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That stung. It also held some truth, more than Sam Yeager really cared to acknowledge. Refusing to acknowledge it, he went on as he had intended: “We were advanced enough to fight you to a standstill. You recognized some of us as equals, but you never truly meant it, not down in your livers, not even when we began to get ahead of you technologically. As long as we could not get out of our own solar system, you had some justification for this. But since we are talking here in Sitneff…”
“Everything you have said is a truth. It makes you more dangerous, not less. Why should we not try to rid ourselves of you while we still have the chance? If we do not, how long will it be before you try to get rid of us?”
There was the rub. The Race had always seen humans as nuisances. Now it saw them as dangerous nuisances. “We will fight to defend ourselves,” Sam warned.
“That is not the issue,” Atvar said. “Any species will fight to defend itself. You will fight to aggrandize yourselves. You will, but you will not do it at our expense.”
“Was the conquest fleet fighting in self-defense?” Sam asked acidly.
“In the end, it certainly was,” the fleetlord said, and Sam laughed in surprise. Atvar went on, “We had-and we paid for-a mistaken notion of where you Tosevites were in terms of technology. We knew as much before we landed on your planet. But if you had been what we thought you were, would you not agree you would have been better off if we had conquered you?”
Had the Lizards brought Earth from the twelfth century to the late twentieth in a couple of generations… “Materially, no one could possibly say we would not have been,” Sam answered.
“There. You see?” Atvar said.
Sam held up a hand. “Excuse me, Fleetlord, but again I had not finished. The one thing you would have taken away from us forever is our freedom. Some of us would say that is too high a price to pay.”
“Then some of you are fools,” Atvar said with acid of his own. “You had freedom to murder one another, starve, and die of diseases you did not know how to cure. It is easy to speak of freedom when your belly is full and you are healthy. When you are starving and full of parasites, it is only a word, and one without much meaning.”
That held some truth-more, again, than Yeager cared to admit. But just because it held some truth did not mean it was a truth. Sam said, “The Greeks invented democracy-snoutcounting, if you like-more than fifteen hundred of our years before your probe came to Tosev 3: more than three thousand of yours. They were full of diseases. They were hungry a lot of the time. They fought among themselves. But they did it anyway. They believed-and a lot of us have always believed since-that no one has the right to tell anyone else what to do just because of who his sire was.”
“Snoutcounting.” As usual, Atvar filled the word with scorn. “My opinion remains unchanged: it is nothing to be proud of. And is this vaunted freedom of yours worth having when it is only the freedom to starve or to die or to impose your superstition on others by force?”
“Who brought reverence for the spirits of Emperors past to Tosev 3?” Yeager inquired.
“That is not superstition. That is truth,” Atvar said primly, sounding as certain as a missionary evangelizing an islander in the South Seas.
“Evidence would be nice,” Sam said.
The fleetlord winced, but he answered, “We at least have the evidence of a long and prosperous history. Your superstitions have nothing whatever-nothing but fanaticism, I should say.”
“We are a stubborn lot,” Sam admitted.
“You are indeed.” Atvar used an emphatic cough.
Sam said, “What you do not seem to understand is that we are also stubborn in the cause of freedom. Suppose you had sent the conquest fleet right after your probe and conquered us. You could have done it. No one would say anything else, not for a moment. Suppose you had, as I say. Do you not think that, once we learned about modern technology from you, we would have risen to regain our independence?”
He had often seen Atvar angry and sardonic. He had hardly ever seen him horrified. This was one of those times. The fleetlord recoiled like a well-bred woman who saw a mouse (which reminded Sam that the Lizards had yet to exterminate the escaped rats). Visibly gathering himself, Atvar said, “What a dreadful idea!” He used another emphatic cough. “You realize you may not have done your species a favor with this suggestion?”
He could only mean Sam had made humans seem more dangerous, which made a preventive war more likely. Sam wanted to scowl; that wasn’t what he’d had in mind. He held his face steady. Atvar had probably had enough experience with humans to be able to read expressions. Picking his words with care, Sam said, “Whatever happens to us is also likely to happen to you. You know this is a truth, Fleetlord.”
