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He wondered what that meant. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have anything to do with the attack on the colonization fleet. The space station hadn’t been involved in that; the Lizards had detected a signal from a submarine that promptly submerged, and then somebody’s nasty chunk of hardware had gone into action. Somebody’s. Whose? He had no more proof than the Lizards did.
Then he stopped worrying about it for a while, because Barbara came home with the trunk of the car full of groceries, and he had to help haul them into the house. She put away the food that went into the refrigerator, he what went into the pantries. About halfway through the job, Barbara looked over to him and said, “This is all for Jonathan, you know. There wasn’t enough room in the car for a week’s worth of groceries for him and us both. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll have to go back to the store for some food for us.”
“You expect me to laugh and think that’s a joke,” Sam said. “Trouble is, I’ve seen the way the kid eats. I believe you, or close enough, anyhow.” He put a couple of cans of tomatoes on a shelf, then said, “Karen seems happier when she comes around here these days.”
“Of course she does,” his wife answered at once. “Liu Mei is five thousand miles away now. I hope she and her mother have made it back to China all right, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Karen hoped their ship sank. Hand me that sack of oranges, would you? They’re nice and ripe.”
They were just finishing when the telephone rang. Barbara answered it, then called out for Sam. He took the handpiece from her and spoke: “Yeager.”
“Good morning, Major.” The crisp voice on the other end of the line belonged to Colonel Edwin Webster, Sam’s immediate superior. “You are to report in tomorrow at 0800: no working out of the house. We have a visiting fireman who wants to see you. He’s asked for you by name, and he’s not somebody who’ll take no for an answer. Have you got that?”
“Yes, sir: report in at 0800,” Yeager said in martyred tones. He much preferred working from his home, which, thanks to his personal library and his computer connection, he got to do most of the time. “Who is this fellow, anyway?” he asked, but Webster had hung up on hearing him acknowledge the order.
Barbara was properly sympathetic. Jonathan, when he got home from classes, wasn’t. “I have to go in at eight o’clock three mornings a week this term,” he said.
“That’s because you’re young-and if you don’t watch the way you talk, you won’t get much older,” Sam told him. With the heartlessness of youth, Jonathan laughed.
Fortified by two cups of coffee, Yeager drove downtown the next morning. He poured himself another cup as soon as he’d reported to Colonel Webster, who looked disgustingly wide awake himself. Sam repeated the question he’d asked the day before. Webster didn’t answer it this time, either.
Before long, though, Sam found out. Colonel Webster’s adjutant, a harried-looking captain named Markowitz, came into his cubicle and said, “Sir, if you’ll come with me…?” Yeager put down his pen and forgot about the meaningless piece of busywork he was doing. He got up and followed Captain Markowitz.
In the office to which the adjutant led him sat a three-star general smoking a cigarette with sharp, savage puffs. The general waited till Markowitz had gone and closed the door behind him, then stubbed out the butt and impaled Yeager with a glare that held him in place as a specimen pin held a preserved butterfly to a collecting board. “You have been poking your nose into places where it has no business going, Major,” he rasped. “That will cease, or your military career will, forthwith. Have you got that?”
“Sir?” Sam said in astonishment. He’d expected a visiting fireman who wanted to know something special about the Lizards, not one who aimed to carve chunks off him and roast them over the fire. And he didn’t even know what he was supposed to have done.
Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay didn’t keep him in suspense for long: “You have been snooping about the space station. Whatever may be going on there, it is none of your goddamn business. You are not authorized to have that information. If you try to get it from us again, you will regret it for the rest of your days. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Major Yeager?”
“Sir, I understand what you’re saying,” Yeager answered carefully, “but I don’t understand why you’re saying it.”
“Why is not your business, Major,” LeMay said. “I’ve come a long way to give you that order, and I expect to have it obeyed. Is there any danger I am laboring under a misapprehension?” His tone warned that there had better not be. He lit another cigarette and started smoking it down to a nub.
“No, sir,” Sam said, the only thing he could say under the circumstances. If LeMay didn’t want him taking a look at the space station, he wouldn’t… or he wouldn’t get caught again, anyhow. Why Lieutenant General LeMay was so vehement about the matter, he couldn’t guess-but LeMay wasn’t in the mood to answer questions.
“You had better not,” the general growled, and seemed to notice Yeager still standing at attention in front of him. “Dismissed. Get the hell out of here.” Yeager saluted, then frankly fled.
Straha had the best computer equipment money could buy. It wasn’t his money, either, but that of the Tosevites with whom he had chosen to make his home. The equipment, though, was regulation issue for the Race. How the Americans had got it for him, he found it wiser not to ask. But get it they had. They had also managed, in some highly unofficial fashion, to connect it to the Race’s network by way of the consulate in downtown Los Angeles. That gave Straha one more window on the way of life he had deliberately abandoned.
It was, necessarily, a one-way window. He could observe, but did not interact. If he did interact-if he sent messages for placement on the network-he might reveal and forfeit his highly unofficial connection. In the American phrase, he stayed on the outside looking in.
And so, when he turned on the computer and discovered he had a message waiting, his first reaction was alarm. If the Race discovered his connection on its own, he was liable to lose that window.
But the message, he discovered, was not from any male of the Race, or even from some new and snoopy female. It was from Major Sam Yeager, who had connections of his own. It asked nothing more dangerous than whether Yeager could come and visit the exiled shiplord at his home one day before too long.
“Of course you may visit,” Straha said on the telephone, still not eager to send a message and make the system notice him. “I do not understand why you did not simply call, as I am doing now.”
“I like the message system the Race uses,” replied the Tosevite, whose access to that system was somewhat-but only somewhat-more official than Straha’s. It did not seem a good enough reason to the ex-shiplord, but Straha chose not to pursue the point. He proposed a time at which Yeager might come, the Big Ugly agreed, and they both hung up.
Yeager was punctual, as Straha had expected him to be. “I do not see your driver here,” the Tosevite remarked after he had exchanged greetings with Straha.
“No, he is not here; I gave him the morning off, knowing I would not be going anywhere because you would be coming here,” Straha answered. “I can quickly summon him by radio link, if that is what you require.”
“No,” Yeager said, and used an emphatic cough. “Perhaps we could go out into the back yard and talk there.”
“It is warmer inside,” Straha said unhappily. Yeager stood quiet, not saying anything more. Straha’s eye turrets swung sharply toward him. “You think my house may be-” He broke off even before Yeager began to raise a warning hand. “Yes, let us go out into the back yard.”
By local standards, it was not much of a yard, being dirt and rocks and sand and a few cacti rather than the green grass and gaudy flowers customary in the United States. But in essence if not in detail, it put Straha in mind of Home. Yeager said, “Shiplord, what do you know and what can you find out about the American space station?”
“Rather less than you can, I suspect,” Straha answered. ?
??I have access only to what the Race knows about it. Your own people, the builders, will surely have whatever detailed knowledge you may require.”
Yeager shook his head. “I have been ordered not to inquire into it, and American computers are closed against me-indeed, are warned against me.”
Straha needed no elaborate calculation to understand what that was liable to mean. “You have in some way triggered a security alert?” he asked.
“Oh, you might say so,” the Big Ugly answered in English. Before Straha could grow too confused, he shifted back to the language of the Race: “That is an idiom of agreement.”
“Is it? I thank you; I had not encountered it before,” Straha said. “But you are a military officer, and one who, because of your dealings with the Race, is privy to many secrets. Why would questions about your space station be closed to you?”
