Second Contact

19

Little by little, Nesseref was getting used to her flat in the new town that had gone up east of the Tosevite hamlet called Jezow. The flat itself boasted all the conveniences she’d enjoyed back on Home. She had access to the Race’s computer network, which put her in touch with all of Tosev 3. Telephone and television service were also as good as they would have been on the world she’d left behind. She could find entertainment programs at the touch of a fingerclaw. They were all recordings, of course, but that mattered little to her. Over the course of a hundred thousand years, the Race had produced so much that one lifetime’s viewing couldn’t give a female even a smattering of it.

Only her furnishings told her she dwelt on Tosev 3. The pieces that had come from Home with the colonization fleet were of the lightest and most austere manufacture, nothing she would have had in her apartment there. The tables and chairs made locally did not look like work the Race would do. Even the ones that weren’t too tall and too large were… not so much wrong but alien in style and decoration. The very grains of the woods were strange, as were the gaudy fabrics the Polish Tosevites reckoned the height of style.

Also strange was the view out her window. It is all far too green, she kept thinking. The trees sprouted great profusions of leaves. Grass and shrubs grew lavishly, far more lavishly than most places on Home. Having rain drum against that window almost every other day also felt unnatural.

Going to the shuttlecraft port was always a relief. The facilities there were full of the Race’s gear, even if Big Uglies had erected them. Taking a shuttlecraft up into orbit was an even greater relief. The craft and the starships they served were pure products of the Race. Aboard them, she could almost forget she wasn’t orbiting Home.

Almost. For one thing, the world beneath her looked different. Waterlogged was the word that most readily came to mind. Those vast expanses of ocean seemed as wrong as the frequent rain. And, for another, the Race had to share orbital space with the Big Uglies. Their mushy voices, chattering in their languages and in hers, crowded the radio bands even worse than their hardware crowded space.

One piece of hardware in particular stood out. “What are the Big Uglies doing?” she asked as she floated weightless at the central docking hub of the 27th Emperor Korfass. “Are they building a starship of their own?”

“Do not be absurd,” answered the male she had come to ferry down to the surface of Tosev 3, a chemical engineer named Warraff. “They cannot hope to fly between the stars. They did not even travel beyond their own atmosphere until after the fighting stopped. That is only the space station of the not-empire called the Confederated-no, excuse me, the United-States.”

“Why is it so large?” Nesseref asked. “I am certain the Tosevites had nothing of that size in orbit when we first came to Tosev 3.”

“No one knows the answer to that,” Warraff replied. “No one of the Race, at any rate. The American Tosevites are doing something peculiar there; I would be the last to deny it. Keep an eye turret on the computer network to stay up with the latest gossip, but bear in mind it is only gossip.”

“I thought you told me it belonged to the United States,” Nesseref said. “Who are the Americans?”

Straightening out that misunderstanding took a little while. Nesseref had paid little attention to the lesser continental mass. She knew about the SSSR and the Reich because Poland lay sandwiched between them. But she’d had only radio contact with U.S. spacefliers and ground stations, and had forgotten those Big Uglies had an alternative name for themselves.

Several officials were waiting for Warraff when she brought him down to the shuttlecraft port outside the new Australian cities; he was, evidently, good at what he did. No one was waiting for Nesseref, no matter how good she was at what she did. She found transportation from the shuttlecraft port to the airfield not far away. Then she had to wait for the next flight to Poland, and then she had to endure the journey halfway round the planet.

By the time she walked into her flat, her body had no idea whether it was supposed to be day or night. Locally, it was late afternoon. She did know that felt wrong. Uncertain whether to eat breakfast or go to sleep, she chose the latter. When she woke up, it was the middle of the night, but she could not go back to sleep no matter how hard she tried.

She felt caged inside the flat. She’d spent too much time inside her shuttlecraft and inside the airplane that had brought her home. She rode the elevator down to the lobby of her building and then strode out into the street. This sort of thing had happened to her after other missions, too. Once more was an annoyance, not a catastrophe.

Few other males or females of the Race were on the street. Nesseref eyed the ones who walked or motored past with a certain amount of wariness, but only a certain amount. The Race was generally more law-abiding than the Big Uglies, and males and females chosen as colonists were generally law-abiding even by the standards of the Race. Still, every hatching ground held a few addled eggs.

Tosev 3 could do some addling of its own. A male sidled up to Nesseref, saying, “I greet you. How would you like to greet something nice for your tongue?”

“No,” Nesseref said sharply-all the more sharply because she did crave ginger. “Go away.” When the male did not move off fast enough to suit her, she added, “Very well, then, I will call the authorities,” and reached for her telephone.

That got the fellow moving at a better clip. Nesseref felt more regret and anger than satisfaction. She walked along the quiet streets. Loud metallic crashes sent her skittering forward to investigate. She found a couple of Big Uglies loading trash cans into a ramshackle truck of Tosevite design.

“We greet you, superior sir,” they said, lifting cloth caps from their heads in unison. Their accents were even worse than the foremale Casimir’s, and they couldn’t tell Nesseref was a female. But they acted as if they had every right to be where they were and do what they were doing.

“What is going on here?” Nesseref asked.

She had little experience in judging Tosevite expressions, but needed little to realize they found the question stupid. So did she, once she thought about it. One of the Tosevites said, “Taking trashes away, superior sir. Race not wanting to do. Paying us to doing instead.”

“Very well,” Nesseref said, and the Big Uglies resumed their noisy, smelly work. Indeed, it was labor no male or female of the Race would want to perform. Paying the Tosevites to do it made perfect sense.

The truck rumbled off down the street, leaving a cloud of noxious fumes in its wake. Nesseref coughed a couple of times, and did her best not to breathe till the cloud dispersed. Yes, paying Big Uglies to haul trash made sense. But Big Uglies also made trucks. If they did that more cheaply than members of the Race could, would paying them for such manufacturing also make sense? Nesseref didn’t know. She did know some of the colonists were industrial workers. If they didn’t manufacture, say, trucks, what would they do?

If the trucks they did make were better but at the same time more expensive than those of the Big Uglies, what would the Race do? What should the Race do? She was glad she didn’t have to decide things like that.

She prowled the streets of the new town, now and then looking up through the scattered clouds at the stars. She knew the constellations well; they didn’t look a great deal different from the way they would have in the northern hemisphere back on Home, though of course they rotated about a different imaginary axis.

Little by little, the eastern sky turned pale with the approach of day. Before the star Tosev came up, a mist rose on the fields and meadows around the settlement the Race had built. Tendrils flowed through the streets, leaving the air damp and clammy. Despite that and despite the unpleasant chill, Nesseref stayed out, watching in fascination. Such mists occurred in only a few places back on Home, and then but seldom; the air usually stayed too dry to support them. They seemed common enough here in Poland, but still intrigued her.

This one, like most, hugged the ground. When Nesseref looked up through it, she had no trouble seeing the tops of taller buildings. But when she turned her eye turrets down to street level, so that she peered along the layer of water droplets, the lower stories of nearby structures blurred, while those farther away-and not much farther away, at that-disappeared altogether. She might have been alone in the center of a small, clear circle, the rest of the planet (for all she could prove, the rest of the universe) shrouded in fog. Even the sounds that reached her hearing diaphragms were distant, muffled, attenuated.

