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He hoped he’d stay around to help. Being fifty-seven had a way of putting that kind of thought in his mind. He was in pretty good shape for his age, but every time he shaved in the morning the first glance in the mirror reminded him he wouldn’t be here forever. Barbara could take over for him if he went too soon (somehow, contemplating his own death was easier than thinking about hers), and Jonathan, and whomever Jonathan married. He hoped that would be Karen. She was a good kid, and she and Jonathan had been thick as thieves lately.
After a moment, he shook his head. “Back to business,” he muttered. Business was getting a summary of the conversation Jonathan and he had had with Kassquit down on paper, and adding his impressions to it. He was glad he’d talked with his son. It helped him clarify his own thoughts.
He had to use the human-made computer to draft his report. With the one he’d got from the Lizards, he couldn’t print in English, but was stuck with the language of the Race. Kassquit might have found a report in the Lizards’ language interesting, but it wouldn’t have amused his superiors.
When he finished the report and pressed the key that would print it, a glorified electric typewriter hammered into life. The printer hooked up to the Lizard-built computer was a lot more elegant, using powdered carbon and a skelkwank light to form the characters and images it produced. You needed a powerful magnifier to tell its output was made up of tiny dots and didn’t come from a typewriter or even from set type.
He read through the report, made a couple of small corrections in ink, and set it aside. The printer kept humming till he turned it off. He started to turn off the computer, too, but changed his mind. Instead, he hooked himself up to the U.S. network. He hadn’t tried visiting the archive that stored signals traffic from the night the colonization fleet was attacked for quite a while. The more he learned about that, the better his chances of nailing the culprit and passing what he knew on to the Lizards.
They’ll never figure out whether it was the Nazis or the Russians, not on their own they won’t, he thought. The Lizards were less naive than they had been when they came to Earth, but humans, long used to cheating one another, still had little trouble deceiving them. And, because the Lizards weren’t human, they often missed clues that would have been obvious to a person.
“There we go,” Sam muttered, as the name of the archive appeared on his screen. He waited for the table of contents to come up below it, so he could find exactly which transcripts would be most useful to him. The list took its own sweet time appearing; compared to the Race’s machine, this one was slow, slow.
Instead of the contents list, he got a blank, dark screen. Pale letters announced, CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.
“You cheap piece of junk,” he snarled, and whacked the side of the case that held the screen. That didn’t change the message, of course. It did go a little way toward easing his annoyance. The Lizards’ computer worked all the time. The machine made in the USA broke down if he looked at it sideways.
But he was a stubborn man. He wouldn’t have spent eighteen years riding trains and buses through every corner of the bush leagues if he hadn’t been stubborn. He wouldn’t have risen to lieutenant colonel, either, not when he’d joined the Army as a thirty-five-year-old private with full upper and lower dentures. And he wouldn’t have got so far with the Lizards, either.
And so, even though he kept swearing under his breath, he patiently reconnected the computer to the network and navigated toward that archive again. This time, he didn’t even get the archival name before he lost his connection.
He scowled and stared at the dark screen with the now familiar message on it. “Junk,” he repeated, but now he sounded less sure whether the fault lay inside his computer. Maybe the chain connecting him to that distant archive-actually, he didn’t know how distant it was, only that it existed-had some rusty links in it.
He wondered if he ought to report the problem. He didn’t wonder for long, though. While his security clearance was high enough to give him access to that archive, he had no formal need-to-know. Nobody above him would be happy to find out he’d been snooping around in things that were formally none of his business. The powers that be would frown all the harder because he’d already established a reputation for snooping.
“Hell with it,” he said, and this time he did turn off the computer. Maybe the simplest explanation was that somebody somewhere had made a tidy profit selling the U.S. government-or would it be the phone company? — some lousy wiring.
He was making himself a bologna sandwich (he’d got sick of ham) when a car stopped in front of the house. The sound of the closing door made him look up from pickles and mayonnaise. A young man he’d never seen before was walking across the lawn toward the front porch. Another one sat in the car, waiting.
