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“Sure enough.” His father nodded. “The female Lizard and her male friend would mate whenever she tasted ginger, and she tasted a lot. After a while-from what I heard over the phone just now, they were best friends before she got the habit-they decided they wanted to stay together all the time. And boy, did they get in trouble when they told their local mayor or whomever it was they told what they wanted.”
“I bet they would,” Jonathan exclaimed. He tried to look at things from the point of view of a Lizard official. Having done so, he whistled softly. “It’s a wonder they didn’t lock ’em in jail and throw away the key.”
“Truth,” his father said in the language of the Race, and added an emphatic cough. “Maybe they figured this pair would be a bad influence even in jail. I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is, the Race let ’em ask for asylum here in the United States, and we’ve granted it. They expect to settle in California, as a matter of fact.”
“We’ve probably got the biggest expatriate community in the country-either Los Angeles or Phoenix,” Jonathan said.
His father laughed again. “Not a whole lot of them move to Boston or Minneapolis,” he agreed. “They don’t much fancy the weather in places like those. I grew up not all that far from Minneapolis. I don’t much fancy the weather there, either.”
Having lived most of his life in Los Angeles, Jonathan had trouble imagining the sort of weather Minneapolis got. He didn’t waste his time trying. Instead, he asked, “May I tell Karen about this? She’ll think it’s funny, too.”
“Sure, go ahead,” his dad answered. He walked across the kitchen and set a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “And thanks for asking before you talked with her, too. This one isn’t classified, but it could’ve been.”
“I know better than to run my mouth, Dad,” Jonathan said righteously. After a moment, though, he admitted, “I did tell her about what you’d found out-but only after those goons grabbed you. Looking back, I don’t suppose I was doing her any big favor.”
“No, I don’t think you were, either,” his father said. “But you were trying to make sure people didn’t get away with what they’d done to the Race. And, incidentally, you were trying to save my neck, so I guess I’ll forgive you.”
“Okay.” Jonathan walked over to the phone. “I’m going to call her now, if that’s okay with you. The people she works with’ll think that’s funny, too.”
Because of his time up on the space station, he still had a couple of quarters left at UCLA. After Karen graduated, she’d landed a job at a firm that adapted Lizard technology to human uses. Jonathan dialed her work number. When she answered, she didn’t go, Borogove Engineering-Karen Culpepper speaking, the way she had the day before. What she did say was, “Hello, Jonathan. How are you today?”
“I’m fine,” he answered automatically. Then he blinked. “How’d you know it was me? I didn’t say anything.”
“We’ve just got a new gadget-we’re sublicensing it from a company up in Canada,” she answered. “It reads phone numbers for calls you get and displays them on a screen.”
“That’s hot,” Jonathan said. “Somebody had a real good idea there. Anyway, the reason I called…” He repeated the story he’d heard from his father.
When he finished, Karen gurgled laughter. “Oh, I do like that,” she said. “That’s funny, Jonathan. I wonder what the Race will think of us from now on. The United States of America, the place where they can dump their perverts.”
“Yeah.” Jonathan laughed, too, but not for long. “You know, that might not be so good. If they start looking at us that way, it’s liable to make them start looking down their snouts at us, too.”
“Maybe you ought to say something about that to your dad,” Karen said.
“I think I will,” he answered. “You still want to go to Helen Yu’s for dinner tonight?”
“Sure,” Karen said. “It’s Friday, so we can do something afterwards, too-we don’t have to get up in the morning. Come get me around half past six, okay? That’ll let me hop in the shower after I get home.”
“Okay. See you at six-thirty. ‘Bye.” He hung up and turned to his father. “Dad…”
“I know what you’re going to want from me.” Sam Yeager pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket. “Twenty bucks do the job?”
“Thanks. That’d be great.” Jonathan took the bill and stuck it in his own pocket. “But that wasn’t the only thing I had in mind.”
