Second Contact

8

Having composed the document about which she’d been thinking for some time, Kassquit was polishing it when the speaker by the door hissed, announcing that someone outside wanted to come in. “Who is it?” she asked, using her fingerclaw to make the document vanish from her computer screen.

“I: Ttomalss,” came the reply.

“Come in, superior sir,” she said. “You are welcome.” That last was not altogether true, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She intended to present the document to Ttomalss when she finished it, but she didn’t want him seeing it till she did. And how could she work on it while he was here?

“I greet you, Kassquit,” he said as the door slid open to reveal his familiar face and form.

“I greet you, superior sir,” she replied. As she bent into the posture of respect, she realized how glad she was that he did not have Felless with him. No matter how the other researcher might have apologized, she still looked on Kassquit as half alien, half animal. When she was with Ttomalss, he seemed to look on Kassquit the same way. When he visited her by himself, though, he came closer to treating her as if she were a female of the Race in all fashions.

Whatever Ttomalss wanted now, he looked to be having some difficulty coming to the point. He said, “I am glad you have grown out of hatchlinghood and into something approaching maturity.”

“I thank you, superior sir,” Kassquit said gravely. “I am also glad of this as it makes me less of a burden for you and more readily able to care for myself.”

“You are gracious, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said.

“I know I was more difficult to raise than a proper hatchling would have been, superior sir, and I applaud your patience in caring for me as you have,” Kassquit said. “I cannot help it if I was not so ready to begin life on my own as a hatchling of the Race would have been.”

Ttomalss shrugged. “Now that the experience is behind me, I can truthfully say not all of it was negative. You must know that, while you were more dependent than a hatchling of the Race, you also acquired language more readily than such a hatchling would be likely to do. Once I could communicate with you, matters did improve considerably.”

“I am glad to hear this,” Kassquit said, one of the larger understatements of her young life. Usually, comparisons between the way she looked or behaved and the standards of the Race were to her disadvantage. Praise fell on her like rain on a desert that rarely saw it: a figure applicable to large stretches of Home.

“It is the truth,” Ttomalss said. “And it is also the truth, as I mentioned before, that you are now mature, or nearly so.”

He was uncomfortable. Something was wrong. For the life of her, Kassquit couldn’t tell what. Sometimes the direct approach worked well. She tried it now: “What is troubling you, superior sir? If it is anything with which I can help, you know that is my privilege as well as my duty.”

It didn’t work, not this time. It only made Ttomalss even twitchier than before. He strode back and forth across the chamber, his toeclaws clicking off metal, his tailstump twitching in agitation. At last, with what looked like a distinct effort of will, he stopped and cautiously turned one eye turret toward her. He said, “Are you aware that this chamber can be illuminated with infrared light, light to which your eyes-and, to a lesser degree, mine as well-do not respond?”

Kassquit stared. She could not imagine a greater irrelevancy. Puzzled still, she said, “I did not know such a thing could be done in this chamber, no. I did know it could be done, speaking more generally. Landcruisers, for example, can see targets by these infrared rays even in complete darkness.”

“Yes, that is so,” Ttomalss agreed. He started pacing again. His tailstump twitched harder than ever. “That is precisely one of the purposes for which infrared rays are useful: seeing in what would otherwise be darkness, I mean.”

“Well, of course,” Kassquit said, still trying to understand why he was so agitated. Then she grew agitated herself, remembering the last time he and Felless had visited her together, and what she’d been doing when they visited her. “You have been observing me in the dark,” she whispered.

Blood rushed to her cheeks and ears and scalp, as it did when she was mortified. He had seen her when she evoked pleasure by stroking her private parts. Of course she was mortified. What else could she be? By pleasuring herself thus, she proved beyond any hope of contradiction that she was a Big Ugly and not anything even close to a proper female of the Race.

She looked up at the ceiling in shame. “I did not think you knew, superior sir,” she said, whispering still.

“I know,” Ttomalss said. “I have known for some time. I am not angry, Kassquit.” He used an emphatic cough to stress that. “I am not even disappointed in you. Please understand that. You are not only a product of your environment. You are also a product of your biology. If it were otherwise, you would now be a female of the Race, not… what you are.”

“Why do you tell me this?” Kassquit asked. “Could you not have observed in silence and discretion?”

“I could have, yes,” Ttomalss said. “I did, in fact. But now choices must be made: not this instant, you understand-we are not hasty, after all, as the wild Tosevites are-but consideration must nonetheless begin.”

“I suppose so,” Kassquit said reluctantly. “What you say makes good logical sense.” What she felt when she touched herself, though, was about as far removed from good logical sense as anything could be. The Race, as far as she knew, was logical all the time. She wished she could be. Except when she was touching herself, she wished she could be. Then… She didn’t know what she wished then, except that it could go on forever.

Ttomalss said, “I must tell you, Kassquit, this is not easy for me. Matters pertaining to Tosevite reproduction behavior are most alien to the Race, and lie at the heart of the differences between us and the Big Uglies.”

He is embarrassed, too, Kassquit realized. Had he not felt it to be his duty to bring this up with her, he would without a doubt have been happier saying nothing. She admired him for doing his duty despite embarrassment.

She said, “What are my possibilities, superior sir? The only ones I can see are continuing my present behavior and not continuing it… and not continuing it, at least occasionally, would be difficult for me.” Without some sort of release when the pressure of not quite belonging to the Race grew too great, what would she do? She had no idea. She did not want to have to find out.

“I understand,” Ttomalss said. “That is, I understand as well as our differences in biology permit me to understand. Tosevite females have the potential to be sexually available to males at all seasons of the year. From this, it follows that there would be interest in and desire for activities pertaining to mating throughout the year as well. Your behavior seems to affirm this.”

“I suppose you may be correct, superior sir,” Kassquit said, “although I have never thought of what I do as a mating behavior, only as something that gives me pleasure.”

“Mating behavior is designed to give pleasure, to ensure that organisms continue to pursue it,” Ttomalss said. Kassquit made an affirmative hand gesture; she had encountered that concept before. Ttomalss went on, “There are, or could be, other possibilities available to you besides those you mention, though they might require considerable discussion before they could be implemented.”

“What other possibilities?” Kassquit demanded. “If any other researchers have raised Big Uglies from hatchlinghood, I am not aware of it.”

“No, nothing of the sort,” Ttomalss said. “It might have been better-I daresay it would have been better-for researchers other than myself to have undertaken such a project, but none chose to. Other than myself, none had the patience for it.”

“I understand, superior sir,” Kassquit said. “You have spoken many times of the difficulties involved in rearing Tosevite hatchlings. This being so, what other alternatives are there for me?”

Ttomalss let out a hissing sigh. “If the urge to mate grows uncontrollable, I suppose it could be arranged to bring a male up from the surface of Tosev 3 to attend to the matter. I do not urge this course, mind you; I merely mention it as a possibility.”

“A-wild Tosevite?” Kassquit used the negative hand gesture. “I think not, superior sir. I want as little acquaintance with the Big Uglies as I may have; my destiny, for better or worse, is with the Race.”

“I agree, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said gravely. “But, however much your spirit may belong to the Race, it is housed in a Tosevite body with Tosevite hormonal urges. The strength of these we are still in the process of ascertaining, but everything we have learned proves they are not to be despised.”

