Second Contact

13

“No, I’m sorry, Karen,” Major Sam Yeager said into the telephone, “but I can tell you right now that Jonathan isn’t going to be around tomorrow night. There’s a reception scheduled downtown, and he’s got to be there with Barbara and me.”

“Oh,” Karen said in a dull voice, and then, “Is it another reception for these Chinese women? I’d thought they’d have gone home by now.”

“Not for a while yet,” Yeager answered, which, he realized too late, was probably more than he should have said.

“The one my age-” Karen began. After a moment, she sighed and said, “I’d better go. I’ve got studying to do. Goodbye, Mr. Yeager.”

“Goodbye,” Sam said, but he was talking into a dead telephone. With a sigh of his own, he hung up. Sitting on the bed beside him, Barbara gave him a quizzical look. He shook his head. “Karen’s jealous of Liu Mei, that’s what it is.”

“Oh, dear.” Barbara raised an eyebrow. “Does she have reason to be jealous, do you think?”

“Why are you asking me? The one you need to ask is Jonathan.” Yeager held up a hasty hand. “I know, I know-he’ll say, ‘None of your business.’ I probably would have said the same thing when I was his age-but when I was nineteen, I was out on the road playing ball, making my own living.”

“Not so easy to do that nowadays,” Barbara said.

“No, especially if you can’t hit a curveball,” Sam said, a little sadly. Jonathan wasn’t a terrible sandlot player, but he’d never make a pro, not in a million years.

Barbara said, “Maybe he is sweet on Liu Mei. You used to have to drag him to these receptions. Now he goes without any fuss, and the two of them do spend a lot of time together.”

“I know. Wouldn’t that be something, though?” Yeager shook his head in slow wonder. “Bobby Fiore’s kid…”

“Who is half Chinese,” Barbara said with brisk feminine practicality. “Who was raised in China-except when she was raised by the Lizards-who doesn’t speak much English, and who’s going back to China some time in the not too indefinite future.”

“You know all that,” Sam said. “I know all that. Jonathan knows all that, too. Question is, does he care?”

He got another chance to find out the next evening, when he and Barbara and Jonathan piled into the Buick to go up to the reception at City Hall. The building dominated the Los Angeles skyline, being the only one permitted to exceed the twelve-story limit enforced from fear of earthquakes.

People still turned out to meet and be seen with Liu Han and Liu Mei: the local Chinese community, politicians, military men, and the kind of people Sam had come to think of as prominent gawkers. He’d been astonished to meet John Wayne at one of these bashes. Barbara’s only comment was, “Why couldn’t it have been Cary Grant?”

Here and now, Sam got a drink, made a run at the buffet, and dutifully circulated through the crowd. If he ended up in a knot of men in uniform, that was no great surprise. The officers’ wives formed a similar knot a few feet away.

After a while, Liu Han gave a little speech about how much China in general and the People’s Liberation Army in particular needed American help. Her English was better than it had been when she got to the USA the summer before. When she sat down, the mayor of Los Angeles got up and made a much longer speech covering the same points.

Actually, Sam only thought it covered the same points, for he soon stopped listening. Turning to the colonel next to him, he murmured, “Sir, isn’t there something against this in the Geneva Convention?”

The colonel snorted. “We’re not prisoners of war,” he said, and then paused. “It does seem that way, though, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” Yeager answered. “And to think: I could be at the dentist’s office now.”

That won him another snort from the colonel, a big, bluff fellow with pilot’s wings and the rocket that showed he’d flown in space. “You’re a dangerous man-though not half as dangerous as the windbag up there.”

“He’ll shut up sooner or later,” Sam said. “He has to… doesn’t he?”

Eventually, the mayor did descend from the podium. He got a heartfelt round of applause, and looked delighted. Sam shook his head. The damn fool couldn’t tell the audience was cheering not because of anything he’d said but because he’d finally stopped saying it.

“That calls for a drink, Major,” the colonel said. “I never thought we ought to get hazardous-duty pay for these affairs, but I may just change my mind.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Eli Hollins.”

Yeager shook it. “Pleased to meet you, sir.” He gave his own name.

“Oh, the alien-liaison fellow.” Hollins nodded. “I’ve heard of you. Read some of your reports, too. Solid stuff in there; I used pieces of it when I was talking with the Lizards up in orbit.” He cocked his head to one side. “You get right inside ’em, seems like. How do you do that?”

A grin stretched across Yeager’s face. He was no more immune to praise than anybody else. “Thank you very much, sir,” he said. “How? I don’t know. You try to see things from a Lizard’s point of view, that’s all. You see what makes him tick, and then reason from that the way he would.”

“You make it sound easy,” Hollins said. “Any ten-year-old kid can fly a fighter plane-with about thirty years of practice.” He and Yeager finally made it through the crowd to the bar; after the mayor at last fell silent, a lot of people had decided they needed refreshing. Hollins ordered scotch for himself, then raised an eyebrow at Sam. “What’ll it be?”

“Let me have a Lucky Lager,” Yeager told the barkeep. Hollins covered both drinks. “Thanks again, sir,” Sam said. “Next round’s mine.”

“That’s a deal,” the flier said equably. He raised his glass. “Confusion to the Lizards-may we cause plenty of it.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Sam said, and did. “And we do cause ’em plenty. We have, ever since they got here. They figured they’d be knocking over savages, but we were already geared up for a hell of a big war. They’re still trying to figure that out. They’ll be trying to figure it out ten thousand years from now. That’s how they work: slow, patient, thorough.” He took another swig from his Lucky. “I’m going on like His Honor.”

“Yeah, but there’s a difference: you make sense, and he didn’t.” Eli Hollins studied Yeager. “The Lizards’ll still be figuring us out ten thousand years from now-if we don’t lick ’em first. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“Sir, you’re right,” Sam answered. “No question about it: you’re right. Sooner or later, we’ll have the edge on them. We come up with new things faster than they do, and they know it. Question is, do they give us the chance to use what we’ve got when we do start sliding past them?”

“Once we’re ahead of them, they won’t stop us.” Hollins had a fighter pilot’s arrogance, all right. He was fifteen years younger than Yeager, too. That also probably had something to do with it.

Yeager said, “If they think we can go after Home, sir, they’re liable to try to wreck Earth, destroy us as a species. I know they’ve talked about it. They’ve seen how dangerous we are now, and they aren’t stupid. They may have a better idea of where we’ll be a hundred years from now than we do.”

“That’s… interesting,” Hollins said. “Cold-blooded little bastards, aren’t they?”

“They don’t want to do it,” Sam said. “I think they’re more squeamish about mass murder than we are. The Nazis’ death camps almost made them turn up their toes. That’s one of the reasons they’ll go on hunting whoever blew up the ships from the colonization fleet till they catch ’em. I wouldn’t want to be in Himmler or Molotov’s shoes when that happens, either.”

“Makes sense to me.” Colonel Hollins finished his drink. “But steer on back to what you were saying before, why don’t you? If the Lizards are squeamish about mass murder, how come they’re thinking about wiping out Earth?”