When Tosev rose, the mist let her look at it without protection. That seemed even stranger to her than the fog itself. As a shuttlecraft pilot, she’d grown used to harsh, raw sunlight, unfiltered even by atmosphere, let alone by these billions of droplets. Even a glimpse of a sun should have been enough to make her automatically turn her eye turrets away. But no, not here. She could look at Tosev with impunity-and she did.

With sunrise, the town began to come to life around her. Males and females trooped out of their apartment buildings. Off they went, to whatever work they had. A couple of them turned curious eye turrets in her direction. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was only standing and watching. That made her not fit in. She kept on doing nothing but standing and watching, too, which left the curious no excuse to ask her any questions. That suited her fine.

Now she didn’t know that she felt like breakfast, but she didn’t know that she felt like any different meal, either. She did feel like something, and breakfast would do. She had to look around to see where she was; she’d walked through the night almost at random. But the new town wasn’t large enough to make getting lost easy. Before long, she found herself in an eatery she’d already visited several times.

“Ham and eggs,” she told the male behind the counter. Ham she esteemed, as did most of the Race; the only thing better she’d found on Tosev 3 was ginger, and ginger she stubbornly refused. The local eggs tasted different from those of Home-rather more sulfurous-but weren’t bad when flavored with enough salt.

As the male gave her the meal, he remarked, “Before long, they will start bringing down our own domestic animals. Then we shall have proper eggs and more kinds of meat worth eating.”

“Good,” Nesseref said, handing him her identification card so he could charge her credit balance. “Yes, that will be very good indeed. Little by little, we may be putting down roots on this world after all. Perhaps our settlement here will work out, even if not in the way we thought it would before leaving Home.”

“This is not such a bad place,” the male answered. “Cold and wet, but we already knew that. If only there were fewer Big Uglies running around loose with weapons.”

“Truth,” Nesseref said. Did the Tosevite called Anielewicz have an explosive-metal bomb? Even if he didn’t, did it matter? The Reich and the SSSR and the United States had them. She was sure the countermale had meant Tosevites with rifles and submachine guns. They were the visible danger. But the ones with bombs were worse.

Atvar was feeling harassed. He should have been used to the feeling, after so much time on Tosev 3. In fact, he was used to the feeling. But he had less chance than usual to make the male addressing him regret it, because Reffet was every bit as much a fleetlord as he was.

“By the Emperor, Atvar,” Reffet snarled now, looking most unhappy indeed on Atvar’s screen, “what are these accursed American Big Uglies playing at with their preposterous space station? The miserable thing bloats like a tumor.”

“I do not know what they are doing,” Atvar answered. What he was doing was trying to hold his temper. Being an equal, Reffet was entitled to use his unadorned name. Equal or not, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet wasn’t entitled to use his name in that tone of voice. “Whatever it is, I doubt it means danger to us. When Big Uglies plan something dangerous, they rarely let us see any of it beforehand.”

“They have no business planning anything we do not know about in advance,” Reffet said. “They have no business being in space at all. It is preposterous”-he liked that word-“that we have to endure their presumption.”

“You must adapt,” Atvar said, knowing full well he could give no more infuriating advice to a male of the Race, especially one newly come to Tosev 3. “We have been over this ground before. They were on the point of developing this technology themselves when we arrived. Much of what they use is independently invented.”

“Much also is stolen from the Race.” Reffet’s tone suggested Atvar had personally handed over the engineering drawings.

“They developed rockets on their own. They were in the process of developing explosive-metal bombs when the conquest fleet came,” Atvar said. “They made it plain they would go to war and wreck this planet if we sought to keep them from doing what they had the ability to do. The colonization fleet would have had a thin time of it then.”

“Had the conquest fleet done its job properly, we would not be having this discussion now,” Reffet snapped.

Atvar wanted to bite him. All at once, he understood how Straha must have felt when he, as fleetlord, rejected the ambitious shiplord’s schemes one after another. For the first time, he even got some inkling of understanding why Straha had defected to the Big Uglies. At the moment, he felt rather like defecting himself. Then he wouldn’t have to deal with fools like Reffet, too hidebound to shed his own skin.

“You were not here at the time,” he said. “No doubt we could have benefited from your wisdom.”

“Truth,” Reffet said, not recognizing sarcasm. “Now we have to make the best of this bad situation. And I tell you this: even some from the conquest fleet are growing alarmed. My Security personnel and I have been bombarded with messages from a female named Kassquit, urging some sort of action against this space station.”

“Have you been tasting ginger, Reffet?” Atvar demanded. “You know perfectly well that the conquest fleet had no females.” Yet the name Kassquit was familiar to him. He checked the computer records, then started to laugh. By the time it was through, that laugh was so enormous, it looked as if he were taking the bite he so desired out of the other fleetlord.

“That is an offensive expression on your face,” Reffet said angrily, “and I will have you know for a fact, Atvar-for a fact, do you hear? — that no Kassquit with that identity number came from Home aboard the colonization fleet. Therefore, she must have come with you. I do not know how she did it, but I do know that she did it.”

Atvar laughed harder and wider than ever. Almost shaking with mirth, he said, “I will have you know for a fact-for a fact, Reffet, do you hear? — that you are an idiot, addled in your eggshell before you hatched. Do you have any notion who this Kassquit is?”

“One of yours,” Reffet answered. “One of yours, by the Emperor, which is all that matters to me. Try to evade it as you will, you-”

“Oh, shut up,” Atvar told him. “Truth: Kassquit is one of mine, in a manner of speaking-but only in a manner of speaking. She is a female Big Ugly hatchling one of my research psychologists obtained not long after the fighting stopped. He has been raising her as nearly as possible as a female of the Race ever since. And because of her word you are jumping around as if you had parasites sticking their pointed little snouts between your scales and sucking your blood.”

Reffet looked as if his eyes were about to pop out of the turrets that housed them. Atvar rather wished they would. At last, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet wheezed, “A Big Ugly? I have been taken in by a Big Ugly?”

“Again, in a manner of speaking,” Atvar said. He had the computer file he needed on the screen beside Reffet’s reduced but still furious image. That gave him all the advantage over the other fleetlord he needed. “She is, however, a Big Ugly in biology only. In culture, she is a citizen of the Empire, as much as a Rabotev or one of the Hallessi.”

“A Big Ugly,” Reffet repeated. He still sounded so disbelieving, Atvar wondered if he’d heard a word other than that. Reffet went on, “Well, if one can do it, maybe more than one can do it, too.”

“And what are you maundering about now?” Atvar inquired sweetly. He hadn’t liked Reffet since the colonization fleet arrived. The more he got to know his opposite number, the more he despised him, too.

But then Reffet brought him up short. “One of the things this Kassquit keeps complaining about is possible-she says probable-Tosevite penetration of our computer network. I thought that even more ridiculous than everything else the female was saying. But if she herself is a Big Ugly and tricked me into believing her a female of the Race, other Tosevites may be practicing similar deceptions.”