Kassquit bent into the posture of respect again. “You are generous, superior sir, to show me so much consideration. But, first, I do not wish to meet any wild Tosevite males.” She used an emphatic cough. “And, second, you understand that I am as ignorant of proper Tosevite mating behavior as the Race was before coming to this world. I suppose there is such a thing as proper Tosevite mating behavior; however beastly they may act, Big Uglies are not beasts.”

“This is all truth.” Ttomalss sounded surprised, and soon showed why: “It is also truth that did not occur to me. If you wish to learn more of Tosevite mating behavior, you may consult our archives on the subject.” He gave her the code by which she could retrieve them from the data system.

“I thank you, superior sir,” Kassquit said. “I did not realize these archives existed. One cannot search for what one does not know is there.”

“Again, truth,” Ttomalss said. “Examine some of them, if you care to. It may help influence your decision. And now, having said what I came to say, I shall depart.” He did, with every sign of relief.

Kassquit went back to the computer. She intended to call up the document on which she had been working, the one in which she was requesting increased autonomy from Ttomalss. But here he had come to give her more autonomy of a different sort.

Curiosity overcame her. She supposed she had known it would. She used the access code Ttomalss had given her. The computer screen showed two wild, unshaven Tosevites coupling. Kassquit watched with fascination and horror mixed. The posture struck her as absurd, and what the male was doing as unlikely to cause pleasure. It looked, in fact, as if it ought to be acutely painful.

Evidently it was not, though. The female gave signs of the same pleasure Kassquit knew when stroking herself. The male’s deeper groans seemed to be of the same kind, even if different in degree. After the recording finished, the computer menu asked if she wanted to view another. She gave an affirmative response.

Again, fascination and disgust warred. Some of the practices in which the Big Uglies indulged looked most unsanitary. Finally, Kassquit turned off the computer. She was very, very glad she had not asked Ttomalss to supply her with a wild Tosevite male.

Monique Dutourd stopped her bicycle in front of a public telephone kiosk on her way home from the university. Before she slid off the bicycle, though, she shook her head and started pedaling again, this time up a side street. A phone on her regular route was too likely to be tapped. After a few blocks, she came to another kiosk, this one in front of a little market.

“Better,” she said, and let down the kickstand. Before she approached the telephone, she looked all around, making certain the coast was clear. She even stuck her head into the market, to make sure Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn was not lurking there after outthinking her. The fellow inside washing squashes-rather a handsome young man, with a diabolical little chin beard-waved and blew her a kiss. She ignored him, as she ignored half a dozen casual invitations every day.

Rummaging in her purse, she found a twenty-five pfennig coin and put it in the telephone’s coin slot. She was glad to hear a dial tone; she would not have wanted to place the call through an operator. She still wondered if she ought to be placing it at all. But surely the brother from whom she’d been so long separated got other calls. What was one more?

Everything, Monique thought. Everything, or maybe nothing.

She dialed the number. Finding it had taken a long time, and meant dealing with people of a sort she’d had nothing to do with since the tense days just after the fighting stopped. She hadn’t trusted them then; she still did not. For all she knew, they’d taken her money and given her a number that would connect her with the city pound. And if they had, maybe that was just as well.

The telephone rang… and rang, and rang. Monique was about to hang up, get her quarter-mark back, and give up the whole thing as a bad job when someone answered: “Allo? Who’s there?”

Monique had not expected a woman with a sexy voice on the other end of the line. Flustered, she blurted, “Let me talk to Pierre.”

“And who the devil are you?” From sexy, the voice went to hard and suspicious in the blink of an eye.

“I’m his sister,” Monique said desperately.

“You’re a lying bitch, is what you are,” the other woman snapped. “He hasn’t got a sister. So he’s two-timing me again, is he? He’ll be sorry.”

“I am not. He has. And he isn’t,” Monique said. “Tell him I remember that the name of the dog we had when he went off to war was Alexandre.”

She waited to discover whether the woman would hang up on her. Silence stretched. At last, the woman said, “He has spoken of this dog to me. I do not think-I could be wrong, but I do not think-he would have spoken of it to any of his whores. You wait. I will see if he will speak to you.”

Wait Monique did. The operator frightened her out of a week’s growth by demanding another twenty-five pfennigs. She paid. The operator got off the line again.

Another man came onto it. “Tell me your name,” he said, his voice strange and familiar at the same time.

“Pierre? I am your sister Monique, Monique Dutourd,” she answered.

As she hadn’t expected a woman to answer the phone, so the sigh now also took her by surprise. “Well, I might have known you would catch up with me sooner or later,” he said. “Life at the university finally got boring, eh?”

“You know about me?” That struck her as the most unfair thing she’d ever heard.

He laughed. “My business is knowing things, little sister. The more things you know, the better, and the more you can do with them.”

“You sound just like the SS man who’s looking for you,” Monique said, angry enough to try to blast him out of his complacency.

But he laughed. “He can keep looking. Go on back home. Study your inscriptions. Forget all about it. I wish Kuhn had kept his damned mouth shut, that’s all.” If he knew the German’s name, maybe he did know everything about her.

“Be careful, Pierre,” she said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “I-Ah, the bastards are trying to tap the line. So long.” He hung up. The phone rang. The operator demanded yet another quarter of a mark. Monique paid again. She got back on her bicycle and headed home.

How had Pierre known what the Germans were doing? Dieter Kuhn had said he was too cozy with the Lizards to suit the Reich. Maybe they’d given him a gadget that would tell him such things. People had gained on the Lizards since the days when the conquest fleet came, but the aliens’ electronics still outdid anything mere humans made.

Monique was struggling with an intractable inscription when the telephone in her flat rang. She guessed who it might be before she lifted the handset from its cradle. And sure enough, Dieter Kuhn spoke in precise, German-accented French: “Good afternoon, Monique. A very interesting lecture, as always, and a very interesting telephone call as well. It did not help me so much as I might have liked, but it was interesting nonetheless.”

How much of her conversation with her brother had he heard? Had he heard any? Were his gadgets better than Pierre thought they were? Or was he running a bluff, hoping Monique would tell him more than he already knew?

Automatic distrust for Germans made her suspect the latter. She said, “I told you I did not want you calling me any more.”

“My dear Professor Dutourd, I am not calling on a social occasion, I assure you,” Kuhn answered, still precise, still polite, but suddenly with iron in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “I am calling in regard to the security of the Greater German Reich.” French was not in the habit of capitalizing nouns, as German was. Monique heard, or imagined she heard, capital letters thudding into place just the same.

Picking her words with care, she said, “I don’t know anything more about the security of the Great German Reich than I did when you took me to Chez Fonfon, and I knew nothing then. You said as much yourself. The other thing I will tell you is that I do not desire to know anything more, either.”

“Ah, Monique,” he said, trying without much luck to sound playful, “you know at least one thing more than you did then: a certain telephone number.” Before she could do any more than begin to wonder whether he really had it, he rattled it off.

“If you already knew that number, why did you need me?” she demanded. “You could have done whatever you were going to do, and I would never have been the wiser.” Like so many in the lands the Reich occupied, she saw staying out of the eye of the authorities as the highest good.