“I asked Straha about that once.” Sam looked around, but didn’t see the shiplord here. “What he said was, ‘If you have a leg with a cancer in it, sometimes you have to cut it off to save the body.’ ” Yeager paused for effect, then added, “Can I get you that other drink now?”

“Don’t mind if I do-don’t mind if you do,” Hollins said, and Sam bought him another scotch. His own beer had some mileage left.

Sipping it, he looked around the City Hall reception room again. Barbara was talking with the mayor’s wife. Maybe that didn’t rate hazard pay; Sam hoped the lady was less dull than her husband. And Jonathan was having an animated conversation with Liu Mei. It was animated on his side, anyhow; her face never changed expression much.

Yeager turned back to Hollins; nobody in his family looked eager to flee, as sometimes happened. He polished off his beer, then said, “I’ve been poking around a little, trying to see what I can find out. If I can whisper something into a Lizard’s hearing diaphragm, maybe the Race will come down on the Russians or the Germans, and that’ll be the end of it. Nobody will have to look over his shoulder any more, and nobody will ever try such a dumb stunt again.”

Hollins’ voice was dry: “Tell you what, Major-you tend to your knitting and let the Lizards tend to theirs.”

“Well, yeah, sure,” Sam said. “Even Molotov’s a human being. Even Himmler’s a human being… I suppose. But I can think of a hell of a lot of Lizards I’d sooner have living next door to me than either one of them.”

“Damned if I’ll argue with you there,” Hollins said with a chuckle, “but there’s a hell of a lot of people I’d sooner have living next door to me than those guys, too. Like all the rest of the human race, for instance.”

“That’s true,” Sam admitted. “Other thing is, though, the Lizards are sort of distracted right now. They’re trying to decide what to do about ginger and what it does to their females. That’ll keep them busy for a while, unless I miss my guess. I’ve been trying to lend a hand, you might say.”

“I don’t know about a hand,” Colonel Hollins said. “I’d give ’em a finger any old day, though.” Sam laughed. Hollins went on, “Yeah, if sex won’t distract you, I don’t know what will. Here’s hoping they stay distracted for a long time, too.”

“They may,” Yeager said. “This isn’t like anything they’ve run into before. The ginger bomb somebody threw at Australia showed how big a problem it could be. And just being horny from one day to the next is confusing the heck out of them.”

“Good,” Hollins said. “We already drank to that once, remember? Let ’em stay confused. The more confused they are, the less time they have to go poking their snouts into our affairs. And that’s what it’s all about, Major.” He spoke with great certainty. Yeager got the idea he usually did.

“Yes, sir,” Sam said. It wasn’t as if Hollins were wrong. If he came down a little hard for human beings, well, why not? He was one. So was Sam. He still wanted justice done on the human beings who had committed the perfectly human crime of murder by blowing up the ships of the colonization fleet.

Rance Auerbach looked toward the border between the United States and Lizard-held Mexico. “I hear they’ve got dogs trained to sniff for ginger these days,” he said as Penny Summers eased the old Ford she’d bought one step closer to the checkpoint.

“Yeah, they’ve been doing that for a little while now,” Penny said. “Just don’t be a worrywart, okay? Whatever they’ve got, it doesn’t keep the stuff out-and it won’t keep this stuff out. Relax. Enjoy the ride.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Auerbach said. Penny laughed, but he hadn’t been joking. She had more in the way of balls than he did. He wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He’d been pretty much content to vegetate for years till she bounced back into his life. He didn’t know what to call what he was doing now, but it wasn’t vegetating. He was sure of that.

They crawled over the toll bridge from Rio Grande City south into Ciudad Camargo. The Mexican cops and customs men were working for the Lizards these days, but that didn’t mean they liked yanquis any better than they had before. “Purpose for coming here?” one of them demanded, pencil poised over a form.

“We’re tourists,” Auerbach answered. Penny nodded.

“Ha!” the customs man said. “Everyone who smuggles ginger, he says he’s a tourist.” If he thought he could rattle the Americans, he was barking up the wrong tree. Penny had played these games before, and Rance didn’t much care what happened to him. He leaned back in his seat and relaxed, as Penny had suggested.

Then the customs man whistled shrilly. Up came one of his pals, leading a female German shepherd on a leash. The dog sniffed all around the automobile. Auerbach’s breath came short-but then, it always did. Penny hid whatever jitters she had by lighting a cigarette.

When the dog didn’t start barking its head off, its handler led it away. The customs man waved the Ford forward. As soon as they were out of earshot, Penny turned to Auerbach and said, “See? Piece of cake. If I’m not smarter than a damn Mexican dog-”

“Takes one bitch to outfox another,” Rance said. Penny hit him in the arm, a gesture half friendly, half angry. After a couple of seconds, she decided it was funny and laughed.

Ciudad Camargo was a pleasant little town nestled in a green valley. Lots of cattle and a few sheep grazed in that green valley. The town itself smelled powerfully of manure. The road paralleled the Rio Grande till it got past San Miguel, then went inland. Away from the river, the countryside stopped being pleasant and green and turned into a sun-blasted desert.

“No wonder the Lizards like it here,” Rance said, sweat pouring off him. “Christ, it’s worse than Fort Worth, and I didn’t reckon anything could be.”

“It’s hot, all right,” Penny agreed. “But we’re going looking for Lizards, after all. Aren’t a whole lot of ’em in Greenland.”

“Just don’t let the car boil over,” Auerbach said. “I haven’t seen any other traffic on this miserable road. If we get stuck here, buzzards are liable to pick our bones.” He looked up into the bake oven of the sky. Sure as hell, several broad-winged black shapes floated on the currents of hot air rising from the ground. They didn’t have to work very hard to stay airborne, not in this weather.

“Don’t worry about it,” Penny said, which was like asking him not to worry about the endless gnawing pain in his leg. She could ask, but that didn’t mean she’d get what she asked for.

Smoking one cigarette after another, she drove south with assurance. Every so often, the Ford would go past a farm where a family tried to scratch out a living without enough land, water, or livestock. Back in the States, hardly anyone plowed with mules any more. Here, even having a mule looked to be a mark of some prosperity. Children stared at the battered old Ford as it went by. It was almost as alien to them as one of the Lizard’s starships would have been.

A drunkenly leaning sign marked the border between the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon. The road ran into a bigger, better one running southwest from Reynosa. Penny turned onto that one. It went through a little town called General Bravo, and then, on the eastern bank of a trickle called the San Juan River, an even littler one implausibly called China.

On the western bank of the San Juan sat a Lizard town, tiny and neat and clean, the buildings sharp-edged and perfectly white, the streets all paved, everything in perfect order. The Lizards went about whatever business they had. A couple of them might have turned an eye turret toward the American car. Most paid no attention to it whatever.

“That’s new,” Penny said as she drove out of the Lizard town. “They are settling down to stay, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” Rance said harshly. “They’d be doing that on the other side of the Rio Grande, too, if we hadn’t fought ’em to a standstill.” Peering back over his shoulder hurt, but he did it anyhow. “Wonder if they’ve brought any crops from their planet that’ll grow around these parts. Too early to tell; they haven’t even been here a year yet.”