“I find that unlikely,” Atvar said, but it disquieted him just the same. “What do your Security males and females think of the notion?”

“They reckoned it nothing more than the glow that comes from rotten meat-till now,” Reffet said. “With this new information, they may take the idea more seriously. With this new information, I know I take it more seriously.”

“Have them transmit Kassquit’s allegations to my males in Security,” Atvar said. “They do have more experience of Tosevites than is true of your personnel. I shall be interested to learn if they, too, revise their opinion.”

“So shall I.” Reffet used the affirmative hand gesture. “All right, Atvar, I will do that.” No Exalted Fleetlord from him, no. No It shall be done, either. Unique among all the members of the Race on and around Tosev 3, he was not Atvar’s subordinate. That was one of the reasons Atvar disliked him, even if Atvar might not fully realize as much himself. He had to hope Reffet would do as he asked; he could not insist on it. This time, Reffet had chosen to oblige him. He had to be grateful, which irked him, too.

“I thank you,” he said, hoping he sounded as if he meant it.

“And I will thank your Security males for their analysis,” Reffet replied. Now that they had found something to worry them both, they could be civil to each other. Reffet continued, “Having Tosevites pawing through our files is the last thing we need.”

“That is another truth.” Atvar meant it. “Leaks of intelligence can prove disastrous, as our military history before Home was unified proves.”

“Does it?” Reffet said. “I would not be surprised, but I am not the male who could prove it. You who were brought up in a Soldiers’ Time have a training different from mine.”

Then why do you endlessly criticize what I did and did not do? You do not understand it. But Atvar did not drop that on Reffet’s snout, as he would have a little while before. All he said was, “I am sure the data will be valuable to us. On behalf of my Security force, I look forward to receiving them for analysis.”

“I will send them,” Reffet said, and blanked the screen.

Atvar promptly telephoned Security and warned them of what was coming. “Whatever you learn from these data, inform me before transmitting your analysis to Reffet,” he told the chief of the service, a male name Laraxx.

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Laraxx said. Unlike Reffet, he had to show Atvar proper deference.

“I look forward to hearing from you,” Atvar said, and tried to pick up the threads of what he’d been doing before Reffet telephoned.

Laraxx telephoned back much sooner than he had expected-soon enough to distract him from the work he had begun to gather into his hands once more. “Exalted Fleetlord, we have seen this material before. There is nothing new here,” the Security chief said.

“You have?” Atvar said in surprise. “Why was I not informed of it?”

“Why?” Laraxx sounded surprised, too. “Because we paid very little attention to it, is why. That Big Ugly the researcher-Ttomalss, his name is-keeps for a pet is utterly mad, you know. She cannot be blamed, of course, but still… In any case, we most assuredly did not think we should waste our time or yours with this.”

“I see,” Atvar said slowly. And Laraxx did make some sense. How could Kassquit, hatched (no, born; revoltingly born) one thing, raised another, be anything but addled? As the Security male said, no blame could attach to her. But, as the saying went, being addled wasn’t always the same thing as being wrong. The fleetlord said, “She may have found something interesting after all. Do a thorough analysis, as if this were new data.”

Laraxx’s sigh was quite audible. So was the resignation in his voice as he said, “It shall be done.”

Over the next two days, Atvar forgot all about Kassquit. Irrefutable evidence reached him that the agitator Liu Han had succeeded in reaching Peking, the leading city in the Chinese subregion of the main continental mass. He had hoped the accursed female would not succeed in returning from the United States. The Japanese Empire had let him down. So had the Chinese working for the Race along the coast of China. He wondered whether that was treason or ineptitude, then wondered which he dreaded more.

He was still trying-without much hope of success-to straighten out that situation when Laraxx called again. “Well?” Atvar demanded testily.

“I have the analysis you requested, Exalted Fleetlord.” Laraxx sounded much more subdued than he had before.

By the Emperor, he has found something, Atvar thought. “Well?” he said again.

Laraxx said, “Analysis of the messages issued by the male calling himself Regeya shows traces of syntax and idiom from the Tosevite language called English, Exalted Fleetlord.”

“He is a Big Ugly!” Atvar exclaimed.

“So it would seem, our previous belief to the contrary notwithstanding,” Laraxx agreed. “Investigation of how a Tosevite has penetrated our networks and how deeply he has penetrated them is now ongoing.”

“You had also better investigate how many other Big Uglies, as yet undetected, are doing the same thing,” Atvar snapped.

Laraxx looked startled all over again. That evidently hadn’t occurred to him. The fleetlord wondered what else hadn’t occurred to him. “It shall be done,” Laraxx said.

“Good,” Atvar said, in lieu of something harsher. The Security chief vanished from his computer screen.

Before Atvar could get any useful work done, Pshing rushed in, exclaiming, “Exalted Fleetlord!”

That always meant trouble. “What has managed to go wrong now?” Atvar asked his adjutant.

“Exalted Fleetlord, one of our reconnaissance satellites, one of those with a near approach to the U.S. space station at apogee, reports a sudden sharp increase in radioactive emissions from the station,” Pshing replied. “The significance of the increase cannot yet be established, but it is most unlikely to be beneficial to us.”

Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson felt like whistling with glee as he eyed the Peregrine ’s radar screen. Things couldn’t have been better if he’d scripted them himself. Since he wasn’t over the United States, he called down to a relay ship: “Requesting permission to visually evaluate Lizard satellite 2247, and to make orbital changes required for prolonged visual inspection.”

“Have to check with Kitty Hawk on that one, Peregrine, ” the radio operator answered. “Monitor this frequency. Somebody will get back to you.”

“Roger,” Johnson said, and then, under his breath, “What the hell else would I do but monitor this frequency?”

Kitty Hawk might remember he’d been too nosy about the American space station and refuse him permission to eyeball the Lizard satellite. Somehow, though, he didn’t think that would happen. Satellite 2247 and several others with similar orbits had been launched so the Lizards could keep an eye-or an eye turret-on the space station themselves. They were curious about it, too. He knew that from intelligence intercepts, from his conversations with their radio operators, and from his conversations with Major Sam Yeager.

But were satellite 2247 and the others like it just designed to keep an eye on the space station, or could they also harm it? The Lizards said no. Johnson wouldn’t have wanted to take their unsupported word on anything that important. He didn’t think the people in charge of the space station would, either.

After about five minutes, the word came back: “Peregrine, you are clear to change your orbit to inspect 2247. Burn parameters follow…”

Johnson listened carefully, read the parameters back, and smiled to himself. They were very close to the ones he’d calculated for himself. They would put him up near 2247 when the Lizards’ satellite was close to the space station. He was glad he was flying Peregrine and not a Russian tin can. In one of those, he wouldn’t have been able to make such a large orbital change or to do so much of his own calculating. The Lizards might look down their snouts at Peregrine, but he thought he was flying a pretty fine bird.

