“Well, yes,” Ttomalss said, “but everything that happened before the days of the Empire was a very long time ago for us. What real difference if something happened 103,472 years ago or 104,209? I pick the numbers at random, you understand.”
In an aside, Pierre added, “When Lizards talk about years, cut everything they say in half. They count two for every one of ours, more or less.”
“Thanks. I think I already knew that,” Monique answered. It was still daunting. She tried to imagine keeping more than fifty thousand years of history straight. Maybe Ttomalss had a point after all. Even here on Earth, with only a tenth as much history to worry about, people specialized. She concentrated on Roman history. The faculty at the University of Tours also boasted a historian of pre-Roman (not ancient; that wasn’t a word historians used since the Lizards came) Greece, one who studied medieval western Europe, one who specialized in the history of the Byzantine Empire (which struck even Monique as uselessly arcane), and so on.
Even so, she said, “Knowing the relative order in which things happened is important. Otherwise, you cannot speak of causation in any meaningful sense.”
“Causation?” Her brother gave her a dirty look. “How the devil am I supposed to say that in the Lizards’ language?”
“Figure it out,” Monique told him. “If Ttomalss decides you’re not doing a good job, he’ll ask for a new interpreter, and I won’t be able to do a thing about it.”
Pierre’s expression grew even more forbidding, but he must have man-aged to get the meaning across, for Ttomalss answered, “Yes, you are right about that: sequence and relative chronology must be preserved. Absolute chronology may be less important.”
Monique wouldn’t have said that, but she had less absolute chronology to keep in mind. And she found herself enjoying the give-and-take of the discussion with Ttomalss. The Lizard didn’t think like a human being-and why should he? she thought-but he was a long way from stupid. He had trouble understanding how people worked as individuals, though he tried hard at that, too. When he dealt with groups, he did better.
“I thank you,” he said one day. “I am learning a great deal from you. You are both intelligent and well organized. These traits are less common among Tosevites than I might wish.”
After Pierre translated that, he added a two-word commentary of his own: “Teacher’s pet.”
Monique stuck out her tongue at her brother. She said, “Tell Ttomalss that I thank him and I think he’s very kind.” That was flattery, but flattery with a core of truth. It was also flattery with a core of worry. What exactly was he learning from her besides Roman history? Something that would help the Lizards rule their part of Earth more effectively? Did that make her a traitor to mankind?
Don’t be silly, she said to herself. Most people don’t think Roman history matters to us these days, so how could it be important to the Lizards? She relaxed for a while after that crossed her mind. But then she thought, If the Lizards think it’s important, maybe it is.
When the telephone rang in her flat, she hurried to answer it. She’d dreaded the phone in Marseille: it was too likely to be Dieter Kuhn. Here, though, she hadn’t had any trouble. “Allo?”
“Hello, Professor.” Even if Rance Auerbach hadn’t been speaking English, she would have known his wrecked, rasping voice at once. He went on, “How are things going for you up there?”
“Things are… very well, thank you. Thank you very much,” Monique replied. She also used English, and was glad for the chance to practice it. Auerbach was a ginger dealer, too, but somehow that bothered her less in him than it did in her brother. She said, “Is it that I could ask you something?”
“Sure. Go ahead,” he told her, and she poured out the substance of her conversations with Ttomalss and her worries about what the Race was learning. When she’d finished, Auerbach said, “The world would be a better place if everybody’s troubles were so small.”
“Thank you,” Monique said again, this time in French: a breathy sigh of gratitude. She felt as if he were a priest who’d just given her absolution and a very light penance after a particularly sordid confession. “You have no idea how much you relieved me there. I want to be able to see myself in a mirror without flinching.”
That produced a long silence. At last, Auerbach spoke in English again:
“Yeah. Don’t we all?” Monique suddenly wondered if she were the only one whose conscience bothered her.
18
“Yes, Colonel Webster,” Jonathan Yeager’s father was saying into the telephone. “I think we’ll be all right if we keep cool. We have to stay firm out there, but we can’t get pushy about it or we’ll make them nervous. My professional opinion is, everybody’d be sorry if that happened.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay, sir, I’ll put it in writing for you, too,” and hung up.
