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“Whatever it is doing, it is none of the Race’s concern,” Lodge said, and used an emphatic cough of his own. “If you interfere with its operation in any way or attack it, the United States will reckon that an act of war, and we will answer with every means at our disposal. Do I make myself plain?”
“You do.” Atvar seethed, but did his best not to show it. Before he’d gone into cold sleep, he’d never imagined he would have to submit to such insolence from a Tosevite. “But let me also make one thing clear to you. You are not a party to the dispute between the Race and the Reich. Because you are not a party, you would be well advised to remove your snout from the dispute, or it will be bitten. Do I make myself plain?”
“Events all over this planet are the concern of the United States.”
“Oh?” Atvar spoke in a soft, menacing tone; he wondered if the Big Ugly could perceive that. “Do you consider yourself a party to this dispute, then? Is your not-empire declaring war on the Race? You had better make yourself very, very plain.”
Lodge licked his fleshy lips, a sign of stress among the Tosevites. “No, we are not declaring war,” he said at last. “We are trying to arrange a just and lasting peace.”
“The Race will attend to that,” Atvar answered. “Battering the Deutsche to the point where they are not dangerous to us is the best way I can think of to make certain the peace endures. And that peace will last, would you not agree?”
“Perhaps that peace will,” Lodge said. “But you will also frighten the United States and the Soviet Union. Is that what you want? I know the Deutsche have hurt you. How much could we and the SSSR hurt you? Do you want to make us more likely to fight you? You may do that.”
“How?” Atvar was genuinely curious. “Will you not think, If we fight the Race, we will get what the Reich got? Surely any sensible beings would think along those lines.”
“Perhaps,” Lodge said, “but perhaps not, too.” His features were not so still as Molotov’s or Gromyko’s, but he revealed little. “We might think, The Race will believe we have so much fear that it can make any demand at all upon us. We had better fight, to show that belief is mistaken.”
Atvar didn’t answer right away. Given what he knew of Tosevite psychology, the American ambassador’s comment had an unpleasant ring of probability to it. But he could not admit as much without yielding more ground than he wanted. “We shall have to take that chance,” he said. “Is there anything more?”
“No, Exalted Fleetlord,” Lodge said. “I shall send your words back to President Warren. I fear he will be disappointed.”
“I do not relish this war myself. It was forced on me,” Atvar answered. “But now that I have it, I intend to win it. Is that clear?”
“Yes, that is clear.” Lodge’s sigh sounded much like that which might have come from a male of the Race. “But I will also say that your reply is a personal disappointment to me. I had hoped for better from the Race.”
“And I had hoped for better from the Deutsche,” Atvar said. “I warned them what would happen if they chose conflict. They did not care to believe me. Now they are paying for their error-and they deserve to pay for their error.”
Before the American ambassador could reply, Pshing burst in and said, “Exalted Fleetlord, a Deutsch missile has just got through our defenses and wrecked Istanbul!”
“Oh, a plague!” Atvar cried. “That makes resupplying Poland all the more difficult.” He turned both eye turrets back to Henry Cabot Lodge. “You see, Ambassador, that the Deutsche do not yet believe the war to be over. If they do not, I cannot, either. Goodbye.” For a wonder, Lodge left without another word.
Not for the first time, Sam Yeager spoke reassuringly to his wife: “He’s all right, hon. There’s the message.” He pointed to the computer monitor. “Read it yourself-he’s fine. Nothing bad has happened to him.” As a matter of fact, he’s probably screwing himself silly and having the time of his life. He didn’t say that to Barbara.
She wasn’t reassured, either. “He shouldn’t be up there in the first place,” she said. “He ought to be down here in L.A., where it’s safe.”
Yeager sighed. Barbara was probably right. “I really didn’t think the Germans would be dumb enough to start a war with the Lizards. Honest, I didn’t.”
“Well, you should have,” Barbara said. “And you should have put your foot down and kept him from going, especially since you know the main thing he was going up there to do.”
“It’s one way to get to know somebody. Sometimes it’s the fastest way to get to know somebody.” Sam raised an eyebrow. “It worked like that for us, if you want to think back about it.”
Barbara turned red. All she cared to remember these days was that she was respectably married, and had been for a long time. She didn’t like remembering that she’d started sleeping with Sam during the fighting, when she’d thought her then-husband dead. She especially didn’t like remembering that she’d married Sam not long before finding out her then-husband remained very much alive. Maybe the marriage wasn’t so perfectly respectable after all.