He made the burn on schedule, kicking himself up into a more elliptical orbit that would let him pass within a mile or so of satellite 2247’s path and within about ten miles of the space station. He actually was curious about the reconnaissance satellite. He was even more curious about the space station. His smile got wider. With a little luck, he’d be able to satisfy himself twice in a few minutes, which wasn’t easy for a man his age.

“U.S. spacecraft! Attention, U.S. spacecraft!” That wasn’t an American relay ship. It was a Lizard, using his own language. “You are not to damage the satellite with which you are closing. Damage to this satellite will be taken as a hostile act. You have been warned. Acknowledge immediately!”

“Acknowledged,” Johnson answered in the same language, thinking, You arrogant bastard. “No damage intended-inspection only.”

“See that action matches intent,” the Lizard said coldly. “Out.”

As he drew near the satellite, Johnson photographed it with a long lens and studied it through binoculars. It didn’t look as if it could launch a missile; he saw no rocket motors. But that didn’t necessarily signify. The Lizards were as good at camouflage as any humans around. The satellite wasn’t very big. But that didn’t necessarily signify, either. These days, nuclear bombs didn’t have to be very big, not even human-made ones. If the Lizards couldn’t build them smaller still, Johnson would have been surprised.

Still, 2247 had the look of a reconnaissance satellite. It bristled with sensors and dishes, almost all of them aimed at the space station. A few swung from the station toward Peregrine as Johnson neared. What those said in electronic language was, If you do anything nasty to me, I’ll know about it. And what the satellite knew, the Lizards would learn at the speed of light.

But Johnson didn’t aim to do anything nasty to it. He took a couple of rolls of photographs as Peregrine reached its nearest approach to 2247. That done, he set down the camera and took out a screwdriver. He used it to undo a piece of sheet aluminum not far below his instrument panel. That done, he reached in and detached a length of wiring. The wire with which he replaced it was almost identical, but had bad insulation. Whistling, he plucked the panel out of the air and screwed it back into place. One of the screws had drifted farther away than he’d expected, which gave him an anxious moment, but he found it.

He waited till it was time to make the burn that would take him back into his lower orbit. When he flicked the switch, nothing happened. “Oh, damn,” he said archly, and turned his radio to the frequency the space station used. “Station, this is Peregrine. Repeat: station, this is Peregrine. I have had a main motor malfunction. My attempted burn just failed. I have to tell you, I’m glad you’re in the neighborhood.”

“This isn’t a gas station, Peregrine,” the space-station radio operator said, his voice friendly as vacuum.

“Christ!” Johnson hadn’t expected to be welcomed with open arms, but this went above and beyond, or maybe below and beneath. “What the hell do you want me to do, get out and walk?”

The silence that followed suggested the radioman would have liked nothing better. But Johnson wasn’t the only one listening out there. The fellow couldn’t very well tell his own countryman to get lost, not unless he wanted to create an enormous stink and raise enormous suspicions. And so, slower than he should have, he asked, “Can you make it here on your maneuvering jets, Peregrine?”

“I think so,” answered Johnson, who was sure he could: he’d done a lot of calculations before he requested permission to change orbit.

“All right,” the operator in the space station said. “You have permission to approach and suit up and come aboard. Do not- repeat, do not-approach by way of the unit on the end of the long boom there.”

“Why not?” Johnson asked. He wanted to find out what was on the end of that boom.

“Because you’ll regret it for the rest of your days if you do,” the radioman answered. “You want to be a damn fool, go ahead. No skin off my nose, but it will be off yours.” He had a very unpleasant laugh.

Johnson thought it over. He didn’t much care for the sound of it. “Roger,” he said, and picked a course that took him over toward the space station’s enormous, untidy main structure, giving the smaller, newer section on the end of the boom a wide berth.

“Smart fellow,” the radio operator said: he had to be tracking Peregrine ’s slow, cautious approach either by radar or by eyeball. Did he sound disappointed that Johnson had listened to him, or was that just the tinny speaker inside Peregrine? Johnson didn’t know, and wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.

He didn’t have much of a chance to worry about it, anyhow. He was busy making sure his pressure suit-a distant, a very distant, descendant of the suits high-altitude pilots had started wearing around the time the Lizards came-was tight. If it failed, he had nobody to blame but himself… and he wouldn’t be blaming himself for long.

“You want to kill as much relative motion as you can there,” the radioman said. “A quarter mile is plenty close enough.”

“Roger,” Johnson said again, and then, with his transmitter off, “Yes, Mother.” Didn’t the fellow think he could figure all that out for himself? Maybe he wasn’t so glad to be visiting this place after all. It looked to be full of Nervous Nellies.

He bled his cabin air out through the escape vents, then opened the canopy and stepped out. He had more time here than he would have had trying to bail out of a burning fighter plane. An air lock opened in the space station. Tiny in the distance, a spacesuited man waved in the lock.

His jump took him in the general direction of the lock, but not straight toward it. To correct his path, he had a pistol that looked as if it should have come from a Flash Gordon serial but fired nothing more lethal than compressed air. Before he used it, he let that length of good wire go drifting off into space. Then he fixed his aim with it and slowed himself as he neared the air lock.

The other suited figure reached out, snagged him, and touched helmets to say something without using the radio: “That’s real smooth, sir.”

Looking at the face bare inches from his, Johnson recognized Captain Alan Stahl. He puckered up, as if to kiss the younger man. Stahl laughed. Johnson said, “I didn’t plan on coming up here, but here I am. Can you show me around?” Lying to somebody he knew was harder than holding off a stranger would have been, but he did it anyway.

Stahl didn’t laugh this time. He said, “I don’t know about that. We’ll have to see what Brigadier General Healey thinks.”

“Take me to him,” Johnson said as the outer air-lock door swung shut.

But, once he got a good look at Charles Healey, he wasn’t sure he was glad to have it. Despite looking nothing like Curtis LeMay, Healey had the same clenched-fist combativeness stamped on his face. And he knew about Johnson, growling, “You are the damned snoop who tried talking his way aboard this spacecraft before. You should have let well enough alone, Lieutenant Colonel.”

“I didn’t have much choice, sir,” Johnson answered with as good a show of innocence as he could muster. “My main motor wouldn’t fire.”

Save for having rubber bands holding down papers to keep them from floating away, Healey’s office might almost have belonged back on Earth. He picked up a telephone and barked into it: “Steve, go check out Peregrine. You find anything fishy, let me know.” He turned his glare back toward Johnson. “If he finds anything fishy, you’re history, just in case you were wondering.”

Johnson didn’t say anything to that. He simply nodded and waited. He had a considerable wait. Steve seemed thorough.

Presently, the telephone rang. Healey snatched it up, listened, and said, “Bad wiring, eh? All right. Can you fix it? You can? How long? Okay, that’s good enough. Stahl will take it downstairs again. We’ll say Johnson got sick up here and couldn’t.”

“What?” Glen Johnson yelped.

Brigadier General Healey glared at him. “You wanted to know so goddamn bad, didn’t you, Lieutenant Colonel? Well, now you’re going to know, by God. You’ve heard too much, you’ve probably seen too much, and you’re not going downstairs to run your mouth to anybody.” That hard face yielded a meager, a very meager, smile. “You’re part of the team now, whether you like it or not. Good thing you don’t have much in the way of family. That makes things easier. Welcome aboard, Johnson.”