Penny looked over toward him-safe enough, with so little traffic on the road. “You think of all kinds of funny things, don’t you? I was just wondering how many Lizards in that place taste ginger.”

“That’s a sensible thing to wonder,” Auerbach said. “I’m full of moonshine, that’s all. You could have stopped and found out.”

He wasn’t serious. Luckily for him, Penny knew it. “Didn’t want to take the chance,” she answered. “Up ahead, I’ll be dealing with Lizards I know. That’s a lot safer-you bet it is.”

“Okay,” Auerbach said. “I’m just along for the company.” He slid closer to Penny, reached under her pleated cotton skirt, and ran his hand up the inside of her thigh all the way to her panties.

She laughed. “If a gal did that to a guy, he’d drive right off the damn road. We’ll have plenty of time for games later, all right?” She sounded almost like a mother trying to keep a rambunctious little boy in line.

The Lizard air base and antiaircraft missile station sat in the desert about halfway between China and Monterrey. Unlike the new colonists’ center, it had been there a long time; planes from it had undoubtedly flown against the United States during the fighting. The buildings were still neat and clean, but they’d lost something of that razor-edged look newer ones had. The comparison was easy to make, because some buildings close by were new.

“Colonists here, too.” Now Penny didn’t sound so happy. “I hope the Lizards I knew are still around. If they aren’t, that complicates things.” She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

She pulled the Ford to a stop next to one of the shanties of the little human hamlet that had grown up to serve the Lizards and the people who labored for them. When she got out, Auerbach did, too. The fellow behind the battered bar of what turned out to be a tavern looked up and addressed Penny not in Spanish or English but in the Lizards’ language: “I greet you, superior female. I have not seen you for too long.”

“I greet you, Esteban,” Penny answered in the same language. Auerbach followed it haltingly. She went on, “I need to see Kahanass. Is he still here?” When the Mexican nodded, she broke into a grin. “Can you get someone to tell him I am here?”

“It shall be done,” Esteban said, one phrase in the Lizards’ language almost everyone understood. He shouted in Spanish. When a teenage kid stuck his head in the door, he sent him off. Then, to Rance’s relief, he turned out to speak some English: “You want beers?”

“Oh, Christ, yes!” Rance exclaimed. He sucked down a blood-temperature Dos Equis as if it were the nectar of the gods.

Before too long, the teenager came back, a Lizard in tow. “I greet you, Kahanass,” Penny said. “I have things you may want to see, if you have things you can give me.”

Kahanass wore the body paint of a radar operator. “Truth?” he asked, another Lizard word with broad currency among humans. “I did not expect you to come back here with things for me to see, but I will look at them. If I like them, I may have things to give you.” He swung an eye turret toward Auerbach. “Who is this Tosevite? Have I seen him before? I do not think so. Can I trust him?”

“You can trust him,” Penny said. “He and I have mated. He has killed my enemies.”

“It is good,” Kahanass said. “Bring me these things, then, so I may look at them. If I like them…” His voice trailed away. People who bought and sold ginger spoke in circumlocutions. If someone was listening, if someone was recording, that made proving what they were up to harder.

“It shall be done.” Penny went out and opened the Ford’s trunk, returning with a couple of suitcases.

Kahanass recoiled from them. “Phew! What is that horrible stink?”

“Lighter fluid,” she answered in English. The Lizard evidently understood, for he didn’t ask her to explain. She went on, “It keeps the animals from smelling whatever else is inside. None of it got on whatever else is inside.” She opened a suitcase. “You can tell that for yourself, if you like.”

Kahanass took a taste. He hissed with pleasure. “Yes!” He used an emphatic cough. “Yes, I shall have things. I shall indeed. You wait here. Esteban has a scale. He will weigh out these things and weigh out the pay.”

“It shall be done,” Penny said as the Lizard hurried out of the tavern. She turned to Auerbach. “You see, sweetheart? No trouble at all.”

“Yeah.” Rance nodded. For the first time, Tahiti started to look real to him. He thought about island girls not overly burdened with clothing. A man could get used to that, even if he didn’t do anything but watch. And if he did… well, if he was careful, odds were he could get away with it.

Esteban took a scale out from under the bar and set it on the counter. It looked like the balances Rance had used in chemistry classes at West Point. Penny nodded at it. “We’re gonna be a while, weighing all I got on those litty bitty scales.”

“That’s okay,” Rance said expansively. “We haven’t got anywhere more important we’re supposed to be.” With money or gold or whatever the Lizards paid in straight ahead, all they had to do was get back across the border and into the USA again. And that was the easy part; as a general rule, folks didn’t smuggle things into the United States from Mexico, but rather the other way around.

Penny looked out the window. “Here he comes back again,” she said. “Boy, he didn’t waste any time there, did he? He wants some for himself, and he’ll sell the rest.”

“Sounds good to me,” Auerbach agreed.

In came Kahanass. “I will pay gold at the usual rate,” he said. “Is it good?”

“Superior sir, it is very good,” Penny said.

That was when things went to hell. A couple of Lizards with rifles burst into the tavern behind Kahanass. “You are prisoners!” they shouted, first in their own language and then in English. Three more burst in from a back entrance behind the bar. They also yelled, “You are prisoners! Do not move, or you are dead prisoners!”

Kahanass cried out in horror. Rance’s hand started to slide toward the waistband of his trousers. It didn’t get more than an inch or two before it froze. Unlike the bruisers in his apartment, the Lizards didn’t take him for granted. If he pulled out a pistol, they’d plug him.

He wondered what had gone wrong. Had the Lizards been watching Kahanass? Or had some of Penny’s former friends tipped them off that she might be going into business for herself? He glanced over to her. Her face was set and tense. Like him, she’d looked for a chance to fight and hadn’t seen any. He shrugged, which hurt. “Well, babe, so much for Tahiti,” he said, which hurt even worse.

When her telephone rang these days, Monique Dutourd flinched. Calls were all too likely to be from people with whom she didn’t want to talk. But she had to answer anyhow, on the chance things would be different this time. “Allo?”

“Hello, Monique,” came the quiet, steady voice on the other end of the line. She sighed. As if she didn’t know that voice better than she wanted to, it continued, “Ici Dieter Kuhn. I have an interesting story to tell you.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear from you at all. Don’t you understand that?”

“It is relevant,” the SS man said. “You would be well advised to listen to me.”

“Go ahead, then,” Monique said tightly. Kuhn could have done much worse than he had. She kept reminding herself of that. No doubt he wanted her to remind herself of that. If she terrorized herself, she did his work for him. She understood as much, but couldn’t help the fear.

“Merci,” Kuhn said. “I want to tell you about the inventiveness of a certain Lizard.” Monique blinked; that wasn’t what she’d expected. The German officer went on, “It seems a certain female recently agreed to taste ginger and come into season so males could mate with her-provided they first transferred funds from their credit balances to hers.”

It needed a moment to sink in. When it did, Monique blurted, “Merde alors! The Lizards have invented prostitution!”

“Exactly,” Kuhn said. “And what one has thought to do, others will think of before long. This will make the problem they face from ginger even worse than it is already. It will make the pressure on your brother even worse than it is already. He remains uncooperative, you know.”

