Part 18 (2/2)

”Her face is like Liu Mei's,” Jonathan said as they got to the car. ”It doesn't show anything.”

”Nope,” Sam agreed, sliding behind the wheel. ”I guess what they say is, you have to learn how to use expressions when you're a baby, or else you don't. Since the Lizards' faces don't move much, the kids they took couldn't do that.” He glanced over at his son. ”Were you just looking at her face?”

Jonathan coughed and spluttered a little, but rallied fast: ”I've seen lots of bare t.i.ts before, Dad. They're not such a big deal for me as they would have been for you when you were my age.”

And that was undoubtedly true. Sam sighed as he started the engine. ”Having 'em out in the open so much takes away some of the thrill, I think,” he said. His son looked at him as if he'd started speaking some language much stranger than that of the Race. So he was: to Jonathan, he was speaking the language of the nostalgic old-timer, a tongue the young would never understand.

Proving as much, Jonathan changed the subject. ”She seems pretty smart,” he said.

”Yeah, she does.” Sam nodded as he got on the southbound freeway for the ride back to Gardena. ”That probably helps her. I bet she'd be a lot crazier if she were stupid.”

”She didn't seem all that crazy to me,” his son said. ”She acts more like a Lizard than a person, yeah, but heck, half my friends do that.” He chuckled.

So did Sam Yeager, but he shook his head while he did it. ”There's a difference. Your friends are acting, as you said.” He'd been married to Barbara for quite a while, and most of the time he automatically kept his grammar clean. ”But Ka.s.squit isn't-acting, I mean. The Race is all she knows. As best I can tell, we're the first Big Uglies she's ever seen face-to-face. We're at least as strange to her as she is to us.”

He watched Jonathan think about that and slowly nod. ”No ordinary person would have come out and talked about, uh, reproduction like that.”

”Well, it would have been surprising, anyhow,” Sam said. ”But she thinks about it the way the Lizards would. She can't help that-they've taught her everything she knows.” He took a hand off the wheel to remove his uniform cap-he'd gone to the consulate in full regalia-and scratch his head. ”Still, she's not made the way they are. She can't even be as old as you are, Jonathan. If she's like anybody else your age, she's going to get urges. I wonder what she does about them.”

”What can she do, up there by herself?” Jonathan asked.

”What anybody by himself, or by herself, can do.” Sam raised an eyebrow. ”Sooner or later, you find out it doesn't grow hair on the palm of your hand.”

That made Jonathan turn red and clam up for the rest of the drive back home. Sam used the quiet to do some thinking of his own. Not only seeing Ka.s.squit, but also listening to her trying so hard to be something she couldn't be, did bring on guilt about Mickey and Donald. No matter how hard he and his family tried to raise them up as people, they would never be human beings, any more than Ka.s.squit could really be a Lizard.

And what would happen when they met Lizards, as they surely would one day? Would they be as confused and dismayed as Ka.s.squit had been at the prospect of talking with a couple of genuine human beings? Probably. He didn't see how they would be able to help it.

It wasn't fair. They hadn't asked to be hatched in an incubator on his service porch. But n.o.body, human or Lizard, had any say about where he got his start in life. Mickey and Donald would have to make the best of it they could, as did everybody else on four worlds. And Sam and his family would have to help.

He hoped he'd stay around to help. Being fifty-seven had a way of putting that kind of thought in his mind. He was in pretty good shape for his age, but every time he shaved in the morning the first glance in the mirror reminded him he wouldn't be here forever. Barbara could take over for him if he went too soon (somehow, contemplating his own death was easier than thinking about hers), and Jonathan, and whomever Jonathan married. He hoped that would be Karen. She was a good kid, and she and Jonathan had been thick as thieves lately.

After a moment, he shook his head. ”Back to business,” he muttered. Business was getting a summary of the conversation Jonathan and he had had with Ka.s.squit down on paper, and adding his impressions to it. He was glad he'd talked with his son. It helped him clarify his own thoughts.

He had to use the human-made computer to draft his report. With the one he'd got from the Lizards, he couldn't print in English, but was stuck with the language of the Race. Ka.s.squit might have found a report in the Lizards' language interesting, but it wouldn't have amused his superiors.

When he finished the report and pressed the key that would print it, a glorified electric typewriter hammered into life. The printer hooked up to the Lizard-built computer was a lot more elegant, using powdered carbon and a skelkw.a.n.k skelkw.a.n.k light to form the characters and images it produced. You needed a powerful magnifier to tell its output was made up of tiny dots and didn't come from a typewriter or even from set type. light to form the characters and images it produced. You needed a powerful magnifier to tell its output was made up of tiny dots and didn't come from a typewriter or even from set type.

He read through the report, made a couple of small corrections in ink, and set it aside. The printer kept humming till he turned it off. He started to turn off the computer, too, but changed his mind. Instead, he hooked himself up to the U.S. network. He hadn't tried visiting the archive that stored signals traffic from the night the colonization fleet was attacked for quite a while. The more he learned about that, the better his chances of nailing the culprit and pa.s.sing what he knew on to the Lizards.

They'll never figure out whether it was the n.a.z.is or the Russians, not on their own they won't, he thought. The Lizards were less naive than they had been when they came to Earth, but humans, long used to cheating one another, still had little trouble deceiving them. And, because the Lizards weren't human, they often missed clues that would have been obvious to a person. he thought. The Lizards were less naive than they had been when they came to Earth, but humans, long used to cheating one another, still had little trouble deceiving them. And, because the Lizards weren't human, they often missed clues that would have been obvious to a person.