“I know that whatever happens now is likely to be better than what would happen in a hundred years, and much better than what would happen in two hundred.” Atvar sighed. “I am sorry, Ambassador, but that is how things look out of my eye turrets.”
“I am sorry, too.” Sam used an emphatic cough of his own.
“Will it be war?” Jonathan Yeager asked his father.
Sam Yeager shrugged. “I don’t know yet. But that’s about as much as I can tell you.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not right. I can tell you one other thing: it doesn’t look good right now.”
“Everything seemed so fine when we got here,” Jonathan said mournfully.
“I know,” his father said. “But that we got here… It’s just made the Lizards more nervous the longer they think about it. Now we can reach them. We can hit them where they live-literally. They’re starting to figure that if they don’t move to get rid of us now, they’ll never have another chance. They worry we’ll have the drop on them if they wait.”
Jonathan looked out the window of his father’s room. There was Sitneff, the town he’d come to take for granted, with the greenish-blue sky and the dry hills out beyond the boxy buildings. It had been a comfortable place for Lizards to live since the Pleistocene, since before modern humans replaced Neanderthals. A female of the Race from those days wouldn’t have much trouble fitting into the city as it was now. A Neanderthal woman dropped into Los Angeles might have rather more.
With a distinct effort of will, Jonathan pulled back to the business at hand, saying, “They may be right.”
“Yeah, I know. It doesn’t do us any good-just the opposite, in fact,” his father said. “But if they do attack us, Earth isn’t the only planet that’ll suffer. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”
“Do you know for a fact that we’ve sent ships to Rabotev 2 and Halless 1?” As he usually did, Jonathan used the Race’s names for the stars humans called Epsilon Eridani and Epsilon Indi. “Do you know that we’ve sent more ships here?”
“Know for a fact? No.” Sam Yeager shook his head again. “The Admiral Peary hasn’t got news of any other launchings except the Molotov. If the Lizards have, they aren’t talking. But…” He sighed heavily, then repeated it: “But…” The one ominous word seemed a complete sentence. “If
we did launch warships, we’d be damn fools to let the Lizards know we’d done it. If war does start, they’re liable to get some horrendous surprises. And I have no idea-none at all-what the Russians and the Japanese and even the Germans might be able to do by now. There may be a fleet behind the Molotov. I just don’t know.”
“Madness,” Jonathan said. “After you had your audience with the Emperor, I thought everything was going to fall into place. We’d have peace, and nobody would have to worry about things for a while.” He chuckled unhappily. “Naive, wasn’t I?”
“Well, if you were, you weren’t the only one, because I felt the same way,” his father said. “And I really don’t know what queered the deal.”
“That experiment back on Earth, whatever it was?”
“I guess so,” his father said. “I’d like things a lot better if I knew what was going on there, though. The Lizards who do aren’t talking.” He paused to make sure the Race’s listening devices were suppressed, then spoke in a low voice: “The Emperor wouldn’t even tell Kassquit.”
Jonathan whistled softly. “Kassquit is as loyal to the Empire as the day is long. Or do the Lizards think she’ll spill everything she knows to Frank in pillow talk?” He threw his hands in the air to show how unlikely he thought that was.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know, dammit,” Sam Yeager said. “That’s possible-if the Lizards know us well enough to know what pillow talk is. But they do know we can bug their phone lines here, remember. That may be why Risson kept quiet. I can’t say for sure. Nobody human on Home can say for sure. That worries me, too.”
“Do they have any ideas on the Admiral Peary?” Jonathan asked.
“I asked Lieutenant General Healey.” His father’s mouth twisted, as if to say he considered that above and beyond the call of duty. “He hasn’t found anything yet, but there’s a hell of a lot of Lizard signal traffic between Earth and Home to sift through and sometimes try to decrypt, so who knows what he’ll come up with once he does some real digging?”
