But he’d gone right on getting smashed after drinking became legal again. A lot of his teammates had been hard drinkers. That wasn’t enough of an excuse for him, though, and he knew it. He’d enjoyed getting loaded. He hadn’t enjoyed it so much the morning after, but that was later. He wondered why he’d enjoyed it. Because it gave him an excuse to get stupid? That didn’t seem reason enough, not looking back on it.
Jonathan and Karen also held it to a couple of beers. He knew they’d done their share of drinking before he went on ice and stopped being able to keep an eye on them. He laughed at himself. No doubt they’d missed that a lot-just the way a frog missed a saxophone. They’d done fine without him, which was, of course, the way things were supposed to work.
He drove home with no trouble at all. His head was clear enough to work on the manuscript for a while before he went to bed. When he got up the next morning, he didn’t have a headache. He didn’t have any memories of stupidity or, worse, holes where he needed to find memories.
Aren’t I smug and superior? he thought as he sipped his morning coffee the next day. He was more sober than he had been once upon a time. So what? All over the world, people by the millions needed no excuse at all to drink as much as they could hold, or a little more than that.
He’d just come out of the shower when the phone rang. That made him smile: whoever‘d tried to catch him in there had missed. “Hello?”
“Yes. Is this Sam Yeager that I have the honor to be addressing?”
Alertness tingled through Sam. Though speaking English, that was a Lizard on the other end of the line.
“Yes, this is Sam Yeager. Who’s calling, please?”
Talking to members of the Race, once one of Sam’s greatest pleasures, was fraught with risk these days. They still hoped he might have a message from Home for them. The American government still feared he did. He didn’t, and wouldn’t have delivered it if he had. Nobody-not Lizards, not American officials-wanted to believe him when he said so.
“I am Tsaisanx, the Race’s consul in Los Angeles.”
Sam whistled softly. Tsaisanx should have known better. He’d been consul here for a human lifetime, and was a veteran of the conquest fleet. If he didn’t know better than to call here… maybe it was a mark of desperation. “I greet you, Consul,” Sam said, using the Race’s formula but sticking to English. “You do know, I hope, that anything we say will be monitored? You had better tell me very plainly what you want.”
Tsaisanx let out a hissing sigh. “I would rather talk in greater privacy…”
“I wouldn’t.” Sam used an emphatic cough. “I have nothing to say that others can’t hear. Nothing-do you understand me?”
“I cannot believe that,” Tsaisanx said. “You aided us before. Why not now?”
“I helped you when I thought we were wrong,” Sam said. “I’m not going to help you when I think we’re right. So we know something the Race doesn’t? All I have to say is, good for us. We didn’t do anything we shouldn’t have to learn it. All we did was make experiments and see where they led. If you want to do the same thing, okay, fine. Go right ahead.”
“You are not showing a cooperative attitude,” the Race’s consul complained.
“Tough.” Sam used another emphatic cough. “I’m very sorry, but I don’t feel like cooperating here. Not only that, I damn well can’t. Am I plain enough, or shall I draw you a picture?” He was about to hang up on the Lizard, a bit of rudeness he couldn’t have imagined before coming back to Earth on the Commodore Perry.
“You are painfully plain.” Tragedy trembled in Tsaisanx’s voice. “What is also plain is that my civilization-indeed, my entire species-trembles on the brink of extinction. And you-you do not feel like cooperating.”
“I’m afraid I can’t be polite about this, so I won’t bother trying,” Sam said. “When the conquest fleet came, you intended to do to us what you did to the Rabotevs and the Hallessi. You were going to turn us into imitations of the Race and rule us forever. If we didn’t like it, too bad. You were ready to kill as many of us as you needed to get the message across. I was there, too. I remember. If you think I’m going to waste a hell of a lot of sympathy on you now, you’d better think again. That’s all I’ve got to tell you.”
“Rabotev 2 and Halless 1 are both better, happier, healthier worlds than they were before they became part of the Empire,” Tsaisanx said. “Tosev 3 also would have been. We would have made sure of it.”
Take up the white man’s burden, Sam thought. He didn’t doubt that Tsaisanx meant it; the Lizard was nothing if not sincere. All the same, he said, “The United States is a better, happier, healthier place than it was before you got here, and we did it all by ourselves.”
“How much of our technology did you steal?” Acid filled Tsaisanx’s voice.
“A good bit,” Sam admitted. “But we would have done it without that, too. If you’d never come, we’d be better and healthier and happier than we were ninety years ago. We wouldn’t be the same as we are now, but we wouldn’t be the same as we were back then, either. You think progress is something to squash. We think it’s something to build on. And we would have, with you or without you.”
“We really have nothing to say to each other, do we?” Tsaisanx said sadly. “And here all this time, I thought you understood.”
“I do-or I think I do, anyhow,” Sam replied. “I just don’t agree. There’s a difference.”
“Farewell.” Tsaisanx hung up.
“So long,” Sam said, though the Lizard couldn’t hear him. He put the handset back in the cradle. Shaking his head, he returned to the galleys of Safe at Home.
A minute later, he stood up again. He couldn’t concentrate on the words in front of him. All these years, all these upheavals, and what did it mean? His own people thought he’d betrayed them, and now the Lizards thought he’d betrayed them, too? He wondered if he should have called the book A Moderate’s Story. What was a moderate but somebody both sides could shoot at?
But he still thought he’d had it right with Tsaisanx. Even if the Race hadn’t come, the United States would be a better place now than it was in 1942. The rest of the world might be better, too, in ways it had never had a chance to show with the Lizards sitting on half of it.
He shrugged and returned to the galleys. He’d already seen so much happen, more than almost any man alive. He’d gone from horse and buggy to spanning the light-years one way in cold sleep, the other in the wink of an eye.
And what would the next chapter be? He could hardly wait to find out.
About the Author
HARRY TURTLEDOVE was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After flunking out of CalTech, he earned a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from UCLA. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and he has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles. His alternate history works have included many short stories, the Civil War Classic The Guns of the South, the epic World War I series The Great War, and the Worldwar tetralogy that began with Worldwar: In the Balance. He is a winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History for his novels How Few Remain and Ruled Britannia, and of the Hugo for his novella “Down in the Bottomlands.”