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Monique answered. “If you don’t know that, you should. He doesn’t care whether I live or die.” In a way, saying that wounded her. In a different way, her words were like a paid-up life-insurance policy. If Pierre didn’t care what happened to her, and if the SS knew he didn’t care, they wouldn’t have any incentive to start carving chunks off her.

“Unfortunately, I believe you have reason,” Dieter Kuhn said. “Otherwise, we might have made the experiment by now.”

She did not, she would not, let him know he had frightened her. “If that is all you have to say, you wasted your time calling,” she told him, and hung up.

But going back to work after a call like that was almost impossible. The Latin inscriptions might have been composed in Annamese, for all the sense they made to Monique. And whatever she had been on the point of saying about them had gone clean out of her head. She cursed Kuhn both in standard French and with the rich galejades of the Marseille dialect.

Having done that, she spent a while cursing her brother. If he’d chosen a more reputable profession than smuggler, she wouldn’t be in trouble now. With a sigh, she shook her head. That probably wasn’t so. She might not be in this particular trouble right now. She would probably be in some other trouble. Trouble, her whole life argued, was part of the human condition-and an all too prominent part, at that.

She went back to the inscriptions. They still didn’t mean much. The Lizards thought humans very strange because the past of less than two thousand years before was different enough to be of interest. Almost all their history was modern history: history of well-known beings who thought much like them.

The knock on her door came two nights later. She was brushing her teeth, getting ready for bed. At that sharp, peremptory sound, she had to grab desperately to keep from dropping the glass. The Nazis did not let late-night knocks appear in books or films or televisor or radio plays. Such silence fooled no one Monique knew. The knock came again, louder than before.

Monique thanked heaven that she hadn’t yet changed into her nightclothes. Still in the day’s attire, she kept a shred of dignity she would have lost. Even so, she went to the door as slowly as she could. Had she not been sure the SS men outside would kick it in, she would not have gone at all.

She opened it. Of course none of the neighbors had come out to see what the racket was; they would be glad it wasn’t their racket. To her surprise, there in the hallway stood neither Dieter Kuhn nor his friends in field-gray uniforms and black jackboots but a dumpy, middle-aged Frenchman in baggy trousers and a beret that sat on his head like a cowflop.

“Took you long enough,” he grumbled in accents identical to her own.

Despite that, she needed a moment before she realized who he was, who he had to be. “Pierre!” she whispered, and grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside. “What are you doing here? Are you out of your mind? The Boches will be watching this place. They may have microphones in here, and-”

“I can find out about that.” Her brother took from a pocket a small instrument of obvious Lizard manufacture. He used a pencil point to poke a recessed button. After a moment, a light at the end glowed amber. “Unless the Germans have come up with something new, they aren’t listening,” he said. “For the love of God, Monique, how about some wine?”

“I’ll get it,” she said numbly. She poured a glass for herself, too. When she brought the wine back from the kitchen, she stared at the brother she hadn’t seen in two-thirds of a lifetime. He was shorter than she remembered, only a few centimeters taller than she. Of course, she’d been shorter the last time she saw him.

He was looking her over, too, with a smile she thought she remembered. “You look like me,” he said, his voice almost accusing, “but on you it looks good.” He glanced around the flat. “So many books! And have you read them all?”

“Almost all,” she answered. A lot of people who saw the crowded bookshelves asked the same question. But then she gathered herself and asked a question of her own: “What are you doing here? When we talked on the telephone, you wanted nothing to do with me.”

“Times change,” he answered, resolutely imperturbable. He had, no doubt, seen a lot of changes. With a shrug, he went on, “You must know what ginger does to female Lizards, n’est-ce pas?”

“Yes, I know that,” Monique said. “If you will recall”-she could not resist letting her voice take on a sardonic edge-“I was here when the SS man warned you the Lizards in authority would be more upset about your trade than you thought.”

“So you were.” No, Pierre was not easy to unsettle. In that, though Monique did not think of it so, he was very much like her. He went on, “Kuhn is not stupid. If the Nazis were stupid, they would be much less dangerous than they are. If they were stupid, we would have beaten them in 1940. Instead, we were stupid, France was stupid, and see what it got us.” Almost as an aside, he added, “The trouble with the Nazis is not that they are stupid. The trouble with the Nazis is that they are crazy.”

“And what,” Monique inquired, “if you would be so kind as to inform me, is the trouble with the Lizards?”

“The trouble with the Lizards, my dear little sister?” Pierre Dutourd finished his wine and set the glass on the table in front of him. “I should think that would be obvious. The trouble with the Lizards is that they are here.”

Startled, Monique laughed. “So they are. But would we be better off if they were not? The Nazis-the crazy Nazis-could have conquered the whole world by now, and then where would we be?”

“Trying to get along, one way or another,” Pierre answered. “That is all I ever wanted to do. I did not intend to become a smuggler. Who grows up saying, ‘I, I shall become a smuggler when I am a man’? I was working in a cafe in Avignon when it became clear the male Lizards were mad for ginger. I helped them get it and”-a classic Gallic shrug-“one thing led to another.”

“What do you want from me?” Monique asked. “You still have not told me that.”

“If I go home… if I go to any of the places I might call home, I believe I will end up slightly dead,” her brother answered with what was, under the circumstances, commendable aplomb. “As you will have gathered, the Lizards are less than happy with me and others in my trade right now. If they get their tongues on what I sell, then they are happy, but that is a different matter.”

“Do you want help from the Germans, then?” Monique asked. “I don’t know how much I can do. I don’t know if I can do anything.”

“Even though you are so fond of this Kuhn?” Pierre said. He sounded serious, damn him.

Monique was serious, too, and seriously furious. “If you weren’t my brother, I’d throw you out of here on your arse,” she snapped. “I ought to do it anyway. Of all the things you could have said-”

“It could be that I do not have reason here,” Pierre said. “If I am mistaken, I can only apologize.”

Before Monique could answer, someone else knocked on her door. This knock was soft and casual. It could have come from a friend, even a lover. Monique didn’t think it did. By the way he stiffened, neither did Pierre. His hand darted into a trouser pocket and stayed there. Monique said, “For what may be the first time in the history of the Reich, I hope that is the SS out there.”

“Yes, that is a curiosity, isn’t it?” her brother agreed. “Well, you had better find out, hadn’t you?”

She went to the door and opened it. Sure as sure, there stood Dieter Kuhn, bold as the devil. Behind him were three uniformed SS men, all carrying submachine guns. “May I come in?” he asked mildly. “I know who your company is. I assure you, I shall not be jealous.”

Too much was happening too fast. Monique stood aside. The SS men tramped into her flat and closed the door behind them. One spoke in German to Kuhn: “Now we do not have to look as if we captured you, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.” Monique’s spoken German was rusty but functional.

“Ja,” Kuhn agreed. “But if I came here in uniform, Professor Dutourd’s reputation among her neighbors would suffer.” He shifted back to French as he turned toward Pierre Dutourd: “We meet at last. Your scaly friends are less friendly now than they used to be. Did I not predict this?”

