Down to Earth

7

Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker was walking past Peenemunde’s liquid-oxygen plant when loudspeakers throughout the enormous rocketry complex began blaring out his name: “Lieutenant Colonel Drucker! Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker! Report to the base commandant’s office immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Drucker…!”

“Donnerwetter!” Drucker muttered. “What the devil has gone wrong now?” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anyone so summarily summoned to Lieutenant General Dornberger’s office.

He couldn’t report there immediately, either, not when he was closer to the Peene River side of Peenemunde’s flat, muddy peninsula while the commandant’s office lay a couple of kilometers away, hard by the Baltic. He started down the road toward the office, hoping to flag a lift along the way.

No such luck. He made the journey by shank’s mare, and arrived about as sweaty as he could get in a cool, clammy climate like northern Germany’s. “Reporting as ordered,” he told Dornberger’s adjutant, a skinny major named Neufeld who always looked as if his stomach pained him.

“Yes, Lieutenant Colonel. One moment, please.” Major Neufeld pressed the intercom switch and spoke two words: “He’s here.”

“Send him in,” Walter Dornberger said, and Neufeld waved Drucker past him and into the commandant’s sanctum.

Walter Dornberger was in his late sixties, bald but still erect and vigorous. He’d been in the artillery during the First World War, and in charge of Peenemunde since before the start of World War II. He knew as much about rockets and space flight as any man alive.

“Heil Himmler!” Drucker said, and shot out his arm in the Party salute that had also become the Army salute. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Heil,” General Dornberger returned, though his answering salute was more nearly a wave. “Close the door behind you, Drucker, and then take a seat.”

“Yes, sir,” Drucker said, and obeyed. He tried to look brisk and capable and-most of all-innocent. He wondered if he was innocent. If he wasn’t, looking as if he were became all the more urgent. He tried to sound innocent, too, asking, “What’s up, sir?”

“A letter mentioning your name in unusual circumstances came to me.” Dornberger shoved a piece of paper across the desk at him. “Tell me what you think of this, if you’d be so kind.”

Even before Drucker picked it up, he knew what it would be. And it was: a denunciation from the pen of Gunther Grillparzer. Maybe Grillparzer hadn’t believed he was an SS man after all. Or maybe he had, and decided to get him in trouble with the Wehrmacht. I should have killed him when I had the chance, Drucker thought, him and his girlfriend, too.

“Well?” General Dornberger asked when Drucker set the paper down again.

“Well, what, sir?” Drucker answered. “If you want my head on a bloody platter, this gives you the excuse to take it. If you don’t, throw it in the trash can where it belongs and let’s go about our business.”

Dornberger tapped the letter with a nicotine-stained fingernail. “So you deny these accusations, then?”

“Of course I deny them,” Drucker exclaimed. “Only a man who wanted to commit suicide would admit to them.” He’d been brought up to fear God and tell the truth. The second sentence was nothing but the truth… and he feared the Gestapo, too.

“This fellow includes some circumstantial details,” the commandant at Peenemunde observed. “If he wasn’t there, if this didn’t happen as he says, how could he make them up? I have done a little checking. This Colonel Jager was supposed to have been arrested. Somehow, he wasn’t-somehow, he escaped, apparently to Poland. It’s believed he died there.”

“Is it?” Drucker fought the chill of fright that ran through him. Dornberger didn’t want his head on a platter; the commandant had already proved that. But he was a conscientious man, or maybe just a good engineer-he wanted to get to the bottom of things. Drucker had never heard what had happened to his regimental commander after the lady flier from the Red Air Force took him away.

“Yes, it is.” General Dornberger tapped Gunther Grillparzer’s letter once more. “I ask you again, Hans-what about this? What do I say when the pointy-nosed SS men come around here and start asking me the questions I’m asking you now?”

That was a fair question-more than a fair question, if Dornberger wanted to be able to protect him. Drucker thought fast, as he had in the hallway outside Grillparzer’s flat in Weimar. “Sir,” he said, “it’s pretty plain somebody in the SS doesn’t like me, isn’t it? The way they went after my wife…”

“Yes,” Dornberger said, nodding. Drucker didn’t tell him-Drucker wouldn’t tell anybody, not to his dying day-that Kathe truly did have a Jewish grandmother. Whoever’d found that out had been right, even if Drucker and Dornberger between them had managed to quash the investigation. The commandant went on, “You are suggesting this is another hoax?”

“Yes, sir,” Drucker answered. “One way to put all sorts of details in a letter is to just make them up. The SS knows my service record; it knows the names of the men I served with. This letter makes it sound like Grillparzer was as much a murderer as I was. Do you think anybody who really did something like that would give you or the blackshirts the whole story?”

“A point-a distinct point,” General Dornberger said.

Drucker nodded, doing his best to look as well as sound convincing. He was convinced Gunther Grillparzer wouldn’t be in that Weimar flat any more if he or the Gestapo came knocking. The ex-gunner would probably have shed his alias and his girlfriend, too, though Friedli had been worth hanging on to. Nothing, though, was worth the risk of kicking your life away at the end of a piano-wire noose after some highly ingenious men spent a long time making you wish you were dead.

Dornberger paused to light a cigar. He aimed it at Drucker as if it were a pistol. “You realize that, if your enemy in the SS wants you badly enough, he will simply come and take you away regardless of anything I can do.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Drucker said. He knew he sounded worried-he was worried. But anyone with a powerful enemy in the SS had every right to be worried. More than a generation of German history proved as much.

“All right, then.” General Dornberger picked up Grillparzer’s letter, folded it in thirds, as it had been in the envelope, and then slowly and methodically tore it to pieces. “I think we will be able to carry on on that basis. You understand that Neufeld has also seen this?”

“I would have expected that, yes, sir,” Drucker said, nodding. “But, sir, Major Neufeld wouldn’t tell his granny her own name if she happened to ask him for it.”

Dornberger chuckled, coughed, and chuckled some more. “I won’t say you’re wrong. I will say that’s one of the reasons he’s so useful to me. If your unfriend has sent copies of this letter to people besides me-which it makes sense that he would do-we shall try to deal with them as you’ve suggested.” He took another puff on the cigar, then set it in an ashtray. Exhaling smoke, he went on, “You are dismissed, Lieutenant Colonel.”

Drucker sprang to his feet and saluted. “Heil Himmler!” he said, as he had when he came in. For once, the words were not automatic. He wondered what he was doing hailing the man who, along with heading the Reich, also headed the outfit that had tried to execute Kathe, the outfit that had done its best to get him drummed out of the Wehrmacht, the outfit that would no doubt take another shot at him now, thanks to Gunther Grillparzer.

But that couldn’t be helped. As long as he lived in the Greater German Reich, he had to conform to its outward usages. He made a smart about-turn and strode out of General Dornberger’s office. In the antechamber, Major Neufeld’s face revealed nothing but dyspepsia. Drucker nodded to him and walked out.

He was just leaving the administrative center when a black Mercedes pulled to a halt in front of it. A couple of Gestapo men got out of it and hurried into the building. They took no special notice of him, but he would have bet Reichsmarks against pfennigs they hadn’t come to Peenemunde on any other business.

