Down to Earth

3

Up until now, the only time since the Japanese overran her village just before the little scaly devils came that Liu Han had lived in a liberated city was during her visit with her daughter to the United States. Now… Now, in exultation, she turned to Liu Mei and said, “Peking remains free!”

“I never thought we would be able to drive out the scaly devils’ garrison.” Liu Mei’s eyes glowed, though the rest of her long face remained almost expressionless. The scaly devils had taken her from Liu Han just after she was born, and for more than a year set about raising her as if she were one of theirs. They had not smiled-they could not smile-back at her when she began to smile as a baby. Without response, her ability to smile had withered on the stalk. That was one reason, and not the least of reasons, Liu Han hated the little scaly devils.

“Shanghai is still free, too,” Liu Han went on. “So is Kaifeng.”

“They are still free of the little devils, yes, but they aren’t in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army, the way Peking is,” Liu Mei said. Her revolutionary fervor burned hotter than her mother’s. “We share them with Kuomintang reactionaries, the way we share Harbin and Mukden up in Manchuria with pro-Japanese reactionaries. But Peking is ours.”

“Next to the little scaly devils, the fighters from the Kuomintang aren’t reactionaries. They’re fellow travelers,” Liu Han answered. “Next to the scaly devils, even the jackals who want to turn Manchuria back into Manchukuo and make it a Japanese puppet again are fellow travelers. If we don’t have a common front together against the little devils, we are bound to lose this struggle.”

“The logic of the dialectic will destroy them in their turn,” Liu Mei said confidently.

Liu Han was confident that would happen, too, but not so confident about when. Had she replied just then, Liu Mei wouldn’t have been able to hear her; killercraft piloted by scaly devils screamed low above their rooming house in the western part of Peking’s Chinese City. Cannons roared. Bombs burst close by with harsh roars-crump! crump! Window frames rattled. The floor beneath Liu Han’s feet quivered, as if at an earthquake.

Down on the ground, machine guns rattled and barked as the men-and a few women-of the People’s Liberation Army tried to bring down the scaly devils’ airplanes. By the way the jet engines of the killercraft faded in the distance, Liu Han knew the machine guns had failed again.

Her mouth twisted in vexation. “We need more antiaircraft weapons,” she said. “We need better antiaircraft weapons, too.”

“We only got a few guided antiaircraft rockets from the American, and we’ve used most of those,” Liu Mei answered. “With the fighting the way it is, how can they send us any more?”

“I would take them from anyone, even the Japanese,” Liu Han said. “We need them. Without them, the little scaly devils can pound us and pound us from the sky, and we can’t hit back. I wish we had more mortars, too, and more mines we could use against their tanks.” While you’re at it, why not wish for the moon? she thought-not a Chinese phrase, but one she’d picked up in Los Angeles.

Before Liu Mei could answer, a new cry pierced the shouts and screams that mingled with the gunfire outside. The cry was raw and urgent and came from the throats of both men and women: “Fire!”

Liu Han rushed to the window of the room she shared with her daughter. Sure enough, a column of black smoke rose from a building only a block or so away. Flames leapt up, red and angry. Turning to Liu Mei, she said, “We’d better go downstairs. That’s a big fire, and it will spread fast. We don’t want to get stuck in here.”

Liu Mei didn’t waste time answering. She just hurried for the door. Liu Han followed. They went down the dark, rickety stairs together. Other people in the rooming house, some of them also prominent Communists, were scurrying to the ground floor, too.

When Liu Han got down there, she ran out into the hutung- the cramped alleyway-onto which the rooming house opened. Peking was a city of hutungs; between its broad thoroughfares, alleys ran every which way, packed with shops and eateries and shacks and rooming houses and taverns and everything else under the sun. Hutungs were commonly packed with people, too; in a country as crowded as China, Liu Han hadn’t particularly noticed that till she went to the USA-before then, she’d taken it for granted. Now, every so often, she didn’t.

This hutung, at the moment, was so packed, people had a hard time running. The wind-as usual, from out of the northwest, from the Mongolian desert-blew smoke through the alley in a choking cloud. Eyes streaming, Liu Han reached out for Liu Mei’s hand. By what was literally blind luck, she seized it. If she hadn’t, they would have been swept apart, two different ships adrift on the Hwang Ho River. As things were, they drifted together.

“No one will be able to get through to fight the fire.” Liu Mei had to scream to make herself heard in the din, though her mother’s ear was only a couple of feet from her mouth.

“I know,” Liu Han said. “It will burn till it stops, that’s all.” Peking had seen a lot of fires since the uprising against the little scaly devils began. A lot of them had ended that way, too. Fire trucks were all very well for blazes on the larger streets, but hadn’t a prayer of pushing their way into the hutungs, and bucket brigades weren’t much good against the massive fires combat caused. Even a bucket brigade would have had a hard time breasting this tide of fleeing humanity.

More smoke billowed over Liu Han and Liu Mei. They both coughed horribly, like women dying of consumption. Behind them, people shrieked in panic. Above the shrieks came the crackle of flames. “The fire is moving faster than we are,” Liu Mei said, fear in her voice if not on her impassive face.

“I know,” Liu Han answered grimly. She had a knife in a hidden sheath strapped to her ankle; she didn’t go anywhere unarmed these days. If she took it out and started slashing at the people ahead of her, would it clear a path so she and Liu Mei could outrun the flames? The only thing that kept her from doing it was the cold judgment that it wouldn’t help.

And then, without warning, the pressure eased. Like melon seeds squeezed between the fingers, she and Liu Mei popped out onto a wider street, one with cobblestones rather than just dirt. She hadn’t even known it was close by, for she couldn’t see over the backs of the people ahead. Liu Mei hadn’t seen it either, though she was a couple of inches taller than her mother-Bobby Fiore, her American father, had been a big man by Chinese standards.

Now people could move faster. Liu Han and Liu Mei fled the fire, and gained on it. “Gods and spirits be praised,” Liu Han gasped, even though, as a good Marxist-Leninist, she wasn’t supposed to believe in gods or spirits. “I think we’ll get away.”

Liu Mei looked back over her shoulder. She could do that now without so much fear of getting trampled after a misstep. “The rooming house must be burning,” she said in a stricken voice.

“Yes, I think so,” Liu Han said. “We are alive. We will stay alive, and find another place to live. The Party will help us, if we need help. Things are not important. We didn’t have many things to lose, anyhow.” Having grown up in a peasant village, she needed few things to keep her going.

But tears streamed down Liu Mei’s expressionless, soot-streaked (and, yes, rather big-nosed) face. “The photographs we got in the United States,” she said in a broken voice. “The photographs of my father and his ancestors.”

“Oh,” Liu Han said, and put a consoling arm around her daughter. Ancestors mattered in China; filial piety ran deep, even among Party members. Liu Han had never imagined that Liu Mei would be able to learn anything about Bobby Fiore and his family, even after leaving China for the United States. But Yeager, the expert on scaly devils with whom she’d talked, had turned out to be a friend of Fiore’s, and had put her and Liu Mei in touch with his family. Everything the Fiores had sent was indeed bound to be going up in flames. Liu Han sighed. “You know what you know. If peace comes back”-she was too honest to say, When peace comes back- “we can get in touch with the Americans again.”