“More trouble about the motors on the rocks in the asteroid belt?” Jonathan asked.
His dad nodded. “You betcha. They can’t blame me for that one, so they’re asking my advice instead.” Sam Yeager’s chuckle sounded sour to Jonathan. “Hell, son, I didn’t even know this was going on-though I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had suspicions ever since that big meteor slammed into Mars.”
“Have you?” Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “You never said anything about it to me-or to Mom, either, that I know of.”
“Nope.” His father shook his head. “Not much point to talking about suspicions when you don’t know for sure. Last time I was back in Little Rock, I did ask President Stassen about it.”
“Did you?” That his father was in a position to ask questions of the president of the United States still sometimes bemused Jonathan. “What did he tell you?”
“Not much.” His father looked grim. “I didn’t really expect him to. He was probably afraid I’d go running to the Lizards with whatever I heard. That’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense I’m going to be stuck with for the rest of my life.”
“That’s not fair!” Jonathan exclaimed with the ready outrage of youth.
“Probably not, but I’m stuck with it, as I said.” His dad shrugged. “I could go on and talk about what sort of lesson that should be for you, and that you should always keep an eye on your reputation no matter what. But if I did that, you’d probably look around for something to hit me over the head with.”
“Yeah, probably,” Jonathan agreed. “You’re not too bad as far as lectures go, but-”
“Thanks a lot,” his father broke in. “Thanks a hell of a lot.”
Jonathan grinned at him. “Any old time, Dad.” But the grin had trouble staying on his face. “What are the Lizards going to do, out there in the asteroid belt? If they try doing anything, will we fight them?”
“It’s like I told Ed Webster: if we don’t do anything to get ’em twitchy, I think we can ride out the storm,” his father answered. “But I also think they have to think we’d fight if they did try anything out there. A lot of the time, you end up not having to fight if you show you’re ready to in a pinch.”
“If we did fight the Race, we’d lose, wouldn’t we?” Jonathan asked.
“Now? Sure we would, same as we would have last summer,” his father replied. “But that’s not the point, or it’s only part of the point. The other part is how bad we’d hurt ’em if we went down swinging. They don’t like what the Nazis did to them, and we’d do more and worse.” He sighed. “If that outbound probe of theirs hadn’t spotted our rocket lighting up, we could have built a much stronger position out in the asteroid belt before the Race caught on.”
A strong position in the asteroid belt was something less than important to Jonathan. “Do you think there’ll be a war, or not?” he asked. “The whole idea of fighting the Race seems like such a waste of everything worthwhile to me…”
“I know it does,” his father said slowly. “It seems that way to a lot of kids in your generation. I’ll tell you something, though: when the Lizards first came to Earth, they shot up the train I was riding on, and I volunteered for the Army as soon as I made it into a town where they’d take me. So did Mutt Daniels, my manager, and he was about as old then as I am now. They took both of us, too. They didn’t even blink. That’s how things were back in those days.”
Jonathan knew that was how things had been back in those days. He tried to imagine it, tried and felt himself failing. Stumbling a little, he said, “But the Race isn’t so bad, really. You know that’s true, Dad.”
“I know it’s true now,” Sam Yeager said. “I didn’t know it then. Nobody knew it then. All we knew was that the Lizards came out of nowhere and started beating the crap out of us. And if we-and the Reds, and the Nazis, and the British, and the Japs-hadn’t fought like mad bastards, the Lizards would’ve conquered the whole world, and you and your pals wouldn’t be looking at them from the outside and thinking how hot they are. You’d be looking at ’em up from under, and no way to get out from under ’em.”
“Okay. Okay.” Jonathan hadn’t expected a speech. Maybe his dad hadn’t expected to make one, either, because he looked a little surprised at himself. Jonathan went on, “I understand what you’re saying, honest. Things do seem different to me, though. I can’t pretend they don’t.”
“I know they do.” His father’s laugh was rueful. “You take the Race and spaceships and explosive-metal bombs and computing machines for granted. They’re part of the landscape to you. You’re not an old fogy who remembers the days before they got here.”