“Sometimes anyone can be right,” Pierre replied. “But yes, there are leading Lizards who want me out of the business I have been in.”

“We do not want you out of business,” Kuhn said. “We want you to go right on doing what you have been doing. Is this not agreeable to you?”

“Doing it under your auspices,” Pierre said glumly.

“But of course.” The SS man was cordial, genial.

“It must be that you don’t understand,” Monique’s brother said. “I had grown used to being free. I am one of the few people in the Reich who was.”

“You were one of the few people who was,” Kuhn returned, genial still. “But there is a difference between what you call unfreedom and what the Reich can call unfreedom. If you care to experience that, I assure you I can arrange it.” He nodded to his tough-looking henchmen. Monique’s heart leapt into her throat.

But Pierre sighed. “One does what one can do. One does only what one can do. Without you and without the Lizards, I cannot go on. Since the Lizards seem in a bit of a temper for the time being, I must place myself in your hands.” He sounded anything but overjoyed.

With the airtight door to his quarters shut, Ttomalss felt safe and secure. The Race had included such doors to the embassy in Nuremberg because the Deutsche were so proficient at manufacturing poisonous gases. But, when closed, the doors also kept out the females’ pheromones that had cast the Race into so much confusion.

Ttomalss wished he could stay in there and never come out. He had psychological training; he understood the concept of wanting to return to the egg. Most of the time, such desires were pathological. Here, though, he had solid practical reasons for viewing the outside world as a source of peril.

Had he so desired, he could have gone to the computer to find out how many of the workers at the embassy were females. The computer, unfortunately, could not tell him how many of those females tasted ginger. More did so every day, though; he was sure of that. And when they tasted, and for a while after they tasted, they went into their season.

And the pheromones they released stayed in the air, and excited any male who smelled them. Ttomalss, having almost fought the Race’s ambassador to the Reich, did not care to brawl again. Nor did he care for the half addled feeling even a thin dose of pheromones gave him. His eye turrets kept swinging this way and that, searching for ripe females who, frustratingly, were not there. And he had trouble thinking straight; the desire for mating kept clouding his mind, distracting him, teasing him.

His mouth fell open in a bitter laugh. Veffani had said the mating season would be sweet, back there at the start when Ttomalss and the ambassador both coupled with Felless for the first time. Veffani was a clever, cultured male, but seldom had any member of the Race made a greater blunder on Tosev 3.

At the computer, Ttomalss struggled once more with the problem the Deutsche posed the Race: not so much in the sense of physically endangering it, although this not-empire was dangerous, but in ideological terms. He could not grasp how and why intelligent, capable individuals would subscribe to what appeared to him to be such obvious nonsense. The Race had been grappling with that since the arrival of the conquest fleet, and grappling in vain.

He examined Felless’ notes on her talk with Eichmann and his own interview with the Big Ugly called Hoss. They were consistent with other data the Race had compiled on the Reich. The Deutsche, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, remained convinced they were genetically superior to other Tosevites; that the Deutsch word Herrenvolk translated as Master Race hatched endless sardonic mirth among Ttomalss and his fellows.

That the Deutsche put their theory into practice by attempting to exterminate those they judged genetically inferior had puzzled and horrified the Race ever since it came to Tosev 3. The government of the Reich had not changed its policy in all that time, either. The only reason its exterminations had slowed was the increasing scarcity within its borders of members of the proscribed groups.

Ttomalss dictated a note for the computer to record: “Recent interviews confirm that one reason the Deutsche have been able to succeed with their policy of extermination is the equally relentless policy of euphemism they use in connection with it. Big Uglies tend to focus on words as opposed to actions to a greater degree than is common among the Race. If they conceive themselves to be ‘carrying out a final solution’ rather than ‘killing fellow Tosevites of all ages and sexes,’ they do so without worrying about the truth behind the screen of words. A male or female of the Race, if faced with such a prospect, would be likelier to go mad.”

But the Tosevites are mad to begin with, he thought. Nevertheless, he left the note unrevised. No one-certainly no one among the Race-could argue against the madness of the Deutsch notempire. Unfortunately, no one could argue against the success of the Deutsch not-empire during the time just before and after the arrival of the Race, either.

What did that combination of success and madness mean? The most obvious answer was, a quick end to success. Pundits among the Race had been predicting that for the Greater German Reich ever since its noxious nature became obvious. So far, they’d been wrong. Anyone who chose anything obvious pertaining to Tosev 3 seemed doomed to disappointment.

He had just thought of something new to add to the note when the door hissed for attention. Whatever the thought was, it fled for good. He cursed in mild annoyance, then turned on the exterior microphone to ask, “Who is it?”

“I: Felless,” came the reply from the corridor.

Ttomalss felt like jumping out the window. Unfortunately, he would have bounced off it instead; it was made from an armored glass substitute. “Superior female, have you tasted ginger during the past day?”

“I have not,” Felless said. “I swear by the Emperor.”

“Very well.” Ttomalss cast down his eyes in automatic respect undimmed by living so long on Tosev 3. “You may enter.” He hit the control that opened the door. “If you are lying, we shall both regret it.”

As soon as Felless had come into the room, Ttomalss closed the door behind her. Not much air from the corridor could have come in with her, but he still got a whiff of pheromones. For a bad moment, he thought they were hers, and that she had lied to him. Then he realized he did not smell them strongly enough to send him into the full frenzy of the season, only enough to make him jumpy and edgy and acutely aware she was a female, where in normal times he would have ignored the sex difference.

“I greet you, superior female,” he said, as dispassionately as he could.

“I greet you,” Felless returned. Then she pointed. “The scales of your crest are trying to rise. I am not in my season now.”

With an effort of will, Ttomalss was able to make the offending scales lie flat. He did his best to quell the turmoil he could not help feeling. “No doubt it is someone else’s pheromones I smell, then, superior female,” he said. “And how may I help you today?”

Part of what he meant was, Could you have sent me a message and not disturbed me by coming in person? The pheromones had not-quite-addled him enough to make him say that out loud.

If Felless understood the subtext of the question, she gave no sign of it, which was probably just as well. She said, “I want to discuss with you the ideology of the Deutsch Big Uglies as it relates to their policy of massacring other groups of Tosevites of whom, for whatever obscure reasons, they fail to approve.”

“Ah,” Ttomalss said. “As it happens, I was just recording a few notes on that very topic.” She’d made him forget what he was going to say next, too, but he was not so pheromone-addled as to tell her that, either.

“I should be grateful for your insights,” Felless said, sounding more like a working member of the Race and less like a female in heat than she had for some time. Maybe she really was fighting the urge to taste ginger.

“Insights?” Ttomalss shrugged. “I am far from sure I have any of significance. I do not pretend to be an expert on the Deutsche, only a student of Tosevites in general who is attempting with limited success to apply that general knowledge to a particular situation more unusual than most.”

“You do yourself too little credit,” Felless said. “I have heard males speak of Tosevites with unusual insight into the Race. I think your experience in rearing Big Ugly hatchlings makes you the converse to these.”