Liu Mei nodded. “Yes, that’s true,” she said. “Thank you, Mother. That does make it easier to bear. I thought my family was being all uprooted.”

“I understand.” No one had tended the graves of Liu Han’s ancestors for a long time. She didn’t even know if the village near Hankow had any people left in it these days. How many times had the red-hot rake of war passed through it since the little scaly devils carried her off into captivity?

A roar in the air that might have come from a furious dragon’s throat warned her the little devils’ airplanes were returning for another attack run. All over Peking, machine guns started shooting into the air even though their targets weren’t yet in sight. Before long, those bullets would start falling back to earth. Some would hit people in the head and kill them, too.

All that passed through Liu Han’s mind in a couple of seconds. Then the scaly devils’ killercraft roared low overhead. One of their pilots must have spied the swarm of people in the street because of the fire, for he cut loose with his cannon. When one of those shells struck home, it tore two or three people into bloody gobbets of flesh that looked as if they belonged in a butcher’s shop, then exploded and wounded another half a dozen. In that tight-packed crowd, the little scaly devil had a target he could hardly miss.

The attack itself lasted only a moment. Then the killercraft that had fired was gone, almost as fast as the sound of its passage. The horror lasted longer. Men and women close by Liu Han and Liu Mei were ripped to bits. Their blood splattered the two women. Along with its iron stink, Liu Han smelled the more familiar reek of night soil as shells and their fragments ripped guts open. The wounded, those unlucky enough not to die at once, shrieked and howled and wailed. So did men and women all around them, seeing what they had become.

Liu Han shouted: “Don’t scream! Don’t run! Help the injured! People must be strong together, or the little scaly devils will surely defeat us.”

More because hers was a calm, clear voice than because what she said made sense, people listened and obeyed. She was bandaging a man with a shattered arm when the roar of jet engines and the pounding of machine guns again cut through every other sound. Though she ground her teeth, she kept on working on the injured man. Peking was a vast city. Surely the killercraft would assail some distant part.

But they roared right overhead. Instead of ordinary bombs, they released swarms of little spheres. “Be careful of those!” Liu Han and Liu Mei cried together. Some of the spheres were tiny mines that were hard to see but could blow up a bicycle or a man unlucky enough to go over them. Others…

Others started squawking in Chinese: “Surrender! You cannot defeat the scaly devils! Give up while you still live!” Someone stomped one of those to silence it. It exploded, a sharp, flat bark. The woman stared at the bloody stump that had replaced her foot, then toppled screeching to the ground.

“Even if we hold Peking, I wonder if anyone will be left alive inside the walls,” Liu Han said glumly.

“That is not a proper revolutionary sentiment,” Liu Mei said. Her mother nodded, accepting the criticism. But Liu Han, twice her daughter’s age, had seen far too much to be certain proper revolutionary sentiment told all the truth there was to tell.

As Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker stopped his Volkswagen at one of the three traffic lights Greifswald boasted, drizzle began to fall. That was nothing out of the ordinary in the north German town: only a few kilometers from the Baltic, Greifswald knew fog and mist and drizzle and rain with great intimacy. It knew snow and ice, too, but the season for them was past-Drucker hoped so, anyhow.

He pulled the windshield-wiper knob. As the rubber blades began traveling streakily across the glass in front of him, he rolled up the driver’s-side window to keep the rain out of the automobile. His wife, Kathe, did the same thing on the passenger’s side.

With the two of them in the front, and with Heinrich, Claudia, and Adolf squeezed into the back, the inside of the hydrogen-burning VW’s windows began to steam up. Drucker turned on the heater and vented the warm air up to the inside of the windshield. He wasn’t sure how much good it did, or if it did any good at all.

The light turned green. “Go, Father,” Heinrich said impatiently, even as Drucker put the auto into first gear. Heinrich was sixteen now, and learning to drive. Had he known half as much about the business as he thought he did, he would have known twice as much as he really did.

As the Volkswagen went through the intersection-no more slowly than anyone else-a great roar penetrated the drizzle and the windows. Peenemunde was only about thirty kilometers east of Greifswald. When a rocket went up, everybody in town knew about it.

“Who would that be, Father?” Adolf asked, sounding as excited as any eleven-year-old would have at the prospect of blasting into space.

“It’s Joachim’s-uh, Major Spitzler’s-turn in the rotation,” Drucker answered. “Unless he came down with food poisoning”-a euphemism for getting drunk, but Adolf didn’t need to know that-“last night, he’s heading for orbit right now.”

“When do you go up again?” Claudia sounded wistful, not excited. She enjoyed having her father down on the ground.

Drucker enjoyed it, too. But, as he had to be, he was intimately familiar with the duty roster. As the roar from the A-45 slowly faded, he said, “I’m scheduled for next Thursday.” Claudia sighed. So did Kathe. He glanced over at his wife. “It won’t be so bad.”

She sighed again. He prudently kept driving. She knew how much he loved going into space; he knew better than to rhapsodize about it. He even enjoyed weightlessness, which put him in a distinct minority. And coming back after being away gave him several honeymoons a year. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, he thought, cheerfully butchering Shakespeare-American spaceman had taught him the pun, which didn’t work in German.

When they got back to their neat, two-story home on the outskirts of Greifswald, the children hurried to the door and went inside. Drucker didn’t bother locking it unless everyone was going to be away longer than for an hour’s shopping. Greifswald had few thieves. Few people were rash enough to want to risk falling foul of the Ministry of Justice.

“Let’s get the packages out of the boot,” Kathe said.

“You have to wait for me-I’ve got the key,” Drucker reminded her. He pulled it from the ignition switch and walked up to the front of the car. As he walked, his mouth twisted. He, or rather Kathe, had fallen foul of the Ministry of Justice. They’d found out she had, or might have had, a Jewish grandmother-which, under the racial-purity laws of the Reich, made her a Jew, and liable to liquidation.

Because Drucker was a Wehrmacht officer, and one with important duties, he’d been able to pull strings. The Gestapo had set Kathe free, and given her a clean bill of racial health. But pulling those strings had cost him. He’d never rise above his present rank, not if he served his country till he was ninety. From what the commandant at Peenemunde said, he was lucky he hadn’t been thrown out of the service altogether.

He opened the boot. Kathe scooped up the bundles-clothes for the children, who outgrew them or, with the boys, wrecked them faster than he thought they had any business doing. He didn’t really want to think about clothes, though. He slipped an arm around his wife’s waist. Kathe smiled up at him. He leaned over and planted a quick kiss on her mouth. “Tonight…” he murmured.

“What about it?” By the smile in her voice, she knew just what he had in mind, and liked the idea, too.

Before he could answer, the telephone rang inside the house. He let out a snort of laughter. “We don’t have to worry about that. It’ll be Ilse calling Heinrich or else one of Claudia’s school friends. Nobody bothers with old folks like us.”

But he was wrong. Claudia came hurrying to the door, pig-tails flying. “It’s for you, Father-a man.”

“Did he say which man he was?” Drucker asked. Claudia shook her head. Drucker scratched his. That eliminated everyone military, and most of his civilian friends, too-though his daughter would have recognized their voices. Still scratching, he said, “All right, I’m coming.” He slammed down the Volkswagen’s boot lid and went inside.

