Second Contact

7

Just watching the way some of the newly defrosted colonists strolled around Basra made Fotsev’s scales itch. “By the Emperor, they are asking to get killed,” he burst out. “Some of them will get what they are asking for, too.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said. “I do not know whether they think the Big Uglies are civilized, the way the Rabotevs and Hallessi are, or whether they just figure they are tame, like meat animals.”

“Whatever they think, they are wrong,” Fotsev said. “I am just glad this ‘Allahu akbar!’ business has died down for the time being. If it had not, you would need to be addled to let colonists into Basra at all.”

He watched and listened to a revived female dickering with a Tosevite over an ornately decorated but useless brass ornament. She had not the faintest idea how to bargain, and paid three times the going rate for such a trinket. Gorppet sighed and said, “Everything is going to get more expensive for all of us.”

“So it is,” Fotsev agreed unhappily. “They do not know anything, do they?” One eye turret turned toward a male who was wandering around photographing everything he saw. Fotsev couldn’t imagine why; Basra wasn’t much, even by the minimal standards of Tosev 3.

The male noticed him watching and called, “Is it always so chilly here?”

“Does not know anything,” Fotsev repeated in a low voice. Aloud, he answered, “For Tosev 3, this is good weather. You will never see frozen water falling out of the sky here, for instance.”

“They told us about that,” the colonist said. “I do not believe it.”

“Have you see the videos?” Fotsev demanded.

“I do not care about videos,” the newcomer said. “You can make a video look like anything. That does not mean it is true.” Off he went, camera in hand.

“Ought to send him up to the SSSR,” Gorppet muttered. “He would learn something there-or else he would freeze to death. Either way, he would shut up.”

“That is cruel.” Fotsev thought about it. His mouth fell open in a nasty laugh. “I do wonder how he would make out in that snow stuff up past his head, with the Big Uglies sliding along over it on boards. How would he like that? How much ginger do you suppose he would taste to keep himself from thinking about it?”

“Enough to make him mutiny, by the Emperor,” Gorppet exclaimed.

Fotsev eyed him warily. So did the other males in their small group. The last time he and Fotsev had spoken of mutiny, they’d been alone together. That was how males from the conquest fleet usually spoke of mutiny, when they spoke of it at all. Fotsev didn’t think there was a male who was ignorant of the mutinies some troops had raised against their superiors. Talking much about them was something else. Like a lot of things on Tosev 3-the death factories of the Deutsche sprang to mind-they were usually better ignored.

Gorppet looked defiantly at his comrades. “They happened. We all know they happened.” But he lowered his voice before going on, “Would not surprise me a bit if some of the officers deserved what they got, too.”

“Careful,” Fotsev said, and added an emphatic cough. “If you go around saying things like that, people will say you think like a Tosevite, and that will not do you any good.”

“I do not think like a stinking Big Ugly,” Gorppet said. “I am no snoutcounter. Nobody whose brains are not in his cloaca is a snoutcounter. But I will tell you this: when I have officers over me, I want them to know what they are doing. Is that too much to ask?”

“A lot of the ones who did not know what they were doing are dead now,” Fotsev said. “The Big Uglies took care of them. We did not need mutineers.” The word felt odd coming off his tongue. Back on Home, no one had used it in tens of thousands of years, not unless he was creating a drama about the distant times before the Empire was unified.

Gorppet refused to spit it out and walk away from it. “Truth-the ones who did not know what they were doing are dead now. But how many perfectly good males went to meet the spirits of Emperors past because of their bungling?”

Too many was the answer that hatched in Fotsev’s mind. He didn’t say it. He didn’t want to think about it. It, too, was better left unexamined.

Before Gorppet could say anything more, a male from the colonization fleet came running toward the small group. In the years since coming to Tosev 3, Fotsev had fallen out of practice in reading civilians’ body paint. He thought this fellow was a mid-senior cook, but wasn’t quite sure.

Whatever the male was, he was excited. “You soldiers!” he shouted. “To the rescue! I need you!”

“For what?” Fotsev asked. Turning an eye turret in the direction from which the cook had come, he saw no Tosevites pounding after him with knives and pistols in their hands. By local standards, that meant things couldn’t be too bad.

“For what?” the male from the colonization fleet cried. “For what? Why, back around that corner yonder, one of these native creatures, these untamed native creatures everyone keeps warning us about, is carrying a gun twice the size of the one you have there.”

“Did he shoot you with it?” Gorppet asked. “Does not look that way, on account of you are still here.”

“You do not understand!” the cook said. “A wild native is walking these filthy streets with a gun. Go take it away from him.”

“Did he try to shoot you?” Fotsev asked.

“No, but he could have,” the newly revived colonist answered. “What kind of world is this, anyhow?”

All the males in the small group began to laugh. “This is Tosev 3, that’s what,” Fotsev said. “This is the kind of world where that Big Ugly probably will not try to shoot you unless you give him some sort of reason to want you dead. It’s also the kind of world where, if we try to take his rifle away, everybody in this town will be shrieking ‘Allahu akbar!’ and trying to kill us faster than you can flick your nictitating membrane across your eyeball.”

“You are crazy,” the other male said. His eye turrets swung to look over the males who accompanied Fotsev. “You are all crazy. You have spent too much time with the horrible creatures that live here, and now you are as bad as they are.” Hissing in disgust, he stalked off, tailstump rigid with fury.

“Tell you what,” Gorppet said. “If I had a choice, I would sooner act like a Big Ugly than like him.”

No one argued with him. The patrol made its way through Basra. Fotsev turned at the corner around which the excitable cook had come. Sure enough, there stood a Big Ugly with a rifle on his back. He was eating some of the fruits that grew on the local trees that looked like dusting tools. When he saw the soldiers of the Race, he bobbed his head up and down in a Tosevite gesture of greeting. Fotsev showed his empty right hand, palm out. That motion, unlike most, meant about the same thing to the Big Uglies as it did to the Race.

As Fotsev walked on, he did turn an eye turret back toward the Big Ugly to make sure he didn’t have anything treacherous in mind. The Tosevite went on eating the small brown fruits-they looked rather like turds, but tasted sweet-and spitting the seeds into the dust of the street.

“Oh, he is dangerous, all right,” Gorppet said, and laughed again.

After the males of the Race rounded another corner, a Big Ugly approached them. It was a male, Fotsev saw: it had hair on its jaw and cheeks, and it exposed its entire face to the view of outsiders, which violated local custom for females. A moment later, he realized it was a prosperous male. The Big Ugly’s robes and headgear were fancier than those of most of his kind. That wasn’t so reliable an indicator as body paint, but nothing on Tosev 3 seemed as reliable as its equivalent back on Home.

Then, to his surprise, the Big Ugly spoke in the language of the Race, and spoke well for one of its kind: “You males, will you answer some questions of mine? I am an ignorant man, and I seek to learn.”

“Go ahead and ask,” Fotsev said, unused to such politeness from a Tosevite. The Big Ugly had given him more than the cook of his own species.

