Putting on artificial fingerclaws to deal with the keyboard of the Lizard machine, he grinned. He could see a lot further now. Had he really been a Lizard, he could have done most of his work on their machine by talking to it rather than typing. Its voice-recognition system, though, wasn’t set up to deal with a human’s accent. Voice commands sometimes went spectacularly wrong, so he avoided them. The computer didn’t care who typed into it.
Because he was an expert on the Race, he was one of the few humans in the independent countries allowed even limited access to the Lizards’ vast data network; in his case, the connection was wired through the Race’s consulate in downtown Los Angeles. He admired that network tremendously, but sometimes-often-felt going through it for information made looking for a needle in a haystack seem simple by comparison.
That was especially true because he had access to more of the data network than the Lizards at the consulate or back in Cairo thought he did. Some of his friends among the former prisoners who’d decided to stay in the United States after the fighting ended were clever with computers. They’d forked-their idiom-the programs the consulate had given him to let him range more widely than Lizard officialdom thought it was permitting. They reckoned that a good joke on their own kind. Yeager reckoned it highly useful.
The Lizards had never stopped discussing the attack on the colonization fleet. The topic filled several fora-the best translation Sam could make. He wasn’t supposed to be able to read what was said in those fora, but he could. That topic interested him, too. If he could pin the crime on the Greater German Reich or the Soviet Union, the Lizards would punish the guilty party-preferably with a two-by-four-and life could finally get back to normal.
A name-Vesstil-caught his notice. “I knew a Vesstil once upon a time,” he muttered, and noted down the number that accompanied the Lizard’s name. Then he had to take off the fingerclaw so he could use the American-made computer that took up twice as much desk space as its Lizardly counterpart. It didn’t run as well, either, despite using technology borrowed-or, more accurately, stolen-from the Race. But one of the things that computer stored was a list of all the Lizard prisoners the United States had captured.
Sure enough, there was Vesstil’s name. And, sure enough, the number attached to it matched that of the Lizard now holding forth about the attack on the colonization fleet. This was the shuttlecraft pilot who’d flown Straha down to the USA when the shiplord decided to defect. Yeager remembered that he had repatriated himself not long after the fighting ended.
It is unlike the Big Uglies to keep secrets so well, Vesstil had written. Even with their safety hanging in the balance, it is unlike them. This argues something unusual even for Tosevites went on in relation to this attack.
Another Lizard had answered, Interesting speculation, but useless to us, and the discussion had drifted on to other things.
“I’m not sure it is useless,” Sam muttered, deliberately using English to get himself out of the chattering among the Lizards in which he’d been immersed. In fact, he’d been collecting examples of unusual actions by the Germans and Russians in the hope that one of them would lead to more clues he could use to pin down the guilty party. It hadn’t happened yet, and didn’t look as if it would happen any time soon, but that didn’t mean he’d abandoned hope.
Yeager also collected examples of strange American behavior: those were easier for him to come by and let him hone his analytical skills, though they had nothing to do with the colonization fleet. He wondered why one of the spacemen who flew out of Kitty Hawk had got a black mark by his name for getting too curious about the growing U.S. space station.
He suspected he could have found out with a couple of phone calls, but playing detective through the American computer network gave him more practice at manipulating such creations, so he went at it that way. Back in the bush leagues, he’d always asked for curves from the batting-practice pitchers because he’d had more trouble hitting them than fastballs.
He grumbled as he waited for the human-made computer to spit out the information he needed. It was slower than the one the Lizards made, and the U.S. computer network, a creation of the past five years, far smaller and more fragmented than the one the Lizards took for granted.
As things turned out, he had to make the phone calls anyhow, because the network let him down. He really did have U.S. security clearances-unlike the ones the Lizards had flanged up for him for a lark-but they didn’t seem to be high enough to take him where he needed to go. They should have been, or so he thought, but they weren’t.
He wondered what that meant. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have anything to do with the attack on the colonization fleet. The space station hadn’t been involved in that; the Lizards had detected a signal from a submarine that promptly submerged, and then somebody’s nasty chunk of hardware had gone into action. Somebody’s. Whose? He had no more proof than the Lizards did.
Then he stopped worrying about it for a while, because Barbara came home with the trunk of the car full of groceries, and he had to help haul them into the house. She put away the food that went into the refrigerator, he what went into the pantries. About halfway through the job, Barbara looked over to him and said, “This is all for Jonathan, you know. There wasn’t enough room in the car for a week’s worth of groceries for him and us both. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll have to go back to the store for some food for us.”
“You expect me to laugh and think that’s a joke,” Sam said. “Trouble is, I’ve seen the way the kid eats. I believe you, or close enough, anyhow.” He put a couple of cans of tomatoes on a shelf, then said, “Karen seems happier when she comes around here these days.”
“Of course she does,” his wife answered at once. “Liu Mei is five thousand miles away now. I hope she and her mother have made it back to China all right, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Karen hoped their ship sank. Hand me that sack of oranges, would you? They’re nice and ripe.”
They were just finishing when the telephone rang. Barbara answered it, then called out for Sam. He took the handpiece from her and spoke: “Yeager.”
“Good morning, Major.” The crisp voice on the other end of the line belonged to Colonel Edwin Webster, Sam’s immediate superior. “You are to report in tomorrow at 0800: no working out of the house. We have a visiting fireman who wants to see you. He’s asked for you by name, and he’s not somebody who’ll take no for an answer. Have you got that?”
“Yes, sir: report in at 0800,” Yeager said in martyred tones. He much preferred working from his home, which, thanks to his personal library and his computer connection, he got to do most of the time. “Who is this fellow, anyway?” he asked, but Webster had hung up on hearing him acknowledge the order.
Barbara was properly sympathetic. Jonathan, when he got home from classes, wasn’t. “I have to go in at eight o’clock three mornings a week this term,” he said.
“That’s because you’re young-and if you don’t watch the way you talk, you won’t get much older,” Sam told him. With the heartlessness of youth, Jonathan laughed.
Fortified by two cups of coffee, Yeager drove downtown the next morning. He poured himself another cup as soon as he’d reported to Colonel Webster, who looked disgustingly wide awake himself. Sam repeated the question he’d asked the day before. Webster didn’t answer it this time, either.
Before long, though, Sam found out. Colonel Webster’s adjutant, a harried-looking captain named Markowitz, came into his cubicle and said, “Sir, if you’ll come with me…?” Yeager put down his pen and forgot about the meaningless piece of busywork he was doing. He got up and followed Captain Markowitz.