“For one thing, I did not have that number until the day after you did,” Kuhn answered. “For another, as I already told you, it is not so useful. It does not lead me directly to your brother. He has some verdammte Lizard machinery that relays from that telephone to wherever he happens to be. We know of this machinery, but we cannot match it.”

“What a pity,” Monique murmured, all but hugging herself with glee at having her guess confirmed. She felt extraordinarily clever, as if she’d proved what had killed Augustus’ right-hand man Agrippa.

“Another ten years,” the SS officer said. “Maybe less.” That brought her up short. Humanity had been at least fifty years-maybe twice that far-behind the Lizards when the conquest fleet arrived. Had the gap really narrowed so much so fast? In another generation, would the Lizards fall behind? There was an alarmingly modern thought for a Roman historian.

But then it was gone, replaced by one more urgent at the moment: “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

“I’m sorry,” Dieter Kuhn told her, and he actually did sound sorry. How good an actor was he? Pretty good, by everything she’d seen. He went on, “When we deal with the Lizards here inside the Reich, we want it to be on our terms, not theirs. Your brother makes that harder.”

“When you deal with anyone anywhere, you want it to be on your terms.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did Monique wonder whether Kuhn would take that as politically irresponsible. To her, they’d seemed a self-evident truth, as much a given as tomorrow’s sunrise.

They seemed that way to him, too. With a chuckle, he said, “Aber naturlich,” and then went back to French: “That is the way of the strong with the weak.”

“And who is strong and who is weak, between the Reich and the Lizards?” Monique asked: almost but not quite a rhetorical question.

“Oh, they are stronger, no doubt about it,” Dieter Kuhn answered at once, for which she reluctantly gave him credit. “But we are-or we had better be-strong enough to make the rules on our own territory. Do you want the Lizards back again?”

“I am not a political person. It is not wise for anyone French to be a political person. And so I do not have to answer that question,” Monique said. “And now, if you will excuse me, I would like to go back to my work.”

She started to hang up the phone. Before she could move it more than a few centimeters, Kuhn said, “Wait.” His voice had the flat snap of command. Even as she obeyed, she wondered where he’d learned it. He couldn’t be old enough to have fought against the Lizards when the conquest fleet landed.

“What do you want with me?” she cried. She wished he’d only been trying to seduce her; that, she could have dealt with, even if he’d succeeded. Here she felt like a mouse trying not to let a rhinoceros trample it. No, two rhinoceri: Kuhn had made it plain the Lizards were in this up to their eye turrets, too.

“Your help, for the sake of mankind,” Kuhn answered.

Some Frenchmen wore field-gray uniforms with tricolor patches on the left sleeves and coal-scuttle helmets with tricolor shields painted on them. They thought they were serving for the sake of mankind. As far as she was concerned, they were serving for the sake of the Nazis. “Were you not listening when I said I cared nothing for politics?” she asked.

“I listened. I chose not to hear,” Kuhn said. “Monique, it would be unfortunate if you failed to cooperate with us. It would be both professionally and personally unfortunate. I would regret that. You would regret it more.”

“I will not betray my brother, damn you,” Monique whispered. This time, she managed to hang up before the Sturmbannfuhrer ordered her not to.

Afterwards, though, she stood by the phone, waiting for it to ring again, waiting for Dieter Kuhn to give her more orders in his calm, reasonable voice. No, she thought fiercely. I will not. Not for anything. You can do whatever you want to me.

She wondered how true that was. She’d never thought of herself as the stuff from which heroes were made. The Spartan boy had smiled when the fox under his cloak gnawed his belly. She was sure she would have screamed her head off. Who wouldn’t have? Who couldn’t have? A hero-and she wasn’t.

The telephone did not ring. Eventually, she went back to her desk and tried to get more work done. She accomplished very little. Looking back on it, she found it startling she’d accomplished anything at all. She kept glancing over toward the phone, and toward the front door. One day soon, she would hear a ring, or a knock. She was sure of that. She could feel it in her bones. Then she would have to find out just how much of a hero hid inside her.

As Reuven Russie came into the house, he announced, “Mother, I asked Jane Archibald if she’d have supper here with us tonight, and she said she would.”

“All right,” Rivka Russie answered. “I’m making beef-and-barley soup. I’ll put in some more barley and onions and carrots. There’ll be plenty.” She didn’t say anything about putting in more beef. Meat was harder to come by than produce. From what Reuven had learned from the Lizards, too much meat wasn’t good for the human organism. Fat clogged the arteries, leading to heart attacks and strokes. But it tastes so good, he thought, wishing he’d skipped a lesson.

“Esther, chop the onion,” his mother called to his twin sisters. “Judith, take care of the carrots.”

“Maybe you could throw them in the soup pot,” Reuven suggested. Before anyone could answer, he shook his head and went on, “No, don’t bother-I know they would spoil the taste of the soup.”

That got him a couple of almost inaudibly shrill squeals of rage, as he’d hoped it would. It also got him a dire threat: one of the twins-he couldn’t tell which-said, “Wait till you see what happens to your friend tonight. She’ll be sorry she ever came around here.”

They’d done that before. They could be holy terrors when they chose-and even more terrifying when they chose to show how smart they were. But Reuven said, “Good luck. It’s Jane tonight. You weren’t listening-and what else is new?”

As he’d hoped, his sisters shut up. Jane Archibald did intimidate them. For one thing, they had most of the height they’d have as adults, but almost none of the shapes they’d acquire. Jane was, most emphatically, a woman. And, for another, she was too good-natured to let them get her goat. They’d tried before, without any luck. Reuven hoped that didn’t mean they’d try especially hard tonight.

His father came in a few minutes later. From the kitchen, his mother called, “Moishe, you have a letter from your cousin in the RAF.”

“What’s in it?” Moishe Russie asked.

“How should I know?” Rivka answered. “It’s in English. David speaks Yiddish well enough, he reads it, but I’ve never yet known him to try and write it.”

“I’ll read it if you want, Father,” Reuven said. He saw the letter on the table by the sofa.

“Never mind,” his father said. He saw the sheet of paper, too. “My English can always use practice. It’s not perfect, but I can use it.”

“You’ll get some more practice in a little while,” Reuven said. “Jane is coming to supper, and then we’re going to study.”

Moishe Russie raised an eyebrow. “Is that what young people call it these days?” Reuven’s ears got hot. His father went on, “Should be interesting dinner-table conversation: Hebrew, English, and bits of the Lizards’ language to fill in the cracks. Arabic, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Jane has bits, doesn’t she?”

“Hard to live here without learning some.” Reuven made a sour face. “Allahu akbar, for instance.” He pointed to the letter, which his father had picked up. “What does your cousin have to say?”

“He’s your cousin, too,” Moishe pointed out, “only once further removed.” He read on; glum vertical lines filled his face. “It’s getting harder for his family to get by in Britain, even in Northern Ireland. Little by little, being next door to the Reich is turning the British into anti-Semites.”

“That’s not good,” Reuven said, and his father nodded. He went on, “He should take his family out while he still can and come here. If he can’t come here, he should go to the USA. From everything you’ve always told me, too many people stayed in Poland too long.” He wished he remembered even less of Poland than was the case.