To hell with you, Grillparzer, you son of a bitch, Drucker thought. If you drag me down, I’ll take you with me. He knew the alias under which the ex-panzer gunner had been living in Weimar. If the Gestapo couldn’t track the bastard with that much to go on, the boys in the black shirts weren’t worth much.

As Drucker walked away from the administration building, he wondered if the loudspeakers would blare out his name again. The SS had wanted his scalp ever since he managed to get Kathe out of their clutches. If Dornberger couldn’t convince them to leave him alone…

What would he do then? Take out his pistol and go down fighting? Take it out and kill himself, so he wouldn’t suffer whatever the blackshirts wanted to inflict on him? If he did either of those things, how would he avenge himself on Gunther Grillparzer? And what would happen to his family afterwards? But if he didn’t do it, would that save his wife and children? And what horrid indignities would be waiting for him?

The loudspeakers kept quiet. Drucker stayed where he could keep an eye on that black Mercedes. After about forty-five minutes, the Gestapo men came out of the administrative center and got back into the car. By the way they slammed the doors, they weren’t happy with the world. The Mercedes leaped away with a screech of tires, almost flattening a couple of enlisted men who’d presumed to try to cross the road. The soldiers sprang out of the way in the nick of time.

Drucker watched it go with the same savage joy he’d known when he stuck a pistol in Grillparzer’s face. Before then, he hadn’t felt that particular delight since taking out a Lizard panzer during the fighting. Somebody’d tried to ruin him, tried and failed. That was how things were supposed to work, but things didn’t work that way often enough.

Whistling, Drucker went into the officers’ club, ordered a shot of schnapps, and knocked it back with great relish. The fellow behind the bar, a young blond corporal straight out of a recruiting poster, grinned at him. “Something good must have happened to you, sir,” he said.

“Oh, you might say so. You just might say so,” Drucker agreed. “Let me have another one, why don’t you? There’s nothing in the world to match the feeling you get when somebody shoots at you and misses, you know that?”

“If you say so, sir,” the bartender answered. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen combat myself, though.” Polite puzzlement was on his face: what sort of combat would Drucker have seen lately?

But Drucker knew-and combat it was, even without a literal shot being fired. “Don’t be sorry, son,” he said. “Count yourself lucky. I wish I could say the same thing.”

“Germans!” Monique Dutourd snarled as she walked up to her brother in the Jardin Puget, a few blocks south of Marseille’s Old Harbor. Not far away, sweaty kids booted a football toward one side’s goal.

“Don’t start talking yet,” Pierre warned. He looked around to make sure no one else in the park was taking any notice of him, then pulled from his pocket a gadget plainly not of Earthly manufacture. Only after waving it at her and examining the lights that glowed and flickered at one end did he nod. “All right. The Boches have not planted any ears on you.”

“Germans,” Monique said again; even the usual scornful French nickname for them didn’t let her get rid of enough anger to be satisfying. Only by calling them exactly what they were could she vent even part of the loathing she’d come to feel for the occupiers.

To her intense annoyance, her older brother chuckled. “You just went about your business as long as they didn’t bother you too much. It’s only after they start annoying you personally that you discover you’ve hated them all along, eh?”

“Oh, shut up, damn you,” Monique said. Pierre had been content to let her think for twenty years that he was dead; she saw little point wasting politeness on him. “This is business. If we can get the Lizards to rub out Dieter Kuhn-”

“I get him off my back and you get him off your belly,” Pierre broke in, which almost made Monique turn on her heel and stalk out of the park. He went on, “Well, neither of those things would be so bad.”

“Nice of you to say so.” Monique glared. She was sick to death of Kuhn on her belly, and inside her, and in her mouth. But it wasn’t her death she wanted; it was the Sturmbannfuhrer ’s. She lusted for that as she would never lust for the Nazi alive.

Pierre waggled a finger at her. He was sad-eyed and plump, not at all the young poilu who’d gone off to fight the Reich in 1940-not that she was a little girl any more, either. He said, “You have to understand, I don’t hate the Germans just because they’re Germans. I do business with quite a few of them, and I make a nice piece of change off them, too.”

Monique tossed her head. “Never mind the advertisements, dammit. We both want this one dead, and we want it done so we can’t be blamed. You have the connections with the Lizards to arrange it, and-” She broke off.

“And what?” her brother prompted.

Unwillingly, she went on, “And, since he comes to my flat every couple of nights, we have a place where the Lizards can lie in wait.”

“Ah,” Pierre said. “You want him to die happy, I comprehend.”

“I want him to die dead,” Monique ground out. “I don’t care how. He won’t stay happy, by God.”

“I suppose not,” Pierre said, with the air of a man making a sizable concession. He sat down on a wooden bench with rusty iron arm rests. Monique stood there, hands on hips; in his own way, her brother could be almost as infuriating as Dieter Kuhn. Pierre continued, “Well, I will see what I can do. When will the Nazi be at your flat again? Tonight?”

Monique grimaced. Having to admit that Kuhn came there at all was humiliating enough. Having to admit that she knew his schedule was somehow worse. But she did, and could hardly pretend otherwise. Reluctantly, she answered, “No, he was there last night, and that means he isn’t likely to be back till tomorrow, and then a couple of days after that, and so on.”

“Nice regular fellow, eh?” Pierre chuckled. Monique wanted to hit him. In that moment, she wouldn’t have minded seeing him dead. But then he said, “All right, my little sister, I’ll pass the word along. And who knows? It could be that, one day before too long, someone scaly will be waiting for your German when he comes outside.”

“He’s not my German, and you can go straight to hell if you call him that again,” Monique said. She didn’t have to worry about keeping Pierre sweet. He had his own good reasons for wanting Kuhn dead. That let Monique take a certain savage pleasure in turning her back on him and stamping past the oleanders that screened the traffic noise and out of the Jardin Puget.

She would have taken even more pleasure if she hadn’t heard Pierre laughing as she stalked away.

Since she didn’t have to entertain Dieter Kuhn that evening, she actually managed to get some research done. Reading Latin, especially the abbreviation-filled Latin of her inscriptions, helped ease some of her fury. Scholars would be poring over these texts a thousand years from now, long, long after she and Dieter Kuhn were both dead. Thinking in those terms gave her a sense of proportion.

She bared her teeth in something that wasn’t a smile. With any luck at all, a thousand years from now Dieter Kuhn would be dead a great deal longer than she was. Outliving him is the best revenge, she thought. But she shook her head a moment later. Revenge was the best revenge.

When he knocked on her door a night later, she was almost eager to see him. He’d brought along a bottle of red wine, too; he didn’t try to make himself hateful to her. He could only have succeeded, though, by leaving her alone. He didn’t feel like doing that.

As usual, she endured his attentions without enjoying them. As usual, that bothered him not in the least. Men, she thought. She’d known a couple of Frenchmen who’d cared for her pleasure as little as Dieter Kuhn did. But she hadn’t had to go to bed with them, and she’d stopped going to bed with them as soon as she realized what sort of men they were. The German didn’t give her that choice.

Monique didn’t mind drinking his wine. Having him spend a few Reichsmarks was revenge of a sort, even if only of the tiniest sort. It turned out to be pretty good wine, too. And, if she got a little drunk, if her thinking got a little blurry, so much the better.

“Well, my dear,” Kuhn said as he buttoned the fly to his trousers, “I must be off. I will see you again day after tomorrow, I think.”

