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“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 go
ne 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.”
