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“I didn’t mean it like that, darn it,” Jonathan said. “Now she’s thinking about coming down here to see what life among the Big Uglies is like, and all she ever wanted to do before was stay on the starship and pretend she was a Lizard.”
“And what would she do if she did come down here?” Karen demanded. “Whatever it was, would she do it with you?”
Jonathan’s ears heated. That had nothing to do with the weather, even though the day, like a lot of allegedly early-autumn days in Los Angeles, was well up into the eighties. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s research, is what it is.”
“Is that what you call it?” Karen said. “How would you like it if I were doing research like that?” She laced the word with scorn.
And Jonathan knew he wouldn’t like it for hell. He took a deep breath. “There’s one way that wouldn’t happen, even if Kassquit did come down to Earth,” he said.
“Sure there is-if she landed in Moscow,” Karen said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Jonathan said. “Not even close. She knows about marriage-I don’t think she really understands it, but she knows what it means. That’s why”-he blushed again-“that’s why my dad wasn’t up there being experimental, if you know what I mean.”
“And so?” Karen said.
“And so…” Jonathan plunged: “And so, if I were engaged to you, it wouldn’t be the same as married, but it would be on the way to the same thing, and she’d see that it meant she and I couldn’t do, uh, anything any more.” He brought the words out in a quick, almost desperate rush.
Karen’s eyes widened-widened more, in fact, than Jonathan had ever seen them do. Ever so slowly, she said, “Are you asking me to marry you?”
“Yeah.” Jonathan nodded, feeling very much as if he’d just gone off the high board without bothering to see if there was any water in the pool. “I guess that kind of is what I’m doing. Will you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.” Karen shook her head, not in rejection but in bemusement. “If you’d asked me before you went up to the starship the last time, I’d’ve said yes in a minute. Now…? Now it sounds more like you’re asking me to marry you to give you an excuse not to fool around with Kassquit than for any other reason, and I don’t think I like that very much.”
“That isn’t why,” Jonathan protested, though it had sounded like why to him, too. He did his best to make it sound like something else: “It was the only way I could think of to tell you I’m sorry about what happened up there and that there isn’t anybody but you I want to spend my life with.” His mother wouldn’t have approved of his ending a sentence with a preposition. Right this minute, he didn’t care whether his mother would have approved or not.
And this time he’d said the right thing, or something close to it. Karen’s expression softened. “That’s… very sweet, Jonathan,” she said. “I’ve thought for a long time that we might one day. Like I say, I used to like the idea-but things changed when you went up there. I’m going to have to sort that out.”
“We weren’t engaged or anything.” Jonathan thought about adding that he’d used some of the things Karen had taught him with Kassquit. But, not being of a suicidal bent, he didn’t.
“No, not really,” Karen said, “but we were as close as makes no difference-I thought so, anyway.”
That had teeth, sharp ones. Jonathan considered explaining again how he’d done everything he’d done with Kassquit purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Again, he thought better of it. What he did say was just as inflammatory, though he didn’t realize it at the time: “Come to think of it, maybe you’d better not marry me. It might not be safe for you.”
“What do you mean, not safe?” Karen asked. “I know you’re crazy, but I never thought you were especially dangerous.”
“Thanks-I think.” He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t told her about this when he found out about it after he got back from the starship. He hadn’t told anybody. The son of an officer, he knew secrets could leak if you started running your mouth. But he was afraid his father had disappeared because of what he knew. Didn’t that mean he, Jonathan, had an obligation to make sure the secret couldn’t be wiped out? And Karen could be counted on. After all, she knew about the hatchlings, didn’t she?
The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. His father had insisted on that for as long as he could remember. Here as other places, his old man looked to have a point.
“You still haven’t told me what you meant,” Karen reminded him.
“Well…” Jonathan did his best to temporize. “I’ve got some idea of why my dad disappeared, and it has to do with something he knew and something he told me.”
“Something he knew?” Karen echoed, while people worrying about nothing but classes and lunch walked back and forth only a few feet away. “Something he knew that he wasn’t supposed to, you mean? Sounds like something out of a spy story.”
“I know it does. I’m sorry,” Jonathan answered. “You’re liable to be in trouble just because you know me. I’m sorry.” He realized he was repeating himself. He also wondered how the devil the conversation had got so far away from his proposal so fast.
Karen said, “You know something?” That was just an ordinary question; she waited for him to shake his head before going on, “You’re going to have to tell me now. If you want me to marry you, I mean. You can’t have that kind of great big secret from somebody you’re married to.”
“Hey! That’s not fair. You don’t even know what you’re asking for,” Jonathan protested. “You don’t know how much trouble you might get into, either. Remember the guy who tried to firebomb our house? As far as we could find out, nothing ever happened to him.”
Karen only folded her arms across her chest-across that ridiculously unconcealing halter top-and waited. She said one word: “Talk.”
And Jonathan saw that, having come this far, he couldn’t do anything but talk. He leaned close to her so none of the happy, unconcerned students going by would hear anything out of the ordinary. Telling what he knew didn’t take long. When he was done, he said, “There. Are you satisfied?”
“My God,” Karen said quietly. “Oh, my God.” She look
ed around the bright, sun-splashed UCLA campus as if she’d never seen it before. “What do we do now?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to work out,” Jonathan replied. “I still don’t have any answers I like. And speaking of answers, you still owe me one for the question I asked you a little while ago.”
“What? Oh, that.” Karen’s voice remained far away. “I’ll worry about that later, Jonathan. This is more important.”
Jonathan wondered if he ought to be insulted. He wondered if he ought to get angry. He discovered he couldn’t do either. The trouble was, he agreed with her.
Mordechai Anielewicz had imagined any number of things in his search for his family. Having a German along, though, a German who was interested in helping him, had never once crossed his mind. But Johannes Drucker had a missing family, too. Anielewicz had always had trouble imagining Germans as human beings. How could they be human and have done what they’d done? But if a man desperately searching for his wife and sons and daughter wasn’t a human being, what was he?
What was funny, in a horrid, macabre sort of way, was that what Drucker had thought about Jews pretty much mirrored what he himself had thought about Nazis. “I never worried my head about the enemies of the Reich,” he told Mordechai one evening. “If my leaders said they were enemies, I went out and dealt with them. That was my job. I never cared about rights or wrongs till Kathe got in trouble.”
“Nothing like the personal touch.” Anielewicz’s voice was dry.
“You think you’re joking,” the German spaceman said.
“No, dammit, I’m not joking.” Now Mordechai couldn’t help letting some of his anger show. “If every other German had a Jewish grandmother or grandfather, none of that murderous nonsense would have happened.”
Drucker sighed and looked around the little tavern in which they were drinking beer and eating a rather nasty stew. There wasn’t much to see; only the fireplace gave light and heat. “Hard to say you’re wrong,” he admitted, and then laughed without much humor. “Hard to imagine I’m sitting here talking with a Jew. I can’t remember the last time I did that.”