I am not your dear, Monique thought. She hadn’t got so blurry as to be confused about that; there wasn’t enough wine in the world to leave her confused about that. With any luck at all, I’ll never see you again, except, it could be, your bleeding corpse.

“Yes, I suppose you will,” she answered aloud, and gave him a sweet smile. “Au revoir.”

“Au revoir,” the SS man answered, and he smiled, too. “You see, you are coming to care for me after all. I knew you would, even if it took a while.”

Monique didn’t say anything to that. She couldn’t, not unless she cared to give the game away. She did manage another smile. It was a smile of gloating anticipation, but Dieter Kuhn didn’t need to know that.

He finished dressing, smugly kissed her, even more smugly fondled her, and, at last, headed for the door. Monique, still naked, stayed in the bedroom. That was what she always did when Kuhn left. If she did anything different tonight, she might rouse his suspicions. The last thing she wanted was to rouse Kuhn in any way.

He turned the knob. Hinges creaked as the door swung open. Back in the bedroom, Monique hugged herself in glee. She didn’t know it would be tonight, but she hoped, she even prayed…

A burst of gunfire shattered the quiet of the street outside, gunfire and a scream. “Gott im Himmel!” Dieter Kuhn exclaimed. Still in German, he went on, “That was a Lizard weapon, or I’m a Jew.” He slammed the door shut behind him and ran down the hall.

“No,” Monique said, shaking her head back and forth. “No, no, no.” She had a horrible feeling she knew what had happened. The Race had as much trouble telling human beings apart as people did telling one Lizard from another. If the would-be assassin had been told to kill whoever came out of the block of flats at such-and-such a time, and if some luckless fellow had chosen just that time to go out for a stroll or a glass of wine… if that had happened, the fellow’s blood was on her hands.

A couple of minutes later, someone pounded on her door. Kuhn, she thought, and then, Dammit. She threw on a nightgown and went to open the door. The SS man pushed past her and into the flat. “I need to use your telephone,” he said.

“What happened?” Monique asked, though she feared she knew only too well.

“Someone just shot a man to death outside this building with a Lizard automatic rifle,” Kuhn answered. “Merde alors, if I had gone out a couple of minutes sooner, that could have been me.” He was dialing the telephone as he replied, and began speaking into it in German, too fast and excited for Monique to follow more than one word in three.

“Quel dommage,” she said distantly. If the SS man heard her, she thought he would think she meant it was a pity the other fellow had got shot, not that he himself hadn’t.

After a couple of minutes, Kuhn hung up. He turned back to her. “They are on their way,” he said, returning to French. “As long as you have some clothes on, come downstairs with me and see if you can identify the body. The fellow may live here. If we know who he is, we may be able to find out why someone with a Lizard weapon-maybe even a Lizard-wanted him dead.”

Monique gulped. “Do I have to?” she asked. She knew perfectly well why the poor fellow out there on the street was dead: because of her, and because the drug-dealing Lizard who’d shot him didn’t know what the devil he was doing. Seeing the result of her failed revenge was the last thing she wanted.

But Dieter Kuhn, as she knew all too well, didn’t care what she wanted. “Come on,” he repeated, and grabbed her by the arm. He wasn’t the typical hulking German; by his looks and compact, wiry build, he might more readily have been French. But he was much stronger than Monique. When he dragged her along with him, she had no choice but to come.

A little crowd of the curious and the ghoulish had gathered around the corpse on the sidewalk just in front of Monique’s block of flats. Blood, black in the moonlight, streamed down into the gutter. A man had a startling amount of blood in him. Monique could smell it, and the latrine stench that had come when the dead man’s bowels let go.

Sirens yowled in the distance, rapidly coming closer. Kuhn took a little flashlight off his belt and shone it in the dead man’s face. “Do you know him?” he asked.

“Yes,” Monique answered, trying not to look at the wound that had torn away one side of his jaw. “That’s Ferdinand Bonnard. He lives-lived-downstairs from me, on the second floor. He never bothered anyone that I heard of.” And I killed him, as sure as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. She wondered if she’d be sick.

Kuhn wrote the name in a little notebook he fished from a trouser pocket. “Bonnard, eh? And what did he do?”

“He sold fish in a little shop on the Rue de Refuge, not far from the harbor,” Monique answered as a couple of SS vehicles squealed to a stop and uniformed Germans spilled out of them. Everyone but Monique suddenly found urgent business elsewhere.

“Dealt with fishermen, did he? Maybe he was a smuggler, too,” Kuhn said, and started talking to his Nazi colleagues. He might have forgotten about Monique. But when she started to go back inside the apartment building, Kuhn shook his head. “No-you will come with us to the Palais de Justice and answer more questions.” She must have looked as horrified as she felt, for he added, “It will not be as bad as it was last time. You have my word of honor.”

And it wasn’t-quite.

Once he started getting used to it, Rance Auerbach discovered Cape Town’s District Six wasn’t such a bad place after all. Yes, he had to treat Negroes as if they were as good as anybody else. He even had to take orders from them every now and then. That wasn’t easy for a Texan. But after he leaped the hurdle, he started having a pretty fair time.

Everybody in District Six, black and white and colored (a distinction between full-blooded blacks and half-breeds the USA didn’t bother drawing) and Indian, was hustling as hard as he or she could. Some people had honest work, some work that wasn’t so honest. A lot of people had both kinds of jobs, and ran like maniacs from long before the sun rose over Table Mountain till long after it set in the South Atlantic.

Rance couldn’t have run like a maniac even if he’d wanted to. Getting up and down the stairs to the flat he and Penny Summers shared was plenty to leave him sore and gasping. When he shuffled along the streets near the apartment building where he lived, kids of all colors laughed at his shuffling gait. They called him Stumpy, maybe because of his stick, maybe just because of the way he walked.

He didn’t care what they called him. Kids back in the States had thought he walked funny, too. Hell, even he thought he walked funny. But he could get to the Boomslang saloon a couple of blocks from his apartment building, and most of the time that was as far as he wanted to go.

Boomslang, he found, meant tree snake, and one particular, and particularly poisonous, kind of tree snake at that. Considering some of the rotgut the place served up, he could understand how it got its name. But it was close, it was cheap, and the crowd, despite being of all colors, was as lively and interesting as any he’d ever found in a bar.

To his surprise, he found he was interesting to the Boomslang’s other patrons. His American accent made him exotic to both whites and blacks. So did his ruined voice. When people discovered he’d been wounded fighting the Lizards, he won respect for courage if not for sense.

But when they found out how he’d wound up in South Africa, he won… interest. One evening, somewhat elevated from a few hours at the saloon, he came home and told Penny, “Half the people in this goddamn country are either in the ginger-smuggling business or want to be, if you listen to ’em talk.”

His girlfriend threw back her head and laughed. “You just figured that out, Rance? Hell, sweetheart, if I’d’ve wanted to, I could’ve gotten back into business long since. But I’ve been taking it easy, you know what I mean?”

“You?” Auerbach felt the whiskey singing in him. It didn’t make him stupid, but it did make him care less about what he said. “Since when did you ever believe in taking it easy?”

