“It could be so,” Pshing agreed. “That strikes me as more likely than his having made it for himself.”

“Speak to the folk hereabout-I want him captured and brought before me,” Atvar said on sudden, almost Tosevite-like, impulse.

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing got out his radio and spoke into it.

It was done, but only barely. When the Tosevite saw males and females of the Race approaching, he disappeared. That was how it seemed to Atvar, at any rate. One instant he was there in plain sight, running away; the next, he might have vanished off the face of Tosev 3.

His pursuers caught him nonetheless. Pshing, who was listening to their calls back and forth, said, “One of them has an infrared detector, Exalted Fleetlord. Without it, I do not think they could have found him.”

The Big Ugly kept struggling for all he was worth. The males and females of the Race had to tie him before they could bring him in to Atvar. By then, the fleetlord wished he hadn’t put them to so much trouble. To avoid disappointing them, he didn’t show it, but praised them extravagantly.

Shouts poured from the Tosevite’s throat, in whatever unintelligible language he spoke and then, to Atvar’s surprise, in English, a speech he recognized even if he’d never learned to use it. Pshing had no trouble finding a male from the conquest fleet who understood it. The fellow said, “Exalted Fleetlord, he says you mate with your own mother and also says you mate at an inappropriate orifice-the Big Uglies have more than we do, you know. He intends these as insults.”

“Ask him how he lives in this country,” Atvar said.

“It shall be done,” the male replied, and began speaking English. The dark-skinned Big Ugly kept yelling the same phrases he had used before. After a while, the male turned back to Atvar, saying, “Exalted Fleetlord, I do not think he knows any more of this language than these few words.”

“How strange,” Atvar murmured. “Why would anyone go to the trouble of learning insults in a language without learning any more in it? Having to try to understand more than one speech is bad enough as it is.” The language of the Race united three worlds, and had for time out of mind. Tosev 3 had even more languages than it had had empires and not-empires before the Race arrived.

“What shall we do with him, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked, pointing to the Tosevite. “He is not going to tell us anything, I don’t think.”

“He is also not going to harm us, for which spirits of Emperors past be praised,” Atvar said. “He cannot harm us, being too ignorant-and how I wish that were true of every member of his species.” He turned to the male who spoke English. “Take him well away from this starship. Give him a knife of ours, to make up for the one he no longer has, and let him go.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the male replied. “May I give him some food, too? We have had some of these savages come around begging before; they mostly know how to pull the lid off a tin.”

“Yes, do that,” Atvar said. “Otherwise, he might come back to rob rather than to beg. I want the Big Uglies to be dependent on us; I do not want them making worse nuisances of themselves than they have already.”

“Any Big Ugly is-or can be-a nuisance,” the male said. He and the ones who had brought the Tosevite to Atvar got him up on his feet in spite of his hoarse shouts and his efforts to bite and kick. As they led him away, he voided liquid waste.

“Disgusting,” said Pshing, who was fastidious even for a male of the Race.

“Big Uglies commonly are,” Atvar said. “Some, though, are disgusting and dangerous. This one, fortunately, is not.”

“Even with the colonization fleet, will we be able to do all we want on Tosev 3?” Pshing asked. “The natives will outnumber us to a far greater extent than anyone knew they would when we left Home.”

“I understand that, but we cannot expect more colonists for many years,” Atvar said. “And, with the Big Uglies so thick on the ground most places, too large a colonization might exceed the carrying capacity of the land.”

“Local agricultural methods are not the most efficient,” Pshing said. “And if a few, or more than a few, Big Uglies go hungry, there are many here among us who would not be overly disappointed.”

“I understand that,” the fleetlord said. “If we ruled this whole world, what you are suggesting would be easy to achieve. But I fear the independent not-empires would not take kindly to the notion of our starving their fellow Tosevites. The independent not-empires do not take kindly to many notions of ours, except those they can steal.” He looked around again. The landscape definitely reminded him of Home. Maybe I will retire here, he thought. If he did, it couldn’t come a day too soon.

Sam Yeager let out a sigh of relief. “Well, honey,” he said, “I could be wrong, but I think we’ve weathered another one.”

“Thank heaven,” Barbara said, carving another bite of lamb off her chop. “I didn’t know whether we would be able to manage it. We hadn’t come so close to big trouble since the fighting stopped.”

“How much help did you give, Dad?” Jonathan Yeager asked. That his father worked with the Race impressed him. Anything that could impress an eighteen-year-old about his father was good, as far as Sam was concerned.

“Not that much,” he answered honestly. “Mr. Lodge is a good ambassador. He let the Lizards know what we’d put up with and what we wouldn’t. All I did was sort through the ways we might compromise.”

“Compromise.” It was in Jonathan’s vocabulary, but he sounded about as keen on it as he was on lima beans.

“We need it,” Barbara said. “If you were old enough to remember the fighting, you’d know how much we need it.”

“A fight would be worse this time, too,” Sam said. “Nobody would wait very long before he started throwing atomic bombs around. And once that genie got out of the bottle, it’d be Katie bar the door.”

Barbara gave him a severe look. “The New Yorker runs a little feature called ‘Block That Metaphor.’ I think you just qualified, honey.”

“Did I?” Yeager mentally reviewed what he’d just said. With a sheepish grin, he admitted, “Well, okay, I guess I did.”

Around a mouthful of lamb chop, Jonathan said, “The Lizards should have stomped whoever did that to them into the mud.” He added an emphatic cough, to which his full mouth lent alarming authenticity.

“I won’t say you’re wrong,” Sam said slowly. “The trick is being able to do that without setting the whole planet on fire.” People had talked that way after Pearl Harbor. It had been a metaphor then. It wasn’t a metaphor any more. He went on, “Whoever did it was pretty sly. He got in a good lick”-Barbara stirred but did not rise to that-“and managed not to get hit back, or at least not very hard. Himmler or Molotov is laughing up his sleeve at Atvar.”

“They both say they didn’t do it,” Barbara said.

“What are they going to say?” Jonathan Yeager waved his fork in the air to emphasize the point.

“Maybe they really didn’t,” Barbara said. “Maybe the Japanese did, or even the British.”

But Sam shook his head. “No, hon, it couldn’t have happened that way. The Japs and the English fly rockets, yeah, but they haven’t got anything up in orbit, and it was an orbiting weapon that took out the Lizards’ ships. The Japanese don’t have nuclear weapons, either, though I know the British do.”

“One of the Big Three, then.” Barbara pursed her lips. “Not us. The Russians or the Germans? The Lady or the Tiger?”

“I’d bet on the Russians,” Jonathan said suddenly.

“How come?” Sam asked. “More people seem to think the Germans did it. More Lizards seem to think the Germans did it, too.”

“Because the Russians are better at keeping secrets,” his son answered. “You hardly ever hear about anything that happens over there. When the Germans do something, they brag about it before they do it, they go on bragging while they’re doing it, and then they brag that they’ve done it once they’re through.”