He’d shed his overcoat by the time he got to the phone; the furnace kept the house toasty warm. Picking up the handset, he spoke briskly: “Johannes Drucker here.”

“Hello, Hans, you old son of a bitch,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “How the hell are you? Been a goddamn long time, hasn’t it?”

“Who is this?” Drucker demanded. Whoever he was, he sounded not only coarse but more than a little drunk. Drucker couldn’t place his voice, but couldn’t swear he’d never heard it before, either.

Harsh, raucous laughter dinned in his right ear. “That’s how it is, all right,” the-stranger? — said “People go up in the world, they forget their old pals. I didn’t think it would happen with you, but fuck me if I’m too surprised, either.”

“Who is this?” Drucker repeated. He was beginning to be sure this fellow was looking for some other Hans. Drucker had given his last name, but how often did drunks bother to listen?

He turned out to be wrong again. The other fellow said, “How many Lizard panzers did we blow to hell and gone in Poland, you driving and me at the gun?”

No wonder the voice seemed as if he might have known it before. “Grillparzer,” he said in slow wonder. “Gunther Grillparzer. Christ, man, it’s been close to twenty years.”

“Too goddamn long,” agreed the gunner with whom Drucker had shared a Panther panzer through the most desperate fighting he’d ever known. “Well, we’ll make up for lost time, you and me. We’re going to be buddies again, damned if we’re not. Just like the old days, Hans-except maybe not quite.” His laugh was almost a giggle.

Drunk, all right, Drucker thought. “What do you mean?” he asked sharply. When Grillparzer didn’t answer right away, he found another, more innocuous, question: “What have you been doing since the fighting stopped?” Kathe was giving him a curious look. “Old army pal,” he mouthed, and she nodded and went away.

“What have I been doing?” Grillparzer echoed. “Oh, this and that, old son. Yeah, that’s about right-a little of this, a little of that, a little of something else now and again, too.”

Drucker sighed. That meant the panzer gunner was a bum or a petty criminal these days. Too bad. “So what can I do for you?” he asked. He owed Grillparzer his neck. He wouldn’t begrudge him five hundred or even a thousand marks. He could afford it, and Gunther was plainly down on his luck.

“Like I say, you’ve come up in the world,” the gunner said. “Me, I wasn’t so lucky.” His voice turned into a self-pitying whine.

“How much do you need?” Drucker asked patiently. “I’m not what you’d call rich-nobody with three kids is likely to be-but I’ll do what I can for you.”

He’d expected-he’d certainly hoped-Grillparzer would babble in sodden gratitude. That didn’t happen, either; it wasn’t his day for guessing right. Instead, the ex-gunner said, “Do you remember the night we went after those black-shirted pigdogs with our knives?”

Ice prickled up Drucker’s back. “Yes, I remember that,” he said. Toward the end of the fighting, the SS had arrested the regimental commander, Colonel Heinrich Jager, in whose panzer Drucker and Grillparzer had both served. The panzer crew had rescued him before he got taken away from the front, and had bundled him into the airplane of a Red Air Force senior lieutenant-a pretty woman, Drucker recalled-bound for Poland. No one but the panzer crew knew what had happened to those SS men. Drucker wanted to keep it that way. “Don’t talk about it on the phone. You never know who might be listening.”

“You’re right-I don’t,” Grillparzer agreed with good humor that struck Johannes Drucker as put on. “I might lose my meal ticket if people start hearing things before I want ’em to. Can’t have that, can we, Hans?” He laughed out loud.

Drucker was feeling anything but cheerful. “What do you want from me?” he asked, hoping against hope it wasn’t what he thought.

But it was. “Whatever you’ve got, and then another fifty pfennigs besides,” Grillparzer answered. “You’ve lived high on the hog these past twenty years. You’re an officer and everything, after all. Now it’ll be my turn.”

After a look around the living room to make sure nobody in his family could hear, Drucker pressed his mouth against the phone and spoke in a low, urgent voice. “My arse. If you bring me down, I’ll sure as hell take you with me. If you don’t think I’ll sing when they start working me over, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”

But Gunther Grillparzer laughed again. “Good luck,” he said. “You’re the first fellow who’s called me Gunther in a devil of a long time. Name got too hot for me to keep wearing it. The papers I’ve got with this one are damn good, too. All I have to do is write the Gestapo a letter. I don’t even have to sign it-you know how those things go.”

That Drucker did, only too well. The Reich ran on anonymous accusations. And he was already in a bad odor with the Gestapo and with his own higher-ups because of the accusations against Kathe. Regardless of whether there was any truth in Grillparzer’s letter, Drucker couldn’t stand another investigation. It would mean his neck, and no mistake-and probably his wife’s neck, too, after he couldn’t protect her any more.

He licked his lips. “How much do you want?” he whispered.

“Now you’re talking like a smart boy,” Grillparzer said with another nasty chuckle. “I like smart boys. Five thousand for starters. We’ll see where it goes from there.”

Drucker let out a silent sigh of relief. He could make the first payment. Maybe Grillparzer aimed to bleed him to death a little at a time, not all at once. After that first payment… He’d worry about that later. “How do I get you the money?” he asked.

“I’ll let you know,” the ex-gunner answered.

“I’m going up next week,” Drucker warned. “My wife doesn’t know anything about this, and I don’t want her to. Don’t mix her up in this, Grillparzer, or you’ll get trouble from me, not cash.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Hans old boy,” Grillparzer said, but that might not have been altogether true, for he went on, “All right, we’ll play that your way-for now. You’ll hear from me.” He hung up.

Kathe chose that moment to come into the living room. “And how is your old army buddy?” she asked indulgently.

“Fine,” Drucker answered, and the lie survived his wife’s long and intimate acquaintance with him. He nodded, ever so slightly. Now he had a little stretch of time in which to plan how best to commit a murder.

Ttomalss had been studying the Big Uglies ever since the conquest fleet came to Tosev 3. Sometimes he thought he understood this world’s strange inhabitants as well as anyone not hatched among them could. He certainly had that reputation among the Race. He was, after all, the only male who’d ever successfully reared a Tosevite hatchling from its earliest days to the approach of maturity. He was, so far as he knew, the only male addled enough even to try such a mad venture.

But, despite that success, despite endless other research, despite endless study of others’ research on the Big Uglies and even their research on themselves, he sometimes thought he didn’t understand them at all. He’d had a lot of those moments since coming to the Greater German Reich. Now he found himself facing another one.

A Big Ugly named Rascher, who called himself a physician-by Tosevite standards, maybe he was one, but Tosevite standards were low, low-spoke in the tones of calm reason that so often characterized officials of the Reich at their most outrageous: “Of course these individuals deserve death, Senior Researcher. They are a weakness in the fabric of the Aryan race, and so must be plucked from it without mercy.”

He used the language of the Race. As far as Ttomalss was concerned, that only made the horror underlying his words worse. The researcher said, “I do not understand the logic behind your statement.” I ought to learn that phrase in the language of the Deutsche, Ttomalss thought. Spirits of Emperors past know I use it often enough.

“Is it not obvious?” Dr. Rascher said. “Does the Race not also punish males who mate with other males?”

Ttomalss shrugged; that was a gesture the Race and Tosevites shared. “I have heard of such matings happening among us,” he admitted. “During the mating season, we are apt to become rather frantic. But the occurrences are rare and accidental, so what point to making a fuss, let alone punishing the behavior?”