“We certainly stayed in Poland too long,” his father said, and tacked on an emphatic cough. “If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d probably all be dead. If the Lizards hadn’t come, all the Jews in Poland would probably be dead.”

“Hitler and Himmler have certainly done their best, haven’t they?” Reuven said.

Moishe Russie shook his head. He couldn’t be flippant about it. “I can’t imagine England going the same way, but they’re starting down the path.” He lowered the letter for a moment, and in that moment looked older and tireder than Reuven ever remembered seeing him. Then he plainly made himself go back to reading. When he frowned a moment later, it was a different sort of frown, one of puzzlement rather than mourning.

“What is it, Father?” Reuven asked.

“He’s wondering if I know anything about a couple of shipments of ginger that went awry,” his father answered. “It seems an officer in a position to do him either a great deal of harm or a great deal of good is somehow involved in the ginger traffic, and wants to use him to use me to find out what happened to them and how to keep it from happening again.”

“And will you try to find out?” It was the obvious question, but still needed asking.

“Yes, I think so,” Moishe said. “Ginger smuggling does the Lizards a lot of harm, I know that. And the Lizards have done us a lot of good. But David is family, and things are looking dark in Britain these days, so I’ll find out what I can. If it does him some good… He broke into a Lizard prison to get me out, so how could I help doing everything I can for him?”

Reuven hadn’t heard that story for a long time, and had forgotten most of it. Before he could ask any questions, though, someone knocked on the front door. Whatever the questions had been, they went clean out of his head. “That will be Jane,” he said, and hurried to let her in.

She carried books and notebooks on her back in a khaki pack a British soldier might have used before the fighting stopped. Shrugging it off, she gave a sigh of relief. Then, in accented Hebrew, she said, “Good evening, Dr. Russie.”

“Hello, Jane,” Reuven’s father answered in English. “I will practice in your language. I do not get to speak it so often.”

“All right by me,” Jane said. “Better than all right by me, as a matter of fact.” Her smile was bemused. “I still find it hard to believe I’m taking supper with the man my school is named for.”

Moishe Russie shrugged. “I was in the right place at the right time-an English saying, isn’t it? But you had better be careful-you will make Reuven jealous.”

“Thanks a lot, Father,” Reuven muttered under his breath. He’d worried that Judith and Esther might embarrass him. Well, his father had taken care of that for the evening.

His sisters came out and stared at Jane, as if wondering what they would look like when they grew up. They wouldn’t look like her; they were both thin-faced and dark like Reuven, not pink and blond. If their figures came close to Jane’s, though, they’d need to carry clubs to hold boys at bay.

“Supper’s ready,” Rivka Russie called a few minutes later. She made sure Jane got a couple of marrow bones in her bowl. The Australian girl didn’t waste them; she worked the marrow free with her knife and spooned it up. “That’s good,” she said. “Takes me back, it does. My mum would make a soup not a whole lot different to this.” She frowned. “I do wonder, I truly do, if the Lizards will let me go home after I finish here.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Esther asked-or maybe it was Judith.

“Because they want Australia all to themselves,” Jane answered. “It never did have very many people in it. They killed a lot of them, and they aren’t worrying very hard about whether the others are sick or well.”

“Humanfrei, not Judenfrei,” Reuven murmured in Yiddish. His father winced. His mother scowled at him. His sisters and Jane, perhaps fortunately, didn’t get it.

After supper, Jane helped Rivka and Esther and Judith with the dishes. Moishe Russie lit a cigar. Reuven gave him a reproachful look. His father flushed, but didn’t stub it out. Between puffs, he said, “I got the tobacco habit before I knew-before anybody knew-how dangerous it was. Now people do know-but I still have the habit.”

With the ready intolerance of youth, Reuven remarked, “Well, now that you do know, why don’t you quit?”

“Ask a Lizard ginger-taster why he doesn’t quit, too,” Moishe answered. “He’ll tell you the same thing I do: he can’t.” Reuven raised an eyebrow. He was convinced anyone could do anything if only he applied enough willpower. He had never had to test this theory himself, which helped explain why he remained convinced of it. His father said, “Of course, one of the reasons we didn’t know how dangerous tobacco was is that most people used to die of something else before it killed them.”

“It’s a slow poison, certainly,” Reuven said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not a poison. If the Lizards made us use it, we’d scream bloody murder-and we’d have a right to.”

“Scream bloody murder about what?” Jane asked, returning from the kitchen.

“Tobacco,” Reuven answered.

“Oh, of course,” she agreed-she didn’t smoke, either. “Nasty stuff.” Only then did she notice Moishe’s cigar. A little defensively, she said, “Well, it is.”

“Do you hear me quarreling with you?” Reuven’s father asked. “I know what it is. I keep smoking anyhow.”

“Speaking of nasty stuff…” Reuven pulled out his biochemistry text. “Did you understand one word of today’s lecture? He might as well have been speaking Hindustani for all the sense it made to me.”

“I got some of it, anyhow,” Jane said. “Here, look…” From then on, most of the conversation was in the Lizards’ language. That effectively excluded Reuven’s mother, but she didn’t let it bother her. She sat down in the front room and embroidered for a while and then, blowing a kiss to Reuven and nodding to Jane, headed for the bedroom.

Judith and Esther were less philosophical about being left in the dark. “I think all those funny noises are just an excuse so they can talk mushy to each other,” one of them said to the other in Hebrew. They both giggled. Reuven hoped Jane hadn’t understood. By the way she raised an eyebrow, she had.

Reuven took a deep breath, preparatory to reading his little sisters the riot act. Before he could, his father looked up from the newspaper he was reading. “They aren’t doing anything of the sort,” Moishe Russie told the twins. “Kindly keep quiet and let them work, or you can go to bed right now.”

He rarely made such dire threats. When he did make them, he meant them. Esther and Judith got very quiet very fast. They didn’t stay quiet long, but they didn’t bother Reuven and Jane any more, either. After a while, Moishe did send them to bed. Jane looked at her watch and said, “I’d better get back to the dorm.”

“Do you want me to walk you back?” Reuven asked. “I know things have quieted down some, but still-” He waited to see what she would say. Last time, she’d turned him down, and she’d got back without trouble.

She thought it over. “All right,” she said at last. “Thanks.”

The night was cool, heading toward chilly. Next to no one was on the streets, for which Reuven was heartily glad. Talking about being a protector was one thing, actually having to do the job something else again. When they got to the dorm-about a fifteen-minute walk from the Russie house-Reuven put his arms around Jane and again waited to see what would happen. She moved toward him instead of away. They kissed for a long time. Then, looking back over her shoulder, she went inside.

Reuven didn’t remember a single step he took all the way home.

Glen Johnson walked into the bar at the Kitty Hawk officers’ club and said, “Scotch over ice, Julius.”

“Yes, suh, Lieutenant Colonel,” said the colored man behind the bar. He was about Johnson’s age, or maybe a few years older, and walked with a limp. He built the drink with casual skill-not that there was anything fancy about scotch on the rocks-and slid it across the polished bar to Johnson. He plied a rag to get rid of the little wet trail the glass left, and contrived to make a couple of quarters disappear as if they’d never been there.

