“Professionals do.” Drucker started to say something else, but checked himself. “Is your father by any chance the male who understands the Race so well? If he is, I have some of his work in translation read. I should have of him thought when I heard the name.”
“Yes, that is my father,” Jonathan Yeager said with what sounded like pardonable pride.
“He does good work,” Drucker said. “He is the only Tosevite who ever made me believe he could think like a male of the Race. Why are you here instead of him?”
“He has been here,” the younger Yeager answered. “I first came here with him, as his assistant-I still wear the body paint of an assistant psychological researcher. But I am… better suited to the research for this part of the project than he is.”
“Can you tell me why?” Drucker asked. Jonathan Yeager shook his head. Seeing that gesture instead of one from a scaly hand made Drucker feel at home, even though the American had told him no.
Yeager said, “I am told you will be able to go home soon.”
“Yes, if I have any home left,” Drucker answered. “I do not know whether my kin are alive or dead.”
“I hope they are well,” Jonathan Yeager said. “I look forward to going home myself. I have been up here since the war began. The Race judged it was not safe for me to leave.”
“I would say that was likely to be true,” Drucker agreed. “We fought hard.”
“I know,” Yeager said. “But did you really think you could win?”
“Did I think so?” Drucker shook his head. “I did not think we had a chance. But what could I do? When your leaders tell you to go to war, you go to war. They must have thought we could win, or they would not have started fighting.”
“They were-” Jonathan Yeager broke off, shaking his head.
He’d been about to say something like, They were pretty stupid if they did. Drucker would have argued with him if he hadn’t felt the same way. The crisis had started while Himmler was Fuhrer, and Kaltenbrunner hadn’t done anything to make it go away. On the contrary-he’d charged right ahead. Fools rush in, Drucker thought. He wondered how General Dornberger would shape up as the new leader of the Reich. He also wondered how much trouble the SS would give the new Fuhrer. Dornberger hadn’t come up through the ranks of the blackshirts; he’d been soldiering since the First World War. The secret policemen might not like him very well.
Drucker had no sympathy for the SS, not after they’d tried to get rid of his wife on the grounds that she had a Jewish grandmother. If all the black-shirts suffered unfortunate accidents, he wouldn’t shed a tear. With SS men in charge of things, his country had suffered an unfortunate accident-except it hadn’t been an accident. Kaltenbrunner had started the war on purpose.
Something else occurred to him: “Is it true what some males of the Race have told me? That France is to be made independent again, I mean?”
“Yes, that is true,” Jonathan Yeager told him. “From the news reports I have seen, the French are happy about it, too.” He sounded pretty happy himself. He was, after all, an American, and the USA and Germany had been at war when the Lizards came. They still didn’t get along very well, and gloating at a rival’s misfortune was a constant all over the world, and probably among the Race as well.
“I do not care whether they are happy or not,” Drucker said. “It will mean a weaker Germany, and a weaker Germany means a stronger Race.” He was sure the Lizards were recording every word he said. He didn’t much care. They’d captured him. They’d beaten his country. If they thought he loved them because of it, they were crazy.
Back in the cubicle Jonathan Yeager shared with Kassquit, he said, “Strange to think I was just talking with a male who could have killed both of us.”
When Kassquit made the affirmative gesture, she almost poked him in the nose. As far as Jonathan was concerned, the cubicle would have been cramped for her alone; being smaller than people, Lizards built smaller, too. But she was used to it. She’d lived in a cubicle like this her whole life. She said, “You can take off those foolish wrappings now. You do not need them any more.”
“No, I suppose not. I certainly do not need them to keep me warm.” Jonathan used an emphatic cough as he kicked off the shorts. The Lizards kept the starship at a temperature comfortable for them, one that matched a hot summer’s day in Los Angeles. Even shorts made him sweat more than he would have without them.
Kassquit was naked, too. She’d never worn clothes, not after she’d got out of diapers. The Lizards-Ttomalss in particular-had raised her ever since she was a newborn. They’d wanted to see how close they could come to turning a human into a female of the Race.
