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?”
“And in the meantime…”
“In the meantime, he’s sending a war warning back to the USA,” his father said grimly. “Whatever the Lizards do, they won’t pull a Jap on us.”
“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said. That was a phrase from Sam Yeager’s generation. Jonathan understood it, though he wouldn’t have used it himself. He wondered how many Americans living right now would have any idea what it meant. Not many, he suspected.
“Wish I had better news for you, son,” his father said.
“So do I,” Jonathan said. “If I can do anything, you sing out, you hear?”
“I will,” his father promised. “That’s what you’re along for, after all. Right now, though, I have to tell you I don’t know what it would be. That’s not a knock on you. I don’t know what more I can do myself. I wish to hell I did.” Sam Yeager had always been a vigorous man who looked and acted younger than his years. But now the weight of worry made him seem suddenly old.
Jonathan walked over and set a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Something will turn up.”
“I hope so.” His father sounded bleak. “I’ll be damned if I know what it is, though. Of course, I would have said the same thing back in 1942, when the Lizards were knocking the crap out of us. Nobody had any idea what to do about them, either, not at first.”
“That’s what I hear,” Jonathan agreed. “Of course, I wasn’t around then. You were.”
“If I hadn’t been, you wouldn’t be around now.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan said.
His father looked back across the years. “And if your mother hadn’t been carrying you,” he said, as much to himself as to Jonathan, “I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”
Jonathan raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sam Yeager blinked. He seemed to realize what he’d just said. A long sigh escaped him. “You know your mother was married to another guy before she met me.”
“Oh, sure,” Jonathan said. “He got killed when the Lizards invaded, right?”
“Well, yeah.” His father was staring into the past again. He looked… embarrassed? “It’s-a little more complicated than we ever talked about, though.”
“Whatever it is, I think you’d better spit it out, Dad,” Jonathan said. “Do I have to come ten light-years to get all the old family scandals?”
“Well, it looks like you probably do.” Sam Yeager not only looked embarrassed, he sounded embarrassed, too. “When your mother and I got married in beautiful, romantic Chugwater, Wyoming, we both thought her first husband was dead. That’s the God’s truth. We did.”