“I thank you,” the Tosevite said, polite still. “Is it true that, in the ships the Race is now landing, there are both males and females, as Noah, peace be upon him, took male and female beasts aboard the Ark?”

Fotsev didn’t know who Noah was, or anything about the Ark, a word the Big Ugly had of necessity put into his own language. Still, the question seemed straightforward enough. “Yes, the colonization fleet carries both males and females. How could we colonize this world if it did not?”

He waited for the Big Ugly to pitch a fit. Instead, the fellow asked, “And, of these new members of the Race we now see on the streets of Basra, some are males and some are females?”

“Yes,” Fotsev said. “How else?”

“And your females are allowed to walk the streets naked, shamelessly showing themselves for your males to gaze upon and admire and desire?” the Big Ugly persisted.

Gorppet pulled Fotsev aside for a moment to whisper, “What is this fool getting at?”

“How should I know? He is not making a fuss, and that is good enough for me,” Fotsev whispered back. To the Tosevite, he said, “We do not wrap ourselves in cloths, the way you people do.”

“But you must, when male and female are together,” the Big Ugly said earnestly. “Nakedness offends every custom.”

“Not our customs,” Fotsev said.

“But you will desire one another too much!” the Big Ugly cried in dismay.

Fotsev didn’t laugh at him, though that wasn’t easy. The Big Ugly was plainly intelligent, and as plainly ignorant, ever so ignorant. “We do not mate because of what we see,” Fotsev said. “We mate because of what we smell.”

“Nakedness is a crime against Allah,” the Tosevite said. “He will punish you for your wickedness.”

“Let us get moving,” Fotsev said to his comrades. Arguing with a Big Ugly caused nothing but trouble. Leaving him to his own foolishness seemed a better idea.

But he wouldn’t be left. He followed the males down the narrow, grimy, unpaved street, crying, “You must clothe your females. Allah teaches it. Do you dare act contrary to the word of Allah?”

“This Allah of yours never talked to me,” Fotsev said, and laughed at the foolish Big Ugly. “If he does, maybe I will listen to him. Until then, I am not going to worry about him. I will worry about things that are real instead.” He laughed again.

The Tosevite’s little eyes got as big as they could. “You say Allah is not real?” He turned and hurried away.

“You got rid of him,” Gorppet said. “Well done!” To emphasize how well done, he folded himself into the posture of respect, as if Fotsev were at least an officer and perhaps a shiplord. Fotsev laughed once more, and so did his comrades. They got through the rest of their patrol with no trouble at all.

A few days later, fresh rioting against the Race broke out in Basra. Three newly revived colonists got caught in the trouble and killed; a large number of Tosevites perished. Like his superiors, Fotsev hadn’t the faintest idea what might have touched it off.

Mordechai Anielewicz was heading back toward his flat in Lodz when two Lizards came up to him. “You are Anielewicz,” one of them said in Polish, looking from his face to a photograph and back again. Even with the photograph, he sounded unsure.

“I am Anielewicz,” Mordechai agreed, after briefly thinking about denying everything. It had worked for St. Peter, but he didn’t know how well it would work for him. “What do you want with me?”

“We are to bring you before the regional subadministrator,” the Lizard answered. He and his comrade both carried automatic weapons. They sounded nervous even so. They had reason to sound nervous. If Mordechai shouted, they’d last only moments in spite of the high-powered rifles. Jews with guns of their own were on the street and, no doubt, watching from windows, too.

But he did not shout. “I’ll come,” he said. “Do you know why the regional subadministrator wants to talk to me?”

“No,” both males said together. Anielewicz believed them. The Lizards’ bosses were in the habit of giving orders, not explanations.

“Well, I’ll find out,” Anielewicz said. “Let’s go.” He started off for Bunim’s headquarters near the square that housed the Bialut Market. The Lizards fell in on either side of him. He towered over them, but that didn’t make him feel important. Size mattered little, power a great deal. He had it, but so did Bunim. One of the Lizards spoke into a portable radio set or telephone to let the regional subadministrator know they were on their way.

When he got there, Bunim addressed him in German: “I have spoken to you of the threat against the colonists I received.”

“Regional Subadministrator, I remember,” Anielewicz replied. “Many ships have landed in Poland now. Many colonists have landed in Poland now. I know of nothing bad that has happened to them, though not many have landed near Lodz.” In their shoes, he wouldn’t have wanted to land near the border with the Greater German Reich, either.

“Nothing bad has happened-not yet,” Bunim said. “But I am concerned. Is it the right word-concerned?” He didn’t like to make mistakes. In that, he was a typical Lizard. Mistakes showed faulty planning, and the Lizards were much enamored of planning in general.

“Concerned is the right word, yes, Regional Subadministrator,” Anielewicz said, giving him what credit he could. “You have come to speak this language well.” That was a lie, but not an outrageous one. Bunim did work hard. Having delivered the compliments, Mordechai got down to business: “Why are you concerned? Have you received another threat?”

“No, no one has threatened,” Bunim told him. “That is one reason I am concerned. When you Tosevites strut and bluster, we of the Race at least know where you stand. When you are quiet, that is the time for worry. That is the time when you are hatching plots in secret. And-” He fell silent.

Anielewicz exhaled in some exasperation. “If no one had sent you the first message, you would not be worried now, even though everything was quiet. Since everything has been quiet since, why are you still worrying?”

Bunim’s eye turrets flicked this way and that. He was an unhappy Lizard, no doubt about it. “I have reason to be concerned,” he declared, and added an emphatic cough even though he was still speaking German.

“Well, if you do, you’d better show me why,” Mordechai said, his patience wearing thin. “Otherwise, I’ll just think you’ve been wasting my time.”

“Show you why? It shall be done,” Bunim said. Even in German, the phrase sounded odd, and seemed to imply Anielewicz was the regional subadministrator’s superior.

Bunim took out one of the skelkwank disks the Lizards used for just about all their recording. He stuck it in a player. Out came the threat he had mentioned before to Anielewicz. Mordechai was not tremendously fluent in the language of the Race, but he followed it well enough to understand what he heard here.

“Well?” he said when the brief recording was done. “I heard it. It was what you said it was, but so what?”

“You heard it, but you heard without full understanding,” Bunim said.

“You’d better explain, then,” Mordechai said. “I must be missing something here, but I don’t know what.”

“You heard the threat?” Bunim asked. Mordechai nodded. Bunim understood the human gesture. He went on, “That threat, Anielewicz, was not spoken by a Tosevite. Without the tiniest fragment of doubt, it came from the mouth of a male of the Race.”

Anielewicz thought about that for a few seconds. Then, very softly, he said, “Oy.” Bunim was right. People didn’t-couldn’t-sound quite right speaking the Lizards’ language. Sure as hell, that had been a Lizard. “What do you suppose it means?” Anielewicz asked the regional subadministrator.

“One of two things.” Bunim held up a clawed middle finger. “It could be some Tosevites holding a male of the Race prisoner. This is not good.” The Lizard held up his index finger. “Or it could be a male of the Race plotting with Tosevites: a criminal, I mean to say. This also is not good.”

“You are right,” Mordechai said. “Did any male go missing not long before you got this recording?”