Penny Summers turned red. “You really want to know? Since those damn Nazis pointed every gun in the world right at my head and carted you and me off to that jail in Marseille, that’s when.” She shuddered. “And then, after the Lizards got us back, they could’ve locked us up in their own jail and thrown away the key. So I’m not real hot to give ’em another shot at doing that. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Auerbach stared. Of all the things he’d expected, Penny cautious was among the last. “You mean you like living like this?” His wave took in the cramped little flat. If he hadn’t been careful, he would have barked his knuckles on the wall.

“Like it? Hell no,” Penny answered. “Like it better than a nice, warm, cozy cell with nothing but Lizards to look at for the rest of my days? Hell, yes.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “They really did put the fear of God in you, didn’t they?”

She walked up to him and set her hands on his shoulders. It wasn’t the prelude to a kiss, as he’d hoped at first it might be. “Listen to me,” she said, as serious as he’d ever heard her. “Listen to me good. We caused those scaly bastards a lot of trouble, I mean a lot of trouble. If you don’t think they’re keeping an eye on us to make sure we’re good little boys and girls, you’re smack out of your mind. Want to bet against me? How much have you got?”

Auerbach thought about it. He thought slower than he should have, but still thought pretty straight. When he was done, he shook his head, even though it made his ruined shoulder ache. “Nope. That’d be like raising with a pair of fives against a guy who’s got four diamonds showing.”

Now Penny did kiss him, a peck on the lips that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with gratitude. “See, Rance?” she said. “I knew you weren’t dumb.”

“Only about you,” he answered, which made her laugh, though he hadn’t been more than half joking. He sighed and went on, “But if you listen to them, half the guys in the Boomslang have sold the Lizards a taste one time or another.”

Penny laughed again. “How much have you had to drink, babe? Must be a hell of a lot, if you’re dumb enough to believe what a bunch of barflies say. And even if they have sold some poor damn Lizard a taste or two, so what? That’s nickel-and-dime stuff. If I ever do start playing the game down here, it won’t be for nickels and dimes, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

“If you get in trouble, you want to get in a whole lot of trouble-that’s what you’re telling me.” Now Rance nodded; that did sound like the Penny Summers he’d known for the past twenty-odd years. Penny… you could say a lot about her, but she never did things by halves.

She knew it, too. “I stiffed my pals for plenty before I came running back to you,” she said. “If I ever take a shot at it again, I’ll do it once-once and then it’s off to Tahiti or one of those other little islands the Free French run.”

Free France was a joke, but a useful joke. The Japanese Empire could have run the French off their South Pacific islands. So could the USA. So could the Lizards, flying out of Australia. Nobody bothered. Neutral ground where nobody asked a whole lot of questions was too useful to everyone.

“I could go for that,” Rance agreed. The ginger he and Penny had run down into Mexico should have got them a stash that would have taken them to Tahiti. Auerbach liked the notion of island girls not overburdened with clothes or prudery. But things hadn’t worked out the way they’d had in mind, and so…

Penny said, “I’ll tell you one more time, sugar: you won’t find anything that could head us toward Free France there in the goddamn Boomslang. And if you do find it in the Boomslang, it’s dollars to doughnuts somebody’s trying to set us up. You want to be a sucker, go ahead, but leave me out, okay?”

“Okay,” Auerbach said, and then he yawned. “Let’s go to bed.”

“How do you mean that?” Penny asked.

“Damned if I know,” he answered. “Meet me in the bedroom and we’ll both find out.” Five minutes later, two sets of snores rose from the bed.

A couple of evenings afterwards, Rance and Penny went to the Boomslang together. She didn’t go with him all the time, but then, she wasn’t in constant pain, either. When she did come into the saloon, she always drew admiring glances, not just from whites but from blacks as well. That was one more thing Auerbach had had to get used to in a hurry here. Those kinds of looks from Negroes in Texas might have touched off a lynching bee. He gathered the same thing had been true in South Africa before the Lizards came. It wasn’t true any more.

Rance drank scotch that had never been within five thousand miles of Scotland. Penny contented herself with a Lion Lager. A barmaid took one of the other regulars upstairs. “Don’t even think about it, buster,” Penny murmured.

“I won’t,” Rance promised. “She’s homely.” Penny snorted.

After a while, a big, broad-shouldered black fellow whom Auerbach knew only as Frederick-emphatically not as Fred-came over and sat down beside him. “It is the ginger man,” he said in a rumbling bass. His smile was broad and friendly. Too broad and friendly to be convincing? Rance had never quite figured that out, which meant he stayed wary where Frederick was concerned. The black man inclined his head to Penny. “And this is the ginger lady?”

His musical accent made the question less offensive than it might have been otherwise. Penny tossed her head. “There’s plenty of ginger in me, pal,” she said, “but I’m spoken for.” She put a hand on Rance’s arm.

In a way, Rance was annoyed that she thought she needed to say such a thing, especially to a Negro. In another way, he was relieved. He wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with Frederick even if he’d had two good arms and two good legs. With things as they were, the black man could have broken him in half without working up a sweat.

But Frederick shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “Not that kind of ginger, dear lady. The kind that makes the Lizards dance.”

“Ixnay,” Rance muttered to Penny. South African English was different enough from the kind he’d grown up with that he didn’t worry about Frederick’s knowing what that meant.

Penny nodded slightly, but leaned forward so she could see Frederick around Rance and said, “Yeah, I’ve done that. But so what? If I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have ended up here, and so I’m not going to do it any more.”

If the Negro was a plant, if the Lizards were looking to get Rance and Penny in more trouble, that would put sugar in their gas tank. But all Frederick said was, “No doubt you are wise. Still, though, do you not miss the excitement of never knowing when things might turn… interesting?”

Damn him, Auerbach thought. He’d made a shrewd guess there. Penny liked living on the edge. Once upon a time, Rance had known that feeling, too. Before Penny could answer, he said, “You lose excitement in a hurry the first time somebody puts a couple of bullets through you.”

“Yeah,” Penny said. If she sounded a little disappointed, then she did, that was all. Tahiti remained tempting-to her and to Auerbach both-but only if the potential gain made the risk worthwhile. And she was dead right about that being unlikely for any deal made in a no-account District Six saloon.

Frederick spoke a sentence in whatever African language he’d grown up with, then translated it into English: “Who is a hunter after the lion bites?” He beamed. “You see? We are not so very different, you people from a far land and me.”

“Maybe not,” Auerbach said. He didn’t want to start a brawl. A couple of bullets had ruined his taste for that, too. Penny nodded, which eased his mind. She was still looking for her big chance; she just didn’t think she’d find it here.

And damned if Frederick wasn’t doing the exact same thing. With a sigh full of longing, he said, “If only I could find enough ginger and the right Lizards, all my worries would be over.”

“Yeah,” Penny said, that same longing in her voice.

“Hell of a big if,” Rance said, and hoped she was listening to him.

Engine rumbling, Jonathan Yeager’s elderly Ford came to a stop in front of Karen’s house. He killed the engine, jumped out of the car, and hurried toward the door. Summer nights could be chilly in Southern California, but that wasn’t the only, or even the main, reason he wore his T-shirt striped with the fleetlord’s body paint. Karen’s parents were nice people-for old fogies, he added to himself, as he did whenever the thought occurred to him-but they weren’t the sort of folks who took bare chests for granted.

