She read the message through several times. Then, slowly, she made the affirmative hand gesture. Sam Yeager the Tosevite sounded exactly like Regeya, the purported male of the Race.
He still took her for a female of the Race. That gave her a certain amount-a large amount-of pleasure, pleasure of the same sort she’d known when she made the hateful researcher Tessrek back down. In those moments, life looked like a game, a game in which she’d just won a turn.
“How do I answer?” she murmured to herself. It wasn’t an easy question. She’d never exchanged words with a wild Tosevite before, not knowingly. If she kept doing it, would he realize she was a Tosevite, too? He was a clever male; she’d seen that. Could she stand being discovered? What would he think of her?
I greet you, she wrote in reply. Her back straightened. She stuck out her chin. No matter what the Tosevite thought of her, she was proud of herself. No, she wouldn’t let him know she was anything but a female of the Race. He wouldn’t find out anything different. She’d make sure he didn’t, by the Emperor. Your spying was doomed to fail, she went on. You cannot pretend to be what you are not. Her mouth fell open in amusement-here she was, pretending to be what she was not. Now that you openly admit to being what you are, perhaps we shall become friends, as much as two so different can.
She studied that, then decided to transmit it. She did not think the wild Big Ugly would take it for undue familiarity. He might not belong to the Race, but he did show considerable understanding of it. He had, in fact, fooled males and females who truly came from eggs.
I hope we shall become friends, you and I, Yeager responded. Tosevites and the Race are going to be sharing this planet for a long time. I have said it before-we need to get along with each other. Kassquit made the affirmative gesture again. Then the Tosevite wrote, I have a question for you: why, when you thought I was Regeya, did you say you would not talk with me on the telephone?
Kassquit studied those words with dismay. No, this Tosevite was anything but a fool. He noticed discrepancies and put them together. And he knew she was a female, even if not of which species. She couldn’t say, for instance, that she was a veteran with a horrible scar she didn’t like to display on the screen.
Yeager sent another message while waiting for her reply. You would have found out for sure I was a Tosevite if we had talked on the telephone, he wrote. I speak the language of the Race pretty well, but there are some sounds I cannot make quite right no matter how hard I try, because my mouth is the wrong shape.
“I know,” Kassquit whispered. “Oh, I know.” The language of the Race was the only one she knew, but she spoke it mushily, too. She couldn’t help it. Like this Yeager’s, her mouth was the wrong shape.
Again, she asked herself how she was supposed to answer that. Telephones are too spontaneous, she wrote at last. I might have given away something I should not have. And that was true-she’d have given away that she was a Big Ugly by birth. But Yeager would think (she hoped he’d think) she was talking about security.
All right, then, he replied. I hope whatever it is you cannot talk about goes well for you. He was friendlier than most males of the Race. Of course, they looked down their snouts at her because she was a Tosevite. This Sam Yeager-she wondered why he had two names-wouldn’t do that, anyhow.
She was pondering her reply when a flashing red star appeared in the lower right-hand corner of her computer screen. That meant an urgent news flash. She gave up on her message-the Tosevite could wait. She wanted to find out what was going on.
The image that appeared on her screen when she switched to the news feed made her exclaim in surprise. She’d seen video of the American Big Uglies’ space station before, and had spent a lot of time discussing it on the network. Now here it was-and it was moving. She saw a faint glowing stream of expelled reaction mass emerging from the lump at the end of the new boom.
A commentator from the Race was saying, “-is the first known use by the Big Uglies of a motor powered by atomic energy. It appears to be a fission motor, not the far more efficient and energetic fusion reactors we have used for so long. Acceleration is feeble, hardly more than one part of gravity per hundred. Nevertheless, as you see, it moves.”
Kassquit watched the American ship-space station no longer. But for the exhaust, she could not have proved it moved. The motion she saw might as easily have come from the camera.
“We have sent urgent queries to President Warren, leader of the not-empire known as the United States,” the commentator said. “Fine details of his reply are still being translated, but he asserts that the ship was built for no warlike purpose, but solely for the exploration of this solar system.”
“How can we trust that?” Kassquit said, as if someone were standing beside her insisting that she trust it. “They built the ugly thing without telling us what they were up to.”
“Their ship is too slow and ungainly to make a likely weapons platform.” The commentator might have been answering her. “It is also moving away from Tosev 3. But investigation will continue until its nature may be precisely ascertained.”
“Its nature should have been ascertained a long time ago,” Kassquit said. “Security has done a slipshod job.”
Again, she was arguing with the commentator. This time, he did not even seem to pay attention to her. He said, “Fleetlord Atvar of the conquest fleet and Fleetlord Reffet of the colonization fleet have issued a joint statement affirming that there is no cause for alarm in this new development, and expressing relief that this ship does appear to be no more than an oversized exploration vessel, as the ruler of the not-empire known as the United States has declared.”
“And if we start blindly accepting a Big Ugly’s word, where will we be?” Kassquit answered her own question: “In trouble, nowhere else.”
But the commentator sounded convinced everything was fine. “The subject of the American space station has been on the minds of males and females in recent times, as the computer discussion areas show,” he said. “Now we see that much of the anxious speculation was misinformed, as anxious speculation commonly is.”
“How do you know we see anything of the sort?” Kassquit demanded, as if the male could hear her.
The U.S. spacecraft disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by a graphic showing its projected course. “As you can observe, the craft is headed for none of the major planets of this solar system. It is not heading toward Home or any other world of the Empire. And, with its feeble acceleration, it must lack the fuel capacity to be a starship. Its most likely destination appears to be one of the many useless and insignificant rocks orbiting between Tosev 4, a small world, and Tosev 5, a gas giant larger than any in Home’s system. The American Big Uglies have previously sent chemically powered exploration rockets out among these minor planets, as the Tosevites term them. Now it appears they are visiting them on a larger scale. As far as the Race is concerned, they are welcome to them.”
There, for once, Kassquit agreed with the noisy male. Here as in so many other ways, the star Tosev’s solar system was different from those of other stars in the Empire: it held far more such debris. No one was sure why; speculation centered on Tosev’s greater mass.
How typical of Big Uglies, she thought, to spend so much time and so many resources going off to examine what is not worth examining in the first place. Feeling obstreperous (and hoping that feeling was not a product of her own Tosevite heritage), she decided to send Sam Yeager a message. So this, then, is what so concerned you, she wrote. A large, clumsy spaceship that was not worth being kept secret.