“No, but this does not have to mean anything,” Bunim answered. “We know both the Reich and the Soviet Union still have prisoners they took during the fighting. So does the USA. So do Britain and Nippon. Those not-empires are less likely to threaten Poland, though. If you were wondering, the recording was posted to me here from Pinsk. How it got to Pinsk, I do not know.” His eye turrets swung toward Anielewicz. “You were in Pinsk not so long ago, nicht wahr?”

“Yes, it is so,” Anielewicz said, judging a lie there more dangerous than the truth. “I was meeting an old friend”-which stretched the point about David Nussboym as far as it would go, and then another ten centimeters-“I hadn’t seen since the fighting stopped.” That last clause, at least, was true.

Bunim looked to be on the point of saying something, but closed his mouth instead. Maybe he’d expected Mordechai to lie about going to Pinsk. After a moment, he started again: “You Jews could have captives, too. Do not think we do not know about this.”

“So could the Poles, more easily than we could,” Mordechai said. “Or it could be a ginger smuggler angry at the administration here and wanting to embarrass you.”

“All these things may be true,” Bunim said. “Only one of them is true, or perhaps truth lies in none of them, but in a place we have not yet found. But where is that place? I have males of the Race trying to learn. I have Poles trying to learn. And now I have Jews trying to learn, too.”

“Yes, we had better find out about that, hadn’t we?” Mordechai said abstractedly. “You are right, Regional Subadministrator. This could be trouble.”

“The colonization fleet has already had too much trouble,” Bunim said. “We had better not have any more. If we have any more, Tosevites will also have trouble. They will have more trouble than they ever imagined.”

“I understand,” Anielewicz said. “I tell you this, Regional Subadministrator: no humans like you any better than the Jews of Poland. If you will not find humans on your side among us, you will not find them anywhere.”

“Then it may be that we shall not find them anywhere,” Bunim said. “I know you have had dealings with the Reich when you thought our eye turrets were turned the other way. I know you are not the only one to do this, too.”

Anielewicz felt a dull embarrassment, rather as if he’d been caught in bed with a woman other than Bertha. But his marriage to the Lizards was one of convenience, not of love. And he’d been unfaithful not only with the Nazis but also with the Russians, as David Nussboym could attest. He shrugged. Like any adultery, his bouts of infidelity to the Race had seemed a good idea at the time.

He said, “When the Race came to Earth, we Jews here in Poland were slaves to the Reich. Men are not meant to be slaves.”

“And we set you free,” Bunim said. “And see the thanks we have had for it.”

Yes, he sounded like a woman betrayed. “You set us free of the Germans,” Mordechai said.

“That is what I told you,” Bunim said.

But Anielewicz shook his head. “No, it is not. You set us free of the Germans. You did not set us free. You aimed at becoming our masters yourselves. We do not care for that any more than we cared for having the Nazis enslave us.”

“And who would rule you if we left Poland?” Bunim inquired. Twenty years on Tosev 3 had taught him sarcasm.

He had also asked a question-the question-for which Anielewicz had no good answer, and indeed no answer of any sort. Instead of answering, he evaded: “This is why we will help you now. For your safety, and for our own, we need to find out who is making threats against the arriving colonists.”

“So you do,” Bunim said. “Any trouble that comes down on our heads-in the end, it comes down on your heads, too.”

Anielewicz sent him a stare of undisguised loathing. “It’s taken you all this time since you came to Earth, but you’ve finally figured out what being a Jew means, haven’t you?”

“I do not know what you are talking about,” Bunim said, which might have been true or might not. The Lizard went on, “I do know that my first duty is to preserve the Race, my next is to preserve the land on which the Race will dwell, and only after that do I concern myself with the welfare of Tosevites of any sort.”

From his perspective, that made perfectly good sense. Mordechai knew he himself put Jews ahead of Poles, Poles ahead-far ahead-of Germans, and humans ahead of Lizards. But Bunim had resources he couldn’t hope to match. If the Lizards decided the Jews deserved oppressing… if they decided that, how were they any different from the Nazis?

He shook his head. That wasn’t fair to the Lizards. When they’d discovered Treblinka, they’d destroyed it in horror. Anielewicz did not think they would ever build an extermination camp of their own. A generation on Earth could not have corrupted the males of the conquest fleet that far, and the males and females of the colonization fleet would not be corrupt at all, not by Earthly standards.

Bunim said, “Remember, our fates-is that the word? — our fates, yes, are tied together. If the Race fails on Tosev 3, your particular group of Tosevites is also likely to fail. The rest of the Tosevites, starting with the Poles, will make sure of this. Am I right or am I wrong?”

He was all too likely to be right. Anielewicz had no intention of admitting as much. In a stony voice, he replied, “Jews got by for three thousand years before the Race came to Earth. If every male and female of the Race disappeared tomorrow, Jews would go right on getting by.”

Bunim’s mouth fell open in Lizardly amusement. “What are three thousand years?” he asked. “Where will you be in three thousand more?”

“Dead,” Anielewicz answered, “the same as you.”

“You, yes,” Bunim agreed. “I, yes. The Tosevites? Possibly. The Race? No.” He spoke with absolute confidence.

“No, eh?” Anielewicz said. “What about that male who threatened the colonists, then?” He had the somber satisfaction of seeing that he’d made Bunim loathe him as much as he loathed the Lizard.

Beside the 13th Emperor Makkakap, the shuttlecraft seemed tiny. Beside the shuttlecraft, Nesseref seemed tiny. That surely made her seem infinitesimal alongside the enormous bulk of the starship now landed not far from the Tosevite town of Warsaw.

The logic was flawless. Nesseref, however, had other concerns besides logic. Turning to the male from the conquest fleet beside her, she asked, “Why would anybody want to live in this miserable, cold place?”

“You think it is cold now, wait another season,” the male answered. “Nobody from Home knows what cold is about. Winter here is like cold sleep without the drugs to make you unconscious.” He laughed. “Tosev 3 has different drugs, believe you me it does. Have you found out about ginger yet, superior female?”

“Yes,” Nesseref said, which was not quite the truth and not quite a lie. She still had the two vials males had given her on earlier visits to Tosev 3. That in itself was against regulations, which grew more strident on the subject with each passing day. But she hadn’t actually opened the vials and tasted the herb inside. As long as she didn’t do that, she felt no enormous guilt.

“Good stuff, isn’t it?” the male said enthusiastically. This time, Nesseref didn’t answer at all. Every male from the conquest fleet who talked about ginger talked about it enthusiastically. That was one reason she hadn’t tried it herself: she didn’t trust anything that evoked such fervent responses. Being a shuttlecraft pilot had made her rely more on her own opinion than was usual among the Race.

Her own opinion at the moment was that things looked more confused than they should have. Newly awakened males and females from the colonization fleet wandered here and there, none of them with any clear notion of where they ought to be going or what they ought to be doing. The males from the conquest fleet who moved among them were easy to pick out by eye. They strode with purpose, to some destination familiar to them. They’d had years to get used to the vagaries of life on Tosev 3. A couple of hasty briefings couldn’t possibly have the same effect.

