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“Probably.” Barbara looked poised to say something else on the same subject, but a crash from the kitchen distracted her. “Oh, God!” she exclaimed. “What have those two gone and done now?” She hurried away to find out.
“Something where we’ll need to sweep up the pieces,” Sam answered, not that that counted for much in the way of prophecy. He got up from his chair and followed Barbara.
He was in the living room, halfway between the study and the kitchen, when he heard a door slam in the back part of the house. He started to laugh. So did Barbara, though he wasn’t sure she was actually amused. “Those little scamps,” she said. “There they’ll be, pretending as hard as they can that they’re innocent.”
“They’re learning,” Yeager said. “Any kid will do that kind of thing, till his folks put a stop to it. And we’re the only folks Mickey and Donald have.”
The shattered remains of what had been a serving bowl lay all over the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Barbara clucked in dismay at the size of the mess. Then she clucked again. “That bowl was in the dish drainer,” she said. “They’re growing like weeds, but I don’t think they’re big enough to reach it, not since I shoved it back sideways against the wall there.”
Sam examined the scene of the crime. “No chair pushed up against the counter,” he said musingly. “I wonder if one of them stood on the other one’s back. That would be interesting-it would show they’re really starting to cooperate with each other.”
“Now if only they’d start cooperating to clean up the messes they make. But that would be too much to ask for, wouldn’t it?” Barbara rolled her eyes. “Sometimes it’s too much to ask for from Jonathan, or even from someone else I might mention.”
“I haven’t got the faintest idea who-whom-you’re talking about,” Sam said. Barbara rolled her eyes again, more extravagantly than before. But when she started for the broom closet, Sam shook his head. “That’ll wait for a couple of minutes, hon. We can’t let Mickey and Donald think they got away with it, or else they’ll try the same thing again tomorrow.”
“You’re right,” Barbara said. “If we read them the riot act, they may wait till day after tomorrow-if we’re lucky, they may.” Sam laughed, though he knew perfectly well she hadn’t been kidding.
Side by side, they walked to the bedroom the two Lizard hatchlings they were raising called their own. Up till a few months before, the door to that bedroom had been latched on the outside almost all the time: the baby Lizards, essentially little wild animals, would have torn up the house without even knowing what they were doing. Now they know some of what they’re doing, and they still tear up the house, Sam thought. Is that an improvement?
He opened the door. Mickey and Donald stood against the far wall. If they could have disappeared altogether, they looked as if they would have done it. Even Donald, bigger and more rambunctious than his (her?) brother (sister?), seemed abashed, which didn’t happen very often.
Yeager held up a piece of the broken bowl. By the way the hatchlings cringed, he might have been showing a couple of vampires a crucifix. “No, no!” he said in a loud, ostentatiously angry voice. “Don’t play with dishes! Are you ever going to play with dishes again?”
Both baby Lizards shook their heads. They’d learned the gesture from Barbara and Jonathan and him; they didn’t know the one the Race used. Neither one of them said anything. They didn’t talk much, though they understood a startling amount. Human babies picked up language much faster. The Lizards would have been amazed that the hatchlings were talking at all. Yeager chuckled under his breath. Barbara and I, we’re bad influences, he thought.
Though behind in language, Mickey and Donald were miles ahead of human toddlers in every aspect of physical development. They’d hatched able to run around and catch food for themselves, and they’d grown like weeds since: evolution making sure not so many things were able to catch them. They were already well on their way toward their full adult size.
Sam remained a towering figure, though, and used his height and deep, booming voice to good advantage. “You’d better not go messing with Mommy Barbara’s china,” he roared, “or you’ll be in big, big trouble. Have you got that?” The young Lizards nodded. They had a pretty good notion of what trouble meant, or at least that it was a good thing to avoid. Yeager nodded at them. “All right, then,” he said. “You behave yourselves, you hear?”
Mickey and Donald both nodded some more. Satisfied he’d put the fear of God in them-at least till the next time-Sam let it go at that. He didn’t spank them save as a very last resort. He hadn’t spanked Jonathan much, either… and Jonathan hadn’t had such formidable teeth with which to defend himself.
“Maybe the Lizards have the right idea about bringing up their babies,” Barbara said as she and Sam went up the hall.
“What? Except for making sure they don’t kill themselves or one another, leaving them pretty much alone till they’re three or four years old?” Sam said. “It’d be less work, yeah, but we’ve got a big head start on civilizing them.”