“It is not rare and accidental among us,” the Big Ugly said. “Some misguided males deliberately pursue it. They must be rooted out, exterminated, lest they pollute us with this unnatural behavior.”

“I do not understand,” Ttomalss said again. “If they mate among themselves, they cannot have hatchlings. This in itself eliminates them from your gene pool. Where is the need to root out and exterminate?”

“Mating among males is filthy and degenerate,” Dr. Rascher declared. “It corrupts the young in the Reich.”

“Even if what you say is true-and I have seen no evidence to that effect-do you not believe the problem to be self-correcting?” Ttomalss asked. “I repeat, these males are unlikely to breed, and so, except for new mutations-assuming this trait to be genetically induced, about which I have seen no evidence either for or against-will in the course of centuries gradually tend to diminish. You Deutsch Tosevites, if you will forgive me for saying so, have always struck the Race as being impatient even for your species.”

He had been around Big Uglies long enough to recognize Dr. Rascher’s glower for what it was. The Deutsch physician snapped, “And the Race has always struck us Aryans as being insanely tolerant. If you are daft enough to put up with degeneracy in your own kind for centuries or millennia on end, that is your affair. If we choose to take direct action in uprooting it, that is ours.”

Plainly, Ttomalss wouldn’t get anywhere with this line. The Race, to its dismay, had got nowhere in attempting to dissuade the Deutsche from slaughtering the Jews in their not-empire for no other reason than that they were Jews. Since they were as determined to slaughter males with different mating habits, they would go on doing that, too. Males… That sparked a thought in Ttomalss’ mind. “Have you also females who mate with females? If so, what do you do with them?”

“Exterminate them when we catch them, of course,” Dr. Rascher replied. “We are consistent. Did you expect anything different?”

“Not really,” Ttomalss said with a sigh. Unless he was mistaken, Rascher’s face bore an expression of smug self-satisfaction. The researcher hadn’t been familiar with that expression in his work in China, but had seen it on a great many Deutsch officials. They are ideology-mad, he thought. Too many Big Uglies are ideology-mad. They are as drunk on their ideologies as they are on their sexuality.

“You should not have,” Dr. Rascher said, and added an emphatic cough. “It is most important for the Aryan race to preserve its purity and to prevent its defilement by such elements as these.”

“I have heard you Deutsche use this term ‘Aryan’ before,” Ttomalss said. “Sometimes you seem to use it to refer to yourselves and yourselves alone, but sometimes you seem to use it in a different way. Please define it for me.” He knew how important precise definitions were. The Deutsche, all too often, preferred arguing in a circle to precision, though they vehemently denied that was the case.

Dr. Rascher said, “I will define it with great pleasure, taking the definition from the words of our great Leader, Adolf Hitler. Aryans have been and are the race which is the bearer of Tosevite cultural development. It is no accident that the first cultures arose in places where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower races, subjugated them and bent them to his will. As a conqueror, he regulated their practical activity, according to his will and for his aims. As long as he ruthlessly upheld the master attitude, not only did he really remain master, but also the preserver and increaser of culture, which was based on his abilities. When he gives up his purity of blood, he loses his place in the wonderful world which he has made for himself. This is why we so oppose the idea of mingling races.”

“You Deutsche see yourselves as Aryans, then, but not all Aryans are necessarily Deutsche-is that correct?” Ttomalss asked.

“It is, although we are the most perfect representatives of the Aryan race anywhere on Tosev 3,” Rascher replied.

“Fascinating,” Ttomalss said. “Most fascinating indeed. And what is your evidence for these assertions?”

“Why, I told you,” Dr. Rascher said. “In his writings, Hitler sets forth the doctrine of the Aryans in great detail.”

“Yes, you did tell me that,” Ttomalss agreed. “But what was Hitler’s evidence? Did he have any? What do Tosevite historians say about these questions? What does archaeology say about them? Why do you accept Hitler’s word and not the statements of those who disagree with him, if there are any?”

Behind corrective lenses that magnified them, Dr. Rascher’s eyes-they were of a washed-out gray, a very ugly color to Ttomalss-grew larger still, a token of astonishment. “Hitler was the Leader of the Reich,” the Deutsch physician exclaimed. “But naturally, his writings on any subject are authoritative.”

“Why?” Ttomalss asked in genuine puzzlement. “He must have known something about leading, of course, or he would not have led your not empire, but how much did he understand about these other things? How much could he have understood? He spent most of his time leading or getting ready to lead, did he not? What chance did he have to study these other issues in any sort of detail?”

“He was the Leader,” Dr. Rascher replied. “He knew the truth because he was the Leader.” He tacked on another emphatic cough.

Ttomalss and he stared at each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. After a long, long pause, Ttomalss let out another sigh. He’d had a lot of these moments with Big Uglies. Trying to get past this one, he said, “You claim this as revealed belief, then, not as scientific knowledge. You hold it as a superstitious opinion, like the ones expressed in… what is the local one here? Ah, Christianity, yes.” He was pleased he’d remembered the name.

But Rascher shook his head. “This is scientific truth. Christianity, on the other fork of the tongue, is a belief similar to your veneration of the spirits of Emperors past.”

He might know the idioms of the Race’s language, but he was an ignorant, barbarous Big Ugly, and did not cast down his eyes when mentioning the Emperors. And he mentioned them in insulting fashion, too. “You have no business speaking of that which you are too foolish to comprehend,” Ttomalss snapped. Dr. Rascher laughed a yipping Tosevite laugh, which further infuriated the researcher.

“Neither have you,” the Big Ugly retorted.

Now Ttomalss and he stared at each other in perfect mutual loathing. “Whatever the veneration of the spirits of Emperors past may be”-Ttomalss lowered his eye turrets toward the ground; he was no ignorant barbarian-“we do not shape the policy of the Empire around it.”

Even as he spoke, he realized that wasn’t completely true. After its first two planetary conquests, the Race had encouraged Emperor-veneration among the Rabotevs and Hallessi, using it as one means of binding the subject peoples to the Empire. Plans had been developed to do the same here on Tosev 3. So far, however, none of those plans had come to anything.

Dr. Rascher said, “Whether the Race lives according to its principles is of no concern to me. The Reich, I am proud to say, does.”

“These principles seem to include slaughtering anyone your famous Leader happened to dislike.” Ttomalss was too nettled to stay anywhere close to diplomatic. “How fortunate for you that his dislikes did not include doctors.”

He’d succeeded in making the Big Ugly as angry as he was. Rascher sprang to his feet and pointed toward the door. “Get out!” he shouted. “Get out, and never show your ugly snouted face outside your embassy again!” He punctuated that with another emphatic cough. “Your kind deserves extermination far more than any Tosevites.”

Ttomalss also rose, with more than a little relief: he found the Big Uglystyle chair in which he’d been sitting imperfectly comfortable. “I never thought any intelligent race or subgroup deserved extermination,” he said. “You Deutsche, though, tempt me to believe I may have been mistaken.”

Having got the last word, he returned to the Race’s embassy in something approaching triumph. He was still studying his recorded notes, trying to find anything resembling sense in the Reich ’s policies, when the telephone circuitry in his computer hissed for attention. On activating the telephone, he found himself looking into Veffani’s face. The ambassador said, “I have received a complaint of you from the Deutsche.”