Turning back to the male beside her, she asked, “When you do not taste ginger, how do you stand Tosev 3? How do you keep from being bored to death?”

The male laughed again. “Superior female, you can die a lot of ways on this planet, but being bored is not one of them. Of course, if you do get bored, one bunch of Big Uglies or another is liable to kill you, but I do not suppose that is what you were talking about.”

“No,” Nesseref said. Just how dangerous these natives could be hadn’t really sunk in, despite her getting shot at on the way down to Cairo. Some Tosevites were laboring in the shadow of the 13th Emperor Makkakap. “They certainly do look funny, do they not? — wrapping themselves in cloths even when they work hard.”

“They stay warm that way,” the male from the conquest fleet said. “But even the Tosevites who live where the weather is decent wear cloths, or most of them do. They use them for display-and for concealment, too, I think.”

“Why would they conceal with cloths?” Nesseref asked, puzzled. “They are not hiding from predators, are they? No, of course not.” She answered her own question. “They could not be.”

“No, no, no-concealment from one another.” The male from the conquest fleet gave a brief, highly colored account of Tosevite courtship and mating habits.

“That is revolting,” Nesseref said when he was through. “I think you are making it up. I am new to this miserable world, so you figure I will believe anything.”

“By the spirits of Emperors past, I swear it is the truth,” the male said, and looked down at the ground. “They are worse than animals, but they have a civilization. Nobody will ever figure them out.”

“Yes, we will, sooner or later.” The shuttlecraft pilot spoke with conviction. “We just have not given it enough time yet. In a few hundred years, or maybe a few thousand years, our descendants will look back on this time and laugh at how foolish and upset we were. And the Big Uglies will be loyal subjects of the Emperor, just like everyone else.” She paused and peered over toward a couple of them. “They will still be funny-looking, though.”

“That last is truth,” the male said. “The rest… I tell you, superior female, you are still new-come from Home. You do not really know what things are like here. On Tosev 3, time is different, somehow. You can see things happen over years; they do not take centuries, the way they did with us. I am not sure there was a televisor on this planet when we got here. There are millions of them now.”

“I do not know what that proves,” Nesseref said. “For all you know, they stole the idea from us. They seem to have stolen a lot of ideas from us.”

“Oh, they have,” the male from the conquest fleet said. “They have, though it is not as if they have not got plenty of ideas of their own. But they do not just steal. They use what they steal, and they use it right away. Imagine the Race had never heard of televisors, but stole the idea for them from someone else. How long would we need before every other flat-every flat, some places-had a televisor in it?”

Even the form of the question felt strange to Nesseref. Imagining the history of the Race as different from the way it really was took a distinct and uncomfortable mental effort. She handled it as she would have handled a simulator session for the shuttlecraft: not real, but to be taken as real. The answer she got was obvious and disturbing at the same time: “We would have needed thousands of years, because we would have to study the effects of televisors on a society that did not have them. We would have to be certain they were harmless before we began to use them.”

“Just so,” the male agreed. “The Tosevites are not like that. They just start using things and then see what happens. Since we came, they have added televisors and computers and atomic energy and spacecraft and hydrogen engines and any number of different things-they tossed them into the pot to see how they flavor the stew. That is how they do things-and somehow they have not destroyed themselves.”

“Not yet,” Nesseref said. “Slow and steady is better.”

“On Home, slow and steady is better,” the male said. “Here-who knows?”

Nesseref didn’t feel like arguing with him. “Can you arrange transportation to the west for me?” she asked. “I am supposed to visit a city called-Lodz, is it? — to examine the area for a possible shuttlecraft port site.”

“I can direct you to one who will make those arrangements for you,” the male replied. “I can also tell you I think it is a bad idea: too close to the border with the Greater German Reich. Why do you think the ships from the colonization fleet have been landing in this part of Poland and not over there?”

“My superior has ordered me to examine the area, and so it shall be done,” Nesseref said. “And I can also tell you that you seem to me to sound more like a Tosevite, or what I think a Tosevite would sound like from what I have heard, than a proper male of the Race.”

She thought that a crushing insult. The male from the conquest fleet only shrugged and answered, “I am alive. That lets me talk however I like. And a lot of the males who used to sound so prim and proper are dead these days, so they do not sound like anything at all.”

Having got the last word, he also got his revenge on Nesseref, or so she assumed, for the transportation to which another male from the conquest fleet assigned her was a Tosevite railroad train propelled by an engine-a steam engine, she discovered by asking-that stained the sky with its plume of black exhaust smoke. She had one compartment of her railroad car to herself, but that did not keep Big Uglies from walking by, staring in at her, and using their own gluey-sounding languages to make remarks she could not understand.

Her compartment had seats made to accommodate backsides with tailstumps, which was something, but not much. Despite the seats, she had an uncomfortable trip. Railroads back on Home used magnetic levitation and had a smooth ride; here, iron wheels kept clattering along rails and over rail junctions. Unpleasant, unfamiliar smells filled the car. When she opened a window to get some fresh air, she got soot from the engine’s exhaust instead. Finally deciding that was worse, she closed the window again and watched the countryside through its none-too-clean glass.

Before long, she was thinking of going to sleep. The land between Warsaw and Lodz was flat and boring. Aside from being unusually green, it had nothing to commend itself to the eye. True, she was startled the first time she saw a Tosevite animal drawing a wagon, but then she saw several more in quick succession, which killed the novelty. She was also briefly interested at the first stop the train made in a small town, but she couldn’t tell the Big Uglies who got on from the ones who got off. Also, every stop-and the train made a lot of them-meant she took even longer to get where she was going.

By the time she arrived, she was tempted to haul out a vial of ginger and have a taste, in the hope that the herb would make moments seem to move faster. But, unsure of what it would do to her common sense, she refrained. She wanted to be able to think clearly after she reached the town.

When, after what seemed like forever, she finally did leave the railroad car and go out into the train station, the officer who met her was energy personified. “Of course we can find you what you need,” he said as he led her through the station, which seemed gloomy and cramped on the one fork of the tongue and ridiculously high-ceilinged on the other (only after she recalled it was built for Tosevites did the latter make sense). “Wherever you want it, superior female, we will put it there. If you like, we will flatten out some ground specially for you. We can do it. We can do anything.” He gave her not one but two emphatic coughs.

“I do not even know if this is a suitable place yet,” Nesseref said, a little taken aback at such vigor. “Are the Big Uglies west of here not supposed to be dangerous?”

“Oh, we can take care of the Deutsche, too,” the officer said with another emphatic cough. “If they give us trouble, we will give them a good kick in the snout.”

But, over the next little while, his enthusiasm and his boasts faded away. He started looking all around, as if afraid someone might be following him. “Is something wrong?” Nesseref asked.

“No,” he said in a forlorn voice, but then added, “Wait here, superior female,” and skittered around a corner. When he returned a moment later, he was strutting again, up on top of the world. “Wrong?” he demanded. “What could possibly be wrong? Everything is just as right as it could be, and this is the perfect-the perfect, I tell you-place for a shuttlecraft port, or my name isn’t Emmitto.”