”There we go,” Sam muttered, as the name of the archive appeared on his screen. He waited for the table of contents to come up below it, so he could find exactly which transcripts would be most useful to him. The list took its own sweet time appearing; compared to the Race's machine, this one was slow, slow.

Instead of the contents list, he got a blank, dark screen. Pale letters announced, CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.

”You cheap piece of junk,” he snarled, and whacked the side of the case that held the screen. That didn't change the message, of course. It did go a little way toward easing his annoyance. The Lizards' computer worked all the time. The machine made in the USA broke down if he looked at it sideways.

But he was a stubborn man. He wouldn't have spent eighteen years riding trains and buses through every corner of the bush leagues if he hadn't been stubborn. He wouldn't have risen to lieutenant colonel, either, not when he'd joined the Army as a thirty-five-year-old private with full upper and lower dentures. And he wouldn't have got so far with the Lizards, either.

And so, even though he kept swearing under his breath, he patiently reconnected the computer to the network and navigated toward that archive again. This time, he didn't even get the archival name before he lost his connection.

He scowled and stared at the dark screen with the now familiar message on it. ”Junk,” he repeated, but now he sounded less sure whether the fault lay inside his computer. Maybe the chain connecting him to that distant archive-actually, he didn't know how distant it was, only that it existed-had some rusty links in it.

He wondered if he ought to report the problem. He didn't wonder for long, though. While his security clearance was high enough to give him access to that archive, he had no formal need-to-know. n.o.body above him would be happy to find out he'd been snooping around in things that were formally none of his business. The powers that be would frown all the harder because he'd already established a reputation for snooping.

”h.e.l.l with it,” he said, and this time he did turn off the computer. Maybe the simplest explanation was that somebody somewhere had made a tidy profit selling the U.S. government-or would it be the phone company?-some lousy wiring.

He was making himself a bologna sandwich (he'd got sick of ham) when a car stopped in front of the house. The sound of the closing door made him look up from pickles and mayonnaise. A young man he'd never seen before was walking across the lawn toward the front porch. Another one sat in the car, waiting.

The one coming up to the house had his right hand in the pocket of his blue jeans. After somebody had taken some potshots at the house, that triggered an alarm bell in Sam. He hurried to the hutch in the front room and pulled out his . .45.

Barbara came into the front room from the direction of the bedroom. She'd spotted the guy, too, and was going to find out what he wanted. When she saw the automatic in Sam's hands, her eyes opened enormously wide. He used it to motion her away.

Up on the porch came the stranger. Before he could knock, Sam opened the front door and stuck the .45 in his face. ”Take that hand out of your pocket real nice and slow,” he said pleasantly, and then, over his shoulder, ”Honey, call the cops.”

”Sure, Pop, anything you say,” the young man answered. ”You've got the persuader there, all right.” But his hand moved swiftly, not slowly, and had a pistol in it as it cleared his pocket.

He must have thought Yeager would hesitate long enough to let him shoot first. It was the last mistake he ever made. The .45 jerked against Sam's wrist as he fired. The young man went down. He wouldn't get up again, either, not after taking one between the eyes at point-blank range. He kept jerking and twitching, but that was only because his body didn't know he was dead yet.

Tires screaming, the car in which he'd come roared away. Barbara and Jonathan came das.h.i.+ng out at the sound of the shot. ”Thank G.o.d,” Barbara said when she saw Sam standing. She turned away from the corpse on the porch. ”Christ! I haven't seen anything like that since the fighting. The police are on the way.”

”Good. I'll wait for 'em right here,” Sam said.

They arrived a couple of minutes later, lights flas.h.i.+ng, siren yowling. ”What the h.e.l.l happened here?” one of them asked, though he was talking more about why than about what-that was obvious.

”Somebody shot at this house from the street last year, Sergeant,” Yeager answered. He explained what he'd seen and what he'd done, finis.h.i.+ng, ”He tried to draw on me, and I shot him. His pal took off as soon as I did.”

”Okay, Lieutenant Colonel, I've got your side of it,” said the sergeant, who'd been taking notes. He turned to his partner. ”See just what the guy was holding, Clyde.”

”Right.” The other cop used his handkerchief to pick up the weapon. It was a .45 nearly identical to Sam's. Clyde looked up at Yeager. ”He was loaded for bear, all right. Lucky you were, too.” He glanced over at the sergeant. ”If this isn't self-defense, I don't know what the devil it is.”

”A h.e.l.l of a mess on this guy's porch,” the sergeant said. He looked back to Yeager. ”No charges I can see, Lieutenant Colonel. Like Clyde says, this one looks open-and-shut. But don't leave town-we're going to have about a million questions for you, maybe more once we find out who this character is and what he had in mind.”

”If I get orders to go, I'll have to follow them,” Yeager said. ”I've got to report this to my superiors, too.”

”If you do have to leave, let us know where you're going and how long you'll be there,” the police sergeant said. ”And if I was your CO, I'd give you a medal. If you didn't do what needed doing, you wouldn't be able to report to him now, that's for d.a.m.n sure.” He raised an eyebrow. ”You think this guy had anything to do with the shots last year?”

”d.a.m.ned if I know,” Sam answered. ”Maybe we'll be able to find out.”

8.

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