Jonathan shaved his head. Plenty of kids of his generation-girls as well as boys, though not so many-did that, aping the Lizards and incidentally annoying their parents. Kassquit shaved not only her head-including her eyebrows-but all the hair on her body in an effort to make herself as much like a Lizard as she could. She’d told him once that she’d thought about having her ears removed to make her head look more like a Lizard’s, and had decided against it only because she didn’t think it would help enough.
She said, “I wonder if I will be allowed to meet him before he returns to the surface of Tosev 3. I should learn more about wild Tosevites.”
With a chuckle, Jonathan said, “I think he would be glad to meet you, especially without wrappings.” The Lizards’ language had no specific term for clothes, which the Race didn’t use, but could and did go into enormous detail about body paint.
“What do you mean?” By Earthly standards, Kassquit had a remorselessly literal mind. “Do you mean he might want to mate with me? Would he find me attractive enough to want to mate with?”
“Of course he would. I certainly do.” Jonathan used another emphatic cough. He always praised Kassquit as extravagantly as he could. She unfolded like a flower when he did. He got the idea the Lizards hadn’t bothered-or maybe they just hadn’t known people needed such things. Whenever he thought Kassquit acted strangely, he had to step back and remind himself it was a wonder she got even to within shouting distance of sanity.
And he hadn’t been lying. She was of Oriental descent; living in Gardena, California, which had a large Japanese-American population, he’d got used to Asian standards of beauty. And by them she was more than pretty enough. Her shaved head didn’t put him off, either; he knew plenty of girls at UCLA who shaved theirs. The only thing truly odd about her was her expression, or lack of expression. Her face was almost masklike. She hadn’t learned to smile when she was a baby-Lizards could hardly smile back at her-and it was evidently too late after that.
She asked, “Would you be upset if I decided to mate with him?” She didn’t have much in the way of tact, either.
To keep from examining his own feelings right away, Jonathan answered, “Even if he finds you attractive, I am not sure he would want to mate with you. He is concerned with his own mate down in the Reich, and does not know her fate.”
“I see,” Kassquit said slowly.
Jonathan wondered if she really did. She hadn’t known anything about the emotional attachments men and women could form… till she started making love with me, he thought. He hadn’t wanted to explain to the German spaceman the sort of sociological research project in which he was engaged. It was really more the Lizards’ project, not his. He was just along for the ride.
He chuckled. They brought me up here and put me out to stud. He wondered how much they’d learned. He’d certainly learned a lot.
He went over to Kassquit and put a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed him. She liked being touched. He got the idea she hadn’t been touched a whole lot before he came up to the starship. Touching was a human trait, not one the Race shared to anywhere near the same degree.
“He will be going down to his not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.
“Truth,” Jonathan agreed.
“And you will be going down to your not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.
“You knew I would,” Jonathan told her. “I cannot stay up here. This is your place, but it is not mine.”
“I understand that,” Kassquit answered. She spoke the language of the Race as well as someone with a human mouth possibly could. And why not? It was the only language she knew. She went on, “Intellectually, I understand that. But you must understand, Jonathan, that I will be sorry when you go. I will be sad.”
Jonathan sighed and squeezed her, though he didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. “I am sorry,” he said. “I do not know what to do about that. I wish there were something I could do.”
“You also have a female waiting for you on the surface of Tosev 3, even if she is not a female with whom you have arranged for permanent exclusive mating,” Kassquit said.
“Yes, I do,” Jonathan admitted. “You have known that all along. I never tried to keep it a secret from you.”
He wondered if Karen Culpepper would still be his girl when he came home. They’d been dating since high school. When he’d come up to the starship, he hadn’t expected to stay, and he hadn’t thought he would have that much explaining to do once he got back. He hadn’t really believed the Nazis would be crazy enough to attack the Lizards over Poland. But they had, and he’d been here for weeks-and he’d almost died a couple of times, too. Karen would have an excellent notion of where he was and why he’d come up here. He didn’t think she’d be very happy about it.