“It could be so. I had hoped it would be so,” Ttomalss answered. “But I must confess, I am still puzzled by Kassquit’s reaction on learning you and I had mated.” He’d spent a good deal of the time since that unfortunate telephone conversation trying to repair the bond he had formerly established with the Tosevite fosterling. He remained unsure how far he had succeeded.

Felless said, “Mating, as I have been forcibly reminded of late, is not a rational behavior among us. Things relating to it must be even less subject to rational control among the Big Uglies.”

“Now that, superior female, is an insight worth having,” Ttomalss said enthusiastically. “It shows why you were chosen for your present position.” It was, in fact, the first thing he’d noted that showed why Felless was chosen for her present position, but that was one more thing he did not mention.

“You flatter me,” Felless said. As a matter of fact, Ttomalss did flatter her, but she offered the sentence as a conversational commonplace, and so he did not have to rise to it.

He had just finished recording Felless’ remark when the computer announced he had a telephone call. He started to instruct it to record a message, but Felless motioned for him to accept it. With a shrug, he did. The computer screen showed a familiar face. Kassquit said, “I greet you, superior sir.”

“I greet you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said, and waited for the sky to fall: she would be seeing not only his image but also Felless’.

To make matters worse, Felless added, “And I greet you, Kassquit.”

“I greet you, superior female,” Kassquit said in tones indicating she would sooner have greeted the female researcher as pilot of a killercraft equipped with tactical explosive-metal missiles.

“What do you want, Kassquit?” Ttomalss asked, hoping he could keep the conversation short and peaceful.

“It was nothing of great importance, superior sir,” the Tosevite he’d raised from a hatchling replied. “I see that you are busy with more important matters, and so will call back another time.”

Had he taught her to flay him with guilt in that fashion? If he hadn’t, where had she learned it? She reached for the switch that would break the connection. “Wait!” Ttomalss said. “Tell me what you want.” Only later, much later, would he wonder if she had moved more slowly than she might have, to make him beg her to stay on the line.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” she said now, and even her obedience wounded. “I was wondering if you, in the capital of the Deutsch not-empire, could hope to have any influence over the smuggling of the illegal herb ginger through the territory of the Greater German Reich.”

“I do not know,” Ttomalss said. “The Deutsche, like other Tosevites, have a habit of ignoring such requests. They would doubtless want something from us in exchange for acting otherwise, and might well want something we do not care to yield to them.”

“Still, the notion might be worth considering,” Felless said. Ttomalss had studied Kassquit for a long time. He knew her expressions as well as anyone of a different species could. This was, he thought, the first approval Felless had won from her.

Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker looked from his fitness report to Major General Walter Dornberger’s face. “Sir, if you can explain to me why my marks have slipped from ‘excellent’ to ‘adequate’ in the past year, I would appreciate it.”

That that was all he said, that he didn’t scream at Dornberger about highway robbery struck him as restraint above and beyond the call of duty. He was, he knew perfectly well, one of the best and most experienced pilots at Peenemunde. A fitness report like this said he’d stay a lieutenant colonel till age ninety-two, no matter how good he was.

Dornberger didn’t answer at once, pausing instead to light a cigar. When the base commandant leaned back in his chair, it squeaked. Unlike some-unlike many-in high authority in the Reich, he hadn’t used his position to aggrandize himself. That chair, his desk, and the chair in front of it in which Drucker sat were all ordinary service issue. The only ornaments on the walls were photographs of Hitler and Himmler and of the A-10, the A-45’s great-grandfather, ascending to the heavens on a pillar of fire, soon to come down on the Lizards’ heads.

After a couple of puffs and a sharp cough, Major General Dornberger said, “You should know, Lieutenant Colonel, that I was strongly urged to rate you as ‘inadequate’ straight down the line and drum you out of the Wehrmacht.”

“Sir?” Drucker coughed, too, without the excuse of tobacco smoke in his lungs. “For the love of God, why, sir?”

“Yes, for the love of God,” Dornberger said, as if in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. “If you think along those lines for a moment, a possible explanation will come to you.”

A moment was all Drucker needed. “Kathe,” he said grimly, and Dornberger nodded. Drucker threw his hands in the air. “But she was cleared of those ridiculous charges!” They weren’t so ridiculous, as he knew better than he would have liked. He chose a different avenue of attack: “And it was thanks to your good offices that she was cleared, too.”

“So it was,” the commandant at Peenemunde said. “And I called in a lot of markers to do the job. I had enough pull left to keep from throwing you out in the street, but not enough to let you keep rising as you should. I’m sorry, old man, but if you haven’t learned by now that life isn’t always fair, you’re a luckier fellow than most your age.”

One of the things Drucker had on his record-the one he bore in his head and heart, fortunately not the one that went down on paper-was joining with the rest of his panzer crew in murdering a couple of SS men in a forest near the Polish-German border to let their colonel and commander go free. As long as that old crime remained undiscovered, he was ahead of the game. That made the present injustice easier to tolerate, though not much.

With a sigh, he said, “I suppose you’re right, sir, but it still seems dreadfully unfair. I’m not that old, and I had hoped to advance in the service of the Reich.” That was true. Considering what the Reich had done to him and tried to do to his family, though, he wondered why it should be true.

If it weren’t for the Reich, we would all be the Lizards’ slaves today. That was also likely to be true. So what? Drucker wondered. He’d always set the personal and immediate ahead of the broad and general. Maybe, because he’d done that, he didn’t deserve to make brigadier, or even colonel. But that would have been a real reason, not the put-up job Dornberger was forcing on him.

“I can give you a consolation prize, if you like,” the base commandant said. Drucker raised a skeptical eyebrow. Dornberger said, “You will fly more this way than you would have had you gone on to promotion.”

Rather to his own surprise, Drucker nodded. “That’s true, sir. Only a consolation prize, though.”

“Yes, I understand as much,” Dornberger said. “But there are people in Nuremberg who are not at all fond of you. That you have come away with a consolation prize is in a way a victory. It is for you now as it was for the Reich and the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of the fighting: we kept what we had, but had to yield what we were not directly holding.”

“And we have been plotting ever since to see what sort of changes to that arrangement we can make,” Drucker said. “Very well, sir, I will accept this for now-but if you think I will stop trying to change it, you are mistaken.”

“I understand. I wish you all good fortune,” Major General Dornberger said. “You may even succeed, though I confess it would surprise me.”

“Yes, sir. May I please have the report back?” Drucker said. Dornberger pushed it across the desk to him. Drucker took a pen from his breast pocket and filled out the space on the form reserved for the evaluated officer’s comments with a summary of the reasons he thought the report inadequate. Nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred, that section of the form stayed blank even on the worst fitness reports. It was universally regarded as being the space where an officer could give his superiors more rope with which to hang him. Having already been hanged, Drucker did not see that he had anything left to lose.

When he finished, he passed the report back to Major General Dornberger. The base commandant read Drucker’s impassioned protest, then scrawled one sentence below it. He held up the sheet so the A-45 pilot could see: I endorse the accuracy of the above. W.R.D.

