In the office to which the adjutant led him sat a three-star general smoking a cigarette with sharp, savage puffs. The general waited till Markowitz had gone and closed the door behind him, then stubbed out the butt and impaled Yeager with a glare that held him in place as a specimen pin held a preserved butterfly to a collecting board. “You have been poking your nose into places where it has no business going, Major,” he rasped. “That will cease, or your military career will, forthwith. Have you got that?”
“Sir?” Sam said in astonishment. He’d expected a visiting fireman who wanted to know something special about the Lizards, not one who aimed to carve chunks off him and roast them over the fire. And he didn’t even know what he was supposed to have done.
Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay didn’t keep him in suspense for long: “You have been snooping about the space station. Whatever may be going on there, it is none of your goddamn business. You are not authorized to have that information. If you try to get it from us again, you will regret it for the rest of your days. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Major Yeager?”
“Sir, I understand what you’re saying,” Yeager answered carefully, “but I don’t understand why you’re saying it.”
“Why is not your business, Major,” LeMay said. “I’ve come a long way to give you that order, and I expect to have it obeyed. Is there any danger I am laboring under a misapprehension?” His tone warned that there had better not be. He lit another cigarette and started smoking it down to a nub.
“No, sir,” Sam said, the only thing he could say under the circumstances. If LeMay didn’t want him taking a look at the space station, he wouldn’t… or he wouldn’t get caught again, anyhow. Why Lieutenant General LeMay was so vehement about the matter, he couldn’t guess-but LeMay wasn’t in the mood to answer questions.
“You had better not,” the general growled, and seemed to notice Yeager still standing at attention in front of him. “Dismissed. Get the hell out of here.” Yeager saluted, then frankly fled.
Straha had the best computer equipment money could buy. It wasn’t his money, either, but that of the Tosevites with whom he had chosen to make his home. The equipment, though, was regulation issue for the Race. How the Americans had got it for him, he found it wiser not to ask. But get it they had. They had also managed, in some highly unofficial fashion, to connect it to the Race’s network by way of the consulate in downtown Los Angeles. That gave Straha one more window on the way of life he had deliberately abandoned.
It was, necessarily, a one-way window. He could observe, but did not interact. If he did interact-if he sent messages for placement on the network-he might reveal and forfeit his highly unofficial connection. In the American phrase, he stayed on the outside looking in.
And so, when he turned on the computer and discovered he had a message waiting, his first reaction was alarm. If the Race discovered his connection on its own, he was liable to lose that window.
But the message, he discovered, was not from any male of the Race, or even from some new and snoopy female. It was from Major Sam Yeager, who had connections of his own. It asked nothing more dangerous than whether Yeager could come and visit the exiled shiplord at his home one day before too long.
“Of course you may visit,” Straha said on the telephone, still not eager to send a message and make the system notice him. “I do not understand why you did not simply call, as I am doing now.”
“I like the message system the Race uses,” replied the Tosevite, whose access to that system was somewhat-but only somewhat-more official than Straha’s. It did not seem a good enough reason to the ex-shiplord, but Straha chose not to pursue the point. He proposed a time at which Yeager might come, the Big Ugly agreed, and they both hung up.
Yeager was punctual, as Straha had expected him to be. “I do not see your driver here,” the Tosevite remarked after he had exchanged greetings with Straha.
“No, he is not here; I gave him the morning off, knowing I would not be going anywhere because you would be coming here,” Straha answered. “I can quickly summon him by radio link, if that is what you require.”
“No,” Yeager said, and used an emphatic cough. “Perhaps we could go out into the back yard and talk there.”
“It is warmer inside,” Straha said unhappily. Yeager stood quiet, not saying anything more. Straha’s eye turrets swung sharply toward him. “You think my house may be-” He broke off even before Yeager began to raise a warning hand. “Yes, let us go out into the back yard.”
By local standards, it was not much of a yard, being dirt and rocks and sand and a few cacti rather than the green grass and gaudy flowers customary in the United States. But in essence if not in detail, it put Straha in mind of Home. Yeager said, “Shiplord, what do you know and what can you find out about the American space station?”
“Rather less than you can, I suspect,” Straha answered. “I have access only to what the Race knows about it. Your own people, the builders, will surely have whatever detailed knowledge you may require.”
Yeager shook his head. “I have been ordered not to inquire into it, and American computers are closed against me-indeed, are warned against me.”
Straha needed no elaborate calculation to understand what that was liable to mean. “You have in some way triggered a security alert?” he asked.
“Oh, you might say so,” the Big Ugly answered in English. Before Straha could grow too confused, he shifted back to the language of the Race: “That is an idiom of agreement.”
“Is it? I thank you; I had not encountered it before,” Straha said. “But you are a military officer, and one who, because of your dealings with the Race, is privy to many secrets. Why would questions about your space station be closed to you?”
“That is also my question,” Yeager said. “I have not found an answer for it. I have been discouraged from seeking an answer for it.”
“Something most highly secret must be going on in connection with the space station, then,” Straha said. All at once, he wondered whether his wisecrack to the Tosevite reporter who’d questioned him held truth after all. But no. “It cannot be connected to the attack on the colonization fleet.”
“My thoughts also ran in that direction,” Yeager said. “I agree; there can be no possible connection. And that there can be no possible connection gives me great relief. But I cannot imagine what else would be so secret as to keep me from inquiring about the station: indeed, would lead to my being discouraged from making any further inquiries along those lines.”
Straha knew he was no expert in reading the tones in which Tosevites spoke, but he would have placed a fair-sized bet that Yeager had been strongly discouraged from making such inquiries. The exiled shiplord asked, “Are you disobeying orders in asking these questions of me?”
“No, or not precisely,” Yeager replied. “I have been ordered not to seek more information from American sources. I do not think it occurred to anyone above me that I might seek information from other sources.”
“Ah,” Straha said. “You are what we call in the language of the Race a beam-deflector-you twist your orders to your own purposes.”
“I’m obeying the letter, we would say in English,” Yeager said. “As for the spirit…” He shrugged.
“We would have a good deal to say to an officer who played so fast and loose with his orders,” Straha observed. “I know you Big Uglies are looser than we, but in your military, I had always believed, less so than in other areas.”
“That is truth,” Yeager admitted. “I am at-or perhaps over-the limit of my discretion. But this is something that is kept secret when it should not be. I want to know why it is. Sometimes things are made secret for no reason at all, other times to conceal bad mistakes. My not-empire needs to know of that last, should it be true.”
Straha studied Yeager. He spoke the Race’s language well. He could think like a male of the Race. But he was, at bottom, alien, as was the society that had hatched him.