Second Contact

11

Rance Auerbach’s laugh, a harsh rasp, sounded almost as much like a death rattle as like honest mirth. “You think it’s true?” he asked Penny Summers. “You reckon ginger really does make those scaly bastards come into heat like it was springtime?”

“Too many people saying it for it to be a lie,” Penny answered. “I think it’s funny as hell, too, matter of fact. Sort of pays them back for all the nasty things they’ve thought about us, you know what I mean?” She lit a Raleigh.

“Give me one of those, will you?” Auerbach said. After he got it going and helped take one more step in wrecking his already damaged lungs, he went on, “Yeah, turnabout’s fair play, all right.”

That made him look out the bedroom window of his Fort Worth apartment, just to see if he noticed anything out of the ordinary. He didn’t. The people whose money Penny had walked off with had promised some turnabout, too. They hadn’t delivered. He was beginning to hope that meant they wouldn’t.

Penny said, “Ought to get some more ginger and smuggle it down into Mexico. Lots of females there, I hear.”

“Think you can?” If Rance didn’t sound dubious, it wasn’t from lack of effort. “There’s some people who aren’t real fond of you, remember?”

“It doesn’t take a whole lot of work to get ginger,” Penny said with a curl to her lip. “Hell, I can buy some down at the grocery store. But I’d want to lime-cure it, make it so the Lizards get all hot and bothered for it, before I took it down. The really tricky part is selling in someone else’s territory. You’re not careful about that, someday somebody’ll find you floating in an irrigation ditch.”

“Why take the chance, then?” Auerbach asked. Ever since the Lizards filled him full of holes, he’d been a lot less enthusiastic about taking chances than back in his Army days.

But Penny’s eyes glittered. “To get a really big stake, why else? I’ve got a good start on one, after I went and stiffed the boys back in Detroit. But I want more. I want enough so I can just go somewhere, get away from everything, and not have to worry about where my next dime is coming from for the rest of my days.”

“Like where?” Rance said, dubious again. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain?”

Penny shook her head. “No, I really mean it. How’s Tahiti sound? About as far away from Kansas as you can get, this side of Oz, anyway.”

Rance grunted thoughtfully. The outfit calling itself Free France still ran Tahiti and the neighboring islands. Neither the USA nor Japan had bothered gobbling them up, partly because that would have set the two at loggerheads, partly because the Free French made themselves very useful: they did business with everybody, people and Lizards alike, and didn’t ask questions of anybody.

“How would you like that?” Penny asked. “You could lay on the beach all day, suck up rum like it was going out of style, and smile at the native girls when they go by without their shirts on. And if you do anything more than smile at ’em, I’ll kick you right in the nuts.”

“You’re a sweetheart,” Auerbach said, and Penny laughed. Before he could say anything else, somebody knocked on the door. “Who the hell’s that?” he muttered, and made his slow way toward it. “It’s not like I get a whole lot of company.”

When he opened the door, he found two men standing in the hallway. One of them, a broad-shouldered, meaty fellow, put a big hand in the center of his chest and pushed, hard. With one bad leg under him, he went over backwards as if he’d been shot. As he fell, the muscular guy’s skinny pal said, “Don’t fuck with us, gimpy, and you’ll keep breathing. We’ve got some business to finish up with your lady friend. I bet you even know what we’re talking about, don’t you?”

Both bruisers started past him, certain Penny was there and also certain he was no danger to them. They’d likely been casing the joint, so their first certainty was accurate. Their second certainty, however, had some flaws. Rance had got used to wearing that.45 in the waistband of his trousers, and the reflexes he’d honed in the Army still worked. Even though both his leg and his shoulder bellowed at him when he hit, he had the heavy pistol in his hand less than a heartbeat later.

He fired without a word of warning. The.45 bucked in his grip. A hole appeared in the back of the heavy man’s jacket. Gore and guts blew out a much bigger hole in the front of his belly-the sort of hole, Auerbach knew from experience, you could throw a dog through.

The bruiser let out a hoarse scream and crumpled. His friend whirled, hand darting for a trouser pocket. He had commendably quick reflexes, but not quick enough to let him outdraw a gun already aimed at him. Auerbach’s first bullet caught him in the chest. He looked very surprised as he stood there swaying. Auerbach shot him again, this time in the face, and the back of his head exploded. He fell on top of the other thug, who was still writhing and shrieking. Auerbach smelled blood and shit and smokeless powder.

Penny came around the corner from the bedroom, pistol in her hand. She didn’t scream or puke or faint. She aimed the pistol at the head of the heavyset ruffian, the one Auerbach had shot from behind, plainly intending to finish him off.

“Don’t,” Rance told her. “Put your piece away. Go back into the bedroom and call the cops. If half a dozen people haven’t done it already, I’m a Chinaman. These two bastards broke in here intending to rob us or whatever the hell, and I plugged ’em. We don’t have to say a word about ginger.”

“Okay, Rance.” She nodded. The broad-shouldered goon had stopped moaning, anyhow; with a wound like that, he wouldn’t last long. “Keep an eye on ’em anyhow, just in case.”

“I will.” With his usual slow, painful movements, Auerbach levered himself up into a chair. He took a look at the carnage, then shook his head. “What do you want to bet the goddamn landlord tries to stick me with the bill for cleaning this up?”

Penny didn’t answer; she’d already gone back into the bedroom to use the telephone. One of Rance’s neighbors stuck her head into his apartment through the open doorway. She saw him before noticing anything else, and started to talk: “Howdy, Rance. Lucille said there was gunshots somewheres, but I told her it wasn’t nothin’ but firecra-” That was when she noticed the two blood-drenched corpses at the back of the living room. She turned white. “Oh, sweet, suffering Jesus!” she blurted, and got the hell out of there.

Auerbach laughed, but he sounded shaky even to himself. He felt shaky, too, as he had after combat against the Lizards. Reaction setting in, he thought. He was shaky; the.45 trembled in his hand. Deciding neither of the thugs was going to give him any more trouble, he put the safety back on.

From the bedroom, Penny called, “Cops are on the way. You were right-I wasn’t the first one who got through to them.” A minute or so later, Rance heard sirens coming closer. The police cars stopped in front of the apartment building.

Four cops in blue uniforms came running up the stairs, all of them carrying pistols. The first policeman into the apartment looked, whistled, and said over his shoulder, “We ain’t gonna need the ambulance, Eddie, just the coroner’s meat wagon.” He turned to Auerbach. “All right, buddy, what the hell happened here?”

Rance told him what had happened, though he made it sound as if he thought the dead men in his living room were a couple of ordinary robbers, not hired muscle for the ginger smugglers. Another policeman-Eddie? — stepped around the bodies and went to talk with Penny in the bedroom. After a while, he and the cop who’d been talking with Auerbach (his name was Charlie McMillan) put their heads together.

McMillan said, “You and your lady friend tell the same story. I don’t reckon we’ve got any reason to charge you with anything, not when those boys came busting into your place.”