That took nerve, especially in view of the pressure to which he’d partially yielded when he wrote the fitness report. “Thank you, sir,” Drucker said. “Of course, most likely the report will go straight into my dossier with no one ever reading it again.”

“Yes, and that may be just as well, too,” Dornberger said. “But now you are on the record, and so am I.” He glanced toward a framed photograph of his wife and children on his desk, then added, “I wish I could have gone further for you, Drucker.”

He said no more, but Drucker understood what he meant. If he hadn’t yielded to at least some of the pressure, he might never have seen his family again. Even major generals could prove little more than pawns in the game of power within the Reich. Drucker sighed again. “It shouldn’t be this way, sir.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t, but it is. Sometimes we do what we can, not what we want.” Dornberger took out another cigar. “Dismissed.”

“Heil Himmler!” Drucker said as he rose. The words tasted like ashes in his mouth. He saluted and left the commandant’s office.

Outside the office, outside the administration building, Peenemunde bustled on as it had for the past twenty years and more. A breeze blew in from the Baltic, full of the odors of mud and slowly spoiling seaweed. Somewhere along the barbed-wire perimeter of the base, a guard dog yelped excitedly. It was, Drucker knew, more likely to have seen a stray cat than a spy.

Everything at Peenemunde was camouflaged as well as German ingenuity could devise, not so much against spies on the ground as against satellite reconnaissance. Many of the buildings weren’t buildings at all, but dummies of cloth and boards. Some of those even had heaters burning inside, to make them appear as they should to infrared detectors. And all the real buildings were elaborately disguised to seem like nothing but pieces of landscape overhead.

In a way, all that ingenuity was wasted. If the Lizards-or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks or the Americans-ever decided to attack Peenemunde, they weren’t likely to be clinical about it. An explosive-metal bomb would wreck camouflaged and uncamouflaged alike… although some of the reinforced-concrete installations underground would stand up to anything but a hit right on top of them.

Drucker shook his head. Everything here was as it had been. Only he’d changed. No, even he hadn’t changed. It was only that the Reich had just told him his adult lifetime of service to his country didn’t amount to a pile of potatoes. That hurt. He’d never dreamt how much it would hurt.

Officers of junior grade and enlisted men still stiffened to attention and saluted as he went past. They didn’t notice any changes: as far as they were concerned, a lieutenant colonel remained a figure of godlike authority. His mouth twisted. Eventually, he would be saluting some of them, for his place in the firmament was fixed now, while they might keep on rising.

Drizzle started falling, which perfectly suited his mood. He strode on through the base. A couple of A-45s stood at their gantries, in different stages of preparation for launch. Drucker nodded toward them. They were, in a way, the only friends he had left at Peenemunde. Major General Dornberger’s fitness report, as the commandant pointed out, did leave him clear to keep going into space. That was something: less than he would have liked, but something.

He gave the immense rockets another nod. In an odd way, they looked less futuristic than the old A-10s-vengeance weapons, Hitler had called them. A-10s had had the sharp noses and graceful curves everyone in the pre-Lizard days had thought necessary for rocket ships. The A-45s were simple cylinders, the upper stages as blunt-nosed as Bavarians. Blunt noses had more area with which to absorb the heat of atmospheric friction; cylinders were easier and cheaper to manufacture than the fancier chunks of sheet metal that had flown in the early days.

Drucker sighed. Here as elsewhere, reality proved less romantic than dreamers had thought it would be. He shook his head. Maybe things would have been better had the Lizards never come. With the Russians beaten and rolled back across the Urals, the Reich would have had all the Lebensraum it needed to show what it could do in Europe. Maybe he and Kathe and the children, instead of living near here, would be growing wheat or maize on the boundless plains of the Ukraine today.

A moment later, the daydream turned to nightmare. The SS could have plucked her off the plains of the Ukraine as readily as from Greifswald. As a simple farmer, he wouldn’t have had friends in high places. They’d have shot her or thrown her in a gas chamber. He’d kept that from happening in the real world. If he was upset at the fitness report’s wrecking his chances for further promotion, how would he have felt with Kathe liquidated?

That thought spawned another one, a blacker one. Liquidating Kathe for having a Jewish grandmother struck Drucker as outrageously unjust, but that was because he knew her and loved her. What about other people with one Jewish grandparent? Was liquidating them just? What about people with two Jewish grandparents? What about people with three? With four? What about people who were out-and-out Jews?

Where did you draw the line?

The Reich drew it at one Jewish grandparent. That left Kathe in danger and her children safe. Drucker hadn’t been able to see the sense in it. Would there have been more sense in drawing it at two Jewish grandparents? That would have left Kathe safe, but… Was there any sense in liquidating anybody because he was Jewish or partly Jewish?

The Reich thought so. Up till the trouble over Kathe, Drucker hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other. Now… Now he remembered that Colonel Heinrich Jager, for whom his elder son was named, for whom he’d helped murder a couple of SS Schweinhunde, had never had anything good to say about such massacres.

He’d helped Jager disappear into Poland with that pretty Russian pilot, and never heard of or from him since. Now, solemnly, he turned to the east-the southeast, actually-and saluted. “Colonel,” he said, “I think you may have been smarter than I was.”

Fotsev strode into the administrative offices of his barracks complex. A clerk looked up from his computer screen. “Name and pay number?” the male asked. “Purpose for coming here?”

“Purpose for coming here is to report before commencing three days’ leave, superior sir.” Fotsev put what was uppermost in his mind first. That done, he gave the clerk his name and the number that separated him from every other Fotsev ever hatched.

After entering the name and pay number into the computer, the male gave the affirmative hand gesture. “Your leave is confirmed: three days,” he said. “Will you be going into the new town?”

“Of course, superior sir,” Fotsev answered. “I have been away from Home, and from the way life was on Home, for a very long time now. I look forward to being reminded of it. From what other males have said, the new town is the best antidote possible for the mud and the stinks and the mad Tosevites of Basra.”

“I have heard the same,” the clerk said. “My leave time has not yet come, but it is approaching. When it arrives, I too shall go to the new town.” He pointed out the door. “The shuttle bus leaves from there. It should arrive very soon.”

“I thank you.” Fotsev knew where the shuttle bus left. He knew when, too. With barracks cleverness, he had timed the beginning of his leave to spend as little time as he could manage waiting for transportation.

As usual, the bus rolled up on time. Had it been late, he would have suspected Tosevite terrorism. Being late through inefficiency was a failing of the Big Uglies, not the Race. Fotsev and a small knot of similarly canny males waited for the fellows returning from leave to descend, then filed aboard.

With a rumble, the bus-of Tosevite manufacture, and so noisy and smelly and none too comfortable-rolled off down the new highway leading southwest. Big Ugly farmers grubbing in their fields would sometimes look up as it passed. Before long, though, it left the region river water irrigated and entered more barren country that put Fotsev in mind of Home. The plants that did grow here were different from the ones he’d known before going into cold sleep, but not all that different, not from the window of a bus.

He twisted, trying to find as comfortable a position as he could. After a while, he wrestled a window open, and sighed with pleasure as the mild breeze blew across his scales. This was the weather the Race was made for. With the Big Uglies and their noxious city and their even more noxious habits and superstitions fading behind him, he was ready to enjoy himself until he had to return to unpleasant, mundane duty.

