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“You know all that,” Sam said. “I know all that. Jonathan knows all that, too. Question is, does he care?”
He got another chance to find out the next evening, when he and Barbara and Jonathan piled into the Buick to go up to the reception at City Hall. The building dominated the Los Angeles skyline, being the only one permitted to exceed the twelve-story limit enforced from fear of earthquakes.
People still turned out to meet and be seen with Liu Han and Liu Mei: the local Chinese community, politicians, military men, and the kind of people Sam had come to think of as prominent gawkers. He’d been astonished to meet John Wayne at one of these bashes. Barbara’s only comment was, “Why couldn’t it have been Cary Grant?”
Here and now, Sam got a drink, made a run at the buffet, and dutifully circulated through the crowd. If he ended up in a knot of men in uniform, that was no great surprise. The officers’ wives formed a similar knot a few feet away.
After a while, Liu Han gave a little speech about how much China in general and the People’s Liberation Army in particular needed American help. Her English was better than it had been when she got to the USA the summer before. When she sat down, the mayor of Los Angeles got up and made a much longer speech covering the same points.
Actually, Sam only thought it covered the same points, for he soon stopped listening. Turning to the colonel next to him, he murmured, “Sir, isn’t there something against this in the Geneva Convention?”
The colonel snorted. “We’re not prisoners of war,” he said, and then paused. “It does seem that way, though, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Yeager answered. “And to think: I could be at the dentist’s office now.”
That won him another snort from the colonel, a big, bluff fellow with pilot’s wings and the rocket that showed he’d flown in space. “You’re a dangerous man-though not half as dangerous as the windbag up there.”
“He’ll shut up sooner or later,” Sam said. “He has to… doesn’t he?”
Eventually, the mayor did descend from the podium. He got a heartfelt round of applause, and looked delighted. Sam shook his head. The damn fool couldn’t tell the audience was cheering not because of anything he’d said but because he’d finally stopped saying it.
“That calls for a drink, Major,” the colonel said. “I never thought we ought to get hazardous-duty pay for these affairs, but I may just change my mind.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Eli Hollins.”
Yeager shook it. “Pleased to meet you, sir.” He gave his own name.
“Oh, the alien-liaison fellow.” Hollins nodded. “I’ve heard of you. Read some of your reports, too. Solid stuff in there; I used pieces of it when I was talking with the Lizards up in orbit.” He cocked his head to one side. “You get right inside ’em, seems like. How do you do that?”
A grin stretched across Yeager’s face. He was no more immune to praise than anybody else. “Thank you very much, sir,” he said. “How? I don’t know. You try to see things from a Lizard’s point of view, that’s all. You see what makes him tick, and then reason from that the way he would.”
“You make it sound easy,” Hollins said. “Any ten-year-old kid can fly a fighter plane-with about thirty years of practice.” He and Yeager finally made it through the crowd to the bar; after the mayor at last fell silent, a lot of people had decided they needed refreshing. Hollins ordered scotch for himself, then raised an eyebrow at Sam. “What’ll it be?”
“Let me have a Lucky Lager,” Yeager told the barkeep. Hollins covered both drinks. “Thanks again, sir,” Sam said. “Next round’s mine.”
“That’s a deal,” the flier said equably. He raised his glass. “Confusion to the Lizards-may we cause plenty of it.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Sam said, and did. “And we do cause ’em plenty. We have, ever since they got here. They figured they’d be knocking over savages, but we were already geared up for a hell of a big war. They’re still trying to figure that out. They’ll be trying to figure it out ten thousand years from now. That’s how they work: slow, patient, thorough.” He took another swig from his Lucky. “I’m going on like His Honor.”
“Yeah, but there’s a difference: you make sense, and he didn’t.” Eli Hollins studied Yeager. “The Lizards’ll still be figuring us out ten thousand years from now-if we don’t lick ’em first. Am I right or am I wrong?”
“Sir, you’re right,” Sam answered. “No question about it: you’re right. Sooner or later, we’ll have the edge on them. We come up with new things faster than they do, and they know it. Question is, do they give us the chance to use what we’ve got when we do start sliding past them?”