One of the other Fort Worth policemen had stooped beside the bodies. He said, “They’re both packing, Charlie.”

“Okay.” McMillan eyed Rance in a speculative way. “Mighty fine shooting for somebody who’d just got knocked on his ass. Where’d you learn to handle a weapon like that?”

“West Point,” Auerbach answered, which made the policeman’s eyes widen. “I was in the Army till the Lizards shot me up a few months before the fighting stopped. I can’t get around very fast any more-hell, I can’t hardly get around at all any more-but I still know what to do with a.45 in my hand.”

“He sure as hell does,” the cop by the body said. “These boys are history. I don’t make either one of them. You recognize ’em, Charlie?”

McMillan sauntered over and looked at the corpses. As he lit a cigarette, he shook his head. “Sure don’t. They’ve got to be from out of town. I’d know any strongarm boys of our own who were trying to pull jobs like this.” He turned back toward Auerbach. “They picked the wrong guy to start on, that’s for sure.”

“That’s a fact,” the other cop agreed. “You’re not going to charge these folks?”

“Charge ’em? Hell, no.” McMillan shook his head almost hard enough to make his hat fall off. “Ought to be a bounty on sons of bitches like these. All I’m going to do is take Mr. Auerbach’s formal statement, and his lady friend’s, and then wait for the coroner to come take his pictures and haul the bodies away.”

“Okay. Sounds good to me,” the cop by the corpses said. It sounded good to Auerbach, too. Off the hook, he thought.

McMillan took out a notebook and a pen. Before he started taking the statement, he remarked, “Maybe their prints’ll tell us who they are. Little Rock may know, even if we don’t.” He stubbed out his cigarette, then said, “All right, Mr. Auerbach, tell it to me again, only slow and easy this time, so I can get it down on paper.”

Auerbach was less than halfway through his statement when a rangy fellow the policemen all called Doc ambled into his apartment. He had a physician’s black bag in one hand and a camera with a flash in the other. After looking at the bodies, he sadly shook his head and said, “That rug’s never gonna be the same.”

As if his words were some kind of signal, Rance’s landlord came in on his heels. He took one look and said, “You get the cleaning bill, Auerbach.”

“I knew you’d tell me that, Jasper,” Auerbach answered. “Have a heart. If they’d shot me, you’d have to pay it yourself.”

“They damn well didn’t, so you can damn well fork over,” the landlord said. The cops rolled their eyes. Auerbach let out a racking sigh. This was a fight he knew he was going to lose.

A couple of husky coroner’s assistants carried the bodies downstairs one at a time on stretchers. The coroner left with them. Jasper was already gone; he’d said what he came to say. Charlie McMillan finished getting statements. Then he and his pals took off, too, leaving Auerbach alone in the apartment with the blood-soaked carpeting.

After putting a couple of ice cubes in a glass, Rance poured whiskey over them. While Penny was building her own drink, he took a long pull at his and said, “You know what? Tahiti sounds pretty goddamn good.”

“Amen,” Penny said, and finished her whiskey at a gulp.

Kassquit wished Ttomalss would return from the surface of Tosev 3. He had never been gone for so long before. None of the other males on the orbiting starship truly treated her like a member of the Race. Up till now, Ttomalss had served as a buffer between her and them. Now, whenever she let herself out of her compartment, she had to deal with them herself. As a result, she left the compartment as seldom as she could.

Even worse than the long-familiar researchers were the males and females from the colonization fleet. As far as they were concerned, she was nothing but a Big Ugly-a barbarian at best, a talking animal at worst. She’d pined for Home; everything she’d read and viewed made her pine for Home. But the males and females new-come from the world at the center of the Empire were far more callous toward her than those more familiar with Tosev 3 and its natives. That hurt.

It hurt so much, she would have spent all her time in her compartment if she could. Unfortunately for her, the Race had long ago determined it was more efficient to gather males and females in one place to eat than to distribute food to each compartment in which someone dwelt or worked.

She’d taken to eating her meals at odd times, times shifted away from those during which males and females normally crowded the galley. That minimized friction with those who did not care for her. Try as she would, though, she could not eliminate it altogether.

One day, she was heading back from the galley when she almost collided with a male named Tessrek, who skittered around a corner straight into her path. She barely managed to stop in time. Had she failed, the collision would of course have been her fault. “I beg your pardon, superior sir,” she said from the posture of respect.

“Watch where you plant your large, homely, flat feet,” Tessrek snapped. He had never cared for her. Ttomalss had told her Tessrek hadn’t cared for the previous Tosevite infant he’d tried to rear, either.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Kassquit replied now. All she wanted to do was end the conversation and return to the lonely peace of her compartment.

But Tessrek was in no mood to let her off so easily. “ ‘It shall be done, superior sir,’ ” he echoed, imitating her intonation as best he could with his different mouthparts. “Down on Tosev 3, they have animals that can be trained to talk. How do I know you are not just another such animal?”

“By whether what I say makes sense,” Kassquit answered, refusing to let Tessrek see he had made her angry. “I can imagine no other way to do it, superior sir.” Sometimes a soft reply made him give up his attempts to disconcert or simply to hurt her.

It didn’t work this time. “You are only a Big Ugly,” Tessrek said. “No one cares about your imaginings. No one cares about your kind’s imaginings.”

A female from one of the ships of the colonization fleet walked past as Kassquit was doing her best to come up with another polite answer instead of telling Tessrek to flush himself down the waste-disposal opening in his compartment. “My imaginings, such as they are, are not typical of those of Big Uglies, superior sir,” she said. “They are much closer to those of the Race, because…”

Her voice trailed away as she realized, a little slower than she should have, that Tessrek was no longer paying her any attention. Both his eye turrets were fixed on the female who had just gone by. The scales on top of his head rose into a crest, something Kassquit had never seen before on any male. He stood up straight-unnaturally straight for a male of the Race, almost as straight as Kassquit herself. With a peculiar wordless hiss, he hurried after the female.

Her eye turrets swiveled so she could look back at him. She hissed, too, a lower, softer sound than his, and bent into a posture similar but not identical to the posture of respect, a posture that left her head low and her rump high. Tessrek moved into place behind her. Kassquit got a brief glimpse of an organ that, like the male’s erectile scales, she had never seen before. It reminded her a little of the sort of organ male Tosevites possessed. And Tessrek used it rather as she had seen male Tosevites use theirs in the recordings that fascinated and disgusted her at the same time.

No sooner had Tessrek made yet another sound that was not a word than another male came hurrying along the corridor. He also had eyes only for the female. With every step he took, he strode more nearly upright. Like Tessrek, he had a row of scales standing upright on his head.

“Back,” Tessrek snarled at him, and stressed the word with an emphatic cough. But the other male paid him no attention. Tessrek let out a shriek and sprang at him before he could reach the female, who still stood waiting with her head near the floor.