If she hadn’t got pregnant right away, she would have gone back to Jens Larssen in a red-hot minute, too, Sam thought. He’d heard Larssen had come to a hard, bad end later on. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if Barbara had gone back to Jens. Would the physicist not have gone off the deep end? No way to tell. No way to know. Sam was pretty sure he would have been a lot less happy had she chosen the other way, though.
Barbara said, “What on earth are we going to tell Karen?”
“The only thing I’m going to tell her is that Jonathan’s fine,” Sam answered. “I’ve already told her that. I hope to heaven that’s the only thing you’re going to tell her, too. If Jonathan wants to tell her anything else, that’s his business. Not yours. Not mine. His. His girlfriend is his problem. He’s twenty-one.”
“So he kept telling us.” Barbara hardly bothered hiding her bitterness “But he’s living under our roof-”
“Not at the moment,” Sam put in.
“And whose fault is that?” his wife demanded. “He couldn’t have gone if you hadn’t let him.”
“It would have been harder,” Yeager admitted. “But I think he would have managed it. And if we had put our feet down, he’d be mad at us for years. When would this chance have come along again?”
“This chance for what?” Barbara asked. “To go into space, or to go into…?” She broke off, grimacing. “Now you’ve got me doing it.”
“Sooner or later, the Nazis will run out of upper stages and orbiting bombs,” Sam said. “Then it’ll be safe for the Lizards to let Jonathan come home.”
“In the meantime, I’ll go out of my mind worrying,” Barbara said.
“He’s fine,” Yeager said. “He’ll be fine.” He’d been saying that all along. Sometimes, on good days, he managed to convince himself for a little while. Most of the time, he was as nearly out of his mind with worry as his wife was. Long training in the minor leagues and in the Army had taught him not to show whether or not things were going his way at any given moment. That didn’t mean he lacked feelings, only that he kept them inside more than Barbara did.
“He never should have gone up there.” Barbara glanced at the message-the very reassuring message-on the computer screen, shook her head, and strode out of the study.
Yeager left the connection to the Race’s electronic network and went back to review messages he’d received in the past. The one he’d got from Straha a little before the Germans attacked Poland stuck in his mind. He examined it yet again, trying to extract fresh meaning from the shiplord’s oracular phrases.
He had no great luck. He’d been wondering for some time whether his own superiors had it in for him. He had to wonder, since none of the people who’d tried to do bad things to h
is family and him suffered any great punishment. Some of those people hadn’t suffered anything at all that he knew of-the fellow with the Molotov cocktail, for instance.
And how had Straha got wind of this? Probably from the hard-nosed fellow who did his errands for him. Sam wouldn’t have wanted to wind up on that guy’s bad side, not even a little he wouldn’t.
The next interesting question was, how much did the Lizard’s man Friday know about such things? Sam realized he might know a great deal. To work for Straha, he had to have a pretty high security clearance. He also had to know a good deal about the Race. Put those together, and the odds were that he knew quite a bit about Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yeager.
“How can I find out what he knows?” Yeager muttered. Inviting the fellow over and pumping him while they drank beer didn’t strike him as the best idea he’d ever had. He didn’t think it would do any good, and it would make the man suspicious. Of that Sam had no doubt whatever. Anybody who did what Straha’s factotum did was bound to be suspicious for a living.
I’ll have to operate through Straha, Yeager realized. He started to telephone the defector, but then checked himself. Straha hadn’t phoned him, but had used the Race’s electronic network to pass on the message. Did that mean Straha thought his own phone was tapped, or did he worry about Yeager’s? Sam didn’t know, and didn’t care for either alternative.
He reconnected to the Lizards’ network and asked, Did you learn of my difficulties with my superiors from your driver?
He stared at the screen, as if expecting the answer to appear immediately. As a matter of fact, he had expected the answer to appear immediately, and felt foolish because of it. Straha had a right to be doing something other than sitting around waiting for a message from a Big Ugly named Sam Yeager.
As long as Yeager was hooked up to the Race’s electronic network, he checked the news feeds the Lizards were giving one another. By what they were saying, they’d squashed Germany flat, and everything was over but for the mopping up. Scattered Deutsch units still refuse to acknowledge their inevitable defeat, but their resistance must soon come to an end.