His father laughed at him. “That’s a line you’re supposed to use with Karen, not with me.” Jonathan’s ears burned. Sometimes his dad could be very crude. Sam Yeager went on, “I’ll bite. What’s so important besides money?”
“Something Karen said,” Jonathan answered, and explained her reaction to what the Race might think about America sheltering the two Lizards who wanted to get married.
“That is interesting,” his father said. “But we’re a free country, and we keep getting freer a little bit at a time. If we can start giving our own Negroes a fair shake, I expect we’ll be able to find room for a few Lizards who do strange things. The Race already thinks we’re too free for our own good.”
“All right,“ Jonathan said. “If you’re not going to worry about it, I won’t, either.”
“I expect you’ve got other things on your mind right now, anyway,” his dad said. Jonathan did his best to look innocent. His father laughed some more, so his best probably wasn’t very good.
He pulled up in front of Karen’s house at six-thirty on the dot. Since they were engaged, he could even give her a quick kiss in front of her parents. When they got to Helen Yu’s, on Rosecrans near Western, only a couple of spaces in the lot were empty. Jonathan grabbed one. Yu’s was one of the oldest and most popular Chinese restaurants in Gardena-actually, just outside the city limits.
They ate egg-flower soup and sweet-and-sour pork ribs and chow mein and crunchy noodles and drank tea, something neither of them did outside a Chinese restaurant. After a while, Karen said, “I wonder what Liu Mei would think of the food here.”
“She’d probably say it was good,” Jonathan replied. “I don’t know how Chinese she’d think it was.” That question had occurred to him before. He’d sensibly kept his mouth shut about it. When Liu Mei visited the States with her mother, he’d had something of a crush on her. Karen had known it, too, and hadn’t been very happy about it. But now that she’d asked the question, he could safely answer it.
After fortune cookies and almond cookies, Jonathan paid for dinner. They went out to the car. His arm slipped around Karen’s waist. She leaned against him. “What time is it?” she asked.
Jonathan looked at his watch. “A little past eight,” he answered. “Next show at the drive-in starts at 8:45. We can do that, if you feel like it.”
“Sure,” Karen said, so Jonathan drove east on Rosecrans to Vermont and then south past Artesia to the drive-in. It wasn’t very crowded. The movie-a thriller about the ginger trade set in Marseille before it had gone up in radioactive fire-had been there for a couple of weeks, and would be closing soon. Jonathan didn’t mind. He found a spot well away from most of the other cars, under a light pole with a dead lamp.
Karen snickered. “How much of the movie are we going to watch?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “We’ll find out. Shall I go get some Cokes?”
“Sure,” she said. “Don’t bother with candy or popcorn, though-not for me, anyway. I’m pretty full.”
“Okay. Me, too. Be right back.” Jonathan got out of the car and went over to the concession stand. When he returned to the car with the sodas, he found Karen sitting in the back seat. His hopes rose. They probably wouldn’t see a whole lot of the film. He slid in beside her. “Here.” He handed her one of the Cokes. “We’d better be careful not to spill these later.”
She looked at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, which made both of them laugh so hard, they almost spilled the Cokes then.
They did pay some attention to the first few minutes of the movie, but even then they were paying a lot more attention to each other. Jonathan put his arm around Karen. She snuggled against him. He never did figure out which of them started the first kiss. Whichever one it was, the kiss went on and on. Karen put a hand on the back of his neck to pull him to her.
He rubbed her breasts through the fabric of her blouse. She made a noise deep in her throat-almost a growl. Thus encouraged, he undid two buttons of the blouse and reached inside the cup of her bra. Her flesh was soft and smooth and warm.
Before very long, her blouse and bra were off. Now that they were en-gaged, there didn’t seem to be much point to the stop-and-start games they’d played while they were dating. She rubbed him, too, through his chinos. He hoped he wouldn’t explode.
He slid his hand under her skirt to the joining of her legs. “Oh, God, Jonathan,” she whispered as he stroked her.