“It could be, superior sir,” Ttomalss said. “I have a good many complaints against them, too.” He summarized his conversation with Dr. Rascher, including the Big Ugly’s revolting comments about the veneration of the spirits of Emperors past.

“They are revolting,” Veffani agreed. “But you have insulted them to such a degree that they insist you leave the Reich immediately. By the usages of diplomacy on Tosev 3, they are within their rights to make such a demand.”

“It shall be done.” Ttomalss did his best to sound as if he were obeying an order he didn’t care for. Inside, though, he felt like skittering for joy, mad and carefree as a hatchling.

“I want you to know one thing, Senior Researcher,” Veffani said.

“What is that, superior sir?” Ttomalss asked, as he knew he should.

“It is very simple: by the Emperor, how I envy you!”

Kassquit passed Tessrek in a corridor of the orbiting starship where she’d spent almost her entire life. Tessrek, she knew, loathed her for what she was and for what she had so nearly become. But the male was a colleague of Ttomalss, and so Kassquit bent into the best posture of respect she could and said, “I greet you, superior sir.”

“I greet you,” Tessrek replied, and went on his way without so much as turning an eye turret back in her direction. It was the minimum possible politeness, but Kassquit did not feel insulted. On the contrary: most of what she’d had from Tessrek over the years were insults. He’d given them to Ttomalss, too; he was a thoroughly bad-tempered male. After she’d insulted him in return, though, he’d become a lot more wary-she’d gone from target to possibly dangerous foe.

“That will do,” Kassquit murmured as she let herself into her own cubicle. “Let him hate me, so long as he fears me a little, too.”

Once inside, she went over to the computer terminal and sat down in front of it. Before she began to use it, she took a set of artificial fingerclaws from a drawer below the keyboard and put them on. She could not use voice commands; as she’d seen time and again, the machine stubbornly refused to understand her.

A glance at her reflection in the computer screen told her why, as if she hadn’t known. No way around it: though Ttomalss had raised her as a hatchling and then as a female of the Race, she was a Big Ugly. The computer knew-it couldn’t follow the mushy way in which she pronounced the language of the Race. It was the only language she knew, and she couldn’t speak it properly. That struck her as most unfair.

She shaved the hair on her head. Since her body matured, she’d shaved the hair under her arms and between her legs, too. Having the stuff at all disgusted her. Getting rid of it didn’t make her soft, smooth hide much like the scaly skin a female of the Race should have had. Even her color was wrong: she was golden, not a proper greenish brown.

Her eyes were too small and too narrow and did not lie in moving turrets. She had no proper snout. She had no tailstump, either, and when she stood, she stood far too erect. She’d tried leaning forward all the time like a proper member of the Race, but it made her back hurt. She’d had to give it up.

“I am not a proper member of the Race,” she said, rubbing it in. “I am very ugly. But I am civilized. I would rather be what I am-and what I almost am-than a wild Big Ugly down on Tosev 3.”

As she turned on the computer and colors filled the screen, she let out a sigh of relief. For one thing, those colors made her own reflection harder to see, which made it easier to imagine she really was a female of the Race. For another, the computer gave her access to the Race’s information and opinion network. There, she might as well have been a female of the Race. No one could tell otherwise, not by the way she wrote. Her views were worth as much as anyone else’s-sometimes more than someone else’s, if she could argue better.

She wondered what males and females of the Race would think if they knew the person who challenged their views was in fact an overtall, overstraight, soft-skinned, small-eyed Big Ugly. Actually, she didn’t wonder. She knew. Whatever respect she’d earned for her brains would vanish, dissolved in the scorn and suspicion the Race felt toward Tosevites.

She felt the same scorn and suspicion toward Tosevites herself. She’d learned it from Ttomalss, who’d raised her since hatchlinghood; from every other male-and, since the coming of the colonization fleet, female-of the Race she’d met in person; and from every bit of video and writing the Race had produced about Tosev 3.

But having it aimed at her hurt almost too much to bear.

She checked for new comments and speculations about which independent Tosevite not-empire had attacked and destroyed more than ten ships from the colonization fleet not long after they took up their orbits around this world. The Race had delivered token punishments to each of the three suspects-the SSSR, the USA, and the Reich — because it could not prove which of them had done the murderous deed. That didn’t stop males and females from speculating endlessly, but the speculations, as far as Kassquit could see, had reached the point of diminishing returns. And the less the speculators knew, the more strident they were about advancing their ill-informed claims.

With more than a little relief, she escaped that area and went to one nearby: one where the Race discussed the American spacecraft known, for no reason she could fathom, as the Lewis and Flark. No. She corrected herself: the Lewis and Clark. Changing the name made it no more meaningful to her.

Here, too, discussion had died down. The Lewis and Clark had been a mystery when the American Big Uglies were fitting out their former space station to travel through this solar system. They’d done so in such ostentatious secrecy that they’d aroused everyone’s suspicion and alarm. Most males and females had feared they were turning it into some immense, and immensely dangerous, orbital fortress.

It had even aroused the Big Uglies’ suspicions. Somehow or other, a Tosevite going by the name of Regeya had wormed his way onto the Race’s network, to learn what he could of what the Race thought and had learned about the space station. No one had recognized him for what he was till Kassquit did.

I should be proud of that, she thought. I got him expelled from areas of the network where he had no right to go.

With a sigh, Kassquit made the negative hand gesture. She was proud… but then again, she wasn’t. The Tosevite who called himself Regeya had had a more interesting way of looking at things and expressing himself than most of the males and females with whose opinions she’d become all too familiar. The network was a duller place without him on it.

It is a more secure place without him on it, Kassquit told herself. That consoled the part of her which devoted itself to duty: a very large part, thanks to Ttomalss’ training. But it wasn’t all of her. The rest craved fun and amusement. She sometimes wished it wouldn’t, but it did.

Some of the curious part of her also wished Regeya remained on the network. Before she’d recognized him as a Big Ugly, he’d come close to doing the same in reverse. She didn’t know how; her command of the Race’s written language was perfect, which his wasn’t quite. But he had. He’d asked to talk to her by telephone. She couldn’t do that, not without giving away what she was.

“Fun,” she said aloud. “Amusement.” She went to a new area on the network, one that offered both of those: the area devoted to discussion of the best ways to nurture hatchlings. The conquest fleet had been all-male; not till the colonization fleet arrived did that area become necessary.

How do you make hatchlings not bite when you feed them? someone-a harassed someone-had written since Kassquit last checked there.

Someone else, evidently a voice of experience, had given a three-word reply to that: You do not. The responder had also added the Race’s conventional symbol for an emphatic cough.

The next message was a glyph of an open mouth, the conventional symbol for laughter. Kassquit’s mouth fell open, too. She laughed like that when she remembered to. Sometimes, though, amusement made her yip the way a Big Ugly was biologically programmed to do.

A few messages further on, someone named Maargyees wrote, This is my very first clutch of eggs. I wish I had never laid them. Not being able to talk to the hatchlings is driving me out of my scales. What do I do about that?

Live with it, answered the cynic who’d replied to the earlier message.

We all do, someone else added. Sooner or later, they turn into civilized beings. We did, you know.