“Mud in your eye,” Johnson said, and sipped the drink. He reached into his pocket, pulled out an FDR half dollar, and set it on the bar by his glass. “Go on, Julius-have one on me. Have a real one, not the phony drinks bartenders usually take. I’m wise to those tricks, I am.”

Julius looked at the big silver coin. He held out his white-jacketed arm to Johnson. “You got to give it a twist.” Chuckling, the Marine pilot did. The barkeep let out a mock yelp for mercy, and Johnson released him. He scooped up the half dollar, then made himself a bourbon and water. “Much obliged, suh.”

“You deserve it,” Johnson said. “Why the hell not? Besides”-he looked around the otherwise empty bar-“I don’t much feel like drinking by my lonesome.”

“You got troubles, suh?” Julius raised the drink-by its color, not a very strong one-to his lips. The liquid in the glass went down hardly at all. No doubt he had practice at nursing a drink all night long. A bartender who drank too much of what he dispensed wouldn’t last long in the business. One who asked sympathetic questions, on the other hand…

“Troubles?” Johnson said thoughtfully. “You know a man without ’em? Christ on His cross, Julius, do you know a Lizard without ’em?”

“Don’t know any man without troubles, no, suh,” the Negro said. “Lizards? I found out more’n I ever wanted to about Lizards during the fighting, and that there’s the God’s truth.” He took another small sip from his bourbon and water, then stared down into the glass, as if wondering whether to go on.

Johnson started to ask him what was on his mind. A glance at Julius told him that, if he ever wanted to find out, he had better keep his mouth shut. He took a few salted peanuts from the bowl on the bar and munched on those instead. Maybe a bartender needed to talk to somebody every once in a while, too.

At last, still not looking up from the glass in front of him, Julius quietly asked, “I ever tell you before, Lieutenant Colonel, that I was born and raised in Florida?”

“No, as a matter of fact, you never did,” Johnson said. If he’d let it go at that, he never would have found out anything more. But, as he put together Julius’ color, his age, his limp, and now his place of birth… The pilot’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean to tell me you were one of those-?” He stopped in some confusion. He didn’t know how to say it, not in a way that wouldn’t put the bartender’s back up.

“One o’ those colored boys that fought for the Lizards? Is that what you was gonna say, suh?” Julius asked.

“Well, yeah.” Johnson knocked back his drink. He laid more money on the bar. “Give me another one of those, would you? Christ, how did you end up doing something like that? I mean, I know your unit mutinied against the scaly bastards, but how did you get sucked in in the first place?”

“I was hungry,” Julius answered simply. “Everybody was hungry back then, you know-colored folks worse’n most, I reckon, an’ the fighting killed all my livestock and knocked my farm all to hell. So when the Lizards came around an’ promised they’d feed everybody who joined up good, I went.”

The pilot raised his glass. “That wasn’t the only thing they promised you, was it? The way I remember, they promised black men a chance to take it out on whites, too.” He grimaced. “I hate to say it, but that wasn’t the stupidest thing they ever did.”

Julius studied him. Here in North Carolina, things were still anything but easy for Negroes in spite of Martin Luther King and his preaching. Johnson saw him weighing how much he could say. After a long, long silence, the barman said, “Well, I’d be lyin’ if I told you there wasn’t some who wanted that. Like you said, suh, the Lizards sort of knew what they was doin’ there. But most o’ the fellas who signed up did it on account of their bellies was rubbin’ up against their backbones, same as me.”

He chuckled, looking back across a good many years. “They had this one drill sergeant, Lieutenant Colonel, he scare the shell off a snappin’ turtle. Lord, was that man mean! But he was a good sergeant, I reckon. He’d been in the Army in the First World War, so he knew what he was doin’. An’ anybody who wasn’t more scared o’ him than whoever we was gonna fight was a natural-born damn fool.”

“I’ve known drill sergeants like that,” Johnson said. “I have indeed. But was this fellow for the Lizards, or was he just in it for three squares a day like you?”

“I truly don’t know, on account of nobody ever had the nerve to find out,” Julius answered. “When the Lizards reckoned we was ready, they took some o’ their soldiers out of the line they was holdin’ against the U.S. Army and put us in. First time we went into action-Lord! You should have seen how fast we threw down them guns an’ threw up our hands.”

“All of you?” Johnson asked.

The bartender hesitated again. Johnson didn’t suppose he could blame him. He wouldn’t have wanted to admit anything that brought his race discredit, either. “Hell, it don’t matter none now,” Julius said, more than half to himself. He looked over at Johnson. “No, not all of us, God damn it. Like I said, some o’ those boys flat hated white folks, hated ’em worse’n they hated the Lizards. What they said was, the Lizards was honest-to them, everybody was a nigger. And they fought. They fought like sons of bitches. Don’t reckon there’s one of ’em came out of that battle alive. So what do you think of that, Lieutenant Colonel?”

Johnson shrugged. “It was a long time ago, and they’re all dead, like you say, so it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference what I think. Was that when you got wounded?”

“Noticed I ain’t so spry, did you?” Julius said. “Yeah, I was tryin’ to surrender and this damnfool kid-he couldn’t have been seventeen, even-shot me on account of he reckoned I was foolin’. Hurt like hell.”

“Oh, yes,” Johnson said. “It’s not a picnic out there, is it? And the crazy thing is, the politicians who send the soldiers out have fought in wars themselves, or a lot of them have. But they go ahead and give the orders that send out the kids every single time.”

“Sort of different with the Lizards,” Julius observed. “We didn’t have no choice when they went and hit us, and I don’t reckon their Emperor ever did any fighting hisself. From what folks say, the Lizards hadn’t done no fighting for a hell of a long time before they decided to come on over here and take away what’s ours.”

“That’s what I’ve heard, too,” Johnson agreed. “It’s what the Lizards say themselves, as a matter of fact. I don’t swear it’s true, mind you, but I don’t think they’d lie about something like that, something where it’s not to their advantage to lie, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, suh, I do.” The bartender nodded. “From what I seen of ’em, they don’t lie as much as people any which way. Oh, they will-don’t get me wrong, they will-but they’re a little more honest than just plain people, I reckon. Don’t suppose that did ’em a whole lot o’ good when they come up against the likes of us.”

“We’re a sinful lot, all right,” Johnson said, and Julius nodded. The pilot went on, “Good thing we are, too. We tricked the Lizards as often as we beat ’em fair and square-more often than we beat ’em fair and square, I shouldn’t wonder.” He pointed to the black man. “That’s what your unit did, or most of them, anyway.”

“Yeah, most of ’em.” Julius took another small sip from the drink Johnson had bought him. “Some o’ those boys, they didn’t care how the Lizards treated them, long as they treated white folks the same way.”

Johnson thought it was a good time to finish his own drink. Negroes still didn’t get treated like white men in the United States. He said the most he could say: “It’s better than it used to be.” He didn’t know that from his own experience before the war; up till then, he’d seen only a handful of Negroes. He waited to see how the bartender would respond.

Julius chose his words with care; Johnson got the idea that Julius always chose his words with care. “Yeah, it’s better than it used to be,” the bartender said at last. “But it ain’t as good as it ought to be, you don’t mind my sayin’ so. Doctor King say that, too, an’ he’s right.”