They thrashed and twisted, biting and clawing at each other. Kassquit had to spring back to keep from being dragged into the fight. “Help!” she cried. “These two males have gone mad!”

Her shout brought a couple more males out to see what was going on. But both of them immediately displayed the same excitement as Tessrek and his opponent had shown. One, in fact, promptly joined in the brawl. The other nimbly dodged around it and began to couple with the compliant female.

Kassquit stared in astonished horror. She had never dreamt males of the Race could behave thus. Ttomalss had never talked much about what males and females were like during the breeding season. Kassquit had got the idea even thinking about it made him-and all the other males she’d known-nervous. Now, all at once, she understood why.

Males kept running along the corridor. They either piled into the fight or tried to mate with the female. A new fight soon hatched because of that. Kassquit backed away. None of the males showed the slightest interest in her. Unlike the females of their own kind, she did not smell exciting to them. She couldn’t imagine what she would have done if she had.

After backing along the corridor to another one that intersected it, she made her way back to her own compartment by a roundabout route. Once there, she made sure the door would not open without her authorization. Then she sat down-rather uncomfortably, in a chair too small and made for a backside with a tailstump-and put her face in her hands. That was not a gesture the Race used, but it seemed appropriate. Her mind whirled. For as long as she could remember, Ttomalss and other males had mocked the Tosevites’ mating habits. Had the Big Uglies been able to see what she had just witnessed, Kassquit was sure they would have been able to do some mocking of their own.

She wondered why the female had gone into heat, and why no others seemed to have done so with her. As Kassquit had understood things, all females back on Home had their season at about the same time and, once it was done, it was done for another year. That didn’t seem to be what had happened here.

She heard shouts in the corridor outside her compartment. Someone slammed into the door, hard. That wasn’t a knock; it was a male-she assumed it was a male-getting hurled into the metal panel. To her vast relief, the door held. The shouts went down the corridor.

“By the Emperor!” Kassquit burst out. “Are they all addled?” As far as she could tell, they were. She turned on the computer to find out what the Race made of the madness sweeping through it.

But the continuous news broadcast she listened to for a while said nothing about females suddenly entering their season or about males clawing and biting one another in their frenzied eagerness to couple. Instead, the newscaster spent most of his time condemning the ginger habit and everything associated with it. “Were it not for ginger,” he declared, “the Race would be far more tranquil and secure than it is today.”

Kassquit laughed out loud, as a Tosevite would have. That embarrassed her, but not so much as it might have done; at the moment, she was embarrassed for the Race. “Only proves how much you know,” she said, and used an emphatic cough.

She went through the other media channels, trying to find one that would admit the Race was faced with females coming into season at what seemed to be an unexpected time. She could not. Everywhere she checked, though, commentators were inveighing against the insidious Tosevite herb called ginger.

She was about ready to pitch something through the screen when the computer announced she had an incoming telephone call from Ttomalss. “Will you accept?” the electronic voice inquired.

“Yes,” Kassquit said, and had to remind herself not to add on another emphatic cough, which would have confused the machinery. Ttomalss’ image appeared on the screen in front of her. “Superior sir, I am so glad to see you!” she burst out, and did append that second emphatic cough after all.

“I am always glad to see you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said, solemn as usual. He is steady, Kassquit thought. He is reliable. He went on, “And why are you so particularly glad to see me now?”

“Because madness is going through the ship right now,” she answered, and explained what sort of madness she meant.

“Oh,” Ttomalss said when she’d finished. After that, he said nothing for a little while. He is embarrassed by my speaking frankly, Kassquit thought. But Ttomalss was embarrassed for other reasons than that, as he showed when he spoke again: “I must tell you, this problem of females’ apparently untimely coming into season has also occurred here in Nuremberg and elsewhere on the surface of Tosev 3. I myself have succumbed to the mating urge.”

“You have?” Logically, Kassquit knew she had no right, no reason, to feel betrayed. She did nonetheless. “Superior sir, how could you?”

“No. The question is, how could I not? The answer is, there was no way I could not, not after the female’s pheromones reached my scent receptors,” Ttomalss replied. “I must also tell you that it appears as if ingesting ginger triggers females to release the pheromones indicating they are in season. This is not yet confirmed, but appears likely.”

“I see,” Kassquit said, and she did. When the commentators condemned ginger, they’d known what they were doing after all. She found the next question right away: “How much confusion will that cause in the Race?”

“I do not know,” Ttomalss answered. “I do not know if anyone knows. I do not even know if proper projections can be drawn, or whether data on ginger use are too inaccurate to permit such extrapolation. In my own instance, I believe it was the first time Senior Researcher Felless had ever tasted-”

“Felless?” Kassquit broke in, her narrow eyes wide with horror. “You mated with Felless?” Ttomalss’ mating with any other female of the Race she could have tolerated. That one? The one who treated her like a specimen and, by her example, made Ttomalss go halfway toward doing the same? “Oh, I hate you!” Kassquit cried, and ended the connection. Water poured from her eyes and ran altogether unheeded down her face.

Fotsev was jumpy as he patrolled the narrow, stinking streets of Basra. Every other male in his group was jumpy, too. He could see that by the way his comrades moved. And it was a different sort of jumpiness from the one they’d had before the ships of the colonization fleet started coming. That had been a simple, rational concern about fanatical Tosevites starting to screech “Allahu akbar!” and opening up on them with automatic weapons.

Yes, this was different. It was anything but rational, as Fotsev-rationally-knew. He didn’t want to put what it was into words. If he did, he knew he would only think about it more.

His friend Gorppet wasn’t so shy. He let his tongue loll out into the open, which made the scent receptors on it more sensitive. “Put me in cold sleep and ship me Home if I do not smell a ripe female around here somewhere,” he said.

All the males in the patrol sighed at the same time. All of them, for a couple of paces, walked more nearly erect, as if beginning to assume their half of the mating posture. “Whoever she is, wherever she is, she is nowhere near,” Fotsev said, as if reminding himself, calming himself.

“Truth,” Gorppet said, “but I still want her.”

“I wish you had not said that,” Fotsev told him. “Now I am going to be thinking about her instead of about what I am supposed to be doing on patrol, and that is liable to get me killed.”

A stocky veteran named Shaspwikk said, “Does not seem right, smelling a female but not being able to get at one.”

“Truth.” The whole patrol spoke as one male. Fotsev added, “Back on Home, the streets are crazy during the season. So are the corridors of any good-sized building, come to that. And the smell of females gets so thick, you can poke an eating tong into it. And then it is over, and everything gets back to normal again.”

“Shaspwikk said it,” Gorppet agreed. “The way it is on Home, that is the way it ought to be. You smell a female, you go and mate, and that is that. What will it be like if we keep smelling females all the time but there are none in heat close by? We will get as addled as the Tosevites are.”

“It is a wonder we can smell anything here except the stinks the Big Uglies make,” Shaspwikk said.