He rang the doorbell. A moment later, the door opened. “Hello, Jonathan,” said Karen’s father, a burly man whose own red hair was going gray. “Come on in. She’ll be ready in two shakes, I promise.”

“Okay, Mr. Culpepper. Thanks,” Jonathan said. He looked around the living room. The Culpeppers didn’t have so many books as his family did, but nobody he knew had as many books as his family did.

“Would you like a Coke, Jonathan?” Mrs. Culpepper asked, coming out of the kitchen. She was a blonde herself, but Karen looked more like her than like her husband. As far as Jonathan was concerned, that was all to the good.

But he shook his head now. “No, thanks. Karen and I will get our sodas and popcorn and candy at the movie.”

Karen came into the front room just then. “Hi!” she said brightly, and wrinkled her nose at Jonathan. She switched to the language of the Race, saying, “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” and dropped into the posture of respect. Then, laughing, she straightened up again. Her own body paint said she was a senior mechanized combat vehicle driver. Her halter top didn’t hide much of it-didn’t hide any, in fact, because she’d continued the pattern on the fabric in washable paint.

Her parents looked at each other. Jonathan saw them roll their eyes. They didn’t take the Race for granted, the way Karen and he did. Well, even his own folks didn’t do that, but they knew how important the Race was. The Culpeppers didn’t seem to get that, either, or to want to get it.

“Have fun at the movie,” Mrs. Culpepper said.

“Don’t get back too late,” Mr. Culpepper added. But his voice didn’t have a growl in it, the way it had when Karen and Jonathan first started dating. He approved of Jonathan, as much as any middle-aged man could approve of the lout going out with his precious daughter.

As soon as the car got moving east up Compton Boulevard, Karen turned to Jonathan and said, “Okay, now you’re going to tell me why you’re so hot to see The Battle of Chicago. I didn’t think war movies were your taste of ginger.” By her tone, if war movies were his taste of ginger, she was wondering whether she’d made a mistake by having anything to do with him.

But Jonathan answered, “Sure, I’ll tell you. It’s because my dad and mom were in the Battle of Chicago, or at least the first part of it. Their ship got shot up when it took them and everybody else who was working on our explosive-metal bomb out of Chicago when it looked like the Lizards would break in.”

“Oh.” Karen thought about it, then nodded. “Okay. I guess I can put up with it for that. But it won’t be much like what really happened, you know.”

“Of course it won’t-it’s a movie.” Jonathan stopped at the light at Vermont, waited for a couple of southbound cars to go by, and turned right to follow them. On the radio, a fellow with a soft drawl shouted above twanging electric guitars. Jonathan’s parents found modern music raucous-all the more reason for him to like it.

He drove with his left hand for a couple of seconds so he could poke Karen in the ribs with his right forefinger. As she squeaked, he went on, “And don’t tell me you’re just putting up with it, either, not when you’ll be drooling all over everything every time James Dean shows up-and since he’s the star, he’ll show up most of the time.”

She made a face at him. “Like you won’t be leering at that French chippie, whatever her name is-you know, the one who keeps trying to fall out of her clothes all the time. What was she doing in the battle of Chicago?”

“Decorating it?” Jonathan suggested. Karen poked him in the ribs for that, which made him swerve the car and almost nail a station wagon in the next lane. The fellow in the station wagon sent him a dirty look. Jonathan gave Karen one, too, and added, “You were the one who said it wouldn’t be much like what really happened.”

“I didn’t mean like that,” Karen said. They kept teasing each other till they got to the Vermont drive-in, a little past Artesia. Houses were thin that far south; some of the little farms and orchards and nurseries that had been there since before the war still survived. The drive-in movie theater made a raucous addition to the air of rural charm.

Jonathan chose a parking space well, away from the snack bar, though a good many closer to it were open. Karen raised an eyebrow-she knew what he had in mind aside from watching the movie. She stuck out her tongue at him, but didn’t say anything. If she had said something, he might have moved the car. As things were, he said, “I’ll be right back,” and headed off to bring back a cardboard carton full of grease and salt and chocolate and fizzy, caffeinated water and other nutrients essential to human life.

When he got back, he found that Karen had mounted the little speaker on the window of the front driver’s-side door. She was waiting in the back seat, and opened the rear door for him so he wouldn’t have to put down the carton and maybe spill all the goodies.

They grinned at each other as they started eating Milk Duds. She hadn’t come along with him just to watch the movie, either. They didn’t do anything but grin, not yet; cars were still coming in, the glare of headlights blasting into their faces every few seconds. Jonathan didn’t even put his arm around her. They’d have plenty of time for that later.

By luck-and also by Jonathan’s strategic choice of parking space-nobody parked close to the Ford. He looked out at the white lines painted on the asphalt as if he’d never expected such a thing. “How about that?” he said.

“Yeah, how about that?” Karen did her best to sound stern-that was one of the rules of the game-but a giggle lurked somewhere down at the bottom of her voice. They’d been going out for a good long while now. Sure enough, she knew what he had in mind, and he knew she knew, and had it on her mind, too. It wasn’t as if they’d just started discovering each other.

They’d made a good-sized dent in the big bags of popcorn when the screen lit and music blared out of the tinny speaker. An announcer’s voice followed: “Here are scenes from our coming attractions!”

Now Jonathan slipped his arm around Karen’s shoulder. Her flesh was warm and smooth under his hand. She slid closer to him-carefully, so as not to disturb the surviving food and what was left of the sodas. One of the coming features had dinosaurs that looked remarkably like overgrown Lizards tearing up the landscape, one was a tear-jerking love story, and one had Red Skelton and Bing Crosby wisecracking, strutting their stuff, and outwitting real Lizards (one of whom Jonathan thought he recognized) left and right.

“My father would like that one,” Karen said with a sigh.

“Uh-huh,” Jonathan said. “So would mine, even if he spent half the time telling everybody else in the car with him what all was wrong with it.”

“How are Mickey and Donald?” Karen asked as the cartoon came on-a rascally rabbit who eluded Lizards and bumbling human hunters at every turn.

“Growing like weeds,” he answered. “Eating us out of house and home.” Cliches were safest when he talked about the hatchlings. His father surely wished he wouldn’t talk about them at all, but hadn’t ordered him not to do it. He tried not to betray the trust he’d earned. Adding, “They keep learning things all the time, too,” seemed safe enough.

“And now, our feature presentation,” the announcer boomed. Karen snuggled closer to Jonathan. He let his hand close on the smooth skin of her shoulder rather than just resting there. Quite involuntarily, he took a deep breath. He had to remind himself they weren’t in a hurry: for one thing, it was a three-hour movie.

Spaceships filled the enormous screen. “That’s terrific trick photography,” Karen said.

“No, it’s not-it’s real Lizard newsreel footage. I’ve seen it before,” Jonathan answered. “I wonder how much MGM had to pay the Race to use it.”

They watched the movie for a while, though the view from the backseat wasn’t so good as it would have been from up front. Jonathan soon discovered the film was even hokier than he’d feared; just from things his folks had said, he soon found half a dozen absurdities. But some of the battle sequences looked very gritty and realistic. They were newsreel footage, too, human-filmed black-and-white footage turned into color with the help of computers. Watching how the director cut back and forth from them to the actors and the story he was shooting himself kept Jonathan half interested for a while. James Dean aside, Karen hadn’t much cared to begin with. Before long, they found other things to do.