“Once we’re ahead of them, they won’t stop us.” Hollins had a fighter pilot’s arrogance, all right. He was fifteen years younger than Yeager, too. That also probably had something to do with it.
Yeager said, “If they think we can go after Home, sir, they’re liable to try to wreck Earth, destroy us as a species. I know they’ve talked about it. They’ve seen how dangerous we are now, and they aren’t stupid. They may have a better idea of where we’ll be a hundred years from now than we do.”
“That’s… interesting,” Hollins said. “Cold-blooded little bastards, aren’t they?”
“They don’t want to do it,” Sam said. “I think they’re more squeamish about mass murder than we are. The Nazis’ death camps almost made them turn up their toes. That’s one of the reasons they’ll go on hunting whoever blew up the ships from the colonization fleet till they catch ’em. I wouldn’t want to be in Himmler or Molotov’s shoes when that happens, either.”
“Makes sense to me.” Colonel Hollins finished his drink. “But steer on back to what you were saying before, why don’t you? If the Lizards are squeamish about mass murder, how come they’re thinking about wiping out Earth?”
“I asked Straha about that once.” Sam looked around, but didn’t see the shiplord here. “What he said was, ‘If you have a leg with a cancer in it, sometimes you have to cut it off to save the body.’ ” Yeager paused for effect, then added, “Can I get you that other drink now?”
“Don’t mind if I do-don’t mind if you do,” Hollins said, and Sam bought him another scotch. His own beer had some mileage left.
Sipping it, he looked around the City Hall reception room again. Barbara was talking with the mayor’s wife. Maybe that didn’t rate hazard pay; Sam hoped the lady was less dull than her husband. And Jonathan was having an animated conversation with Liu Mei. It was animated on his side, anyhow; her face never changed expression much.
Yeager turned back to Hollins; nobody in his family looked eager to flee, as sometimes happened. He polished off his beer, then said, “I’ve been poking around a little, trying to see what I can find out. If I can whisper something into a Lizard’s hearing diaphragm, maybe the Race will come down on the Russians or the Germans, and that’ll be the end of it. Nobody will have to look over his shoulder any more, and nobody will ever try such a dumb stunt again.”
Hollins’ voice was dry: “Tell you what, Major-you tend to your knitting and let the Lizards tend to theirs.”
“Well, yeah, sure,” Sam said. “Even Molotov’s a human being. Even Himmler’s a human being… I suppose. But I ca
n think of a hell of a lot of Lizards I’d sooner have living next door to me than either one of them.”
“Damned if I’ll argue with you there,” Hollins said with a chuckle, “but there’s a hell of a lot of people I’d sooner have living next door to me than those guys, too. Like all the rest of the human race, for instance.”
“That’s true,” Sam admitted. “Other thing is, though, the Lizards are sort of distracted right now. They’re trying to decide what to do about ginger and what it does to their females. That’ll keep them busy for a while, unless I miss my guess. I’ve been trying to lend a hand, you might say.”
“I don’t know about a hand,” Colonel Hollins said. “I’d give ’em a finger any old day, though.” Sam laughed. Hollins went on, “Yeah, if sex won’t distract you, I don’t know what will. Here’s hoping they stay distracted for a long time, too.”
“They may,” Yeager said. “This isn’t like anything they’ve run into before. The ginger bomb somebody threw at Australia showed how big a problem it could be. And just being horny from one day to the next is confusing the heck out of them.”
“Good,” Hollins said. “We already drank to that once, remember? Let ’em stay confused. The more confused they are, the less time they have to go poking their snouts into our affairs. And that’s what it’s all about, Major.” He spoke with great certainty. Yeager got the idea he usually did.
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. It wasn’t as if Hollins were wrong. If he came down a little hard for human beings, well, why not? He was one. So was Sam. He still wanted justice done on the human beings who had committed the perfectly human crime of murder by blowing up the ships of the colonization fleet.
Rance Auerbach looked toward the border between the United States and Lizard-held Mexico. “I hear they’ve got dogs trained to sniff for ginger these days,” he said as Penny Summers eased the old Ford she’d bought one step closer to the checkpoint.