Maargyees wasn’t easily quelled. Sure seems like later to me, she wrote.

How is it that you are so ignorant of hatchlings and their ways? a male asked.

Me? Maargyees answered. I was hatched in a barn myself I do not know anything. Know? I do not even suspect anything.

That sent several laughter signs up onto the computer screen. Kassquit added one of her own. Maargyees had a flippant, irreverent way of looking at the world, very different from the endless run of boring comments from most males and females. Kassquit hadn’t seen anything like it for quite a while. She hadn’t seen anything like it, as a matter of fact, since…

She paused with her artificial fingerclaws poised above the keyboard. “Since Regeya,” she said aloud. And she knew only too well who, or rather what, Regeya had turned out to be.

Could the obstreperous Big Ugly, having been booted off the network once, have found a new disguise under which to return? Kassquit decided to do a little checking. No messages from anyone named Maargyees appeared anywhere until some time after Regeya had been removed. That didn’t prove anything, but it was suggestive. Maargyees sounded more like a name a Rabotev should carry than one belonging to a female of the Race, but that didn’t prove anything, either-some members of the Race hatched on Rabotev 2 had local names.

As she had for the falsely named Regeya, Kassquit checked the records. Sure enough, a Maargyees had come with the colonization fleet-a Maargyees with a personal identification number different from the one this female was using.

“Well, well,” Kassquit murmured. She knew she ought to report the wild Big Ugly’s return to the network, but had trouble bringing herself to do it. Things had been dull since Regeya vanished from the network. And Kassquit had a hard time seeing how asking questions about hatchlings constituted any sort of danger for the Race.

She could always report the Tosevite later. For now, she sent him-him, not her-an electronic message: I greet you, Maargyees. And how is the life of a senior tube technician these days? That was the fictitious occupation the equally fictitious Regeya had said he used.

If she didn’t get an answer, Kassquit vowed she would report that the Tosevite was roaming the network again. But one came back before long: I greet you, Kassquit. And how is the life of a snoopy nuisance these days? With the words, he used the symbol suggesting he didn’t intend to be taken seriously.

Very well; I thank you, Kassquit answered. And have you truly laid eggs?

Oh, yes, Regeya-so she thought of him-answered. A big square green one and a little purple one with orange spots.

Kassquit stared at the words on the screen, imagining a Big Ugly producing such a preposterous clutch. She dissolved in Tosevite-style noisy giggles. The picture was too deliciously absurd for anything else. I like you, she wrote. I really do.

You must, Regeya wrote back. Why else would you get me in so much trouble? Kassquit cocked her head to one side. How in the name of the Emperor was she supposed to take that?

Straha jumped when the telephone rang. The exiled shiplord laughed at himself as he went to answer it. He’d been living in the United States more than forty years now: more than twenty of Tosev 3’s slow turns about its star. After all that time, ringing telephones could still sometimes startle him. By rights, phones were supposed to hiss, as they did back on Home.

He reached for the handset with a small, scornful hiss of his own. Tosevite telephones were good for little more than voice communication: not nearly so sophisticated as the flexible instruments the Race used. This is what you get-this is part of what you get-for casting your lot with the local primitives, he thought. But he’d been sure Atvar would give him worse had he stayed. Defying the fleetlord-defying him but not overthrowing him-had a price.

So did exile. He’d paid, again and again. He would go on paying till the day he died-and maybe after that, if the spirits of Emperors past turned their backs on him for his betrayal.

He picked up the telephone. “I greet you,” he said in his own language. By now, he spoke and understood English quite well, but his native hisses and pops went along way toward getting rid of annoying Big Uglies who wanted nothing more than to sell him something.

“I greet you, Shiplord, and hope you are well.” That was a Big Ugly speaking, all right, but one whose voice was familiar and welcome in Straha’s hearing diaphragm.

“I greet you, Sam Yeager,” Straha answered. Yeager might inhabit a Tosevite body, but he was good at thinking like a male of the Race-better than any other Big Ugly Straha knew. “And what would you like today?”

What do you want from me? was really what he meant. As exiles had to do, he’d earned his keep by telling the rulers of his new home everything they wanted to know about his old one. He’d known he would have to do that when he fled the 206th Emperor Yower in a shuttlecraft. He’d been doing it ever since.

But all Yeager asked was, “How does the Race ever manage to civilize its hatchlings? Far as I can see, predators are welcome to them.”

Straha laughed. “We do eventually improve. You Tosevites are liable to be less patient than we are, as your hatchlings develop language faster than ours. In every other way, though, ours are more advanced.”

“Shiplord, that is a big exception.” The Tosevite used an emphatic cough.

“I suppose so,” Straha said indifferently. “As for myself, I never had much interest in trying to civilize hatchlings. I never had much interest in trying to civilize anyone. Maybe that is why I have not had too much difficulty living among you Big Uglies.” He used the Race’s imperfectly polite name for the Tosevites without self-consciousness; when they were speaking English, Yeager called him a Lizard just as casually.

“You came down in the right not-empire, Shiplord-that is what it is,” Yeager said. “Suppose you had landed in the Soviet Union. Whatever sort of time you are having here, it would be worse there.”

“So I am given to understand,” Straha answered. “At the time, it was a matter of luck: I had a friend stationed in this not-empire, which gave me a plausible excuse for coming here, so I instructed Vesstil to bring me down not far from that other male’s ship. Had he been in the SSSR, I would have gone where he was.”

By everything he’d learned since, he would indeed have regretted that. The Russkis seemed interested in nothing but squeezing males dry and then discarding them. The Americans had squeezed him dry, but they’d rewarded him, too, as best they could. He had this house in the section of Los Angeles called the Valley, he had a motorcar and a Tosevite driver (who was also bodyguard and spy) at his disposal, and he had the society-such as it was-of other males of the Race living in this relatively decent climate. They weren’t exiles, but former prisoners of war who’d decided they liked living among the Big Uglies. They could, if they chose, travel to areas of Tosev 3 where the Race ruled. Straha couldn’t, not while Atvar remained fleetlord.

And he had ginger. The Americans made sure he had all he wanted. Why not? It was legal here. The local Big Uglies wanted him happy, and ginger made him that way-until he crashed down into depression, even into despair, as the effects of each taste wore off.

Thinking about tasting made him want to do it. It also made him miss a few words of what Yeager was saying: “-do not guess you are the right male to come to for advice about the little creatures, then.”

“No, I fear not,” Straha said. “Why are you suddenly interested in them, anyhow? As I said, I am not so very interested in them myself.”

“I am always curious about the Race and its ways,” the Tosevite replied, an answer that was not an answer. “You may find out more than that one of these days, but the time is not right yet. I hope you will excuse me now, but I have other calls to make. Goodbye, Shiplord.”

“Farewell, Sam Yeager.” Straha swiveled an eye turret in perplexity. Why was Yeager asking questions about hatchlings? The only time Straha had thought about them since coming to Tosev 3 was after he’d mated with a female who’d tasted ginger at a former prisoner’s home: he’d wondered if his genes would go on in the society the Race was building here on Tosev 3, even though he couldn’t.

Well, if Yeager had got an itch under his scales, that was his problem, not Straha’s. Big Uglies had more curiosity than they knew what to do with. What Straha had was a yen for ginger.