“Christ!” Johnson said. “You’re shanghaiing me.”

“In a word, yes.” Healey had no budge in him, none at all. “You just signed up for the duration, soldier. You’re here permanently now, same as everybody else.”

“Permanently?” Johnson spoke the word as if he’d never heard it before. What the hell had he blundered into?

“That’s right, pal.” The general smiled again, this time with an odd sort of pride. He tapped his chest with his thumb. “That’s what you just bought. I don’t expect to set foot on Earth again, not ever. And neither should you.”

Sam Yeager had no trouble understanding why the Lizards had given him access to some parts of their computer network. “These are the sections that don’t tell me anything much,” he muttered. That wasn’t strictly true. But it was a red-letter day when he learned anything in those areas that he couldn’t have learned from the Race’s radio or television transmissions. The stretch of the network he was allowed to roam was the stretch where the Lizards presented the world their public face.

Even though he didn’t learn much, he dutifully skittered through it every day, so the Race could see how glad he was to have even that limited access to their computer network. But when he left, it was always with a sense of relief and anticipation, for his real work on the network started then.

After signing off as Yeager, he signed on as Regeya. Going from himself to the artificial male of the Race he’d created was like going from Clark Kent to Superman. Regeya leapt over all the obstacles that held Yeager back on the network. He could go anywhere, do anything a real male of the Race could go and do. Yeager’s Lizard friends had done a terrific job of creating a new identity for him.

And Yeager himself had done everything he could to make his scaly alter ego seem real to the males and females he’d met only as names and numbers on the computer screen. He’d fooled every damn one of them, as far as he could tell. To be accepted as a Lizard among Lizards… If that didn’t mean he’d done his homework, what could?

Sometimes Regeya seemed real to him, too. The fictitious male of the Race was fussier and more precise than he was himself. Yeager really did think differently when he assumed that identity. Things that wouldn’t have upset him as himself became infuriating while he looked down the snout he didn’t have at the innumerable follies of the Big Uglies.

Today, feeling very Lizardy indeed, he typed in Regeya’s name, identification number, and password (he’d chosen Rabotev 2 for a password-it was easy to remember, but did nothing to suggest Tosev or the Tosevites). He wondered if he could learn any more about Kassquit. Sometimes he thought she was another Big Ugly masquerading as a Lizard. He doubted it, though. His best guess was that she was his opposite number among the Race: a Lizard who somehow had the knack for thinking like a human being.

He waited for the network’s road map to come up onto the screen. He admired that road map; it let a Lizard, or even a sneaky Tosevite, find his way around the whole complex structure with the greatest of ease. A telephone book with a zillion cross references was the way he’d explained it to Barbara, but that didn’t begin to convey its intricacy.

But when the screen lit up, he didn’t see the road map. Instead, three words appeared on it in large, glowing characters: ACCESS PERMANENTLY DENIED. And then the screen went dark again, as if a Lizard had reached out and pulled the plug.

“Oh, dear,” Sam said, or words to that effect. Wondering if the network had hiccuped, he tried again. This time, he didn’t even get the forbidding three-word message. The screen just stayed dark. “Oh, dear,” he said again, rather more pungently than before.

He felt like kicking the Lizard computer. What the devil had gone wrong? One possibility leapt to mind: if Kassquit was a female who had a knack for understanding people, maybe she’d recognized him for what he was. That hurt his pride, but he supposed he’d live through it.

He didn’t want to have to live through it for long, though. He telephoned Sorviss, the male who’d done most to arrange his extended access in the first place, and explained what had gone wrong.

“I shall see what I can do,” Sorviss said-in English; he enjoyed his life among people as much as Yeager enjoyed pretending to be a Lizard. “I will call you back when I discover what the problem is.”

“Thanks, Sorviss,” Yeager said. “Maybe we’ll have to come up with a new name for me, or something like that.” Whatever they had to do, he wanted it taken care of. He couldn’t begin to do his job without the fullest possible access to what the Lizards were thinking and saying.

When the phone rang half an hour later, Sam sprang on it like a cat onto a mouse. It was Sorviss, all right, but he didn’t sound happy. “Restoring your access will not be easy or quick,” he said. “The Race has installed new security filters on the lines leading into the consulate here. I am not certain I will be able to find a way around them: they are well made.”

“Then Straha is liable to be cut off from the network, too, isn’t he?” Yeager asked.

“He is,” Sorviss agreed.

“He won’t like that,” Sam predicted.

“I think you are right,” the Lizard said. “I also think this is not something I can control. If the shiplord starts biting his arms”-a Lizard idiom translated literally into English, a sin whose reverse Yeager sometimes committed-“I can only say, ‘Oh, what a pity.’ ”

“Is that all you can say?” Yeager chuckled. A good many of the Lizards who’d chosen to stay in the USA after the fighting stopped had turned into confirmed democrats. They wanted nothing to do with the multilayered society in which they’d grown up, not any more they didn’t. Ristin and Ullhass, the males he’d known longest, were like that, too, though they stayed polite when dealing with their own kind.

“No, I could say some other things,” Sorviss answered. “But Straha would not be happy if they got back to his hearing diaphragms.”

“You’re right about that, I bet,” Sam said. “But I sure hope you can put me back on the network before too long. Without it, I’m like a man trying to do his job half blind. That’s not good.”

“I understand,” Sorviss said. “But you must understand that I will have to evade many traps to restore you without drawing the notice of the Race. Maybe this can be done; I am a male of skill. But I cannot say, ‘It shall be done.’ “ The last phrase was in the Lizards’ language.

“Okay, Sorviss. Please do everything you can. So long.” Yeager hung up, deeply discontented. He’d got along without the computer network for years. He supposed he could get along without it again for however long Sorviss needed to restore his access. That didn’t mean he was happy about it, any more than he would have been happy about having to write everything out by hand because his typewriter broke down.

He went back and entered the network in his own proper persona once more. As long as he was recognized as a Big Ugly-and restricted because he was recognized-everything went fine. The only problem was, he couldn’t find out even a quarter of the things he wanted to know. The Lizards didn’t talk about the American space station, for instance, in any discussion area to which Sam Yeager, Tosevite, had access.

“Dammit, they know more about what’s going on than we do,” he grumbled.

He wondered if he ought to call Kitty Hawk again. If he did, Lieutenant General LeMay was liable to come down on him like a ton of bricks. But if he didn’t, he’d stay altogether in the dark. A Lizard would have had better sense than to bring LeMay down on him in the first place, and would have obeyed without question after getting in trouble. “Hell with that,” Yeager muttered. “I ain’t no Lizard.” Barbara, fortunately, couldn’t hear him.

He picked up the phone and dialed the Kitty Hawk BOQ. If anybody had any good notions of what was going on up there, Glen Johnson would be the man. Sam nodded to himself as the telephone rang on the other side of the country. Back in the old days, he’d have had to go through an operator and give her Johnson’s name. Now he could just call, and leave no trace of himself behind.

