Second Contact (64 page)

“Obviously, there is more concern where cell growth is rapid,” Slomikk said. “We have few data to suggest how urgent that concern should be. We, unlike the Big Uglies, have been sensible enough to minimize exposure of the vulnerable to radiation.” He hesitated. “Or we have until now, at any rate. I may have to discuss with Veffani the wisdom of moving gravid females out of this area until such time as they have laid their eggs.”

One more notion you did not think of, but for which you are willing to take the credit,
Ttomalss thought. Again, he had trouble being as angry as he might have. The only gravid female he knew well was Felless. He wondered whether he or Veffani had fertilized the eggs she bore.

Had he been a Tosevite, the question would have been of enormous importance to him. All his own research and most of the Tosevite literature he’d studied convinced him of the truth of that. Back on Home, the question of paternity would scarcely have arisen. During her season, Felless would have mated with any number of males. Here on Tosev 3, Ttomalss found himself in the middle: more than curious, less than concerned.

“You seem to have a knack for posing stimulating questions, Senior Researcher,” Slomikk said. “You are to be congratulated.”

“I thank you,” Ttomalss said, in what he feared were abstracted tones. He’d asked himself an interesting question, and one for which he had as yet no good answer. Ginger seemed certain to make more females here on Tosev 3 become gravid after mating with a smaller number of males, or perhaps with only one, than happened back on Home. There were more circumstances in which that could make important who the father was: if he’d given the female ginger to induce her to mate with him, for instance, or if she’d taken credit from his account in exchange for tasting ginger and becoming sexually receptive.

Ttomalss sighed. “This world is doing its best to change us, no matter how much we are in the habit of resisting change.”

“I agree. You are not the first to raise this notion, of course,” Slomikk said. “Even creating embassies and reviving the title of ambassador was new and strange, for the Race has needed neither embassies nor ambassadors these past tens of thousands of years.”

“Forcing us to revive the old is one thing,” Ttomalss said. “It is, in itself, not a small thing. But we have had to respond to so much that is new both from the Tosevites and among ourselves, that the revivals pale to insignificance by comparison.”

“Again, I agree. I wish I could disagree. Too much change is not good for a male, or for a female, either,” the science officer said. “Change swift enough to be perceptible in the course of an individual’s lifetime is too much. This is one of the reasons the Race so seldom goes conquering: to spare the large majority of individuals from ever experiencing the stress of drastic change. It is not the only reason, but it is not the least of reasons. Indeed, we have endured such stress here on Tosev 3 better than I thought we could.”

“Now there is an interesting observation,” Ttomalss said. “The Big Uglies have been in the throes of drastic change for generations. Do you suppose that is one of the reasons they are so strange?”

“I do not know, but it strikes me as something worth investigating,” Slomikk said. “You would, I suppose, have to compare their present behavior with the way they acted before change was a daily occurrence in their lives.”

“So I would,” Ttomalss said. “As best I can tell, they have always behaved badly. Whether they have behaved badly in different ways of late . . . may be worth learning.”

Thanks to his Army security clearance and his connections with Lizard expatriates and exiles, Sam Yeager had access to as much sensitive computer data as any but a handful of men. Some of those data were on the USA’s computers, others on those that belonged to the Race. The only place where the separate streams flowed together was inside his head. That suited him fine.

Every time he had to switch from a computer built by the Race to one made in the USA, he was reminded of the gap in both technology and engineering that still existed.
Apples and oranges,
he thought.
The Lizards have had a lot more practice at this than we have.

He shrugged. Back before the Lizards came, he’d never imagined one computer would fit on his desk, let alone two. Back before the Lizards came, he’d scarcely imagined computing machines at all. If he had, he’d imagined them the size of a building and half mechanical, half electronic. That was about as far as science-fiction writers had seen by 1942.