The house in which he lived was built to Tosevite scale, which meant it was large for a male of the Race. He kept his supply of the powdered herb at the back of a high cupboard shelf. If he didn’t want a taste badly enough to go to the trouble of climbing up onto a chair and then onto a counter to get the jar, then he would do without.

He was perfectly willing to go clambering today. A breathy sigh of anticipation escaped him as he got down and set the jar on the counter. He took a small measuring spoon out of a kitchen drawer, then undid the lid to the jar. He sighed again when the ginger’s marvelously spicy aroma floated up to his scent receptors. One hand trembled a little as he took a spoonful of the herb from the jar and poured it into the palm of his other hand.

Of itself, his head bent. His tongue shot out and lapped up the ginger. Even the flavor was wonderful, though it was the least part of why he tasted. Almost before he knew it, the herb was gone.

And, almost before he knew it, the ginger went straight to his head. Like that of mating, its pleasure never faded. He felt twice as tall as a Big Ugly, full of more data than the Race’s computer network, able to outpull a landcruiser. All that (or almost all of it-he really did think, or thought he thought, faster with the herb than without it) was a ginger-induced illusion. That made it no less enjoyable.

Experience had taught him not to try to do too much while he was tasting. He really wasn’t infinitely wise and infinitely strong, no matter what the herb told him. During the fighting, a lot of males had got themselves and their comrades killed, for ginger made them think they could do more than they really could.

Straha simply stood where he was, eyeing the ginger jar. Before long, the herb would leave his system. Then he would feel as weak and puny and miserable as he felt wonderful now. And then, without a doubt, he would have another taste.

He was still feeling happy when the telephone rang again. He picked it up and, speaking as grandly as if he were still the third most senior male in the conquest fleet rather than a disgraced exile, he said, “I greet you.”

“And I greet you, Shiplord.”

This time, the telephone wire brought Straha the crisp tones of a male of the Race. “Hello, Ristin,” he said, grandly still. “What can I do for you?”

Ristin had been one of the first infantrymales captured by the Americans. These days, he might almost have been a Big Ugly himself, so completely had he taken on Tosevite ways. He said, “No, Shiplord, it is what I can do for you.”

“Ah? And what is that?” Straha asked. He did not altogether like or particularly trust Ristin. While he himself lived among the Big Uglies, he had not abandoned the ways of the Race: he still kept his body paint perfect, for instance, and often startled males and females who saw him without realizing for a moment which shiplord he was. Ristin, by contrast, wore and wore proudly the red, white, and blue prisoner-of-war body paint the Big Uglies had given him in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His housemate Ullhass was the same way. Straha found them in large measure unfathomable.

But then Ristin said, “Shiplord, I can get you several prime ssefenji cutlets. Are you interested?”

“I am. I cannot deny it, and I thank you,” Straha said. “I had heard that the colonization fleet was beginning to bring down domestic animals, but I did not know the meat was available yet. Ssefenji!” He let out a soft exclamation redolent of longing. “I have not tasted ssefenji since before we left Home.”

“Neither had I,” Ristin answered. “It is as good-well, very nearly as good-as I remembered, too. I have some in the freezer. I will bring it to you today or perhaps tomorrow. May you eat it with enjoyment. And may you eat it with Greek olives-they go with it very well.”

“I shall do that. I have some in the house,” Straha said.

“I thought you would,” Ristin said.

Straha made the affirmative hand gesture, though the other male couldn’t see that, not over a primitive, screenless Tosevite telephone. Males-and females-of the Race found a lot of the food Big Uglies ate on the bland side. Ham, salted nuts, and Greek olives were welcome exceptions. Straha said, “So there are herds of ssefenji roaming Tosev 3 now, eh? And azwaca and zisuili, too, I should not wonder.”

“I believe so, Shiplord, though I have not been able to get any of their flesh yet,” Ristin answered.

“Perhaps I can manage that,” Straha said. His connections within the American army and the American government ought to be able to arrange it. “If I can do it, of course I shall make you a return gift.”

“You are gracious, Shiplord,” Ristin said, for all the world as if Straha were still his superior.

“Ssefenji,” Straha said dreamily. The ginger was wearing off now, but he didn’t feel so depressed as he would have otherwise. “Azwaca. Zisuili. Good eating.” The herb still sped his wits to some degree, for he went on, “And not only good eating, but also a sign that we are beginning to make this planet more Homelike. High time we had our own beasts here.”

“Truth. And my tongue quivers at the thought of fried azwaca.” Ristin sounded dreamy, too.

In musing tones, Straha said, “I wonder how our animals and the local ecology will interact with each other. That is always the question in introducing new life-forms to a world. The results of the competition should be interesting.”

“Our beasts and plants prevailed on Rabotev 2 and Halless 1,” Ristin said. “No doubt it will be the same here.”

“You are likely to be right.” Perhaps it was the onset of after-tasting depression that made Straha add, “But this is Tosev 3. You never can tell.”

Jonathan Yeager’s alarm clock woke him at twenty minutes before six. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes. He hated getting up so early, but he had an eight o’clock class in the language of the Race at UCLA and chores to do before then. With a grunt, he got out of bed, turned on the ceiling light, and put on a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans and an even tighter-fitting flesh-colored T-shirt adorned with a fleetlord’s body paint.

He’d showered just before he went to bed, so he ran a hand over his scalp and his chin. His face needed shaving; his scalp didn’t. That saved him a little time in the bathroom.

He went out to the kitchen as quietly as he could. His parents-lucky them! — were still asleep. He poured himself a big glass of milk and cut a slab off the coffee cake in the refrigerator. Inhaling breakfast was a matter of moments. He ate like a shark and never gained any weight. Over the years, the things his father said about that had grown increasingly rude.

That thought made Jonathan laugh. His old man was an old man, all right, even if he did know a hell of a lot about the Lizards. Jonathan washed his glass, his plate, and the silverware he’d used and set everything in the dish drainer by the sink. The hard time his mom would have given him if he’d left the stuff for her made that more trouble than it was worth.

Then he muttered to himself. He was going to have to get another knife dirty. He got a cooked ham out of the refrigerator, cut off a couple of thick slices, and cut them into inch-wide strips. He put those strips on a paper towel, took a pair of leather gloves from a drawer and put them on, and went down the hall to the room in which the baby Lizards lived.

Before he opened the door to that room, he shut the door at the end of the hall. Every so often, the Lizards didn’t feel like eating-instead, they would run past him and try to get away. They were much easier to catch in the hall than when they got into places where they could skitter under or behind furniture.

Jonathan sighed. “Mom and Dad never had to do this when I was little,” he muttered as he opened the door to the Lizards’ room and flipped on the light. Now, closing the door behind him, he spoke aloud: “Come on, Mickey. Wake up, Donald. Rise and shine.”

Both baby Lizards were holed up in a corner, behind a chair that had been ragged before they hatched and that their sharp little claws had torn up further. They often slept back there; it wasn’t quite a hole in the ground or a cave, but it came pretty close.

They came out at the light and the sound of Jonathan’s voice. Donald was a bit bigger and a bit more rambunctious than Mickey; he (if he was a he; the Yeagers didn’t know for sure) was also a little darker. He and his brother-sister? — both made excited hissing and popping noises when they saw the ham strips Jonathan was carrying.