Jonathan untied the bow that held her little halter top on. It was so small, nobody coming by in the dark would notice whether she was wearing it, anyhow. And… “You did the body paint under there, too!” he exclaimed.

Karen smiled at him. “I thought you might find that out,” she answered as he caressed her. She turned toward him. He kissed her, then lowered his face to her breasts. She sighed and pressed him to her. They sank down onto the seat together.

Neither of them had the nerve to go all the way in the drive-in, but Jonathan’s hand glided along her thighs and then dived under the waistband of her shorts and inside her panties. He kissed her breasts and her mouth as he rubbed her. His lips were pressed against hers when she let out a little mewling cry a couple of minutes later. He’d made sure he would be kissing her just then; he knew she got noisy at such times.

“Sit up,” she said. She unzipped his fly, reached in, and pulled him out. His breath came ragged. Her touch seemed sweeter than ever as she stroked him. And then, instead of finishing him with her hands the way she usually did, she bent over him and took him in her mouth. She’d never done that before. He was astonished at how good it felt. She didn’t have to do it very long, either-he exploded almost instantly. Karen pulled back, wheezing and gulping and choking a little, too. She grabbed a napkin from the cardboard carton and wiped at her chin. “Sorry,” she told him. “You caught me by surprise.”

“You caught me by surprise, too.” Jonathan was amazed the whole drive-in couldn’t hear his thudding heart. “What made you decide to do that?” Whatever it was, he hoped it would make her decide to do it again.

“I don’t know.” Her eyes sparkled with mischief. “But my mother did tell us to have a good time, remember.” Their laughter came closer to disturbing the people a few spaces over than anything else they’d done.

Like any Tosevite, Kassquit used metabolic water to cool herself. She used a lot of it aboard her starship, which was of course kept at the temperature the Race found comfortable. Never having known any other, she took that temperature for granted. Intellectually, she knew it was warmer than the mean down on Tosev 3, but that meant little to her. It was the temperature she was used to.

Sweating, of course, made her unique on the starship. The very idea disgusted most males and females of the Race. Because it disgusted them, it disgusted Kassquit, too. She wished she could pant as they did. But that wasn’t how her kind had evolved, so she was stuck with being clammy a lot of the time.

She’d also noticed that she put forth more metabolic water when stressed. She felt stressed now, as stressed as she ever had in her life. She was expecting another telephone call from the wild Big Ugly named Sam Yeager. This time, at Ttomalss’ urging, she was going to leave the video on.

“If you are going to serve as a link between the Race and the Tosevites, you cannot fear to look at them, or to have them look at you,” her mentor had said.

“Truth,” she’d answered, for a truth it obviously was. And Sam Yeager was what passed for an expert on the Race among the Tosevites. She’d seen as much from his comments on the electronic network-and even from his gaining access to the network in the first place.

But sweat poured off her now. Her heart pounded in her chest. She wished she’d never agreed to this. She wished she could hide. She wished she could flee. She wished the video unit in the computer terminal would malfunction. She wished something would happen to the Tosevite so his call couldn’t come through.

None of those wishes, none of the prayers she breathed to spirits of Emperors past, came true. At precisely the appointed time, her screen lit. She muttered a worried curse under her breath-had the spirits of Emperors past forsaken her because she was so irrevocably a Big Ugly herself?

Her internal torment did not show on her face. Nothing much showed on her face. She knew that set her apart from other Tosevites as much as sweating set her apart from the Race, but she didn’t want Tosevites perceiving her thoughts and feelings anyhow.

“I greet you, Sam Yeager,” she said, and then stopped in surprise, for not one but two Tosevite faces peered out of the screen at her.

“I greet you, superior female,” one of the Big Uglies said. His skin had wrinkles in it that almost made him look scaled. He had yellowish gray hair on his head and wore cloth wrappings. “I am Sam Yeager. I also present to you my hatchling here. His name is Jonathan Yeager.”

“I greet you, superior female,” the other Big Ugly said. He spoke a little less fluently than his father, but Kassquit had no trouble understanding him. She eyed him in some surprise. Like her, he shaved his head. And, like her, he wore body paint rather than wrappings-at least, on as much of him as she could see.

“I greet you, Jonathan Yeager,” she replied, doing her best to say the name as Sam Yeager had. “Are you truly a missile radar technician?”

“No, superior female,” he answered, still speaking the language of the Race slowly and carefully. The corners of his mouth turned upward. That, Kassquit had learned, was an expression of amiability. He went on, “I wear the body paint for decoration and amusement, no more.”

“I see,” Kassquit said, though not at all sure she did. She continued, “And I greet you, Sam Yeager. You are surely senior to your hatchling, so I am remiss in making my greetings out of order. I apologize.”

“Do not fret about it. I am not offended,” Sam Yeager replied. “I am not such an easy fellow to offend. I brought my hatchling along with me so you could see that we also have bridges between the Race and the Tosevites.”

“You are such a bridge yourself, I am given to understand,” Kassquit said.

“Yes, that is also a truth,” Sam Yeager agreed. “We have realized the Race is going to be on Tosev 3 for a long time to come. That means we are going to have to deal with it one way or another. And besides…” He glanced over to Jonathan Yeager. Like Kassquit, he had to turn his whole head to do it; he couldn’t just flick one eye turret toward the other Tosevite in the screen. Far more than his words, that motion reminded her she was his biological kin. “Besides, he is ignorant enough to think the Race is a whole lot of fun.”

Was that an insult? Kassquit looked toward Sam Yeager’s hatchling. The corners of Jonathan Yeager’s mouth turned up again. “Truth,” he said, and added an emphatic cough.

“What sort of truth?” Kassquit asked, bewildered. “That you are ignorant?”

“He will never admit that,” Sam Yeager said with a barking Tosevite laugh.

Another insult? Evidently not, for Jonathan Yeager laughed, too, laughed and said, “No-truth that things having to do with the Race are fun.”

“Fun.” Kassquit chewed on the word. She knew what it meant, of course, but she’d never thought of applying it to the Race or the way the Race lived. More bewildered than ever, she asked, “Why?”

“Good question,” Sam Yeager said cheerfully. “I never have been able to figure it out myself.” Then he waved one of his hands-one of his fleshy, soft-skinned hands, so like hers-back and forth, palm out. “I do not intend you to take that seriously.”

“You never intend anyone to take anything you say seriously,” Jonathan Yeager said, and both Big Uglies laughed. Then the younger one turned his face back toward Kassquit. He too had to move his whole head. Kassquit watched in fascination. The wild Tosevites took such motions utterly for granted, while she’d never failed to feel self-conscious about them. But then, they all used those motions, while she was the only individual she knew who did. Jonathan Yeager went on, “Of course the Race is fun. It is new and exciting and fascinating. Is it any wonder that I think as l do?”

Alien, Kassquit thought. She might share biology with these Big Uglies-every move they made reminded her she did share biology with them-but she would never have put new and exciting and fascinating all in the same sentence. “I do not understand,” she confessed.

“Do not worry about it,” Sam Yeager said. “It is a wonder that my hatchling thinks at all, let alone that he thinks in any particular way.”