The one coming up to the house had his right hand in the pocket of his blue jeans. After somebody had taken some potshots at the house, that triggered an alarm bell in Sam. He hurried to the hutch in the front room and pulled out his . 45.
Barbara came into the front room from the direction of the bedroom. She’d spotted the guy, too, and was going to find out what he wanted. When she saw the automatic in Sam’s hands, her eyes opened enormously wide. He used it to motion her away.
Up on the porch came the stranger. Before he could knock, Sam opened the front door and stuck the.45 in his face. “Take that hand out of your pocket real nice and slow,” he said pleasantly, and then, over his shoulder, “Honey, call the cops.”
“Sure, Pop, anything you say,” the young man answered. “You’ve got the persuader there, all right.” But his hand moved swiftly, not slowly, and had a pistol in it as it cleared his pocket.
He must have thought Yeager would hesitate long enough to let him shoot first. It was the last mistake he ever made. The.45 jerked against Sam’s wrist as he fired. The young man went down. He wouldn’t get up again, either, not after taking one between the eyes at point-blank range. He kept jerking and twitching, but that was only because his body didn’t know he was dead yet.
Tires screaming, the car in which he’d come roared away. Barbara and Jonathan came dashing out at the sound of the shot. “Thank God,” Barbara said when she saw Sam standing. She turned away from the corpse on the porch. “Christ! I haven’t seen anything like that since the fighting. The police are on the way.”
“Good. I’ll wait for ’em right here,” Sam said.
They arrived a couple of minutes later, lights flashing, siren yowling. “What the hell happened here?” one of them asked, though he was talking more about why than about what-that was obvious.
“Somebody shot at this house from the street last year, Sergeant,” Yeager answered. He explained what he’d seen and what he’d done, finishing, “He tried to draw on me, and I shot him. His pal took off as soon as I did.”
“Okay, Lieutenant Colonel, I’ve got your side of it,” said the sergeant, who’d been taking notes. He turned to his partner. “See just what the guy was holding, Clyde.”
“Right.” The other cop used his handkerchief to pick up the weapon. It was a.45 nearly identical to Sam’s. Clyde looked up at Yeager. “He was loaded fo
r bear, all right. Lucky you were, too.” He glanced over at the sergeant. “If this isn’t self-defense, I don’t know what the devil it is.”
“A hell of a mess on this guy’s porch,” the sergeant said. He looked back to Yeager. “No charges I can see, Lieutenant Colonel. Like Clyde says, this one looks open-and-shut. But don’t leave town-we’re going to have about a million questions for you, maybe more once we find out who this character is and what he had in mind.”
“If I get orders to go, I’ll have to follow them,” Yeager said. “I’ve got to report this to my superiors, too.”
“If you do have to leave, let us know where you’re going and how long you’ll be there,” the police sergeant said. “And if I was your CO, I’d give you a medal. If you didn’t do what needed doing, you wouldn’t be able to report to him now, that’s for damn sure.” He raised an eyebrow. “You think this guy had anything to do with the shots last year?”
“Damned if I know,” Sam answered. “Maybe we’ll be able to find out.”
8
Ttomalss was happily busy. Not only did he have endless work to do on his stint in the Reich (a stint that had only seemed endless), but his long experiment with Kassquit had entered a new and fascinating phase. “Now that you have made the acquaintance of these Tosevites through electronic messages and by telephone, would you be interested in meeting them in person?” he asked.
“No, superior sir,” Kassquit answered at once, “or at least not yet.”
His Tosevite hatchling perched awkwardly on the chair across the desk from his own. Not only was it the wrong shape for her posterior, but it was also too small. Ttomalss remembered when she could hardly even climb up into it-he remembered when she’d hardly been able to do anything but suck up nutrient fluid, make horrid excretions, and yowl. He had to remind himself she wasn’t like that any more. She was, these days, startlingly far from foolish.