Before very long, Emmitto was subdued and worried again. Nesseref wondered what was wrong with him; such wild mood swings were most unusual in the Race. Only after he excused himself once more and once more returned full of exuberance did a warning light begin to glow on the instrument panel of her mind. She had everything she could do not to let her mouth fall open in sour laughter. I should have tasted ginger, too, she thought. Then Emmitto would have had some company.

Tosev blazed down out of a sky the wrong shade of blue, but with very respectable warmth all the same. Atvar smelled unfamiliar spicy odors far removed from the stinks of Cairo. “I should come to Australia more often, regardless of where I make my capital,” he told his adjutant.

“Whatever pleases the Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing replied. “Since so many of the Race will be settling here, surely your duty might well be construed as requiring you to make frequent visits here.”

“It might indeed,” Atvar said, “although I expect I can find my own excuses for doing what I want to do anyhow. Most males can, at any rate.”

He looked around with considerable satisfaction. Here as in few places on Tosev 3, the Race would have the land to itself. The Big Uglies had made little use of the central part of the island continent. Now the Race would show them how foolish they had been to ignore it.

“Perhaps,” he said, “just perhaps, mind you, the colonization fleet could establish its administrative center here, a center that would, in time, become the Race’s chief administrative center, replacing Cairo. That would allow us to change capitals without confessing weakness to the Tosevites. If I spent my retirement here, I might yet come to think of Tosev 3 as a pleasant world.”

“A clever notion indeed, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said. “Shall I relay it to Fleetlord Reffet for his views?”

“Not yet,” Atvar answered. “Let me study it for possible drawbacks first. We are males of the Race. I need not be hasty here, as I would when dealing with the Big Uglies. Returning to old habits feels good, after so long.” He paused, then let out an exasperated hiss. “Or perhaps not so good. If I return to the habit of slowness, the Tosevites will make me regret it before long.”

“If we succeed in bringing this world into the Empire, I wonder if we shall ever be able to slow the Big Uglies down to a pace that the other races find tolerable,” Pshing said.

“I hope so, for the Tosevites’ sake and ours,” Atvar said. “I also hope we can bring this world fully into the Empire, for their sake and ours.”

Though he would not say as much to his adjutant, he feared the result if the Race failed to bring the independent not-empires into the Empire in a fairly short time. That the Big Uglies had succeeded in building a technological civilization in the relatively brief period since the Race’s probe showed they had none warned of their prowess. What they had done since the colonization fleet made the warning even more urgent. Then, while astonishingly advanced, they had been behind the Race in every area. They’d hung on with an abundance of cunning and materiel. Now…

Some males brushed aside the Tosevites’ progress by noting how much they had borrowed-stolen, many said, and truthfully-from the Race. Atvar recognized the truth in that. But he also saw how the Tosevites did not blindly borrow, how they used machines and information taken from the Race to bring their own preexisting technology up to date, how they put their own slant on everything they stole.

His experts had run projections. He’d run secret projections of his own, too. They differed in detail, depending on just what assumptions went into them. The broad outlines, though, were startlingly, dismayingly, similar: before too long, the Big Uglies’ technology would be more advanced than that of the Race.

Most of the projections said the Race would still enjoy a breathing space after that: the Big Uglies would need a while to realize what they’d achieved. Sooner or later, though, they would. They couldn’t help it.

What would happen then? There too, the projections differed. Nothing good for the Race, though, was the theme that ran through them.

And I can’t even destroy those not-empires, Atvar thought, not without destroying the whole planet, which means destroying the colonization fleet. One of the ideas haunting him was that such destruction might be worthwhile in spite of the cost: it might mean saving the Race as a whole.

Pshing pointed at something moving across the barren countryside, for which distraction Atvar was thoroughly glad. “What are those things, Exalted Fleetlord?” his adjutant asked.

“Tosevite life of some sort, I suppose,” Atvar answered. “If you have a monocular, you will be able to tell more.”

“I do, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing took the magnifier from a belt pouch, turned one eye turret toward the distant creatures, and raised the magnifying lenses. He let out a startled hiss. “How peculiar! Are those Big Uglies? No, they cannot be. But still…” He gave Atvar the monocular. “See for yourself, Exalted Fleetlord.”

“I will.” Atvar brought the little tube up to one of his own eyes. The creatures on the plain seemed to leap much closer. “They are funny-looking.”

“They certainly are.” Pshing added an emphatic cough. “I thought almost all Tosevite life forms except the Big Uglies themselves were quadrupeds, not bipeds.”

“I seem to recall reading that this island continent had an ecosystem long isolated from others on Tosev 3,” Atvar said. “Maybe that accounts for these peculiar things. They look almost like a cross between the Big Uglies and ourselves, don’t they? — though their tails are long.”

Just then, something must have startled the Tosevite creatures, which went bounding off at a very respectable turn of speed. “Well!” Pshing said. “I did not think they could move like that.”

“A lot of Tosevite creatures are deceptive, all the way up to the Big Uglies,” Atvar said. Suddenly, one of the animals crashed to the ground and lay kicking. The fleetlord could not see why until a Big Ugly emerged from concealment and ran over to the downed creature. “Will you look at that!” Atvar exclaimed, and passed the monocular back to his adjutant.

“Yesss.” Pshing drew the word out into a hiss of his own. “Not all Tosevites have moved forward from where the probe found them, have they?”

“By no means,” Atvar answered. The Big Ugly he’d been watching was naked, his dark brown hide filthy and daubed here and there with mud of various colors.

“He is bashing in the animal’s head with a rock,” Pshing reported. “I think his knife is metal, though. Looking at him, I do not think he could have made it for himself.”

“Perhaps he got it in trade from the more advanced Australians,” Atvar said, “the ones whose principal cities we bombed so as to take possession of this continent.”

“It could be so,” Pshing agreed. “That strikes me as more likely than his having made it for himself.”

“Speak to the folk hereabout-I want him captured and brought before me,” Atvar said on sudden, almost Tosevite-like, impulse.

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing got out his radio and spoke into it.

It was done, but only barely. When the Tosevite saw males and females of the Race approaching, he disappeared. That was how it seemed to Atvar, at any rate. One instant he was there in plain sight, running away; the next, he might have vanished off the face of Tosev 3.

His pursuers caught him nonetheless. Pshing, who was listening to their calls back and forth, said, “One of them has an infrared detector, Exalted Fleetlord. Without it, I do not think they could have found him.”

The Big Ugly kept struggling for all he was worth. The males and females of the Race had to tie him before they could bring him in to Atvar. By then, the fleetlord wished he hadn’t put them to so much trouble. To avoid disappointing them, he didn’t show it, but praised them extravagantly.

Shouts poured from the Tosevite’s throat, in whatever unintelligible language he spoke and then, to Atvar’s surprise, in English, a speech he recognized even if he’d never learned to use it. Pshing had no trouble finding a male from the conquest fleet who understood it. The fellow said, “Exalted Fleetlord, he says you mate with your own mother and also says you mate at an inappropriate orifice-the Big Uglies have more than we do, you know. He intends these as insults.”

