“I speak truth,” Drucker declared, with a burst of static warning that they were drifting out of radio range of each other. “It is you Americans who are liars.” More static gave him the last word in the argument.

“Screw him,” Johnson muttered, and then, “On second thought, no thanks. I didn’t come up here to be Mata Hari.” Spying with his eyes and ears and instruments was one thing. Using his fair white body… Again, his laugh was less than wholehearted. Nobody, Nazi pilot or good old American waitress or secretary or schoolteacher, had shown much interest in his fair white body lately.

He brought the Peregrine down to a good landing-about as smooth as he’d ever managed-at Kitty Hawk and then went through debriefing. He remarked that the Germans were curious about what was going on up at the space station. The major taking notes just nodded and waited for him to say something else. If the fellow knew anything, he wasn’t talking.

After a while, Johnson ran dry about the Germans and Russians and Lizards in space. The first debriefer left. His replacement came in and started grilling the spaceman about the changes the mechanics and technicians had made in Peregrine since his last flight. He had answers and opinions, some of them strong ones, about those modifications.

When they finally let him go, he thought about heading for the bar for a bit of high-proof tension relief. Instead, he went back to the BOQ. He was shaking his head as he did it-Christ, don’t I even have the energy to go buy myself a drink? — but the direction in which he kept walking argued that he didn’t.

He took a shower, then went back to his room and flopped down on the bed. Instead of falling asleep, which he’d thought he would do, he lay there for a bit, then pulled a Hornblower novel out of the GI nightstand by the bed and started to read. Things had been simple back in Hornblower’s day, with only people to worry about.

The telephone on the nightstand rang, making him jump. He didn’t like jumping, especially not when he was just back in full gravity. He picked up the phone and said, “Johnson.”

“Lieutenant Colonel, I’m Major Sam Yeager, calling from Los Angeles,” the voice on the other end of the line said. He sounded as if he was calling from the other end of the country; there weren’t so many hisses and pops on the line as there would have been before the Lizards came, but enough to notice remained.

“What can I do for you, Major?” Johnson asked. Yeager’s name seemed vaguely familiar. After a moment, he placed it: a hotshot expert on the Lizards.

He expected Yeager to ask him about dealing with the Race in space. Instead, the fellow came straight out of left field: “Lieutenant Colonel, if you don’t mind my asking, did you by any chance get your ass chewed by General LeMay not so long ago?”

“How the hell did you know that?” Johnson sat up so suddenly, he knocked the Hornblower novel onto the floor.

Across three thousand miles, Major Yeager chuckled. “Because I’m in the same boat-and I think it’s the Titanic. General LeMay gets ants in his pants when people start asking about the space station, doesn’t he?”

“He sure does. He-” Johnson shut up with a snap. He suddenly realized he had only Yeager’s assurance that he was who and what he said he was. For all he knew, Yeager-or somebody claiming to be Yeager-might be one of LeMay’s spies, trying to catch him in an indiscretion and sink him like a battleship. In a tight voice, he said, “I don’t think I’d better talk about that.”

“I’m not after your scalp, Lieutenant Colonel,” Yeager said. Johnson went right on saying nothing. With a sigh, Yeager went on, “I don’t like this any better than you do. Whatever’s going on up there smells fishy to me. The Lizards have it on their minds, too, and I don’t like that for beans. We could end up in big trouble on account of this.”

That matched perfectly with what Glen Johnson thought: so perfectly that it made him suspicious. He picked his words with care: “Major, I don’t know you. I’m not going to talk about this business with somebody who’s only a voice.”

After a pause, Yeager answered, “Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. The general is convincing, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Johnson said, which might as well have meant, Hell, yes!

Another pause. Then Yeager said, “Okay, sir, you don’t trust me, and you don’t have any reason to trust me. But I’m going to lay it on the line. The way it looks to me now, whatever the hell we’re doing up there, it’s something real big. It’s something so big, whoever’s in charge-which may be General LeMay and may be whoever his boss is-doesn’t want anybody, and I mean anybody, finding out about it. How does that sound to you?”

Yeager might have been echoing Johnson’s thoughts. But Johnson was damned if he’d admit it. He’d trusted Stella, and that hadn’t got him anything but pain and lawyers’ bills. If he trusted Yeager, he was liable to get his tit in a worse wringer yet. So all he said was, “This is your nickel, Major. I’m still listening.” If by some chance this wasn’t Yeager, or if it was and he was trying to get Johnson in Dutch, maybe he’d end up hanging himself instead.

“You think I’m setting you up, don’t you?” Yeager asked, which couldn’t have been a better echo of what was going on in Glen Johnson’s mind.

“It did occur to me, yeah,” Johnson said dryly.

“I wonder why.” Yeager could be dry, too. That made Johnson more inclined to believe him, not less. Maybe he’d known it would. He went on, “Listen. This isn’t how you keep a secret. The way you do that is to pretend you don’t have one, not to make a big hairy thing out of yourself and go around yelling, ‘I’ve got a secret and I won’t tell you what it is, so you’d better not ask-or else!’ Come on, Lieutenant Colonel. You’re a big boy. Am I right or am I wrong?”

Johnson laughed. He didn’t want to-he knew he was handing Yeager an edge-but he couldn’t help himself. “I tell you what,” he said. “That’s how I’d play it, anyway.”

“Me, too,” Yeager said. “Some of the big shots don’t understand anything but killing a mosquito with a tank, though. All that does is get a secret noticed. You noticed it-”

“Yeah,” Johnson broke in. Again, he couldn’t help himself. If they’d let him go up to the space station, they could have shown him around, kept him from seeing anything he wasn’t supposed to see, and sent him home. Yeager was right. They hadn’t played it smart, not even a little.

“I noticed, too,” Yeager said. “I’m not the only one, either. The Lizards have noticed something funny’s going on up there. There’s this one female of the Race named Kassquit-at least I think she’s a female of the Race; that’s a little strange-who’s real curious about things that have to do with the space station. And we don’t want the Lizards curious that way, not after what happened to the colonization fleet we don’t.”

“Amen,” Johnson said. “The next time anything goes wrong, they’re going to shoot first and ask questions later.” He listened to himself with no small surprise. Somehow or other, Major Yeager had convinced him while he wasn’t looking.

“That’s what I think, too,” Yeager said. “If you ask me, that’s what anybody with an ounce of sense would think. But that’s probably too much to ask of some people with a lot of stars on their shoulders.”

“Yeah,” Johnson said again. He’d spent a lot of time fishing for bluegill when he was a kid. He knew what setting a hook was like. Yeager had set a hook in him, all right. “Next question is, what can we do about it? Can we do anything about it?”

“I don’t know,” Yeager answered. “Part of that depends on just what they really are doing at the space station. I haven’t been able to find out, and I’ve got better and stranger connections than you might think. I got in big trouble the first time, but I didn’t know I would, so I went in straight up and didn’t bother sliding, if you follow me. I’m not playing it like that any more.”