Somebody picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“I’d like to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, please,” Yeager answered. Whoever that was over there in Kitty Hawk, it wasn’t Glen Johnson. This fellow had a drawl thick enough to slice, one that turned hello into a three-syllable word.

After a couple of seconds’ pause, the Southerner said, “Afraid you can’t do that, sir. He’s up in space right now. Who’s calling, please? I’ll leave a message.”

He sounded very helpful-too helpful, after that little pause. Maybe, maybe not, but Sam wasn’t inclined to take chances, not after the trouble he’d just had from the Lizards. He didn’t give his name, but said, “Really? I thought he’d be down by now.” From what Johnson had told him, he knew damn well that the Marine was supposed to be down by now. “Is he all right?”

“Oh, yes, sir, he’s fine,” the man back in North Carolina answered. “You want to leave your name and a number where he can get hold of you, I reckon he’d be right glad to have ’em. I’m sure he’ll get back to you as soon as he can.”

Very gently, Yeager laid the telephone handset back in its cradle. Sure as hell, alarm bells were going off in the back of his mind. He didn’t think this fellow would have been so eager to get his name and number if they were tracing his call (and, thanks to Sorviss, his calls were hard, maybe impossible, for anyone with merely human equipment to trace), but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.

He sat at his desk scratching his head, wondering what the devil to do next. He wondered if there was anything he could do next. The Lizards had shut him off from whatever they knew about the space station, and his best-Jesus, his only-American source had just fallen off the map, too.

“What the hell is going on up there?” he said, and leaned back in his chair as if he could stare through the ceiling and see not only the space station but Glen Johnson, too.

He hoped that fellow with the Southern accent had been telling the truth when he said Johnson was okay. Sam knew people didn’t stay in space longer than they were supposed to without some pretty important reason. If the man had said the weather in Kitty Hawk was lousy so Peregrine couldn’t come down on schedule, that would have been something else. But he hadn’t. He’d made it sound as if everything were routine. That worried Sam, who knew better.

After some thought, he fired up the U.S.-made computer on his desk. If he used it to ask questions about the space station, he’d trigger alarms. General LeMay’s visit had proved that. But if his security clearance wasn’t good enough to let him find out what was going on with Peregrine, he saw no point to having the miserable thing.

No, sure enough, nothing tried to keep him out of these records. But what he found there made him scratch his head all over again. Unless somebody was doing still more lying, Peregrine had landed right on schedule.

“Now what the hell does that mean?” he asked the computer. It didn’t answer. Facts it could handle. Meaning? He had to supply his own.

Was the screen lying to him? Or had Peregrine come down while Glen Johnson stayed up? If it had, how? Space wasn’t a good place for one driver to get out of a truck and another to hop in and take it on down the line.

“Space isn’t,” Sam said slowly. “But the space station is.” He looked up at and, in his mind’s eye, through the ceiling again. Some things he saw, or thought he saw, very clearly. Others still made no sense at all.

One evening, after Heinrich had gone to the cinema and the younger children were asleep, Kathe Drucker asked, “How long will you go on flying into space, Hans?”

Johannes Drucker looked at his wife in some surprise. “You never asked me that before, love,” he said. “Until they don’t want me to do it any more, I suppose, or…”

Or until I blow up, he’d started to say. He would have said it lightheartedly. Somehow, he didn’t think he could have said it lightheartedly enough to make Kathe appreciate it. Peenemunde already had too many monuments to fallen (or, more often, vaporized) heroes for that. He didn’t dwell on it. He couldn’t dwell on it and do his job. If he did go, he’d probably be dead before he knew it. That consoled him. It was unlikely to console his wife.

“Don’t you think you’ve given the Reich enough of your life?” she asked. By the look in her eye, the fallen heroes of Peenemunde were on her mind, sure enough.

“If I didn’t like what I was doing, I would say yes,” Drucker answered truthfully. “But since I do-”

Kathe sighed. “Since you do, I have to watch you go off and be unfaithful to me, and I have to hope your mistress decides to let you come back to my arms.”

“That’s not fair,” Drucker said, but he couldn’t have told her how it wasn’t. He did love-he dearly loved-riding an A-45 hundreds of kilometers into the sky. He did forsake his wife whenever he went into space. And an A-45 could indeed keep him from coming home to Kathe.

She sighed again. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “You will anyhow.”

“Let’s go to bed,” Drucker said. “Things will look better in the morning.”

After telling her no, he wondered if she’d want to have anything to do with him once they got under the covers together. But if he was willing to take chances every time he rode a pillar of fire up from Peenemunde, he was also willing to take them in the dark quiet of his own bedroom. And when, in an experimental way, he set a hand on Kathe’s hip, she turned toward him and slid out of her flannel nightgown faster than he’d imagined possible. She might have been so urgent on their honeymoon in the south of France; he wasn’t sure he could remember any time since to match this one.

“Whew!” he panted afterwards. “Call the ambulance. I think I need to go to the hospital-I’m all worn out.”

“To have your head examined, I think,” Kathe said, pressing her warm, soft length against him. “But then, you fly rocket ships, so I should have known that already.” She took him in hand. “Maybe I really can make you too tired to be able to fly. Shall I find out?”

He wasn’t sure he would rise to the occasion, but he managed. This time, he didn’t need to feign exhaustion when they finished. As he sank toward slumber, he remembered screwing himself silly in military brothels before dangerous missions against the Russians or the Lizards. Maybe Kathe was doing the same sort of thing, only worrying about his mission, not something she had to face herself.

He’d almost drifted off when he remembered something he would sooner have forgotten: a lot of the women drafted into these military brothels had been Jewesses. That hadn’t meant anything to him during his visits; they’d just been warm, available flesh back then. Once he’d buttoned his trousers and left, he hadn’t given them a second thought. Now, looking back over twenty years, he wondered how long they’d lasted in the brothels and what happened to them when they couldn’t go on any more. Nothing good-he was sure of that.

He didn’t fall asleep right away after all.

For all his doubts, for all its horrors, he still served the Reich. A few days after Kathe failed to persuade him to stop going into space, he sat in a briefing room at the Peenemunde rocket base, learning what the powers that be particularly wanted to learn from his latest missions.

“You will pay special attention to the American space station,” said Major Thomas Ehrhardt, the briefing officer: a fussily precise little man with a bright red Hitler-style mustache. “You are authorized to change your orbit for a close inspection, if you deem that appropriate.”

“Really?” Drucker raised an eyebrow. “I would love to do it-I will do it-but I have never had this sort of authorization before. Why have things changed?”

He wondered if Ehrhardt would invoke the great god Security and tell him that was none of his business. But the briefing officer answered candidly: “I will tell you why, Lieutenant Colonel. There has been unusual emission of radioactivity from the station over the past few weeks. We are still trying to learn the reasons behind this emission. As yet, we have not succeeded. Perhaps yours will be the mission that finds out what we need to know.”

“I hope so,” Drucker said. “I’ll do everything I can.” He got to his feet and shot out his right forearm. “Heil Himmler!”