Putting on artificial fingerclaws to deal with the keyboard of the Lizard machine, he grinned. He could see a lot further now. Had he really been a Lizard, he could have done most of his work on their machine by talking to it rather than typing. Its voice-recognition system, though, wasn’t set up to deal with a human’s accent. Voice commands sometimes went spectacularly wrong, so he avoided them. The computer didn’t care who typed into it.

Because he was an expert on the Race, he was one of the few humans in the independent countries allowed even limited access to the Lizards’ vast data network; in his case, the connection was wired through the Race’s consulate in downtown Los Angeles. He admired that network tremendously, but sometimes—often—felt going through it for information made looking for a needle in a haystack seem simple by comparison.

That was especially true because he had access to more of the data network than the Lizards at the consulate or back in Cairo thought he did. Some of his friends among the former prisoners who’d decided to stay in the United States after the fighting ended were clever with computers. They’d forked—their idiom—the programs the consulate had given him to let him range more widely than Lizard officialdom thought it was permitting. They reckoned that a good joke on their own kind. Yeager reckoned it highly useful.

The Lizards had never stopped discussing the attack on the colonization fleet. The topic filled several fora—the best translation Sam could make. He wasn’t supposed to be able to read what was said in those fora, but he could. That topic interested him, too. If he could pin the crime on the Greater German
Reich
or the Soviet Union, the Lizards would punish the guilty party—preferably with a two-by-four—and life could finally get back to normal.

A name—Vesstil—caught his notice. “I knew a Vesstil once upon a time,” he muttered, and noted down the number that accompanied the Lizard’s name. Then he had to take off the fingerclaw so he could use the American-made computer that took up twice as much desk space as its Lizardly counterpart. It didn’t run as well, either, despite using technology borrowed—or, more accurately, stolen—from the Race. But one of the things that computer stored was a list of all the Lizard prisoners the United States had captured.

Sure enough, there was Vesstil’s name. And, sure enough, the number attached to it matched that of the Lizard now holding forth about the attack on the colonization fleet. This was the shuttlecraft pilot who’d flown Straha down to the USA when the shiplord decided to defect. Yeager remembered that he had repatriated himself not long after the fighting ended.

It is unlike the Big Uglies to keep secrets so well,
Vesstil had written.
Even with their safety hanging in the balance, it is unlike them. This argues something unusual even for Tosevites went on in relation to this attack.

Another Lizard had answered,
Interesting speculation, but useless to us,
and the discussion had drifted on to other things.

“I’m not sure it is useless,” Sam muttered, deliberately using English to get himself out of the chattering among the Lizards in which he’d been immersed. In fact, he’d been collecting examples of unusual actions by the Germans and Russians in the hope that one of them would lead to more clues he could use to pin down the guilty party. It hadn’t happened yet, and didn’t look as if it would happen any time soon, but that didn’t mean he’d abandoned hope.

Yeager also collected examples of strange American behavior: those were easier for him to come by and let him hone his analytical skills, though they had nothing to do with the colonization fleet. He wondered why one of the spacemen who flew out of Kitty Hawk had got a black mark by his name for getting too curious about the growing U.S. space station.

He suspected he could have found out with a couple of phone calls, but playing detective through the American computer network gave him more practice at manipulating such creations, so he went at it that way. Back in the bush leagues, he’d always asked for curves from the batting-practice pitchers because he’d had more trouble hitting them than fastballs.

He grumbled as he waited for the human-made computer to spit out the information he needed. It was slower than the one the Lizards made, and the U.S. computer network, a creation of the past five years, far smaller and more fragmented than the one the Lizards took for granted.

As things turned out, he had to make the phone calls anyhow, because the network let him down. He really did have U.S. security clearances—unlike the ones the Lizards had flanged up for him for a lark—but they didn’t seem to be high enough to take him where he needed to go. They should have been, or so he thought, but they weren’t.

He wondered what that meant. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have anything to do with the attack on the colonization fleet. The space station hadn’t been involved in that; the Lizards had detected a signal from a submarine that promptly submerged, and then somebody’s nasty chunk of hardware had gone into action. Somebody’s. Whose? He had no more proof than the Lizards did.