“Nothing here is as good as it ought to be,” Glen Johnson said at once. “That’s what the USA is about-making things better, I mean. The Lizards think what they’ve got is perfect. We know better. We aren’t at the top, but we’re trying to get there.”

The bartender ran his rag over the already-gleaming surface of the bar. “I think you’re right, Lieutenant Colonel, suh, but you got to remember, some of us is closer to the top than the rest.”

Since he didn’t have a good comeback to that one, Johnson asked for another drink instead. He looked around at the empty stools and the empty chairs around the tables. “Slow tonight,” he remarked. “Real slow tonight, as a matter of fact.”

“Yes, suh,” Julius said, giving him another glass of scotch. “You’re about all that’s keepin’ me in business. Otherwise I’d just pack up and go home and see if there was anything good on the TV.”

“Yeah,” Johnson said. He got partway through his third drink before realizing a colored man who’d had some pointed things to say-and with justice-about the inequalities of life in the United States owned a television set. Ten years earlier, that would have been unlikely. Twenty years earlier, it would have been unimaginable, even if the Lizards hadn’t come.

Johnson was about to finish the scotch and head on over to the barracks when Captain Gus Wilhelm came in, spotted him, waved, and sat down beside him. “Looks like you’re ahead of me,” he remarked. “Have to do something about that. Martini might help.” He set coins on the bar. Julius made them disappear.

“I said things were slow tonight,” Johnson told his fellow pilot. “Now they just went and got slower.”

“Heh,” Wilhelm said, and then, remembering protocol, “Heh-sir.” He was in his mid-thirties, and had just got into the Army when the fighting stopped. He raised his glass in salute. “Confusion to the Lizards.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Johnson said, and did. “That’s what this whole planet is-confusion to the Lizards, I mean.”

“Good thing, too,” Wilhelm said. “If they understood us a little better, they would have kicked the crap out of us, and where would we be then? ‘It shall be done, superior sir’ ”-he used the Lizards’ language for the phrase-“that’s where. No way in hell we’d be out in space yet.”

“I won’t argue with that,” said Johnson, who wasn’t inclined to argue with much of anything. He lifted his own glass on high. “Confusion to the Lizards, yeah-and a big thank-you to ’em, too, for making us want to get ourselves off the ground.” Solemnly, both men drank.

“Sir,” Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb said, “I’ve just had a letter back from my cousin in Palestine.”

“Ah, that’s first-rate, Goldfarb,” Basil Roundbush answered. “There. Do you see? I knew you could do it.” He waved to the Robinsons barmaid. “Another round here, darling.” She smiled and nodded and swayed away to draw two more pints of Guinness. The group captain watched her with the innocent pleasure of a tot in a toy shop.

“Yes, sir.” Goldfarb suppressed a sigh. He hadn’t wanted to get involved in this whole highly unofficial business. Not for the first time in his military career, no one had cared whether he wanted to get involved. “It appears-my cousin had to be careful with the questions he asked, so he’s not perfectly sure-it appears, I say, that things got disarranged in Marseille.”

“Disarranged, eh? That’s not bad.” Roundbush tugged at his mustache. “And Marseille? Why am I not surprised? Was it the bloody Frenchmen or the Nazis who made free with what doesn’t belong to them?”

Goldfarb would have said the Frenchmen or the bloody Nazis. In 1940, Basil Roundbush would have, too. Not now. He would no doubt have said he’d changed with the times. Goldfarb hadn’t. He was glad he hadn’t.

He said, “Moishe doesn’t know that, I’m afraid. Which means the Lizards he was talking to don’t know, either.”

“Well, if they don’t know, they can’t get too upset with us for not knowing,” Roundbush said. The barmaid returned and set their pints of stout in front of them. “Ah, thank you, sweetheart.” He beamed up at her, then turned his attention back to Goldfarb. “You’ve been a good deal of help, old man. You will not find us ungrateful.”

“Thank you, sir,” Goldfarb said, which was not at all what he was thinking. You won’t find us so ungrateful as to murder your wife, or maybe your children. You won’t find us so ungrateful as to trump up a charge to drum you out of the RAF and keep you from finding honest work anywhere else. Roundbush’s friends were generous men, all right. By the standards of today’s Britain, they were extraordinarily generous. Which says more about today’s Britain than it does about generosity.

“Marseille.” Roundbush spoke the name as if it were an off-color word in a language he didn’t speak well. “All sorts of things can go wrong there, no doubt about it. I wonder which one has. I shouldn’t have thought Pierre would play such a shabby trick, but one never can tell.”

“Pierre, sir?” Goldfarb asked. An instant later, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. The less he knew about his former colleague’s business, the less risk he ran of being drawn into that business.

“Pierre moves things hither and yon,” Roundbush explained. That much, Goldfarb had gathered for himself. The senior RAF officer went on, “He has a finger in every pie in Marseille-and that’s a good many fingers. If he’s taken up thievery, we may have to whisper in the ears of some chums we have there.”

Some German chums we have there. Goldfarb had no trouble figuring out what he meant. He took a long pull at his Guinness to disguise what he was thinking. What had the world come to, if a couple of Jews were helping Englishmen turn Germans loose on Frenchmen?

No. What had come to the world? The Lizards had, and things would, could, never be the same.

“It’s a rum old world,” he said, a sentiment fueled both by his thoughts of a moment before and by the Guinness he’d drunk.

“Too right it is, old man,” Basil Roundbush agreed. Why he should agree, with his good looks, his rank, and his upper-crust accent, was beyond Goldfarb. He went on, “What we have to make sure of is that it’s even more of a rum old world for the Lizards than it is for us.”

“Right,” Goldfarb said tightly. He shouldn’t have gone through the latest pint so fast, for he burst out, “And if we have to get into bed with the Nazi bastards who murdered all my kin they could catch, we just turn out the bloody lights and do it, because we have to pay the Lizards back first.”

Well, that’s torn it, he thought. Whatever Roundbush and his friends decided to do, he hoped they’d do it to him and not to his family. If anything happened to his wife or his children, he didn’t know what he’d do. On second thought, that wasn’t true. He knew exactly what he’d do. He’d go hunting. He didn’t know how many he’d get, but it would be as many as he could.

To his surprise, Group Captain Roundbush nodded in evident sympathy. “I can see how you would feel that way,” he said. “Can’t say that I blame you, even, not sitting where you sit. But can you see there are others who might push the Lizards up to the front of the queue and leave the Jerries behind them?”

“Oh, yes, I can see that. I haven’t even got trouble with it,” Goldfarb answered. If he could speak his mind to Roundbush without the world’s ending, he damn well would: “But what I can’t see is the people who push the Lizards up to the front of the queue and then cozy up to the Jerries because they don’t like the Lizards, either. And there are too damned many of that lot.” He looked defiantly at Roundbush. If the other RAF officer wanted to make something of it, he was ready.

But Roundbush again kept his tone mild. “We haven’t got the empire any more,” he said, as if to a schoolchild. “We aren’t strong enough to pretend the Reich isn’t there, right across the Channel from us.”