“Smelling out females-that is different somehow,” Fotsev said. “I would know those pheromones through all the stinks the Big Uglies make all over Tosev 3.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said. “Of course, if we could not smell those pheromones no matter what, we would get no eggs, and after a while there would be no more Race.”

“But when I do smell them, I want to mate, by the Emperor,” Shaspwikk said.

“Good thing there is no female close by right now,” Fotsev said. “We would fight each other to get at her, and nobody would care what the Big Uglies are doing.”

Gorppet turned one eye turret toward him. “I would not mind fighting now, even if I cannot get my cloaca next to a female’s. Smelling the pheromones is plenty to put me on the edge of brawling.” A couple of other males made the hand gesture of agreement.

“I feel the same way,” Fotsev said, “but may the spirits of Emperors past turn their backs on me if I let the Tosevites know. They would laugh themselves silly, the miserable creatures, and then start plotting even more mischief than they get into already.”

He swung his own eye turrets from one male in the small group to another, defying his comrades to argue with him. None of them did. None of them would meet his glance, either. They might not be happy about agreeing with him, but they couldn’t argue.

“And another thing,” he said. “You want to be careful about sticking your own tongues too far into the ginger jar these days. Smelling females in heat makes us twitchy enough all by itself. Pile the herb on top of that and you have trouble waiting to happen.”

“Pile the herb on top of anything that puts too much strain on a male and you have trouble waiting to happen,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets turned every which way, to make sure no one outside the patrol, whether Big Ugly or male of the Race, could overhear. In a low voice, he went on, “That is what happened when things went bad up in the SSSR, or so they say.”

Fotsev wished he wouldn’t have mentioned mutiny, even obliquely. “Put ginger and females’ pheromones together and the trouble they had up in the SSSR is liable to look like hatchlings’ games,” he said.

Again, no one disagreed with him. The problem was, whenever trouble came, he wanted to taste ginger so he wouldn’t have to think about it any more. But that kind of not thinking was what could start troubles with females involved. He saw as much, and saw it clearly. He didn’t see what to do about it.

And then, abruptly, he stopped worrying about it. Along with the usual stenches of Basra, the breeze wafted to his scent receptors the tantalizing odor of a female in season. This was no distant, diffuse scent. It came from somewhere close by-only a few alleys over, if he was any judge. He let out a soft hiss. His head came up. So did the erectile scales on top of it. His mouth opened, not in a laugh but to let more air stream past his tongue and the scent receptors on it.

He wasn’t the only male to catch the scent, either. His comrades’ crests were rising, too. All of them tasted the breeze, ready to follow where it led them. Now they looked warily at one another, each fearing a sudden attack to keep him from getting what he craved.

Gorppet pointed. “That way,” he said, his voice rough.

“We all go together,” Fotsev said. “And we all be careful of what we do. Fighting with teeth and claws is one thing. Fighting with rifles and grenades, though, is a different business.”

Back on Home, they wouldn’t have had to worry about it. Back on Home, weapons were few and far between. No one needed them there, and no one except police and a few criminals could get hold of anything more lethal than knives. Fotsev wished Tosev 3 were like that. But it wasn’t. A male without weapons here was by the nature of things a male in danger. With females in heat around, however, a male with weapons was also likely to be a male in danger… from his own kind, similarly armed.

Its members still eyeing one another, the patrol picked its way through the maze of narrow, crowded lanes toward the females. Before long, they did not need their scent receptors alone to guide them. Shouts from a crowd of Big Uglies ahead told them they had to be getting close. “You speak some of this language,” Fotsev said to Gorppet. “What are they yelling?”

“For someone to pour water over them,” Gorppet answered. “That’s what they do when their domestic animals-you know, the yapping ones-couple in the street. So somebody’s mating up there.”

“Truth.” The rage and jealousy surging through Fotsev shocked him. He wanted that female, wherever she was, and he wanted her this instant. Of itself, his posture grew more upright. He noticed his fellow males were not leaning so far forward as they usually did.

He and the rest of the patrol came round the last corner just as the male finished with the female. The fellow, whose body paint proclaimed him an accountant, was from the colonization fleet. Instead of challenging the newcomers, he turned and skittered off, forcing his way through the crowd of laughing, jeering Tosevites. He must have fully sated himself, then.

The female remained in the mating posture. Her head near the ground, she spoke in a small, bewildered voice: “But I was not coming into heat. By the Emperor, I was not.” She cast down her eyes, not that they could look much farther down than they were already.

“You are in heat now,” Fotsev said. “We can smell it.” The female did not disagree. She remained in place, waiting for him and his comrades. The odor coming from her inflamed him. He clung to coherent thought as best he could. “We shall take turns,” he declared. “And those who are not mating shall stay alert, to make sure these Tosevites here cause no trouble.”

He knew about the new regulations about coupling where Big Uglies could watch, but knowing and remembering were two different things. One after another, he and the other males of the patrol coupled with the female, who remained compliant but perplexed. But, by the time each of them had mated once, the female said, “Enough,” and straightened up. With her pheromones still stimulating him, Fotsev would have liked to couple again. She showed no interest in further mating, though. “I feel so strange,” she muttered. “Just a little while ago, I was happy as I could be, as happy as I have ever been. Now… Now I just want to sink into the ground.”

“Sounds like she has been tasting ginger,” Shaspwikk observed.

“It does,” Fotsev agreed. “That would account for her coming into heat all at once, too.”

“I have not tasted ginger, and you need not talk about me as if I were not here,” the female said sharply. “That other male, wherever he went, the accountant, tried raising his scales at me a while ago. He said he smelled pheromones. Well, he did not smell mine. I got something to drink from one of these ridiculous creatures here. He asked for a sip. I gave him the cup. When he gave it back to me and I drank, my season came upon me without warning. But you know about that.”

“Yes, we know about that.” Now that he had mated once, Fotsev’s mind was working again, after a fashion. “Where is this cup?”

“Right there.” The female pointed.

Fotsev picked it up from the ground. He inhaled sharply, drawing air over his scent receptors. “I thought so,” he said. “The drink in here has ginger in it.”

Thinking along with him, Gorppet exclaimed, “That other male must have slipped it in there. He wanted to mate because he could smell pheromones off in the distance, the same as we did, but this female was not in season, so he got her heated whether she wanted to be or not. What a sneaky fellow!” His emphatic cough said he half admired the vanished accountant.

“He did that to me? He deliberately did that to me?” The female did not sound admiring. She sounded furious, outraged. “He used this herb to make me do something I had no intention of doing, something I could not have done had he not given me the herb to bring me into my season. I do not even know his name, but curse him and all his ancestors from the first egg they hatched out of.”

“Back on Home, this could not have happened,” Fotsev said slowly. “Back on Home, females all come into their season at about the same time, and there are plenty to go around for the males. It is not like that here on Tosev 3.”

“I do not like the way it is here on Tosev 3,” the female said with an emphatic cough of her own. “He used me without my consent. He coupled with me against what would have been my will. That is not right.”