“Ask him how he lives in this country,” Atvar said.

“It shall be done,” the male replied, and began speaking English. The dark-skinned Big Ugly kept yelling the same phrases he had used before. After a while, the male turned back to Atvar, saying, “Exalted Fleetlord, I do not think he knows any more of this language than these few words.”

“How strange,” Atvar murmured. “Why would anyone go to the trouble of learning insults in a language without learning any more in it? Having to try to understand more than one speech is bad enough as it is.” The language of the Race united three worlds, and had for time out of mind. Tosev 3 had even more languages than it had had empires and not-empires before the Race arrived.

“What shall we do with him, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked, pointing to the Tosevite. “He is not going to tell us anything, I don’t think.”

“He is also not going to harm us, for which spirits of Emperors past be praised,” Atvar said. “He cannot harm us, being too ignorant-and how I wish that were true of every member of his species.” He turned to the male who spoke English. “Take him well away from this starship. Give him a knife of ours, to make up for the one he no longer has, and let him go.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the male replied. “May I give him some food, too? We have had some of these savages come around begging before; they mostly know how to pull the lid off a tin.”

“Yes, do that,” Atvar said. “Otherwise, he might come back to rob rather than to beg. I want the Big Uglies to be dependent on us; I do not want them making worse nuisances of themselves than they have already.”

“Any Big Ugly is-or can be-a nuisance,” the male said. He and the ones who had brought the Tosevite to Atvar got him up on his feet in spite of his hoarse shouts and his efforts to bite and kick. As they led him away, he voided liquid waste.

“Disgusting,” said Pshing, who was fastidious even for a male of the Race.

“Big Uglies commonly are,” Atvar said. “Some, though, are disgusting and dangerous. This one, fortunately, is not.”

“Even with the colonization fleet, will we be able to do all we want on Tosev 3?” Pshing asked. “The natives will outnumber us to a far greater extent than anyone knew they would when we left Home.”

“I understand that, but we cannot expect more colonists for many years,” Atvar said. “And, with the Big Uglies so thick on the ground most places, too large a colonization might exceed the carrying capacity of the land.”

“Local agricultural methods are not the most efficient,” Pshing said. “And if a few, or more than a few, Big Uglies go hungry, there are many here among us who would not be overly disappointed.”

“I understand that,” the fleetlord said. “If we ruled this whole world, what you are suggesting would be easy to achieve. But I fear the independent not-empires would not take kindly to the notion of our starving their fellow Tosevites. The independent not-empires do not take kindly to many notions of ours, except those they can steal.” He looked around again. The landscape definitely reminded him of Home. Maybe I will retire here, he thought. If he did, it couldn’t come a day too soon.

Sam Yeager let out a sigh of relief. “Well, honey,” he said, “I could be wrong, but I think we’ve weathered another one.”

“Thank heaven,” Barbara said, carving another bite of lamb off her chop. “I didn’t know whether we would be able to manage it. We hadn’t come so close to big trouble since the fighting stopped.”

“How much help did you give, Dad?” Jonathan Yeager asked. That his father worked with the Race impressed him. Anything that could impress an eighteen-year-old about his father was good, as far as Sam was concerned.

“Not that much,” he answered honestly. “Mr. Lodge is a good ambassador. He let the Lizards know what we’d put up with and what we wouldn’t. All I did was sort through the ways we might compromise.”

“Compromise.” It was in Jonathan’s vocabulary, but he sounded about as keen on it as he was on lima beans.

“We need it,” Barbara said. “If you were old enough to remember the fighting, you’d know how much we need it.”

“A fight would be worse this time, too,” Sam said. “Nobody would wait very long before he started throwing atomic bombs around. And once that genie got out of the bottle, it’d be Katie bar the door.”

Barbara gave him a severe look. “The New Yorker runs a little feature called ‘Block That Metaphor.’ I think you just qualified, honey.”

“Did I?” Yeager mentally reviewed what he’d just said. With a sheepish grin, he admitted, “Well, okay, I guess I did.”

Around a mouthful of lamb chop, Jonathan said, “The Lizards should have stomped whoever did that to them into the mud.” He added an emphatic cough, to which his full mouth lent alarming authenticity.

“I won’t say you’re wrong,” Sam said slowly. “The trick is being able to do that without setting the whole planet on fire.” People had talked that way after Pearl Harbor. It had been a metaphor then. It wasn’t a metaphor any more. He went on, “Whoever did it was pretty sly. He got in a good lick”-Barbara stirred but did not rise to that-“and managed not to get hit back, or at least not very hard. Himmler or Molotov is laughing up his sleeve at Atvar.”

“They both say they didn’t do it,” Barbara said.

“What are they going to say?” Jonathan Yeager waved his fork in the air to emphasize the point.

“Maybe they really didn’t,” Barbara said. “Maybe the Japanese did, or even the British.”

But Sam shook his head. “No, hon, it couldn’t have happened that way. The Japs and the English fly rockets, yeah, but they haven’t got anything up in orbit, and it was an orbiting weapon that took out the Lizards’ ships. The Japanese don’t have nuclear weapons, either, though I know the British do.”

“One of the Big Three, then.” Barbara pursed her lips. “Not us. The Russians or the Germans? The Lady or the Tiger?”

“I’d bet on the Russians,” Jonathan said suddenly.

“How come?” Sam asked. “More people seem to think the Germans did it. More Lizards seem to think the Germans did it, too.”

“Because the Russians are better at keeping secrets,” his son answered. “You hardly ever hear about anything that happens over there. When the Germans do something, they brag about it before they do it, they go on bragging while they’re doing it, and then they brag that they’ve done it once they’re through.”

Yeager laughed. “You make ’em sound like a bunch of laying hens.” He paused and thought about it. “You may have something. But you may not, too. The Germans can keep things quiet when they want to badly enough. Look at the way they sucker-punched the Russians the year before the Lizards came.”

“Look at the way they kept quiet about what they were doing to the Jews,” Barbara added. “Nobody knew anything about that till the Lizards blew the whistle on them.”

“Nobody wanted to know anything about that,” Yeager said, at which Barbara nodded. He went on, “Even so-you could be right, Jonathan. The president was going on about how close to the chest Molotov plays his cards.”

Jonathan looked down at the body paint on his own bare chest. At the moment, he was painted as a killercraft maintenance technician. He said, “I wish you’d let me talk more with my friends about what you do. They’d think it was pretty hot.”

“No,” Sam said automatically. “Not unless you want me to get into big trouble with my superiors. I deal with the Lizards because that’s my job, not to let you impress your buddies.”

“I know,” Jonathan said, “but still…” His voice trailed away. Yeager hid a smile. Jonathan and his friends spent a lot of time and effort acting as much like Lizards as they could, but rarely had anything to do with an actual male of the Race. Sam didn’t paint his hide or shave his head or anything of the sort, but he knew as much about Lizards as any human being around. It probably didn’t seem fair to Jonathan. A lot of things hadn’t seemed fair to Sam at the same age: not least why people like Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby were in the big leagues while he himself had barely managed to hook on with a Class D team.

