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“I want to see,” Sam said, though getting close to the incubator in that cramped little space wasn’t easy. He went on, “I grew up on a farm, remember. I ought to know something about how eggs work.”
“Something, maybe,” Barbara said with a distinct sniff, “but nobody-nobody on Earth, anyhow-has ever watched a Lizard egg hatch till now.”
As she often did, she left him struggling for a comeback. While he was struggling, Jonathan gave him something else to think about: “Dad, may I call Karen to come over and watch them with us?”
His girlfriend was as fascinated by the Race as he was. She wore body paint, too, often with nothing but a tiny halter top to preserve the decencies. She didn’t shave her head, though some girls did. But that wasn’t what made Yeager hesitate. He said, “You know I didn’t get these eggs to entertain you… or Karen.”
“Of course I know that,” his son said indignantly. “Do you think I’m addled or something?” That bit of slang had made it from the Lizards’ language into English.
“No, of course not,” Sam answered, doing his best to remember how touchy he’d been when he was twenty. “But it’s liable to be important not to let anyone know we have Lizard eggs-or hatchlings, which is what we’ll have pretty darn quick now.” Eighteen years of minor-league ball and twenty in the Army had given him a vocabulary that could blister paint at forty paces. Around his wife and son, he did his best not to use too much of it.
Jonathan rolled his eyes. “What are you going to do, Dad, hide them in the garage whenever people or males of the Race come over?”
“When males of the Race come over, I just might,” Sam said. But he sighed. His son had a point. His orders were to raise the baby Lizards as much like human beings as he could. How was he supposed to do that if they never met anybody but his family and him? With another sigh, he nodded. “Okay, go ahead. But when she gets here, I’m going to have to warn her she can’t blab.”
“Sure, Dad.” Jonathan was all smiles now that he’d got his way. “This is so hot!” The Race liked heat. That made it a term of approval. He sprinted for the telephone.
Worry in her voice, Barbara said, “Sooner or later, the Race is going to find out that we have these hatchlings. There’ll be trouble when that happens?”
“I expect you’re right,” Yeager said. “But it’ll be trouble for the government, not trouble for us. If we have to give them up, we have to give them up, that’s all. No point to worrying too much ahead of time, right?”
“Right,” Barbara said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
Sam didn’t know that he was convinced, either, but he forced whatever worries he had down to the bottom of his mind. “Let me have a look, will you?” he said, as he had a moment before. “I’m the only one in the house who hasn’t seen the eggs this morning.”
Now that Jonathan was gone, Barbara had a little more room to move on the service porch. As she stepped aside, Yeager lifted the lid on top of the incubator and peered down. The two eggs inside, both a good deal larger than hen’s eggs, were yellow, speckled with brown and white; he would have bet they got laid in sand. Sure enough, one shell showed a small hole. “Will you take a look at that?” he said softly.
Barbara had already taken a look at that. Her question-typical of her questions-was very much to the point: “Do you really think we’ll be able to take care of them, Sam?”
“Well, hon, we managed with Jonathan, and he turned out okay,” Yeager said.
“I see three things wrong with that as an answer,” she said crisply. She ticked them off on her fingers: “Number one, we’re twenty years older than we were then. Number two, there are two of these eggs, and there was only one of him. And number three, not to belabor the obvious, they’re Lizards. It won’t be like raising babies.”
“It’s supposed to be as much like raising babies as we can make it,” Sam replied. “That’s why we’ve got the job, not a fancy lab somewhere. But yeah, you’re right; from everything I’ve read, it won’t be the same.”
“From everything I’ve read, too.” Barbara set a hand on his arm. “Are they really going to be like little wild animals till they’re three or four years old?”
He did his best to make light of it, saying, “What, you don’t think Jonathan was?” Instead of letting her hand rest quietly on his sleeve, she started drumming her fingers there. He coughed sheepishly, then sighed. “From everything I’ve been able to pick up, that’s about right. They don’t learn to talk as fast as babies do, and they’re able to move around by themselves as soon as they hatch. If that doesn’t make them little wild animals, I don’t know what would. Except we’re supposed to do our best to turn them into little tame animals instead.”