“I agree-that is not right,” Fotsev said. “I think that male committed a crime. I think he committed a new crime, a crime that would have been impossible back on Home. This is a crime that could only happen on Tosev 3.”

“What do we do about it?” Gorppet asked. “If female pheromones keep lingering in the air, more males will think to use ginger to get what they want from females who would not otherwise be ready to give it to them.”

“Truth.” Fotsev took his radio off his belt. “For now, we can only report it-report it and hope our superiors have better ideas than we do.” Even as he began to speak, he could see that neither Gorppet nor the female who’d been fed ginger thought the authorities would. He didn’t think so, either, but did his best not to show it.

Shpaaka looked out at his human students at the Russie Medical College. Along with the rest of the class, Reuven Russie stared at the male Lizard. He poised his pen to record whatever wisdom Shpaaka saw fit to dispense this morning.

Instead of beginning his lecture in the usual way, though, Shpaaka said, “I think I must call on you Tosevites for assistance today.”

A low buzz of surprise went through the chamber. Shpaaka did nothing to check it. That was surprising, too. The male usually took sardonic pleasure in inveighing against Tosevite rudeness and lack of self-control when what he reckoned to be those things manifested themselves in his lecture hall. Reuven raised a hand and waited to be recognized. Jane Archibald came straight out and asked a question: “What is the difficulty, superior sir?”

Shpaaka did not discipline her. He did not even reprove her for the breach of decorum. “The difficulty, I daresay, is one with which you are already familiar,” he replied. “You are intelligent; you have good sources of information. Surely it will not come as any great surprise when I say that the Tosevite herb known as ginger has a pharmacological effect on females of the Race both unexpected and disconcerting.”

It was no surprise to Reuven, not when Atvar had summoned his father to Cairo to confer with him about the problem. Looking around the hall, he saw that his classmates didn’t look astonished, either. Stories of Lizards seen coupling in the streets of Jerusalem had been making the rounds at the medical college for the past few days. Some students had doubted them. Reuven knew better.

Now Jane showed proper etiquette: “Superior sir, permission to ask another question?”

“Granted,” Shpaaka said. “The search for understanding proceeds through questions. It can proceed no other way.”

“How do you believe we Tosevites can help you, superior sir?” Jane asked. Reuven knew what she thought of the Race, and of what the Race had done to Australia. None of that showed in her speech as she went on, “We know little or nothing about the reproductive behavior of the Race. We have had no chance to learn about it until now, when females have come to Tosev 3. In what way, then, can we possibly assist you?”

“This is a good question, a cogent question,” Shpaaka said. “But I must tell you, the reproductive behavior the Race has begun exhibiting here on Tosev 3 is not similar to that which we display on Home.” He sighed, an amazingly humanlike sound. “Very little the Race does on Tosev 3 appears to be similar to what we do back on Home.” An emphatic cough stressed that.

After a moment during which he seemed to gather himself, he went on, “Back on Home, virtually all females come into their season within a short time. Virtually all males are stimulated by the pheromones they release and have the opportunity to mate with at least one of them. That is normality.”

It was normality for most life on Earth, too. Reuven understood that perfectly well. He also understood it was not normality for humans. Glancing over at Jane Archibald, he was glad things worked the way they did, even if he hadn’t had the chance to put all the theory into practice.

Maybe Jane felt his eye on her. She looked his way and impudently stuck out her tongue. He laughed and looked toward Shpaaka again.

The Lizard physician had needed another pause to marshal his thoughts. After that second-embarrassed? — hesitation, he said, “Here on Tosev 3, it appears that ginger causes females almost immediately to enter their season, and to emit the pheromones showing males they have done so. But only a relatively small number of females taste ginger. More males are apt to scent the pheromones than have an in-season female readily accessible to them. This causes tension and frustration of a sort we are not used to.

“Furthermore, females-and males-do not taste ginger only during one short season of the year, but continuously. This means pheromones showing females to be in season are, or will be, released into the air throughout the year. Sexual tension of the sort I previously mentioned will likewise be continuous.

“Now, this runs contrary to all our long-established instinctual patterns. It is, however, the paradigm of normality for you Big Uglies. Your insights on how we are to cope with it will be greatly appreciated.”

Atvar had made the identical appeal to Reuven’s father. Reuven wondered if, all over the world, Lizards were asking such questions of humans they thought they could trust. He pitied them and laughed at them at the same time. They’d been smugly superior for a long time. Now, abruptly, things weren’t so simple for them.

With sudden indignation, Shpaaka added, “We have even had a couple of incidents where a male, smelling a distant female’s pheromones, has surreptitiously given an adjacent female ginger so he could mate with her. This is a depth of iniquity to which I doubt even you Tosevites have ever plunged.”

The lecture hall erupted in loud Tosevite laughter. Reuven joined in. He couldn’t help himself. Even after twenty years on Earth, after twenty years of intensive research on human beings, the Lizards remained painfully naive. They were likely to be right, too: they would need human help in dealing with problems of sexuality. Reuven doubted they could do it on their own.

Shpaaka looked out at his students. “Perhaps I was mistaken,” he said, his voice dry. “Do you find it amusing that your kind may be more iniquitous than I had previously imagined?”

“Yes, superior sir,” they chorused, which touched off another round of raucous laughter.

Shpaaka laughed, too, in the silent manner of his kind. “Very well, perhaps it is amusing,” he said. “But tell me, how do we prevent more such unfortunate incidents in the future?”

That was a serious question, seriously meant. After a little thought, Reuven raised his hand. When Shpaaka recognized him, he said, “Superior sir, I do not know if you will be able to prevent them altogether. We cannot; we have never been able to. We do work to keep them to a minimum.”

“You Tosevites are, in many circumstances, more readily satisfied than we would be,” Shpaaka returned. Reuven glowered; the Lizard had asked for advice, but then what had he done with it? Mocked it, nothing else. Shpaaka seemed to realize his discontent, saying, “In matters pertaining to desire, perfect success may be more difficult to obtain than elsewhere.”

“Permission to speak, superior sir?” an Argentine student named Pedro Magallanes asked. When he got it, he said, “Do the other races in your Empire ever have, ah, problems of this sort?”

“Only in rare instances, due to one hormonal imbalance or another,” Shpaaka replied. “The same holds true for the Race. Until becoming acquainted with you Tosevites, we thought it must necessarily hold true for any intelligent species. Now we discover it does not even necessarily hold true for ourselves. I would appreciate the irony more were it less painful.”

That he noticed it at all spoke well for him. The human rulers of the Greater German Reich and the Soviet Union could not recognize irony if it cocked its leg and pissed on their ankles; of that Reuven was certain.

“You Tosevites have had long practice controlling continuous reproductive urges,” Shpaaka went on. “Since we are newcomers to the business, we shall probably end up borrowing from you: yes, I know, another irony.”