Because they were older than me and better than me. That seemed obvious now. It hadn’t seemed obvious when he was eighteen and fresh off the farm. Life was like that, though at eighteen you didn’t want to know it.

“It’s got to be that way, son,” Sam said. “As things are, I probably talk too much around here.”

“Huh!” Jonathan said. “If you tell me ‘Good morning,’ you think you’re talking too much. The only time you don’t think you’re talking too much is when you’re telling me to do stuff I don’t want to do.”

Spoken in a different tone of voice, that would have touched off a family brawl. Yeager knew a lot of people with kids his son’s age who couldn’t do anything with them and didn’t want to do anything with them but hit them over the head with a brick. But Jonathan was laughing, showing Sam and Barbara he wasn’t-altogether- serious. Shaved head and body paint aside, he was a pretty good kid. Whenever Sam got sick of looking at his son’s bare scalp and painted torso, he reminded himself of that. Sometimes he had to remind himself several times.

After supper, Jonathan went back to his room to study; he’d started his freshman year at UCLA. Barbara washed dishes. Sam dried. Tomorrow night, they’d do it the other way round. “We’ve got to buy a dishwasher,” Barbara said, as she did about once a week. “They get better and cheaper every year.”

Sam answered as he did about once a week: “We’ve already got two good dishwashers here: us. And we’ve got a spare in the back room. Where are you going to buy a dishwasher that can learn calculus and German?”

Before Barbara could make the next move in a sequence almost as formal as a chess opening, somebody rang the front doorbell. Sam was closer, so he went to open it. Standing on the porch was a pretty, freckle-faced, redheaded girl of Jonathan’s age. She wore sandals, denim shorts, and a tiny, flesh-colored halter top; her body paint most improbably proclaimed her an expert sniper.

“Hello, Mr. Yeager.” She held up a book she carried under her arm. “German test tomorrow.”

“Hi, Karen. Come on in.” Sam stood aside so she could. “Jonathan’s already hard at it, I think. Grab yourself a Coke from the icebox and you can give him a hand.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” she said in the Lizards’ language as she headed for the kitchen. She knew the way; she and Jonathan had gone to Peary High School together, and dated on and off their last year there. Sam followed. If he watched her as he followed-well, then, he did, that was all.

After Karen got the Coke, she chatted with Barbara for a minute or two before heading for Jonathan’s room. There with his wife, Sam didn’t eye her at all. Out of the side of her mouth, Barbara murmured, “Oh, go ahead-enjoy yourself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam said virtuously.

“No, eh? A likely story.” Barbara stuck out her tongue at him. “Come on-let’s finish the dishes.”

As he dried the last couple of pots and pans, Yeager listened for the sounds of Teutonic gutturals coming out of Jonathan’s bedroom. He heard them, which meant he kept on drying. Studying with a girl with the door closed was against house rules. Remembering himself at Jonathan’s age, he knew he might have tried to get away with things even with the door open.

“You have an evil mind, Sam,” Barbara said, but he noticed she was cocking her head in the direction of Jonathan’s room every now and then, too.

“Takes one to know one,” he told her, and she stuck out her tongue at him again.

After the dishes were done and put away, he went into the study, turned on the radio, and tuned it to a band the Lizards used. The Race didn’t reveal the details of its plans on public programs, any more than human governments did. But attitudes mattered, too; what they were telling their own people gave some clues about how they would respond to humans.

This was a sort of Lizard-in-the-street program. The interviewer asked, “And what do you think of the Tosevites here in Mexico?”

“They are not so bad. They are not quite so big or so ugly as the males from the conquest fleet made me think they would be,” replied the Lizard he was interviewing, evidently a newly revived colonist. He went on, “They seem friendly enough, too.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said the interviewer, who was as gooey with a microphone in his hand as any human ever born. “And now-”

But the colonist interrupted: “It still seems pretty strange, though: waking up and finding out the Race only owns half this planet, I mean. We ought to do something about that. It is not the way things were supposed to be in the plan, and the plan has to work.”

“Well, of course it does,” the interviewer said, “and of course it will, even if it takes a while longer than we thought it would. Now I shall turn things over to Kekkefu in Australia, who will…”

Sam listened for a while longer, now and then jotting a note. He wondered if the notion that the plan from Home would work but needed more time, which was repeated several times, was intended to get the colonists used to the way things really were by easy stages, or if it reflected the Lizard brass’ true beliefs. If the former, well and good. If the latter, there’d be more trouble ahead. He scribbled a new note.

Karen stuck her head in the door. “Good night, Mr. Yeager.”

He looked up, then looked at his watch. How had it got so late? “Oh. Good night, Karen. I hope you and Jonathan ace that test.”

Had she acted as if she didn’t know what he was talking about, he would have figured she and Jonathan had been studying something other than German-biology, most likely. But she grinned and nodded and headed for the door, so he gave them the benefit of the doubt.

As the pilot opened the hatch to the shuttlecraft, Felless said, “I never imagined my dealings with Tosevites would include dealings with those who have not yet submitted to the Race.”

“If you want to get along with the Deutsche, you will not even think about that yet, superior female,” said the pilot, who was a veteran of the conquest fleet. “As far as they are concerned, they are the biggest and best around. They even call themselves the Master Race sometimes.”

Felless’ mouth opened in a great chortle of mirth. “The impudence!” she exclaimed. “The arrogance!”

But, after she got down out of the shuttlecraft, the Deutsche seemed less impudent, even if she still got a strong impression of how arrogant they were. Their males, wrapped in gray cloth, steel helmets on their heads, automatic rifles in their hands, towered over her, so much so that she wondered if they were specially chosen for height. A couple of Deutsch landcruisers aimed their weapons at the shuttlecraft. They were recognizably the descendants of the machines the Reich had used during the fighting. They were also recognizably more formidable. Not being a soldier, she could not tell if they were a match for those the Race built. If they weren’t, though, they couldn’t have missed by much.

A male in civilian costume-white and black cloth, with a cloth headgear-came up and spoke in the language of the Race: “You are Senior Researcher Felless?”

“I am,” she answered: her first words with a wild Big Ugly.

“I am Franz Eberlein, of the Foreign Ministry,” he said. “You are to present your credentials to me before you may be permitted to enter Nuremberg.”

She had been briefed to expect such a demand. “It shall be done,” she said, knowing it was for form’s sake only. The sheet she gave him was written in both the language of the Race and in the odd, angular characters the Deutsche used to write their language. “Is all in order?” Felless asked, also for form’s sake.

Eberlein seemed to have been reading the document in her tongue, not in his own. “Alles gut,” he said, and then, in the language of the Race, “Everything is good.” He nodded to the soldiers, who, without moving, contrived to look less menacing. Then he turned and waved to the edge of the great concrete slab on which the shuttlecraft had landed. A motor vehicle of Tosevite manufacture approached. “Here is your transport to the embassy of the Race.”

It had, she was glad to see, a male of the Race steering. The Big Ugly from the Foreign Ministry opened the rear door when the vehicle stopped. As Felless went past him, he clicked his heels together and bent at the waist. That was, she had learned, a Tosevite equivalent to the posture of respect.