“Heil!” Ehrhardt returned the salute.

The A-45 on which Drucker rode into space carried strap-on motors attached to either side of the main rocket’s first stage. They boosted him into a higher orbit than the A-45 could have achieved by itself. Any deviation from the norm was bound to make the Lizards and the Americans suspicious (the Bolsheviks, he assumed, were always suspicious). But the Rocket Force Command must have warned the other spacefarers that he would be taking an unusual path, because the questions he got were curious, not hostile.

He enjoyed the new perspective he got on the world from a couple of hundred kilometers higher than usual. He’d seen nearly everything there was to see from the orbit Kathe normally took. The wider view was interesting. It made him feel almost godlike.

And he enjoyed the better view of the U.S. space station he got from this higher orbit. Even before he tried to approach it, his Zeiss binoculars gave him a closer look than he’d ever had. The only drawback to the situation was that, because he moved more slowly than he would have in a closer orbit, he didn’t come up to the station as often as he would have otherwise.

“Having fun, snoop?” the space station’s radioman asked as he did approach from behind.

“Of course,” Drucker answered easily. “I would even more fun have if you had pretty girls at every window undressing.”

“Don’t I wish!” the American said. “It’s supposed to be something special when you’re weightless, too, you know what I mean?”

“I have heard this, yes,” Drucker said. “I do not about it know in person.”

“Neither do I,” the radio operator said. “This is something that needs research, dammit!”

Drucker tried to imagine such goings-on at the Reich ’s space station. Try as he would, he couldn’t. Had Goring become Fuhrer after Hitler died… then, maybe. No-then, certainly. Goring would have had himself flown up there to make the first experiment. But the Fat Boy had disgraced himself instead, and gray, cold Himmler frowned on fooling around for its own sake-all he thought it was good for was making more Germans. With a small mental sigh, Drucker swung back from sex to espionage: “With so much room, you Americans should try to find out.”

“Not enough gals up here,” the radioman said in disgusted tones.

That was interesting. Drucker hadn’t known the American space station held any women at all. He wasn’t sure anyone in the Greater German Reich knew the Americans were sending women into space. The Russians had done it a couple of times, but Drucker didn’t much care what the Russians did. Their pilots were just along to push buttons; ground control did all the real work. Unless war suddenly broke out, a well-trained dog could handle a Russian spacecraft.

“Maybe your women don’t like the radiation,” Drucker said. American radiomen liked to run their mouths; maybe he could get this one to talk out of turn.

He couldn’t. The fellow not only didn’t say anything about radiation, he clammed up altogether. After a while, Drucker passed out of radio range. He muttered in frustration. He’d learned something that might be important, but it wasn’t what he’d come upstairs to learn.

He made some calculations, then radioed down to the ground to make sure he-and Kathe ’s computer-hadn’t dropped a deci-mal point anywhere. Once satisfied he had everything straight, he waited till the calculated time, then fired up the motor on the upper stage of the A-45 for a burn that would change his orbit to one passing close to the American space station.

When he came into radar range of the station, the radio operator jeered at him: “Not just a snoop, a goddamn Peeping Tom.”

“I want to know what you are doing,” Drucker answered stolidly. “For my country’s sake, it is my business to learn what you are doing.”

“It’s not your business,” the American said. “It never was, and it never will be.” He hesitated, then went on, “Looks like you’re going to pass about half a mile astern of our boom.”

“Yes,” Drucker said. “I will not to you lie. I want to see what you are at the end of it there making.”

“I noticed.” The radioman’s voice was dry. He hesitated again. “Listen, pal, if you’re smart, you’ll change your trajectory a bit, on account of if you don’t it won’t be healthy for you. You know what I’m saying? You don’t want to pass right astern of that boom, not unless you don’t have any family you care about.”

“Radiation?” Drucker asked. The radioman didn’t answer, as he hadn’t answered his last question about radiation. Drucker thought it over. Was he being bluffed? If it weren’t for radiation, he wouldn’t have been up here this far. “Thank you,” he said, and used his attitude jets to change course.

What the devil were the Americans doing? He couldn’t see as well as he would have liked, not even through the viewfinder of his camera with the long lens attached. One thing he did see: the boom looked very stiff and strong. He didn’t know what that meant, but he noted it-in space, nobody built any stronger, any heavier, than he had to.

The Geiger counter Drucker had along started chattering. He listened to it with pursed lips. Here he was off-axis to the unit at the end of the boom, and he was still picking up this much radiation? How much would he have taken had he gone right behind it, as he’d planned? More. A lot more. He owed the U.S. radio operator a good turn. So did Kathe. He had the bad feeling Peenemunde’s memorial would have got a new name on it had the American kept quiet.

He wasn’t sorry when his orbit took him away from the space station, but he did some furious calculating for a burn that would bring him back to its neighborhood as fast as possible. Spaceflight was like the rest of the Werhmacht in some ways. Hurry up and wait was one of them. He had to wait till the proper time to make the burn, and then again till his changed trajectory brought him toward the space station.

And, as he began the approach, he stared first at his radar and then out the window of the A-45’s upper stage-for the space station, far and away the biggest and heaviest human-made object in Earth orbit, was nowhere near where it was supposed to be.

To her surprise, Kassquit discovered she missed Regeya. No one came right out and told her, but she gathered he really was a Big Ugly. Because he was one, he had no place on the Race’s computer network. But the chatter about the American space station was less interesting without him. He’d known a lot, and he’d had a knack for asking interesting questions. After he was purged from the network, discussion faltered.

Not long after Regeya vanished, Kassquit got an electronic message relayed through the Race’s consulate in some city or another in the Tosevite not-empire known as the United States. I greet you, it read. I do not know that I much like you, but I greet you anyhow. Unless I am wrong, you are the one who figured out I was nothing but a miserable Big Ugly looking where he should not. Congratulations, I suppose. Even as a Big Ugly, I do have access to some of your network, which is how I am sending you this. Best regards, Sam Yeager.

She read the message through several times. Then, slowly, she made the affirmative hand gesture. Sam Yeager the Tosevite sounded exactly like Regeya, the purported male of the Race.

He still took her for a female of the Race. That gave her a certain amount-a large amount-of pleasure, pleasure of the same sort she’d known when she made the hateful researcher Tessrek back down. In those moments, life looked like a game, a game in which she’d just won a turn.

“How do I answer?” she murmured to herself. It wasn’t an easy question. She’d never exchanged words with a wild Tosevite before, not knowingly. If she kept doing it, would he realize she was a Tosevite, too? He was a clever male; she’d seen that. Could she stand being discovered? What would he think of her?

I greet you, she wrote in reply. Her back straightened. She stuck out her chin. No matter what the Tosevite thought of her, she was proud of herself. No, she wouldn’t let him know she was anything but a female of the Race. He wouldn’t find out anything different. She’d make sure he didn’t, by the Emperor. Your spying was doomed to fail, she went on. You cannot pretend to be what you are not. Her mouth fell open in amusement-here she was, pretending to be what she was not. Now that you openly admit to being what you are, perhaps we shall become friends, as much as two so different can.