Shpaaka’s students whispered and murmured to one another. The Lizard affected not to notice, an indulgence he seldom granted them. Bahadur Singh, a turbaned Sikh, spoke to Reuven in English: “This will drive the Lizards to distraction-assuredly, to distraction-for some time to come.” His eyes glowed. “Maybe my country can use the distraction to make itself free.”

“It could be so.” Reuven didn’t really think it likely. The Lizards, distracted or not, would do whatever they had to do to hold on to India. But Bahadur Singh had hope. Reuven had no hope that Palestine could ever shake off the Lizards’ yoke. Even if it could, it would be torn between Arabs and Jews. The aliens’ rule was about as good as anyone here could hope for, having at least the advantage of disinterest.

Most of the time, Reuven took that for granted. Now, when he looked at it, he found it depressing. Couldn’t people get along well enough so they didn’t need to have disinterested aliens keeping them from quarreling with one another?

His quiet laugh was rueful. His father would have known better even than to bother shaping the question in his own mind. If Poland hadn’t taught that the only possible answer was, Of course not, you fool, what would? The squabbles in Palestine even under Lizard rule should have driven the point home with a sledgehammer.

Before he let it depress him too much, a student from the Soviet Union named Anna Suslova asked, “Permission to speak, superior sir?” Reuven sometimes wondered how she’d got into the medical college, and whether someone capable had taken the entrance exams for her. She often seemed out of her depth here. The question she put to Shpaaka showed how her mind worked: “Superior sir, why not punish ginger users so severely, fear of punishment keeps females from using the drug?”

“We have been trying to do this with our males since we came to Tosev 3,” Shpaaka replied. “We have not succeeded. By all indications, ginger causes pleasure even more acute in females. How likely is it that we will eliminate its use among them through intimidation?”

Maybe he’d thought that sardonic rejoinder would quash Anna Suslova. If so, he had misjudged her. With a toss of her head, she replied, “It could be that you have not yet made the punishment severe enough to intimidate properly.”

“Yes, it could be,” Shpaaka admitted. “But it could also be that we are not so fond of spilling one another’s blood as Tosevites often seem to be.”

Anna Suslova tossed her head again. “In an emergency, superior sir, one does what is immediately necessary and worries about its consequences later. Had the Soviet Union not followed this principle, is it not likely my not-empire would be under the rule of the Race today?”

“Yes, I suppose that is likely,” Shpaaka said. “My opinion is, many of the Tosevites of your not-empire would be happier were that so.”

Where he hadn’t before, he got through to the Russian girl with that. She glared at him, furious and not even trying to hide it. For a Lizard, he was good at recognizing human facial expressions, but he didn’t call her on this one. Reuven Russie scratched his head. If he’d justified the Race’s rule in Palestine on the grounds of utility for the human population, how could he avoid extending the principle over the whole planet?

He contributed little to the discussion for the rest of the period.

Liu Han looked out from the window of her suite in the Biltmore Hotel at the wide street and the automobiles that packed it to the point where hardly any of them could move. With no small reluctance, she turned to her daughter and said, “I am beginning to believe that the Americans’ constant boasting about their prosperity is not boasting, but is a simple statement of fact.”

“They eat well,” Liu Mei said. Then she corrected herself: “They have plenty to eat, and they eat whenever they like. I see that, even if I do not care for much of their food. They have many more motorcars and televisors and radios than we do. They have more room than we do. This is a large city, not so large as Peking but still large, but it does not feel crowded. All these things do make for prosperity, yes. Who could disagree?”

“I myself disagreed,” Liu Han said. “This hotel is a hotel for rich people. Anyone can see that. The Americans do not bother pretending otherwise. Any country will treat rich people, important people, well, no matter how it treats its workers and peasants. You cannot judge how prosperous the United States is by the way the American ruling classes treat us.”

“I understand that, Mother.” Liu Mei’s voice showed amusement, even if her face did not. “It is good, though, that the Americans treat us as important people. They cannot be treating us as rich people, for we are not.”

“No, we are not rich people,” Liu Han agreed. “We should have trouble paying for a day’s stay in this hotel, let alone a stay of weeks like the one they are giving us. But we have been enough other places and seen enough other things for me to be sure they are not simply showing us their best, as we have sometimes done for foreign visitors over the years.”

She thought of televisors and radios and motorcars, as Liu Mei had. She thought of machines to wash dishes, which she’d seen in some of the homes she’d visited, and machines to wash clothes, which she’d seen in almost all of the homes. Those machines were like proletarians who could not be oppressed and so would never need to rise up in revolution against their capitalist overlords.

And she thought of something simpler, something far more fundamental. In every house she visited, she made sure she asked to use the toilet. And every house boasted one, sometimes more than one, not just a squatting-style toilet like those some rich men in China had, but a veritable porcelain throne. And every house boasted not just the cold running water that made the toilet flush but also hot, hers to command at the turn of a tap. If that was not prosperity, what was?

Liu Mei said, “And all the books they have! So many more people have libraries of their own here than back home. That major’s house, for instance, had more bookshelves than I was able to count.”

“Yes, I remember,” Liu Han said, more than a little discontentedly. When she and Liu Mei went to visit Major Yeager, she’d thought the books that packed his house another attempt at deception-a Potemkin village, the Russians called it: something meant to be seen but not used. But when she plucked a book off a shelf at random, Yeager had talked animatedly about it in both English and the language of the Race. Liu Han sighed. “His wife is a scholar. Maybe that helps account for it.”

“He knew my father,” Liu Mei said in tones of wonder. “I never thought I would meet anyone who knew my father. I have cousins in this country. I never thought I would have cousins anywhere.”

Absurdly, Liu Han felt a stab of jealousy. So far as she could tell, she had no relatives except Liu Mei alive anywhere in China. Between them, the little scaly devils and the Japanese had ground her ancestral village to powder; of her family, only she had got out from between the millstones.

“Major Yeager knew your father better than I ever did,” Liu Han said slowly. A strange thing to say, she knew, when Bobby Fiore had sown the seed that grew into Liu Mei deep inside her womb. Strange-but true. “He knew him longer than I did, and they spoke the same language, so they could understand each other. Your father and I spoke in broken bits of Chinese and the little scaly devils’ language and English. He never learned to speak Chinese very well.”

And with our bodies, she thought, though she did not say that aloud. Our bodies understood, even when we did not. That, by the spirit of the compassionate Buddha, was knowledge of Bobby Fiore Major Yeager did not have.

Liu Mei said, “Is it tonight we are going back to Major Yeager’s house?”

“Yes, tonight,” Liu Han answered. “Why do you ask?”

“Because it is good to go to a place where people understand the little devils’ language,” her daughter answered. “It is not as good as if Major Yeager and his wife and his son spoke Chinese, but we both know more of the little devils’ language than we do English, and all three of them are fluent in it.”

“I will not tell you you are wrong,” Liu Han said. Even so, she glanced over toward Liu Mei. “And you will have a chance to talk with that son-Jonathan, his name is. Do not be too free with him. The Americans have less restraint in their dealings between young people than we do.”