“Welcome to Nuremberg, Senior Researcher,” the driver said. “I hope you will forgive me for a lack of conversation as we go. This vehicle has no automatic control, so I must pay attention to the road and to the Big Uglies using it. If I cause a crash, the Race is liable for damages.”

“Which Tosevites are liable for damages from the destruction of the ships from the colonization fleet?” Felless asked. The male did not answer, perhaps because he was minding the road, perhaps because the question, as yet, had no good answer.

Big Uglies stared at Felless and her driver as they went into the capital of the Greater German Reich. She stared, too, at what had to be the most bombastic architecture she’d ever seen. The Race, for the most part, built for reasons purely practical. It had not always been so, not quite, but even the very slow change the Empire knew had long since made other styles extinct.

Not here. When the Deutsche put up buildings, they seemed to want to boast about how splendid they were. The driver explained what some of the buildings were: “That is the congress hall of the leading political faction here, the Nazis. It can hold fifty thousand. That sports palace holds four hundred thousand, though few are close enough to see well. This open area with the stands on either side is for ritualistic rallies. The Nazis have turned their ideology almost into a sort of emperor-worship. And now, as we go farther north, we come to the grand avenue, where our embassy and those of other Tosevite not-empires are located.”

Felless was not sure what made the avenue so grand. It was much wider than it needed to be, which sparked a thought. “These Big Uglies seem to equate size and grandeur,” she said.

“Truth,” the driver agreed. Looking ahead, Felless saw a familiar, functional cube of a building in the middle of the absurdly ornate structures all around. The male pointed to it. “There is our embassy. By the Tosevites’ usages, it is reckoned part of the Empire. Our males guard it, not Big Uglies.”

“This is a surprisingly sophisticated concept,” Felless said.

“They insist on reciprocity, however,” the driver said in disparaging tones as he pulled to a halt in front of the building. “The soldiers of the independent not-empires protect their embassies in Cairo.”

As far as Felless was concerned, that showed almost intolerable arrogance on the Big Uglies’ part. She got out of the motorcar, which was heated to a level she found comfortable, and hurried inside the embassy. The males of the conquest fleet had dusted off a most archaic word there: the Race had had no need for embassies since the Empire unified Home.

Ambassador was a similarly obsolete term that turned out to be useful on Tosev 3. The Race’s ambassador to the Reich, a male named Veffani, soon summoned Felless to his office. “I greet you, Senior Researcher,” he said politely.

“I greet you.” Felless eyed him with no small curiosity. “Tell me, superior sir, if you will-is that the body paint ambassadors wore in ancient days, or were you compelled to devise something new?”

Pride rang in Veffani’s voice: “It is authentic. Research provided an image of an ambassador from long, long ago, and my body paint matches his in every particular.”

“Excellent! I am glad to hear it,” Felless said. With some reluctance, she pulled her mind away from the distant past of Home and toward here and now on Tosev 3. “My thanks for giving me this opportunity to sit in on your meeting with the not-emperor of the Deutsche tomorrow. The experience I gain should be valuable.”

“I hope that may be so, Senior Researcher,” Veffani said. “The interview will be at his residence, and conducted through a Tosevite interpreter. The one Himmler uses is reasonably fluent in our language; you should have no difficulty following what both sides say.”

“Again, I thank you, superior sir,” Felless said. “What should I look for in this-Hitler, was that the name?”

“No. Himmler. Hitler was his predecessor. Hitler was the most willful intelligent being I have ever met or, indeed, ever imagined. Himmler followed him after arcane political maneuverings no one of the Race fully understands. Before, he was in charge of the Deutsch secret police-and, in fact, he still is. He is less flamboyant, less strident, and also, I believe, less intelligent than Hitler. The one thing he is not is less stubborn. This, you will find, is a common factor among Tosevite leaders. The British Big Ugly named Churchill…” Veffani made distressed noises.

Felless shrugged. As far as she was concerned, one Big Ugly was very much like another. “Where will you quarter me in the meanwhile?” she asked, a not so subtle hint.

Veffani, fortunately, recognized it for what it was. “One of the secretaries will show you to a visitor’s chamber,” he replied. “You will, of course, want to settle in. The appointment with Himmler is at midmorning; I will see you then. As Tosevites go, the Deutsche are a punctual folk.”

“I shall not delay you,” Felless promised, and she didn’t. The same driver took her and Veffani to the Deutsch not-emperor’s residence so that they arrived just before the appointed time. A couple of tall Tosevites in long black mantlings and high-crowned caps that made them look even taller escorted the ambassador and the researcher into Himmler’s presence. The room in which the Deutsch not-emperor received them was, by Tosevite standards, bare, being ornamented only by a Deutsch hooked-cross banner and by a portrait of a Tosevite whom Felless recognized as Hitler by the peculiar little growth of hair under his snout.

Himmler had a growth of hair there, too, but one of a more common pattern for Big Ugly males. He looked at Veffani and Felless through corrective lenses, then spoke in his gargling language. As promised, the translator used the language of the Race well: “He greets you in a polite and cordial way.”

“Return similar greetings on behalf of my associate and myself,” Veffani said.

“It shall be done,” the translator said.

Himmler listened. Big Uglies had more mobile features than the Race, but he seemed schooled at holding his face still. Veffani said, “You know the SSSR and the United States both accuse the Reich of attacking the colonization fleet.”

“Of course they do,” Himmler said. He was an alien, but Felless thought she heard indifference in his voice. She could not imagine how he could be indifferent till he went on, “What else would they say? If they say anything else, they endanger themselves. I deny it. I have always denied it. What the Reich does, it does not deny. It proclaims.”

Felless knew that held some truth. The ideology of the Deutsche seemed to involve continual boasting. Master Race indeed, she thought scornfully.

Unruffled, Veffani said, “They have evidence for their claims.”

“The usual forgeries?” Yes, Himmler was indifferent, chillingly so. “I have seen this so-called evidence. The U.S. and Soviet claims contradict each other. They cannot both be true. They can both be lies. They are. We have given you much better evidence concerning the Soviet Union.” By better, Felless took him to mean more plausible, not necessarily true.

Veffani took him the same way. The ambassador said, “I have my own evidence that several Deutsch soldiers crossed the border into Poland the other day. They have no right to do this-Poland is still ours. I insist that they be punished.”

“They already have been,” Himmler said. “Details of the punishment will be furnished to you.”

“I also require an apology to the Race,” Veffani said.

“We would not have punished them if we thought they were right,” the Deutsch not-emperor said. “Since we have punished them, we must reckon them wrong. This makes any further apology unnecessary.”

He was logical. He was reasonable. Had he been a male of the Race, he might have been a schoolmaster. He also headed a notempire that specialized in killing off certain groups of Big Uglies living within it for no logical, rational reason the Race had ever been able to find. Even as Veffani conceded that, under the circumstances Himmler had outlined, no apology would be necessary, Felless studied the Tosevite not-emperor. For his kind, he seemed utterly ordinary. Somehow, that made him more alarming, not less.