One more notion you did not think of, but for which you are willing to take the credit, Ttomalss thought. Again, he had trouble being as angry as he might have. The only gravid female he knew well was Felless. He wondered whether he or Veffani had fertilized the eggs she bore.
Had he been a Tosevite, the question would have been of enormous importance to him. All his own research and most of the Tosevite literature he’d studied convinced him of the truth of that. Back on Home, the question of paternity would scarcely have arisen. During her season, Felless would have mated with any number of males. Here on Tosev 3, Ttomalss found himself in the middle: more than curious, less than concerned.
“You seem to have a knack for posing stimulating questions, Senior Researcher,” Slomikk said. “You are to be congratulated.”
“I thank you,” Ttomalss said, in what he feared were abstracted tones. He’d asked himself an interesting question, and one for which he had as yet no good answer. Ginger seemed certain to make more females here on Tosev 3 become gravid after mating with a smaller number of males, or perhaps with only one, than happened back on Home. There were more circumstances in which that could make important who the father was: if he’d given the female ginger to induce her to mate with him, for instance, or if she’d taken credit from his account in exchange for tasting ginger and becoming sexually receptive.
Ttomalss sighed. “This world is doing its best to change us, no matter how much we are in the habit of resisting change.”
“I agree. You are not the first to raise this notion, of course,” Slomikk said. “Even creating embassies and reviving the title of ambassador was new and strange, for the Race has needed neither embassies nor ambassadors these past tens of thousands of years.”
“Forcing us to revive the old is one thing,” Ttomalss said. “It is, in itself, not a small thing. But we have had to respond to so much that is new both from the Tosevites and among ourselves, that the revivals pale to insignificance by comparison.”
“Again, I agree. I wish I could disagree. Too much change is not good for a male, or for a female, either,” the science officer said. “Change swift enough to be perceptible in the course of an individual’s lifetime is too much. This is one of the reasons the Race so seldom goes conquering: to spare the large majority of individuals from ever experiencing the stress of drastic change. It is not the only reason, but it is not the least of reasons. Indeed, we have endured such stress here on Tosev 3 better than I thought we could.”
“Now there is an interesting observation,” Ttomalss said. “The Big Uglies have been in the throes of drastic change for generations. Do you suppose that is one of the reasons they are so strange?”
“I do not know, but it strikes me as something worth investigating,” Slomikk said. “You would, I suppose, have to compare their present behavior with the way they acted before change was a daily occurrence in their lives.”
“So I would,” Ttomalss said. “As best I can tell, they have always behaved badly. Whether they have behaved badly in different ways of late… may be worth learning.”
Thanks to his Army security clearance and his connections with Lizard expatriates and exiles, Sam Yeager had access to as much sensitive computer data as any but a handful of men. Some of those data were on the USA’s computers, others on those that belonged to the Race. The only place where the separate streams flowed together was inside his head. That suited him fine.
Every time he had to switch from a computer built by the Race to one made in the USA, he was reminded of the gap in both technology and engineering that still existed. Apples and oranges, he thought. The Lizards have had a lot more practice at this than we have.
He shrugged. Back before the Lizards came, he’d never imagined one computer would fit on his desk, let alone two. Back before the Lizards came, he’d scarcely imagined computing machines at all. If he had, he’d imagined them the size of a building and half mechanical, half electronic. That was about as far as science-fiction writers had seen by 1942.
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.