“Do you know what he reminded me of?” Liu Mei said. “The young people in Peking who imitate the scaly devils, that’s what. Except he knows more about them than the young people in Peking do.”

“There was that one we saw,” Liu Han began. But then she shrugged. “You are probably right. You have to remember, though, that his father and mother deal with the scaly devils every day. If he has learned much of them, he has learned it because of what his parents do.” Liu Mei nodded, accepting that. Liu Han let out a silent sigh of relief. She did not want her daughter to have any excuse for developing an infatuation for any American youth.

By the time evening came, she was ready and more than ready to go down to Major Yeager’s home, if only to relax. She had spent the day conferring with several American members of Congress. Frankie Wong helped by interpreting, but she tried to speak as much English as she could, because she did not fully trust him to translate accurately. That made it a grueling session, one in which she felt as if her brains were being rolled out onto something flat and hard like dough being made into noodles.

And the congressmen were less sympathetic than she’d hoped they would be. “Let me say I do not see why we should be helping international Communism,” declared one, a man with a long nose and jowls that showed even more dark stubble than Bobby Fiore had had.

Frankie Wong gave her an expectant look, but she answered that one herself, in English: “You help us, you help people go free from Lizards.” The long-nosed American abruptly stopped asking questions.

Another congressman said, “Why shouldn’t we just send you lots of ginger, to keep the Lizards too drugged up and too horny”-Wong did have to translate that for her-“to be able to fight back?”

“Power come from barrel of a gun. War and politics never separate,” Liu Han replied. “So say Mao. He say true, I think.”

She got through the hearing. She thought she held her own. But letting an American drive her and Liu Mei down the wide but still crowded highways of Los Angeles was still a relief. She’d spent more time in motorcars here in the American city than in all her life in China. Fair enough: these foreign devils did reckon her an important personage. But so many people in the city had automobiles, had them and took them for granted. Even the way the city was built took them for granted. She’d seen that from the start. Prosperity, she thought again.

Only the richest Chinese would have been able to afford the home in which the Yeagers lived. Only those who collaborated with the little scaly devils would have been able to get the electrically powered machines that were so common in this country. “We greet you,” Barbara Yeager said in the little devils’ language when Liu Han and Liu Mei rang the doorbell (even it ran on electricity). Her husband and son nodded behind her. She went on, “Supper will be ready soon.”

Supper was an extravagantly large slab of beef served with a baked potato. Potatoes, Liu Han had found, were harmless; they took the place of rice and noodles in a lot of American cooking. The beefsteak was another declaration of U.S. affluence. Liu Han had never eaten so much meat in China as she did at almost every supper in the United States.

After supper, Major Yeager surprised her by helping his wife clean up. No Chinese man would have done such a thing, despite the Communists’ preaching of equality between the sexes. When the job was done, he went into the front room and pulled a paperbound book off a shelf. “I had to do some shopping around before I found this,” he said in English, sounding pleased with himself, “but I did.”

He handed it to Liu Han. She read English haltingly. “Nineteen Thirty-eight Spalding Official Base Ball Guide.” She looked over at him. “Why you show me this?”

“Open it at the page where I put a card in,” he answered. She did, and looked down at small pictures of men in caps of the sort Americans still sometimes wore. After a moment, one of the faces leapt out at her. She pointed. “That is Bobby Fiore.”

Major Yeager nodded. Yes, he was pleased with himself. “Truth,” he said in the scaly devils’ tongue before returning to English: “He is wearing a baseball uniform there. I wanted your daughter to have the chance to see what her father looked like.”

Liu Mei had gone off to talk with Jonathan Yeager. When she came into the room after Liu Han called, her mother looked closely to see if she was rumpled. Liu Han would not have bet American youths behaved much differently from their Chinese counterparts if they got the chance. But everything here seemed as it should.

Liu Han pointed to the photograph. “Your father,” she said, first in English and then in Chinese. Liu Mei’s eyes got very wide as she stared and stared at the picture. When at last she looked up, they were wet with tears. Liu Han understood that. She and her daughter were good Marxist-Leninists, but the ancient Chinese tradition of respect for one’s ancestors lived in both of them.

“Thank you,” Liu Mei said to Major Yeager. She’d spoken in English, but added an emphatic cough. That let her shift to the little devils’ language: “This means very much to me.”

“I am glad to do it,” Yeager replied in the same language. “He was your father, and he was my friend.” He turned to Liu Han. “Keep the book, if you want to. It will help you remember, even when you go home.”

“I thank you,” Liu Han said softly. She still believed-she had to believe-the American system was flawed, regardless of the prosperity it produced. But some of the foreign devils could be men as good as any Chinese. She’d seen that with Bobby Fiore, and now she saw it again with this other man who had been his friend.

Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb studied the radar screen. “Another American launch,” he remarked. “The Yanks have been busy the past couple of weeks, haven’t they?”

“Aye, sir,” Sergeant Jack McKinnon answered. He chuckled. “Likely they’ve got a lot o’ ginger to fly up to all those poor Lizards who’ve had to do without their womenfolks for so long.” He laughed at his own wit.

So did Goldfarb, but he had a harder time of it. He wished the Lizards had never discovered that ginger made their females randy. Such a discovery could only mean they’d want more of the stuff. Oh, their leaders would do their best to keep them from getting more, but those same leaders had been doing their best for a long time. They’d had little luck yet.

He didn’t think they’d have much luck in future, either. He sighed-not too loud, so the sergeant wouldn’t notice. That meant Group Captain Roundbush would keep moving the stuff by the bushel basket, which meant Roundbush was liable to ask him for more help one day before too long.

And he would have to give it. The way things were in Britain these days, he would have to do whatever Roundbush told him to do. The group captain had said he would help Goldfarb emigrate. With each passing day, that looked like a better idea… if Roundbush had told the truth.

Putting the group captain out of his mind-for a little while-Goldfarb studied the radar screen. “Looks like they’re going hammer and tongs at that space station of theirs,” he remarked. “They’ll really have something when they finally get it done.”

“Oh, that they will, sir-summat grand.” But McKinnon, in spite of what he said, did not sound as if he agreed with Goldfarb. A moment later, he explained why: “And once they’ve got it, what will they do with it? What good will it do them? We can get our toes out into space, aye, but it really belongs to the Lizards.”

“For now it does, yes,” Goldfarb admitted. “And it doesn’t look like it’ll ever belong to Britain, does it?” Saying that pained him. Back before the Lizards came, Britain had been at the forefront of science and technology. British radar had kept the Nazis from invading in 1940. British jet engines had been well in advance of everybody else’s, including the Germans’. When space travel came, what was more natural than to assume it would come from the British Empire?

But the British Empire was only a memory now. And the British Isles lacked the resources for a space program of their own. What resources they had, they’d put into landand submarine-based rockets with which they could make any invader-Lizards, Nazis, even Americans-pay a dreadful price.