He squatted down. The Lizards were a good deal bigger than they had been when they hatched, but their heads didn’t come anywhere close to his knee. He held out a piece of ham. Donald ran up, grabbed it out of his hand, and started gulping it down.

Mickey got the next one, Donald the one after that. Jonathan talked to them while he fed them. They were pretty much used to him and to his mother and father by now, and associated humans with the gravy train. Feeding them, these days, was a lot like feeding a dog or a cat. Jonathan wore the gloves more because the Lizards got excited when they ate than because they were trying to nip him.

After awhile, Donald finished a piece in nothing flat and tried to get the next one even though it was Mickey’s turn. “No!” Jonathan said in English, and wouldn’t let him have it. Jonathan wanted to use the language of the Race-the noises the baby Lizards made clearly showed where its sounds came from-but his father would have pitched a fit. The idea here was to make the Lizards as nearly human as possible, not that they’d be speaking any language themselves for quite a while.

Seeing Mickey get the strip of ham he’d wanted, Donald went over and bit his sibling on the tailstump. They started fighting like a couple of puppies or kittens. That was another reason Jonathan wore leather gloves: to break up squabbles without getting hurt in the process.

“No, no!” he said over and over as he separated them. Like puppies or kittens or small children, they didn’t hold grudges: they wouldn’t start up again after he left the room. Sooner or later, with luck, they’d learn that “No, no!” meant they were supposed to stop what they were doing. Then he wouldn’t need the gloves any more. That wasn’t close to happening yet, though.

When the ham was gone, Mickey and Donald kept on looking expectantly at him. He wondered what was going on inside those long, narrow skulls. The hatchlings had no words, so it couldn’t be anything too complex. But was he only room service for them, or did they like him, too, the way a puppy liked its master? He couldn’t tell, and wished he could.

Before he left, he used a strainer to sift through the cat box in another corner of the Lizards’ room. They’d figured that out even faster than a cat would have, and rarely made messes on the floor. Even when they did, the messes weren’t too messy: their droppings were firm and dry.

Chores done, he shut the door on the Lizards, went back to his own room, grabbed his books, and hopped in the jalopy he drove to school: a gasoline-burning 1955 Ford, an aqua-and-white two-tone job that seemed almost as tall as he was. It got lousy mileage and drank oil, but it ran… most of the time. As he started it up, the tinny car radio blared out the electrified country music that was all the rage these days.

The Westside Freeway was new, and cut travel time from Gardena to UCLA almost in half. Now that he was a sophomore, he’d gained an on-campus parking permit. That saved him a good part of the hike he’d had to make from Westwood every day during his freshman year.

A lot of students had early classes. Some of them carried coffee in waxed-cardboard cups. Jonathan had never got that habit, which amused his father to no end. He often got the idea his dad thought he had life pretty soft. But he didn’t have to listen to the “When I was your age…” lecture too often, so he supposed things could have been worse.

A few students wore jackets and slacks. The rest were about evenly divided between guys who kept their hair and wore ordinary shirts and their female counterparts in clothes their mothers might have worn on the one hand (on the one fork of the tongue, Jonathan thought, using the Lizard idiom) and those like him on the other: fellows and coeds who made the Race their fashion, wearing body paint or, with the weather cool, body-paint T shirts. A lot of the fellows in that crowd shaved their heads, but only a few of the girls.

No girls went bare-chested on campus, either-there was a rule against it-though a good many did at the beach or even on the street. Jonathan didn’t mind the lack too much; he had plenty to watch anyhow.

He trudged up the broad expanse of Janss Steps to Royce Hall, a big Romanesque red-brick building with a colonnade in front, in which he had his class in the language of the Race. He wasn’t surprised to see Karen sitting under the colonnade, her pert nose in the textbook. “Hi,” he said in English, and then switched to the Race’s tongue. “I greet you.”

“And I greet you,” she answered in the same language before she looked up. When she saw the shirt he’d chosen, she smiled and added, “Exalted Fleetlord.”

“Oh, yes, I am an important male,” he said with an emphatic cough that told just how important he imagined he was. Karen’s expression said he wasn’t so important as all that. Tacitly admitting as much, he went on, “Are you ready for today’s quiz?”

“I hope so,” she said, which made him chuckle. He spoke the language of the Race pretty fluently-given what his parents did, he had no excuse not to-but she understood the way the grammar worked better than he did. She also studied harder, which she had ever since high school. Closing her book, she got to her feet. “Shall we go see how it is?”

“Sure,” Jonathan said in English, and tacked on another emphatic cough. A lot of his conversations with his friends mixed his own language and the Lizards’. That kept most of the older generation-though not, worse luck, his own mother and father-from knowing what they were talking about.

He took Karen’s hand. She squeezed his, hard. They hadn’t just been studying together since high school; they’d been dating since then, too. Giving him a sidelong glance, she asked, “Have you heard anything from Liu Mei since she went back to China?”

“No,” Jonathan answered, which made Karen squeeze his hand again-in relief, probably. He’d been taken with the daughter of the Communist envoy who’d come to the USA for weapons. They’d been able to talk with each other, too, because Liu Mei knew the language of the Race. But she was gone, and Karen was still around. He did add, “With all the fighting over there, I hope she’s okay.”

Karen considered that, with some reluctance decided it was unexceptionable, and nodded. She went on, “And how are your little friends?”

“They’re fine,” he said. He didn’t want to say too much more than that, not in a crowded hallway where anybody might be listening. An officer’s son, he understood the need for security, even if he wasn’t always perfect enough about it to delight his father. “They’re getting bigger.” He could tell her that safely enough. “If you want, you can feed them next time you’re over.”

“Okay.” Karen giggled. “That’s the funniest way to get a girl to come over to your house I ever heard of. And you know what’s funnier? It’ll work.”

“Good,” Jonathan said as they went upstairs together. He stopped in front of a door with 227 painted on a rippled-glass window in blocky, old-fashioned numbers. The oval brass doorknob, polished by countless students’ palms, was old-fashioned, too; Royce Hall dated from the 1920s.

Before the Lizards came, Jonathan thought. A whole different world. He tried to imagine what it would have been like then, with people smugly convinced they were alone in the universe. He couldn’t do it, even though his folks talked about those times as if they’d happened day before yesterday. It must have been boring, was the first thing that always sprang to mind. No televisors, no computers, no satellite networks to bring the whole world into your living room… From what his father said, they’d barely even had radio. He shook his head. I couldn’t have lived like that.

The chimes in the Powell Library bell tower, across the square from Royce Hall, announced eight o’clock. As soon as the last note died, the instructor rapped a pointer down on the lectern. “I greet you, class,” he said.

“I greet you, superior sir,” Jonathan chorused along with everyone else.

By his body paint, the instructor, a male named Kechexx, had once served in the artillery. Now, like a lot of captured Lizards who’d chosen not to rejoin their own kind, he made his living by teaching humans about the Race. His eye turrets swiveled this way and that, taking in the whole class. “It was to be a quiz today. Did you think I would forget?” His mouth fell open in a laugh. “Did you perhaps hope I would forget? I have not forgotten. Take out a leaf of paper.”

“It shall be done,” Jonathan said with his classmates. He hoped he wouldn’t forget too much.