“We’ve got a big head start on exhaustion, is what we’ve got,” Barbara said. “We were a lot younger when we did this with Jonathan, and there was only one of him, and he’s human.”
“Pretty much so,” Sam agreed, and his wife snorted. He went on, “The one I take off my hat to is the Lizard who raised Kassquit. He had to be mommy and daddy both, give her attention all the time, clean up her messes-for years. That’s dedication to your research.”
“It wasn’t fair to her, though,” Barbara said. “You’ve talked a lot about how strange she is.”
“Well, she is strange,” Yeager said, “and no two ways about it. But I don’t think she’s nearly as strange as she might have been, if you know what I mean. In the scheme of things, she might have been a lot squirrellier than just wishing she were a Lizard. And”-he lowered his voice; his own conscience was far from clear-“God only knows we’re going to raise a couple of squirrelly hatchlings.”
“We’ll learn from them.” Barbara had a lot of pure scholar left in her. “The Lizards have learned a lot from Kassquit,” Sam answered. “I wonder if she thanks them for it.” But he didn’t wonder. He knew she did. If Mickey and Donald ended up thanking him, maybe he’d be able to look at himself in a mirror. Maybe.
2
When Monique Dutourd had fled down into the bomb shelter below her brother’s flat, Marseille, like all of France, had belonged to the Greater German Reich. She and Pierre and his lover, Lucie, and everyone else in the shelter had had to dig their way out, too, when they ran low on food and water.
She wished they’d been able to stay longer. She might have avoided the bout of nausea and vomiting that had wracked her. But she was better now, and her hair hadn’t fallen out, as had happened to so many who’d been closer to the bomb the Lizards dropped on her city. Of course, tens of thousands who’d been closer still were no longer among the living.
But those who survived were once more citizens of the Republique Francaise. Monique had been a girl when France surrendered to Germany, and only a couple of years older than that when the Lizards drove the Nazis and their puppets in Vichy away from Marseille. But when the fighting ended, France had returned to German hands, and the Germans hadn’t bothered with ruling through puppets in the south any more.
Now Monique could walk through the outskirts of Marseille without worrying about SS men. If that wasn’t a gift from God, she didn’t know what was. She could even think about looking for a university position in Roman history again, and if she got one she would be able to say whatever she pleased about the Germanic invaders who’d helped bring down the Roman Empire.
“Hello, sweetheart!” A man waved to her from behind the table on which he’d set up his wares. “Interested in anything I’ve got?”
He looked to be selling military gear the Germans who’d survived the explosive-metal bombing of Marseille had left behind
when they’d been required to make their way back to the Reich. By the way he tugged at his ratty trousers, that junk might not have been what he’d been trying to interest her in.
Since she wanted no more of him than she did of his junk, she stuck her nose in the air and kept walking. He laughed, not a bit abashed, and asked the next woman he saw the same not quite lewd question.
As Monique drew closer to the region the bomb had wrecked, she saw an enormous banner: DOWN BUT NOT OUT. She smiled, liking that. France had been down a long time-longer than ever before in her history, perhaps-but she was on her feet again now, even if shakily.
A lot of Lizards were on the streets of Marseille-the streets on the fringes of town, the streets that hadn’t been melted to slag by a temperature on the same order as those found in the sun. Returned French independence was one of the prices the Lizards had extracted from the Nazis in exchange for accepting their surrender. Monique hoped it wasn’t the only, or even the largest, price the Race had extracted from the Reich.
Back when Marseille belonged to the Germans, a lot of the Lizards who visited the city had been furtive characters. They’d come to buy ginger and often to sell drugs humans found entertaining. Monique had no doubt a lot of them were still here for those purposes. But they didn’t have to be furtive any more. Nowadays, they were the ones who propped up French independence. What policeman would want to give them any trouble?
Even more to the point, what policeman would have the nerve to give them trouble? They didn’t occupy France, as the Germans had. They didn’t carry away everything movable, as the doryphores — Colorado beetles-in field-gray had. But France wasn’t strong enough to stand on her own even against the battered, enfeebled, radioactive Reich. So the Lizards had to prop up the new Fourth Republic. And, of course, they had to be listened to. Of course.
Monique turned a corner and found what she was looking for: a little square where farmers down from the hills around town sold their cheeses and vegetables and smoked and salted meats to the survivors of the bombing for the most bloodthirsty prices they could extort. “How much for your haricots verts? ” she asked a peasant with a battered cloth cap on his head, stubble on his cheeks and chin, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
