low and shrubby, as they were most places on Home. They had leaves, or things that might as well have been leaves, growing directly from their branches rather than from separate twigs or stalks. But those leaves were of different color and shape from the local ones with which Sam was familiar. Stuff that looked something like grass and something like moss grew on the ground below the treeish things. An animal that resembled nothing so much as a softshell turtle with a red Joseph Stalin mustache jumped into a stream before Sam got as good a look at it as he wanted.

“What was that thing?” he asked their guide.

“It is called a fibyen,” the Lizard answered. “It feeds in the mud and gravel at the bottom of ponds and creeks. Those tendrils above its mouth help tell it what its prey is.”

Frank Coffey said, “It looked like something I’d see Sunday morning if I drank too much Old Overcoat Saturday night.”

He spoke in English. The guide asked him to translate. He did, as well as he could. The translation failed to produce enlightenment. After a good deal of back-and-forth, the guide said, “Alcohol does not affect us in this particular way, no matter how much of it we drink.”

“Lucky you,” Coffey said.

Before that could cause more confusion still, Sam said, “I have a question.”

“Go ahead,” the Lizard replied with some relief.

“You have sent many of your creatures from a dry climate from Home to Tosev 3, to make parts of our planet more like yours,” Yeager said. The guide made the affirmative gesture. Sam went on, “Why have you not also sent creatures like the fibyen and the plants here in Rizzaffi? Tosev 3 has many areas where they might do very well.”

“Why? I will tell you why: because you Tosevites are welcome to areas like this.” The guide’s emphatic cough said how welcome humans were to such places. “Some of us must live here in this miserable place, but we do not like it. I do not believe anyone who was not addled from hatching could like it. And that reminds me…” The Lizard’s eye turrets swiveled in all directions, though how far he could see through Rizzaffi’s swirling mist was a good question.

“Yes?” Sam asked when the guide didn’t say anything for some little while.

“Have you Big Uglies got any ginger?” the Lizard demanded. “That wonderful herb helps me forget what a miserable, damp, slimy hole this is. I would give you anything you like for a few tastes, and I am sure I am far from the only one who would.”

“Well, well,” Frank Coffey said. “Isn’t that interesting?” This time, he didn’t translate from English to the Race’s language.

“That’s one word,” Sam said, also in English. This wasn’t the first time humans had got such a request. He wondered how to answer the guide. Really, though, only one way was possible: “I am very sorry, but we are diplomats, not ginger smugglers. We have no ginger. We would not give it out if we did, because it is against your laws.” What else could he say, when he wasn’t sure if this Lizard was an addict or a provocateur?

The guide let out a disappointed hiss. “That is most unfortunate. It will make many males and females very unhappy.”

“A pity,” Sam said, meaning anything but. “Perhaps we should go back to the hotel now.”

“Yes,” the Lizard said. “Perhaps we should.”

With the air conditioning going full blast, the hotel was merely unpleasant. After hot wet weather, hot dry weather seemed a godsend. The sweat that had clung greasily to Sam’s skin evaporated. Then salt crusts formed instead, and he started to itch. For a human, showering in a stall made for Lizards was an exercise in frustration. Apart from the force of the stream, it involved bending low and banging one’s head against the ceiling over and over. Yeager wouldn’t have liked it when he was young. Now that he was far from young and far from limber, it became an ordeal. But he endured it here for the sake of getting clean.

He ate in the hotel refectory. He didn’t think it deserved to be called a restaurant. As usual, the food was salty by Earthly standards. That probably wasn’t good for his blood pressure, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He fretted about it less today than he would have most of the time. He’d sweated out enough salt to need replenishing.

And he could get pure alcohol and dilute it to palatability with water. Nobody here knew anything about ice cubes. The Race cared nothing for cold drinks. But warm vodka was better than no vodka at all.

His son had a sly look in his eye when he asked, “Well, Dad, aren’t you glad you came along?”

“If Home needed an enema, they’d plug it in right here,” Sam replied, which made Jonathan choke on his drink. The older Yeager went on, “Even so, I am glad I came. When will I ever get the chance to see anything like this again? How many people have ever seen a fibyen?”

“I didn’t even get to see it,” Jonathan said. “But you know what else? I’m not going to lose any sleep about missing it.”

“I lose enough sleep to sleeping mats,” Sam said. “Kassquit may not have any trouble with them, but she’s been sleeping on them all her life. Me?” He shook his head and wiggled and stretched. Something in his back crunched when he did. That felt good, but he knew it wouldn’t last.

Outside, lightning flashed. Now real rain started coming down-coming down in sheets, in fact. Sam knew the Lizards did a good job of soundproofing their hotels. The thunderclap that followed hard on the heels of the lightning still rattled his false teeth.

Karen Yeager said, “This is a part of Home none of the Lizards who came to Earth ever talked much about.”

“I can see why, too,” Jonathan said. “How many people brag about coming from Mobile, Alabama? And this place makes Mobile look like paradise.”

Sam, who’d been through Mobile playing ball, needed to think about that. Mobile was pretty bad. But his son had it right. And if that wasn’t a scary thought, it would do till a really spooky one came along.

“Makes you see why the Race doesn’t care much about ships, too,” Jonathan added. “I wouldn’t want to live here, either.”

“I had the same thought,” Sam said. “But their ports can’t all be like this. Sure, Mobile is a port, but so is Los Angeles.”

“Good point,” Jonathan allowed. He suddenly grinned. “They’ve sent us to the South Pole, and now to this place. Maybe they’re trying to tell us they really don’t want us gallivanting all over the landscape.”

“Maybe they are. Too bad, in that case,” Sam said. “Even Rizzaffi is interesting, in a horrible kind of way.”

“Sure it is,” his son said. “Besides, the more the Race shows us they don’t want us to do something, the likelier we are to want to do it. Sort of reminds me of how I felt about you and Mom when I was sixteen.”

“It would,” Sam said darkly, and they both laughed. They could laugh now. Back then, Sam had often wanted to clout his one and only son over the head with a baseball bat. It had probably been mutual, too. Sure it was, Sam though. But, by God, he was the one who really had it coming. Not me. Of course not me.