“Look!” Another male pointed. “You can see the ships of the colonization fleet ahead in the distance. There is a sight to make a male feel good.”

“Truth!” Several troopers spoke at the same time. A volley of emphatic coughs rang through the bus.

“They were smart,” Fotsev said. “They gave the ships and the new town a good safety zone, so the local Tosevites will have a hard time sneaking up on them and doing anything frightful.” The converse of that was, all three independent Tosevite not-empires doubtless had explosive-metal-tipped missiles aimed at the ships and the town. But Fotsev chose not to dwell on the converse. He was on leave.

He thought about tasting ginger, but decided to wait till he got to the new town. Since finding out what the herb did to females, officers had acted like males with the purple itch. The driver was too likely to be watching for that sort of thing.

“No pheromones in my scent receptors,” another trooper remarked. “Such a relief to feel normal again, not to have mating in the back of my mind all the time. I can think straight again.”

Not one of the other males argued with him. Several voiced loud agreement. Fotsev didn’t, but he didn’t think the fellow was wrong, either.

The ships from the colonization fleet dwarfed the buildings of the new town, even the taller ones, so those buildings didn’t come into view till the males on the bus had seen the ships for some little while. When Fotsev spied the buildings, he let out a hiss of pleasure. “By the Emperor,” he said softly, “it really is a piece of Home dropped down onto Tosev 3.”

With a squeal of brakes, the bus stopped in the middle of the new town. The driver said, “You males have yourselves a good time.”

“How can we help it?” Fotsev said as he descended from the bus and rapturously stared this way and that. With every motion of his eye turrets, he catalogued new marvels. Paved streets. Better yet-clean paved streets. Buildings like the practical, functional cubes he’d known from hatchlinghood till the day when, in a Soldiers’ Time, he was made a soldier. Males and females of the Race strolling those streets and going into and out of those buildings. No guards, or at least no obtrusive ones. Perhaps best of all, no Big Uglies.

He sighed with delight. As he inhaled afterwards, he caught the pheromones of a distant female. She’d surely been tasting ginger. He sighed again, on a different note: half stimulation, half resignation. He shouldn’t have been surprised the chief vice for the Race on Tosev 3 had reached the new city, but somehow he was.

After a moment, he laughed at himself, a laugh full of mockery. He’d brought ginger here himself, to help make the leave more pleasant. If he’d done it, other males had done it. If other males had done it, some of the new colonists would have got ginger by now. And half those colonists, more or less, were females.

Instead of tasting as soon as he found a quiet place, as he’d intended, he strolled along the streets, looking into shop windows. Restaurants and places to drink alcohol were open and doing well. So were the establishments of males and females who sold services: physicians, brokers, and the like.

Few manufactured goods were yet on sale. After a moment, Fotsev corrected himself about that. Few goods manufactured by the Race were yet on sale. Factories hadn’t had a chance to start producing. He did see Tosevite goods for sale, imported from one or another of the not-empires whose technical standards were higher than those prevailing around Basra.

He made a discontented noise. He wouldn’t have wanted to watch a Tosevite televisor, even if the Big Uglies had borrowed, or rather stolen, the technology from the Race. On the other fork of the tongue, if it was a choice between a Tosevite televisor and none, as it would be for a while… He made another discontented noise. If the Big Uglies could manufacture televisors more cheaply than the Race, what would the males and females who would have made them do? That was not a problem the colonization fleet would have worried about before leaving Home. As far as anyone knew then, the Big Uglies had no manufacturing capacity.

If only it were so, Fotsev thought. He’d had too many painful lessons about what the Tosevites could do. And he hadn’t had a particularly hard time of it, not as the fighting went. Other males told stories much worse than any he had.

Still, thinking about what he’d seen over the years since the conquest fleet arrived was enough to tempt him to reach for one of the vials of ginger he carried in his belt pouch. With a distinct effort of will, he checked himself. He’d have time later. He wouldn’t have tasted back on Home, and he was trying his best to pretend he was there now.

What would he have done? He would have gone and drunk some distilled potation. He could do that here, easily enough. He strolled into one of the places that sold such potations.

As per custom immemorial, it was dark and quiet inside. What light there was suited his eyes better than the somewhat harsher glare of the star Tosev. Several males from the new city sat on chairs and stools, talking about work and friends, as they would have back on Home.

Fotsev walked up to the server. The bottles behind the male were all of Tosevite manufacture. Fotsev supposed he shouldn’t have been disappointed. As with realizing ginger had reached the new town, he was. He gave the server his account card. “Let me have a glass from that one there,” he said, pointing to the drink he wanted. “I have had it before, and it is not bad.”

The server billed his card, then gave him the drink. The price he had to pay for it disappointed him, too. He could have got the like from a Big Ugly in Basra for half as much in barter. He’d heard the local Tosevites’ superstition forbade them from drinking alcohol, but had seen little proof of it.

But some of the things he was paying for here were a room that suited his kind and getting away from the Big Uglies. He raised his glass in salute. “To the Emperor!” he exclaimed, and drank.

“To the Emperor,” the server echoed, and cast down his eyes, as he should have done. Then, after reading Fotsev’s body paint, he said, “I would have thought you soldiers would forget the Emperor after so many years on this miserable planet.”

“That could never happen,” Fotsev said with an emphatic cough. “If I do not remember him, spirits of Emperors past will forget me when I die.”

“How can you males of the conquest fleet remember anything?” the server asked. “Everything on this world seems topsy-turvy; nothing is the same from one moment to the next.”

“Truth there,” Fotsev agreed.

A female sitting at the table not far away turned an eye turret toward him. “How could you of the conquest fleet not give us a properly conquered planet?” she demanded. “Too many of these wild Big Ugly creatures are still running their own affairs, and even the ones that are supposed to be conquered are not safe. That is what everyone keeps shouting at us, anyhow.”

“Those creatures turned out not to be what we thought they were,” Fotsev answered. “They were much more advanced than we expected, and are still more advanced today.”

“When the conquest fleet came, they were less advanced than we are,” the server said. “Is that truth, or is it not?”

“It is,” Fotsev began, “but-”

“Then you should have defeated them,” the server broke in, as if the continued independence of some Tosevites were Fotsev’s fault and his alone. “That you failed speaks only of your own incompetence.”

“Truth,” the female said, and a couple of her companions made the affirmative hand gesture. “We came here to a world that was not ready for us, and whose fault is that? Yours!”

Fotsev finished his alcohol, slid off his seat, and left the establishment without another word. He had already seen that the colonists had a hard time fitting in when they came to Basra. But he’d never imagined the reverse might be true, that he might have a hard time fitting in when he came to the new town.

Tosev 3 had changed him. Tosev 3 had changed every male in the conquest fleet. The males and females of the colonization fleet remained unchanged. They might have been on Home yesterday. And he did not fit with them. What did that say? Nothing he wanted to hear. He took out the ginger after all, and had a big taste. With the herb coursing through him, he didn’t have to listen, whatever it was.