She studied that, then decided to transmit it. She did not think the wild Big Ugly would take it for undue familiarity. He might not belong to the Race, but he did show considerable understanding of it. He had, in fact, fooled males and females who truly came from eggs.

I hope we shall become friends, you and I, Yeager responded. Tosevites and the Race are going to be sharing this planet for a long time. I have said it before-we need to get along with each other. Kassquit made the affirmative gesture again. Then the Tosevite wrote, I have a question for you: why, when you thought I was Regeya, did you say you would not talk with me on the telephone?

Kassquit studied those words with dismay. No, this Tosevite was anything but a fool. He noticed discrepancies and put them together. And he knew she was a female, even if not of which species. She couldn’t say, for instance, that she was a veteran with a horrible scar she didn’t like to display on the screen.

Yeager sent another message while waiting for her reply. You would have found out for sure I was a Tosevite if we had talked on the telephone, he wrote. I speak the language of the Race pretty well, but there are some sounds I cannot make quite right no matter how hard I try, because my mouth is the wrong shape.

“I know,” Kassquit whispered. “Oh, I know.” The language of the Race was the only one she knew, but she spoke it mushily, too. She couldn’t help it. Like this Yeager’s, her mouth was the wrong shape.

Again, she asked herself how she was supposed to answer that. Telephones are too spontaneous, she wrote at last. I might have given away something I should not have. And that was true-she’d have given away that she was a Big Ugly by birth. But Yeager would think (she hoped he’d think) she was talking about security.

All right, then, he replied. I hope whatever it is you cannot talk about goes well for you. He was friendlier than most males of the Race. Of course, they looked down their snouts at her because she was a Tosevite. This Sam Yeager-she wondered why he had two names-wouldn’t do that, anyhow.

She was pondering her reply when a flashing red star appeared in the lower right-hand corner of her computer screen. That meant an urgent news flash. She gave up on her message-the Tosevite could wait. She wanted to find out what was going on.

The image that appeared on her screen when she switched to the news feed made her exclaim in surprise. She’d seen video of the American Big Uglies’ space station before, and had spent a lot of time discussing it on the network. Now here it was-and it was moving. She saw a faint glowing stream of expelled reaction mass emerging from the lump at the end of the new boom.

A commentator from the Race was saying, “-is the first known use by the Big Uglies of a motor powered by atomic energy. It appears to be a fission motor, not the far more efficient and energetic fusion reactors we have used for so long. Acceleration is feeble, hardly more than one part of gravity per hundred. Nevertheless, as you see, it moves.”

Kassquit watched the American ship-space station no longer. But for the exhaust, she could not have proved it moved. The motion she saw might as easily have come from the camera.

“We have sent urgent queries to President Warren, leader of the not-empire known as the United States,” the commentator said. “Fine details of his reply are still being translated, but he asserts that the ship was built for no warlike purpose, but solely for the exploration of this solar system.”

“How can we trust that?” Kassquit said, as if someone were standing beside her insisting that she trust it. “They built the ugly thing without telling us what they were up to.”

“Their ship is too slow and ungainly to make a likely weapons platform.” The commentator might have been answering her. “It is also moving away from Tosev 3. But investigation will continue until its nature may be precisely ascertained.”

“Its nature should have been ascertained a long time ago,” Kassquit said. “Security has done a slipshod job.”

Again, she was arguing with the commentator. This time, he did not even seem to pay attention to her. He said, “Fleetlord Atvar of the conquest fleet and Fleetlord Reffet of the colonization fleet have issued a joint statement affirming that there is no cause for alarm in this new development, and expressing relief that this ship does appear to be no more than an oversized exploration vessel, as the ruler of the not-empire known as the United States has declared.”

“And if we start blindly accepting a Big Ugly’s word, where will we be?” Kassquit answered her own question: “In trouble, nowhere else.”

But the commentator sounded convinced everything was fine. “The subject of the American space station has been on the minds of males and females in recent times, as the computer discussion areas show,” he said. “Now we see that much of the anxious speculation was misinformed, as anxious speculation commonly is.”

“How do you know we see anything of the sort?” Kassquit demanded, as if the male could hear her.

The U.S. spacecraft disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by a graphic showing its projected course. “As you can observe, the craft is headed for none of the major planets of this solar system. It is not heading toward Home or any other world of the Empire. And, with its feeble acceleration, it must lack the fuel capacity to be a starship. Its most likely destination appears to be one of the many useless and insignificant rocks orbiting between Tosev 4, a small world, and Tosev 5, a gas giant larger than any in Home’s system. The American Big Uglies have previously sent chemically powered exploration rockets out among these minor planets, as the Tosevites term them. Now it appears they are visiting them on a larger scale. As far as the Race is concerned, they are welcome to them.”

There, for once, Kassquit agreed with the noisy male. Here as in so many other ways, the star Tosev’s solar system was different from those of other stars in the Empire: it held far more such debris. No one was sure why; speculation centered on Tosev’s greater mass.

How typical of Big Uglies, she thought, to spend so much time and so many resources going off to examine what is not worth examining in the first place. Feeling obstreperous (and hoping that feeling was not a product of her own Tosevite heritage), she decided to send Sam Yeager a message. So this, then, is what so concerned you, she wrote. A large, clumsy spaceship that was not worth being kept secret.

I agree, he wrote back a little later. It was not worth being kept secret. In that case, why was it?

Who can tell, with Tosevites? Kassquit answered.

This time, Yeager did not reply. She wondered if she’d insulted him. She didn’t want to do that by accident. When she offended, she aimed to get full value from it.

Then she began to wonder if he’d been trying to tell her something else, something she would miss if she weren’t paying attention. If the American space station or spaceship or whatever it turned out to be had been kept so secret without there being any need for that, all that implied was that Big Uglies were fools, a notion Kassquit was prepared to take on faith.

But not all Big Uglies were fools all the time. She didn’t like believing that so well, but the conclusion was inescapable. Tosev 3, or some parts of Tosev 3, had come too far too fast for her to doubt it. Suppose the American Tosevites had had good reason to keep their project secret. What then?

Then, by logic inescapable as that of geometry, their spacecraft wasn’t so harmless as it now seemed. They had to have something in mind beyond what the Race was seeing.

“But what?” Kassquit wondered aloud. “Their atomic motor?”

Maybe. The idea appealed to her. Having fought the Race with explosive-metal bombs, the American Tosevites had to know the Race would be less than delighted at their using nuclear energy in space. Before the space station turned into a ship, the United States could have shouted its peaceful intentions as often as it liked, but it would have had a hard time convincing the Race it was telling the truth.

Was the United States telling the truth now? Had the Big Ugly named Sam Yeager, the Big Ugly who was and was not Regeya, hinted otherwise? Or was Kassquit reading too much into what he had written? And even if she read him aright, was he really in any position to know?

Those were good questions. Kassquit wished she knew the answers to all of them. As things were, she didn’t know the answer to any of them. She sighed. As she came into adulthood, she was discovering that such frustrations were part of life.