“I know that, too.” The other thing Goldfarb knew was that he was floundering; he hadn’t expected these smooth answers. He fell back on an argument with which no one-no one decent-could disagree, or so he was convinced: “Too bloody many people too high up like the Nazis too bloody well.”

“You’ll never make a practical man,” Basil Roundbush said. “But that’s all right, too; you’ve already done the practical men who drive the Lizards crazy a good turn, and we shan’t forget. I’ve already said that, and I mean it.”

“One of the most practical things you and your practical friends could do would be to help my family and me emigrate to Canada or the United States,” Goldfarb said, his voice bitter. “My kin and my wife’s have been lucky to get out of places where the trouble was bad before it got as bad as it could. It’s looking more and more like things will just keep getting worse here.”

“I hope not,” Roundbush said. “I do hope not.” He even sounded as if he meant it. “But if that’s what you want, old boy, I daresay it could be arranged.”

He didn’t even blink. Goldfarb thought he might have deserved some token surprise, something like, Wouldn’t you sooner stay, in view of your service to the country? But no. If he wanted to go, Roundbush would wave bye-bye.

Or maybe he wouldn’t even do that. He said, “One thing you must bear in mind, though, wherever you turn up, is that people may still ask you to do things for them from time to time. You’ve helped once. Easier to unscramble an egg than to stop helping now.”

Goldfarb looked him straight in the eye. “I took the King’s shilling, sir. I never took yours.”

Roundbush rummaged in his pockets till he found a silver coin. He set it in front of David Goldfarb. “Now you have.”

And Goldfarb did not have the nerve to send the shilling flying across the pub. “Damn you,” he said quietly. He was trapped, and he knew it.

“Don’t fret about it,” Roundbush advised him. “We shall do our best not to make our requests”-he didn’t even say demands — “too onerous.” Oh, the trap had velvet jaws. That did not mean it bit any the less.

Tossing back the last of his Guinness, Goldfarb got to his feet. “I’d better head on home, sir. My wife will be wondering what’s become of me.” Naomi knew he was going to have this meeting with Roundbush, but Roundbush didn’t need to know she knew. Roundbush already knew altogether too much about Goldfarb’s affairs.

He didn’t argue now, saying, “Give her my best. You are a lucky dog; if you must stay with one woman, you couldn’t have picked a finer one. One of these days before too long, I may have another small bit of business on which you can lend a hand. Until then-” He gave Goldfarb an affable nod.

Goldfarb stalked out of Robinsons and retrieved his bicycle from the rack in front of the pub. He couldn’t even be properly angry at Roundbush; getting angry at him was like beating the air with your fists. It accomplished nothing.

He pedaled away from the pub at a slow, deliberate pace. With several pints of Guinness in him, it was the best pace he could manage. He didn’t particularly notice the pack of punks on bicycles till they’d surrounded him. “All right, buddy, which is it? Protestant or Catholic?” one of them snarled.

If he guessed wrong, they’d stomp him for the pleasure of putting down heresy. If he guessed right, they might stomp him even so, just for the hell of it. If he laughed in their faces-what would they do then? He tried it.

They looked astonished. That made him laugh harder than ever. “Sorry, boys,” he said when he got some of his breath back. “You can’t have me. The goddamn Nazis have first claim.”

“Bloody hebe,” one of the punks muttered. They all looked disgusted. He realized he wasn’t out of the woods yet. They might decide to stomp him for spoiling their fun. But they didn’t. They rode off. Some of them threw curses over their shoulders as they went, but he’d heard worse in London.

When he got home, he spoke of that first with Naomi. She laughed. “It is better here than in England,” she said. “In England, you would have got into trouble anyhow. Here, they let you go.”

“I wasn’t what they were after, that’s all,” he answered. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t after somebody. And besides, I’ve got more important people after me.” He told his wife of what had passed with Basil Roundbush.

“They will help us emigrate if we must?” Naomi asked. “This could be very important.” Her family had got out of Germany just before the Kristallnacht. She knew everything she needed to know about leaving and not looking back.

“They’ll help me if I keep helping them,” Goldfarb said. “If I keep helping them, the Nazis are going to give it to some poor Frenchman in the neck.”

Naomi spoke with ruthless practicality. “If he is a ginger smuggler, he is not a poor Frenchman. He is much more likely to be a rich Frenchman. No one who trades with the Lizards stays poor long.”

“Truth,” Goldfarb said in the language of the Race. He returned to English: “But I still don’t want to be the one who put the Gestapo on his tail.”

“I don’t want a lot of the things that have happened to have happened,” his wife answered. “That does not mean I can do anything about them.”

Goldfarb considered. “I’ll tell you what,” he said at last. “I’ll stay home and tend to things here, and you go on out into the world. You’re obviously better suited to it than I am.” Naomi laughed, just as if he’d been joking.

Ttomalss did not care to leave space, to come to the surface of Tosev 3. He especially did not care to visit the independent Tosevite not-empires. Having been kidnapped in China, he did not want to risk falling into the hands of hostile Big Uglies again.

But, when Felless asked him to assist her down in the Greater German Reich, he did not see how he could refuse. And the Reich, he noted after checking a map, was a long way from China.

He watched with more than a little interest as the shuttlecraft descended to the landing field outside Nuremberg, the capital of the Reich. He had landed but seldom since taking Kassquit up from China. The former capital of the Reich, he remembered, had been vaporized. Were Tosevites sensible beings, that would have taught the Deutsche respect for the Race. But very little taught the Big Uglies respect for anything, and the Deutsche, by all evidence, were among the more stubborn Big Uglies.

After disembarking from the shuttlecraft, he endured the formalities with the Tosevite male from the Deutsch Foreign Ministry on the broad expanse of concrete. The conversation, fortunately, was in the language of the Race. Ttomalss understood and still spoke some Chinese, but he very much doubted whether this Eberlein creature did. The language in which the official addressed the armed Big Uglies on the landing field sounded nothing like Chinese, at any rate.

Getting into a motorized vehicle of Tosevite manufacture also made Ttomalss nervous, although he was glad to see a male of the Race driving. “Have no great fear, superior sir,” the driver said. “For Big Uglies, the firm of Daimler-Benz is quite capable, and builds relatively reliable machines.”

“How long have they been building them?” Ttomalss asked.

“Longer than almost any other Tosevite firm engaged in such work,” the driver answered, “about seventy-five of the years of Tosev 3. Twice as many of ours,” he added helpfully.

“If it is all the same to you,” Ttomalss said with dignity, “I shall go right on being nervous.”

Having seen a great deal-more than he ever wanted-of the architecture of China, Ttomalss was struck by how different Nuremberg looked. That held true not only for the outsized Nazi ceremonial buildings the driver pointed out to him but also for the smaller structures that held businesses or Deutsch sexual groupings-families, the Big Uglies called them. What struck him was how unhomogenized a world Tosev 3 was. Home, after a hundred thousand years of Empire, had no real regional differences left. One city was much like another. That wasn’t so here.

“Ah, there it is,” he said with no small relief when he saw the familiar-looking cube of the Race’s embassy to the Reich. “A touch of Home on Tosev 3.”

“Only when you’re indoors, superior sir, only when you’re indoors,” the driver said. “And we’re coming into the cold season of the year, too. You’ll want to muffle yourself up good and snug when you stick your snout outdoors, that you will.”