“Thank you,” Jonathan Yeager said, with an emphatic cough obviously intended to mean he was doing anything but thanking the older Tosevite. No male of the Race would have used the cough that way, but Kassquit understood it.

So did Sam Yeager, who started laughing again. He said, “A lot of Tosevite males and females of about my hatchling’s age feel the same way about the Race as he does. The Race is new on Tosev 3, which to many Big Uglies automatically makes it exciting and fascinating. And the Race is powerful. That makes it exciting and fascinating, too.”

Kassquit understood the connection between power and fascination. That connection had helped make the Rabotevs and Hallessi into contented citizens of the Empire. It would, she hoped, help do the same for the Big Uglies. The connection between novelty and fascination still eluded her. So did another connection: “Why would Tosevites”-she didn’t want to call Big Uglies Big Uglies, even if Sam Yeager casually used the term-“be so interested in the Race, when you are constantly concerned with reproduction, which matters to the Race only during the mating season?”

“I am sorry, superior female, but I did not follow all of that,” Jonathan Yeager said.

“I did. I will translate,” Sam Yeager said. Turning to his hatchling, he spoke in their own language-English, Kassquit had learned it was called. Jonathan Yeager coughed and flushed; his change in color was easily visible on the monitor. Sam Yeager returned to the language of the Race: “I think you embarrassed him, partly because, at his age, he is constantly concerned with reproduction”-the younger Yeager let out another indignant, wordless squawk, which the older one ignored-“and partly because it is not our usual custom to talk so frankly about reproductive matters with strangers.”

“Why not?” Kassquit was confused again. “If they concern you all the time, why do you not talk about them all the time? And why did you yourself talk about them with me in our last conversation?”

“Those are good questions,” Sam Yeager admitted. “As for the second, I guess I was taken by surprise when I found out you were a Tosevite like me. For the first, I do not have an answer as good as I might like. One reason is that we mate in private, I suppose. Another is that we usually form mating pairs, and try to make those pairings permanent. Mating outside a pair is liable to destroy it.”

“Why?” Kassquit asked again.

“Because it shows a lack of trust inside the pair,” Sam Yeager answered. “Since the Race raised you, you probably would not understand.”

“Maybe I do,” Kassquit said slowly. “You are speaking of a competition for attention, are you not?” She remembered how jealous she’d been of Felless when the female of the Race began taking away Ttomalss’ attention, which she’d largely had to herself till the colonization fleet arrived.

“Yes, that is exactly what I am speaking of,” Sam Yeager replied. “Perceptive of you to gasp it when you have not known it yourself.”

“You think not, do you?” Kassquit said. “This proves only that you do not know everything there is to know.” She did not hide her bitterness. Part of her didn’t want to show it to a couple of wild Big Uglies. The rest didn’t care about the embarrassment in that. After all, when would she see them or deal with them again? Who else that she knew would ever see them or deal with them? And showing someone, anyone, that bitterness was such a relief.

Sam Yeager bared his teeth in the Tosevite expression of amiability. “I never said I did know everything, superior female. I have spent a lot of years having it proved to me that I do not. But I know I am ignorant, which puts me ahead of some of the males and females who think they are smart.”

“You speak in paradoxes, I see,” Kassquit answered, which for some reason made the Big Ugly laugh again. Annoyed, Kassquit said, “I must go, for I have an appointment. Farewell.” Abruptly, she broke the connection.

After a moment, she sighed in relief. It was over. But then she stood up, and stood taller and straighter than usual. No small pride filled her. She had given as good as she’d got. She was sure of that. She had seen the wild Big Uglies face-to-face, and she had prevailed.

As Sam Yeager and his son left the Race’s consulate in Los Angeles and headed for his car, he turned to Jonathan and asked, “Well, what did you think of that?”

“It was pretty strange, Dad,” Jonathan answered, and Sam could hardly disagree. His son went on, “It was interesting, too, I guess. I got to practice the language some more. That’s always good.”

“You spoke well. And you look a lot more like a Lizard than I do, too,” Yeager said. “That’s one of the big reasons I brought you along: to give her somebody who might look halfway familiar to deal with. Maybe it helped some. I hope so.” He shook his head. “That poor kid. Listening to her, seeing her, makes me feel terrible about what we’re doing to Mickey and Donald.”

“Her face is like Liu Mei’s,” Jonathan said as they got to the car. “It doesn’t show anything.”

“Nope,” Sam agreed, sliding behind the wheel. “I guess what they say is, you have to learn how to use expressions when you’re a baby, or else you don’t. Since the Lizards’ faces don’t move much, the kids they took couldn’t do that.” He glanced over at his son. “Were you just looking at her face?”

Jonathan coughed and spluttered a little, but rallied fast: “I’ve seen lots of bare tits before, Dad. They’re not such a big deal for me as they would have been for you when you were my age.”

And that was undoubtedly true. Sam sighed as he started the engine. “Having ’em out in the open so much takes away some of the thrill, I think,” he said. His son looked at him as if he’d started speaking some language much stranger than that of the Race. So he was: to Jonathan, he was speaking the language of the nostalgic old-timer, a tongue the young would never understand.

Proving as much, Jonathan changed the subject. “She seems pretty smart,” he said.

“Yeah, she does.” Sam nodded as he got on the southbound freeway for the ride back to Gardena. “That probably helps her. I bet she’d be a lot crazier if she were stupid.”

“She didn’t seem all that crazy to me,” his son said. “She acts more like a Lizard than a person, yeah, but heck, half my friends do that.” He chuckled.

So did Sam Yeager, but he shook his head while he did it. “There’s a difference. Your friends are acting, as you said.” He’d been married to Barbara for quite a while, and most of the time he automatically kept his grammar clean. “But Kassquit isn’t-acting, I mean. The Race is all she knows. As best I can tell, we’re the first Big Uglies she’s ever seen face-to-face. We’re at least as strange to her as she is to us.”

He watched Jonathan think about that and slowly nod. “No ordinary person would have come out and talked about, uh, reproduction like that.”

“Well, it would have been surprising, anyhow,” Sam said. “But she thinks about it the way the Lizards would. She can’t help that-they’ve taught her everything she knows.” He took a hand off the wheel to remove his uniform cap-he’d gone to the consulate in full regalia-and scratch his head. “Still, she’s not made the way they are. She can’t even be as old as you are, Jonathan. If she’s like anybody else your age, she’s going to get urges. I wonder what she does about them.”

“What can she do, up there by herself?” Jonathan asked.

“What anybody by himself, or by herself, can do.” Sam raised an eyebrow. “Sooner or later, you find out it doesn’t grow hair on the palm of your hand.”

That made Jonathan turn red and clam up for the rest of the drive back home. Sam used the quiet to do some thinking of his own. Not only seeing Kassquit, but also listening to her trying so hard to be something she couldn’t be, did bring on guilt about Mickey and Donald. No matter how hard he and his family tried to raise them up as people, they would never be human beings, any more than Kassquit could really be a Lizard.

And what would happen when they met Lizards, as they surely would one day? Would they be as confused and dismayed as Kassquit had been at the prospect of talking with a couple of genuine human beings? Probably. He didn’t see how they would be able to help it.