“I wonder if we can,” Barbara said. “How many stories does the Race tell about eggs back on Home that hatched in out-of-the-way places, and about Lizards that lived like hunting beasts till they were found and civilized?”
“Lots of them,” Sam allowed. “Of course, we have stories like that, too.”
“Wild children.” Barbara nodded. “But even in those, something always helps the babies when they’re small-the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, for instance.” She had her literary references all lined up; she’d done graduate work in medieval English. “And just about all of our stories are legends-myths, really. The ones from the Lizards sound like news items; they read as if they came off the United Press International wire.”
Before Yeager could answer, Jonathan came running back onto the service porch. “Karen’s on her way,” he reported breathlessly. “She says not to let them hatch before she gets here.”
“Fine with me,” Sam said. “Did she tell you how we were supposed to manage that?” Jonathan glared at him. He’d been glared at by professionals, from managers and umpires all the way up to generals and a couple of presidents. He wasn’t about to let his son faze him. He pointed down into the incubator. “Look-the Lizard inside the other egg’s starting to poke his way out, too.”
They jockeyed for position in front of the incubator; it wasn’t easy for all of them to see at once. Sure enough, both eggshells had holes in them now. Jonathan said, “Those are more tears than cracks. The shells look kind of leathery, don’t they, not hard, like hens’ eggs are.”
“As hens’ eggs are,” Barbara said, and then, under her breath, “Honestly, I don’t know what they teach people these days.”
Having watched a lot of chicks hatching, Sam knew it didn’t happen instantly. Sure enough, the tears in the shells hadn’t got much bigger before the front doorbell rang. Jonathan dashed off to the door, and returned a moment later with Karen. “I greet you, Senior Ordnance Specialist,” Sam said in the language of the Race, eyeing her body paint. With both Barbara and Jonathan there, he conscientiously didn’t eye the skin on which the body paint was displayed. That wasn’t easy-she was a pretty redhead, and freckled all over-but he managed.
“I greet you, superior sir,” she answered in the same language. Like Jonathan, like the rest of the younger generation, she couldn’t remember a time when the Lizards hadn’t been around. She and he studied their language at UCLA the same way they studied math or chemistry. Despite aping the Race, they took Lizards more for granted than Sam or Barbara ever would.
Four people crowding around the incubator made looking in harder than ever. Karen happened to have the best view when
the first Lizard’s snout poked out of the shell. “Look!” she said. “He’s got a little horn on the end of his nose.”
“It’s not a horn, it’s an egg tooth,” Sam said. “Turtles and snakes and ordinary small-l lizards have ’em, too, to help them hatch. It’ll drop off in a few days.”
Little by little, the baby Lizards (hatchlings sounded reproachfully in his mind, in the language of the Race) fought their way free of the eggs that had confined them. They were a light greenish brown, lighter than they would be as adults. Their scaly hides glistened with the last fluids from the eggs, though the lightbulbs in the incubators swiftly dried them. “Their heads look too big,” Jonathan said.
“So did yours, when you were first born,” Sam said. Barbara nodded. Jonathan looked embarrassed, though Karen’s head had undoubtedly looked too big for her body when she was a newborn, too.
Hearing voices above them, the Lizard hatchlings turned their tiny eye turrets toward the people. Sam wondered what he looked like to them. Nothing good, evidently; they skittered around the bottom of the incubator, looking for somewhere to hide. Jonathan hadn’t done that when he was a baby. And thank God, too, Sam thought.
He reached in to grab one of the Lizards. It hissed and snapped at him. Also unlike Jonathan as a newborn, it had a mouthful of sharp little teeth. He jerked his hand back. “Where are those leather gloves?” he asked.
“Here.” Barbara handed them to him. He slipped them on, then caught one of the Lizard hatchlings behind the head, as if it were a corn snake back on the Nebraska farm where he’d grown up. It couldn’t get away and it couldn’t bite, though it tried to do both. He carried it up the hall to the spare room that wasn’t spare any more. When he set it down, it scurried into one of the many hiding places he’d set up in the room: an upside-down bucket with a doorway cut into the side. Carefully closing the door behind him, he went back and captured the other hatchling. “All right, we’ve got ’em,” he said as he started up the hall with that wiggling little Lizard. “Now we get to make something of ’em.”