“I will not want to muffle myself,” Ttomalss said. “I may do it, but I will not want to.”

“Better than freezing your scales off,” the driver told him, and with that Ttomalss could not disagree. The motorcar, which had run well enough-if more noisily than a vehicle manufactured back on Home-pulled to a halt in front of the embassy.

Veffani, the Race’s ambassador to the Deutsche, greeted Ttomalss just inside the entrance. Even the hallway that led back to the main chambers of the embassy was heated exactly to the temperature the Race found most comfortable. Ttomalss hissed with pleasure. “We shall try to make your stay here as pleasant as we can, Senior Researcher,” Veffani said. “Felless impressed me strongly with how important she thinks your contribution can be.”

“Of course, I will do everything in my power to serve the Race,” Ttomalss replied. “I am not quite certain about what sort of aid Felless seeks from me. Whatever it is, I shall do my best to give it.”

“Spoken like the sensible male you have proved yourself to be,” the ambassador said. “And, even though this is a city of Big Uglies, there are certain worthwhile aspects to life here. You must try the bratwurste, for instance.”

“Why must I?” Ttomalss asked suspiciously, and then, “What are they?”

“Little sausages,” Veffani answered, which seemed harmless enough. “They are quite flavorful, so much so that we send them to other embassies all over Tosev 3, and even to the fleetlord’s table in Cairo.”

“If the fleetlord enjoys them, I am sure I will, too,” Ttomalss said.

Veffani grew more enthusiastic still: “When commerce between Tosev 3 and Home begins, plans are to freeze some in liquid nitrogen for transport to the table of the Emperor himself.”

“They must truly be very fine, then,” Ttomalss said. Either that or, because you like them, you think every other male and female will, too. He didn’t say that. Instead, he remained polite to his superior: “I shall make a point of trying them.” He paused. “And here is Felless. I greet you, superior female.” He folded himself into the posture of respect, as he had for the ambassador.

Unlike Veffani, Felless returned the gesture. “I greet you, superior sir,” she said, “for while my formal rank may be somewhat higher, I want to draw once more on your superior expertise. Every meeting with these Tosevites, every analysis of what they do, brings only fresh confusion.”

“If you think I do not suffer from these same symptoms, I fear you run the risk of disappointment,” Ttomalss said. “Each day’s work with the Big Uglies only illuminates the width and breadth of our ignorance.”

“I see that,” Felless said. “I have arranged with Ambassador Veffani to quarter you in the chamber next to mine, that we may confer as conveniently as possible.” Her laugh was rueful. “Or, on the other fork of the tongue, I may simply scream in frustration. If I do, I hope it will not disturb your rest.”

“If you think I have not screamed on account of the Big Uglies-in frustration and in terror-you are mistaken, superior female,” Ttomalss said. “I shall find any screams of yours easy to forgive.”

His chamber proved more spacious and more comfortably appointed than the one aboard the ship from the conquest fleet: easier to find room in a building than in a starship, even an enormous starship. He telephoned Kassquit to make sure his Tosevite fosterling was all right and to let her know he was thinking about her even if his work called him away. He had discovered early on that she needed far more reassurance than a male or female of the Race would have.

Felless gave him a little while to settle in, then asked for admittance. When she entered the chamber, she was carrying a tray full of little sausages. “Try some of these while we work,” she said. “They are very tasty.”

“Bratwurste?” Ttomalss asked.

“Why, yes,” Felless said. “How did you know?”

Ttomalss laughed. “The ambassador already praised them.” He picked one up and popped it into his mouth. “Well, I will say he was not wrong. They are quite good.” He ate several, then turned an eye turret toward Felless. “And now, superior female, what troubles you about the Deutsche?”

“Everything!” Felless said with an emphatic cough. “They administer this not-empire on the basis of a whole series of false concepts. They assume they are superior to all other Tosevites, on the basis of no credible evidence whatever-”

“This is common among groups of Tosevites,” Ttomalss broke in. “The Chinese believe the same thing of themselves.”

“But the Deutsche go further, as you must know,” Felless said. “They maintain that certain other groups-some perhaps genetically differentiated, others simply following a relatively unpopular superstition-are so inferior as to deserve extermination, and they mete it out to these groups in immense numbers.”

“We have been pondering that since our arrival on Tosev 3,” Ttomalss said. “It has, if anything, worked to our advantage. One group they persecute, the Jews, has given us a good deal of aid.”

“So I am told,” Felless said. “That, it strikes me, is as it should be. What is not as it should be is the continued survival and scientific progressivism of the Greater German Reich. How can beings so dedicated to utterly irrational premises at the same time fly spacecraft and control missiles tipped with nuclear weapons?”

“I congratulate you,” Ttomalss said. “You have pierced with your fingerclaw a central perplexity of Tosev 3. Part of the answer, I think, is that they have so recently emerged from complete savagery that a good deal remains just under the scales, so to speak: far more than among us.”

“They drive me mad,” Felless said with another emphatic cough. “One moment, they will be as logical, as rational, and as intelligent in conversation as any member of the Race. The next moment, they will confidently assert the truth of a premise that is, to any eye but their own, at best ludicrous, at worst preposterous. And they will proceed to reason from that premise with the same rigor they use on other, more rational, ones. It is madness, and they cannot see it. And they continue to thrive even though it is madness, and aim to infect all of Tosev 3 with these mad doctrines. How is one to deal with what strikes the unbiased observer as a pathological condition?”

“Superior female, you do not strike me as an unbiased observer toward the Deutsche,” Ttomalss said with amusement.

“Very well, then. I shall revise that: with what strikes the non-Deutsch observer as a pathological condition,” Felless answered tartly. “There. Does that satisfy you? Will you now answer the question? How does one deal with Big Uglies whose ideology is nothing but a systematized delusion?”

“All Big Uglies sophisticated enough to have ideologies have them laced with delusions,” Ttomalss replied. “The Deutsche believe themselves to be biologically superior, as you have mentioned here. The Tosevites of the SSSR believe the workers will rule and then no one will rule, for perfect goodness and equity will come to all Big Uglies.”

“Looking for goodness and equity among the Big Uglies is indeed a systematized delusion,” Felless said.

“Truth,” Ttomalss said with a laugh. “And the Big Uglies of the United States believe that counting the snouts of the ignorant and clever together will somehow automatically create wise policy. Much as I have pondered this, I have never grasped its philosophical underpinnings, if there are any.”

“Madness. Utter madness,” Felless said with yet another emphatic cough. “As one researcher to another, I tell you I am near despair. There have been times when I have been tempted to withdraw to my spacecraft, and other times when I have been even more tempted to indulge in the Tosevite herb that has gained such popularity among the conquest fleet.”

“Ginger? I do not think that would be wise, superior female,” Ttomalss said. “Whatever the pleasures of the herb, it is without a doubt destructive of sound intellect and sensible habits. I have seen no exceptions to this rule.”

“Then it might make me better able to understand Big Uglies, don’t you think?” Felless said. “That in itself could make the herb valuable.” Ttomalss must have shown his alarm, for the female added, “I was but joking.”

“Superior female, I should hope so,” Ttomalss said primly.