It wasn’t fair. They hadn’t asked to be hatched in an incubator on his service porch. But nobody, human or Lizard, had any say about where he got his start in life. Mickey and Donald would have to make the best of it they could, as did everybody else on four worlds. And Sam and his family would have to help.

He hoped he’d stay around to help. Being fifty-seven had a way of putting that kind of thought in his mind. He was in pretty good shape for his age, but every time he shaved in the morning the first glance in the mirror reminded him he wouldn’t be here forever. Barbara could take over for him if he went too soon (somehow, contemplating his own death was easier than thinking about hers), and Jonathan, and whomever Jonathan married. He hoped that would be Karen. She was a good kid, and she and Jonathan had been thick as thieves lately.

After a moment, he shook his head. “Back to business,” he muttered. Business was getting a summary of the conversation Jonathan and he had had with Kassquit down on paper, and adding his impressions to it. He was glad he’d talked with his son. It helped him clarify his own thoughts.

He had to use the human-made computer to draft his report. With the one he’d got from the Lizards, he couldn’t print in English, but was stuck with the language of the Race. Kassquit might have found a report in the Lizards’ language interesting, but it wouldn’t have amused his superiors.

When he finished the report and pressed the key that would print it, a glorified electric typewriter hammered into life. The printer hooked up to the Lizard-built computer was a lot more elegant, using powdered carbon and a skelkwank light to form the characters and images it produced. You needed a powerful magnifier to tell its output was made up of tiny dots and didn’t come from a typewriter or even from set type.

He read through the report, made a couple of small corrections in ink, and set it aside. The printer kept humming till he turned it off. He started to turn off the computer, too, but changed his mind. Instead, he hooked himself up to the U.S. network. He hadn’t tried visiting the archive that stored signals traffic from the night the colonization fleet was attacked for quite a while. The more he learned about that, the better his chances of nailing the culprit and passing what he knew on to the Lizards.

They’ll never figure out whether it was the Nazis or the Russians, not on their own they won’t, he thought. The Lizards were less naive than they had been when they came to Earth, but humans, long used to cheating one another, still had little trouble deceiving them. And, because the Lizards weren’t human, they often missed clues that would have been obvious to a person.

“There we go,” Sam muttered, as the name of the archive appeared on his screen. He waited for the table of contents to come up below it, so he could find exactly which transcripts would be most useful to him. The list took its own sweet time appearing; compared to the Race’s machine, this one was slow, slow.

Instead of the contents list, he got a blank, dark screen. Pale letters announced, CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.

“You cheap piece of junk,” he snarled, and whacked the side of the case that held the screen. That didn’t change the message, of course. It did go a little way toward easing his annoyance. The Lizards’ computer worked all the time. The machine made in the USA broke down if he looked at it sideways.

But he was a stubborn man. He wouldn’t have spent eighteen years riding trains and buses through every corner of the bush leagues if he hadn’t been stubborn. He wouldn’t have risen to lieutenant colonel, either, not when he’d joined the Army as a thirty-five-year-old private with full upper and lower dentures. And he wouldn’t have got so far with the Lizards, either.

And so, even though he kept swearing under his breath, he patiently reconnected the computer to the network and navigated toward that archive again. This time, he didn’t even get the archival name before he lost his connection.

He scowled and stared at the dark screen with the now familiar message on it. “Junk,” he repeated, but now he sounded less sure whether the fault lay inside his computer. Maybe the chain connecting him to that distant archive-actually, he didn’t know how distant it was, only that it existed-had some rusty links in it.

He wondered if he ought to report the problem. He didn’t wonder for long, though. While his security clearance was high enough to give him access to that archive, he had no formal need-to-know. Nobody above him would be happy to find out he’d been snooping around in things that were formally none of his business. The powers that be would frown all the harder because he’d already established a reputation for snooping.

“Hell with it,” he said, and this time he did turn off the computer. Maybe the simplest explanation was that somebody somewhere had made a tidy profit selling the U.S. government-or would it be the phone company? — some lousy wiring.

He was making himself a bologna sandwich (he’d got sick of ham) when a car stopped in front of the house. The sound of the closing door made him look up from pickles and mayonnaise. A young man he’d never seen before was walking across the lawn toward the front porch. Another one sat in the car, waiting.

The one coming up to the house had his right hand in the pocket of his blue jeans. After somebody had taken some potshots at the house, that triggered an alarm bell in Sam. He hurried to the hutch in the front room and pulled out his . 45.

Barbara came into the front room from the direction of the bedroom. She’d spotted the guy, too, and was going to find out what he wanted. When she saw the automatic in Sam’s hands, her eyes opened enormously wide. He used it to motion her away.

Up on the porch came the stranger. Before he could knock, Sam opened the front door and stuck the.45 in his face. “Take that hand out of your pocket real nice and slow,” he said pleasantly, and then, over his shoulder, “Honey, call the cops.”

“Sure, Pop, anything you say,” the young man answered. “You’ve got the persuader there, all right.” But his hand moved swiftly, not slowly, and had a pistol in it as it cleared his pocket.

He must have thought Yeager would hesitate long enough to let him shoot first. It was the last mistake he ever made. The.45 jerked against Sam’s wrist as he fired. The young man went down. He wouldn’t get up again, either, not after taking one between the eyes at point-blank range. He kept jerking and twitching, but that was only because his body didn’t know he was dead yet.

Tires screaming, the car in which he’d come roared away. Barbara and Jonathan came dashing out at the sound of the shot. “Thank God,” Barbara said when she saw Sam standing. She turned away from the corpse on the porch. “Christ! I haven’t seen anything like that since the fighting. The police are on the way.”

“Good. I’ll wait for ’em right here,” Sam said.

They arrived a couple of minutes later, lights flashing, siren yowling. “What the hell happened here?” one of them asked, though he was talking more about why than about what-that was obvious.

“Somebody shot at this house from the street last year, Sergeant,” Yeager answered. He explained what he’d seen and what he’d done, finishing, “He tried to draw on me, and I shot him. His pal took off as soon as I did.”

“Okay, Lieutenant Colonel, I’ve got your side of it,” said the sergeant, who’d been taking notes. He turned to his partner. “See just what the guy was holding, Clyde.”

“Right.” The other cop used his handkerchief to pick up the weapon. It was a.45 nearly identical to Sam’s. Clyde looked up at Yeager. “He was loaded for bear, all right. Lucky you were, too.” He glanced over at the sergeant. “If this isn’t self-defense, I don’t know what the devil it is.”

“A hell of a mess on this guy’s porch,” the sergeant said. He looked back to Yeager. “No charges I can see, Lieutenant Colonel. Like Clyde says, this one looks open-and-shut. But don’t leave town-we’re going to have about a million questions for you, maybe more once we find out who this character is and what he had in mind.”

“If I get orders to go, I’ll have to follow them,” Yeager said. “I’ve got to report this to my superiors, too.”

“If you do have to leave, let us know where you’re going and how long you’ll be there,” the police sergeant said. “And if I was your CO, I’d give you a medal. If you didn’t do what needed doing, you wouldn’t be able to report to him now, that’s for damn sure.” He raised an eyebrow. “You think this guy had anything to do with the shots last year?”

“Damned if I know,” Sam answered. “Maybe we’ll be able to find out.”