Then he stopped worrying about it for a while, because Barbara came home with the trunk of the car full of groceries, and he had to help haul them into the house. She put away the food that went into the refrigerator, he what went into the pantries. About halfway through the job, Barbara looked over to him and said, “This is all for Jonathan, you know. There wasn’t enough room in the car for a week’s worth of groceries for him and us both. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll have to go back to the store for some food for us.”

“You expect me to laugh and think that’s a joke,” Sam said. “Trouble is, I’ve seen the way the kid eats. I believe you, or close enough, anyhow.” He put a couple of cans of tomatoes on a shelf, then said, “Karen seems happier when she comes around here these days.”

“Of course she does,” his wife answered at once. “Liu Mei is five thousand miles away now. I hope she and her mother have made it back to China all right, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Karen hoped their ship sank. Hand me that sack of oranges, would you? They’re nice and ripe.”

They were just finishing when the telephone rang. Barbara answered it, then called out for Sam. He took the handpiece from her and spoke: “Yeager.”

“Good morning, Major.” The crisp voice on the other end of the line belonged to Colonel Edwin Webster, Sam’s immediate superior. “You are to report in tomorrow at 0800: no working out of the house. We have a visiting fireman who wants to see you. He’s asked for you by name, and he’s not somebody who’ll take no for an answer. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir: report in at 0800,” Yeager said in martyred tones. He much preferred working from his home, which, thanks to his personal library and his computer connection, he got to do most of the time. “Who is this fellow, anyway?” he asked, but Webster had hung up on hearing him acknowledge the order.

Barbara was properly sympathetic. Jonathan, when he got home from classes, wasn’t. “I have to go in at eight o’clock three mornings a week this term,” he said.

“That’s because you’re young—and if you don’t watch the way you talk, you won’t get much older,” Sam told him. With the heartlessness of youth, Jonathan laughed.

Fortified by two cups of coffee, Yeager drove downtown the next morning. He poured himself another cup as soon as he’d reported to Colonel Webster, who looked disgustingly wide awake himself. Sam repeated the question he’d asked the day before. Webster didn’t answer it this time, either.

Before long, though, Sam found out. Colonel Webster’s adjutant, a harried-looking captain named Markowitz, came into his cubicle and said, “Sir, if you’ll come with me . . . ?” Yeager put down his pen and forgot about the meaningless piece of busywork he was doing. He got up and followed Captain Markowitz.

In the office to which the adjutant led him sat a three-star general smoking a cigarette with sharp, savage puffs. The general waited till Markowitz had gone and closed the door behind him, then stubbed out the butt and impaled Yeager with a glare that held him in place as a specimen pin held a preserved butterfly to a collecting board. “You have been poking your nose into places where it has no business going, Major,” he rasped. “That will cease, or your military career will, forthwith. Have you got that?”

“Sir?” Sam said in astonishment. He’d expected a visiting fireman who wanted to know something special about the Lizards, not one who aimed to carve chunks off him and roast them over the fire. And he didn’t even know what he was supposed to have done.

Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay didn’t keep him in suspense for long: “You have been snooping about the space station. Whatever may be going on there, it is none of your goddamn business. You are not authorized to have that information. If you try to get it from us again, you will regret it for the rest of your days. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Major Yeager?”

“Sir, I understand what you’re saying,” Yeager answered carefully, “but I don’t understand why you’re saying it.”

“
Why
is not your business, Major,” LeMay said. “I’ve come a long way to give you that order, and I expect to have it obeyed. Is there any danger I am laboring under a misapprehension?” His tone warned that there had better not be. He lit another cigarette and started smoking it down to a nub.

“No, sir,” Sam said, the only thing he could say under the circumstances. If LeMay didn’t want him taking a look at the space station, he wouldn’t . . . or he wouldn’t get caught again, anyhow. Why Lieutenant General LeMay was so vehement about the matter, he couldn’t guess—but LeMay wasn’t in the mood to answer questions.