And so Britain remained independent. But the continentbestriding powers-the USA, the USSR, the Greater German Reich — also strode beyond the planets, strode on the moon, on Mars, and even on the asteroids. As a boy, Goldfarb had dreamt of being the first man on the moon, of walking beside a Martian canal.

A Nazi had been the first man on the moon. There were no Martian canals. So the Lizards said, and they turned out to be right. They still couldn’t understand why men wanted to set foot on such a useless, worthless world.

Goldfarb understood it. But, even for the Yanks who’d gone to Mars and then come home again, it must have seemed like a consolation prize. Whatever people did in space, the Lizards had done it thousands of years before.

“If we could build a ship that would pay a call on Home, that would be something,” Goldfarb said dreamily.

“It’d be summat the Lizards didn’t fancy, and go ahead and try telling me I’m wrong, sir,” McKinnon said. “That’d be the last thing they wanted: us coming to pay them a call, I mean.”

“So it would. They wouldn’t know what kind of call we aimed to pay them,” Goldfarb answered. He thought about it for a moment. “And I’m damned if I know what kind of call we ought to pay them, either. It would be nice if we could give them as much to think about as they’ve given us, wouldn’t it?”

McKinnon’s expression of naked longing reminded Goldfarb that the Scot’s relatively recent ancestors had been in the habit of painting themselves blue and swinging claymores as tall as they were. “Aye, wouldn’t it be sweet to drop a nice, fat atomic bomb down the Emperor’s chimney? The Lizards could scarce blame us, not after all they’ve done here.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that would stop them from blaming us.” Goldfarb’s voice was dry. “What I’d like to do, though, is send ships to other planets in the Empire and see if we could free the Rabotevs and Hallessi. They can’t like the Lizards lording it over them, can they?”

But even as he said that, he wondered. The Lizards had ruled those other two worlds for a long time. Maybe the aliens on them really did take the Empire for granted. People didn’t work that way, but the Lizards didn’t work like people, so why should their subjects? And people hadn’t ruled other people for anywhere near that many thousand years. Maybe obedience, even acquiescence, had become ingrained into the natives of Halless 1 and Rabotev 2.

“Might be worth finding out,” McKinnon said. “Pity they aren’t closer. Likely wouldn’t do, sending leaflets through space to ’em.”

“Workers of the worlds, unite!” Goldfarb said, grinning. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

The joke should have gone over better than it did. McKinnon’s smile, now, looked distinctly strained. His lips moved-silently, but Goldfarb had no trouble understanding the word they shaped. Bolshie.

It could have been worse. McKinnon could have said it out loud. That might have wrecked Goldfarb’s career for good, assuming his being a Jew hadn’t already done the job. Being labeled a Bolshevik Jew in a country tilting toward the Greater German Reich wasn’t just asking for trouble. It was begging for trouble on bended knee.

“Never mind,” Goldfarb said wearily. “Never bloody mind. That’ll teach me to try to be bloody funny, won’t it?”

McKinnon stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. Goldfarb was not in the habit of making his speech so peppery. He was not in the habit of banging his head against a stone wall, either. He wondered why not. Metaphorically, he did it every day. Why not be literal about it, too?

He looked at his watch. The luminous dots by the numbers and the hands told him the time in the darkened room. “Shift’s almost over,” he remarked in something close to his normal tone of voice. “Thank heaven.”

Jack McKinnon did not argue with him. Maybe that meant the veteran sergeant would be relieved to go outside and get some fresh air, or something as close to it as Belfast’s sooty atmosphere yielded. But maybe, and more likely, it meant McKinnon would be glad to escape from being cooped up in the same room with a damned crazy Jew.

At last, after what certainly seemed like forever, McKinnon and Goldfarb’s reliefs showed up. The Scotsman hurried away without words, without even his usual, See you tomorrow. He would see Goldfarb tomorrow, whether he liked it or not. Not, at the moment, seemed ahead on points.

Shaking his head, Goldfarb got onto his bicycle and pedaled for home as fast as he could. Since everyone else in Belfast had got off at about the same time, that was not very fast. He hated traffic jams. Too many people in motorcars pretended they could not see the plebeians on bicycles. He had to swerve sharply a couple of times to keep from getting hit.

When he did get back to his flat in the married officers’ quarters, he was something a good deal less than his best. Normally patient with his children, he barked at them till they retreated in dismay. He barked at Naomi, too, something he scarcely ever did. She used a privilege denied the children and barked back. That brought him up short.

“Here,” she said with brisk practicality. “Drink this.” This was a couple of jiggers of neat whiskey poured into a glass. “Maybe it will make you decent company again. If it doesn’t, it will put you to sleep.”

“Maybe it will make me beat you,” he said, full of mock ferocity. Had there been the slightest likelihood he would actually do that, the words would never have passed his lips. But, while he might talk too much when he’d had a drop or two too many, he’d never yet turned mean.

“If you’re going to beat me, why don’t you wait till after supper?” Naomi suggested. “That way, I won’t be tempted to pour a pot of boiling potato soup in your lap.” She cocked her head to one side. “Well, not very tempted, anyhow.”

“No, eh?” he said, and knocked back the whiskey. “In that case, I’d better behave myself.”

He behaved himself to the extent of keeping quiet through the soup and through the roast chicken that followed. Then he plopped himself down in front of the televisor to watch the Cologne-Manchester football match. Most of the time, he had no use for the hooligans who came to the stadium to make trouble and to stomp anyone who showed signs of supporting the wrong team. He listened with benign approval as they cursed and booed and hissed the Germans.

“You’d better win,” a leather-lunged heckler bawled, “or it’s the gas chamber for the lot of you!”

Cologne did not win. Neither did they lose. The match ended in a 1–1 tie. Goldfarb scowled as he turned off the set. He wanted, he craved certainties, and the match, like life, offered nothing but ambiguity.

Although the Manchester coach spent several minutes explaining why the tie was really as good as a victory, he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself. Goldfarb was glad when he disappeared and the blandly handsome face of a BBC newsreader filled the screen.

“Another round of public fornication among the Lizards was observed in London today,” he remarked after touching on larger disasters. “Fortunately, in this day and age, there are few horses left to startle, and mere human beings have grown increasingly blase in the face of the Race’s continued randiness. In fashion news-”

Goldfarb snorted. He tremendously admired traditional British restraint, not least because he had so little of it in his own makeup. He’d once thought the Lizards similarly restrained, but ginger and the arrival of females had changed his mind there. With what ginger had done to his own life, he wished the Lizards had never heard of it.

“Finally this evening,” the newsreader went on, “M.P. Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists introduced a bill in Parliament proposing to restrict the legal privileges of certain citizens of the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that the bill appears to have no chance of passage, Sir Oswald said it continued an important statement of principle, and-”

With a curse, Goldfarb got up and turned off the televisor. He stood by it, shaking. Was that fury or fear? Both at once, he judged. It had started here. At last, it had started here.