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“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, a
nd 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.
