A shuttlecraft from the Empire had brought Karen Yeager and the other Americans down from the Admiral Peary. Now another one would take them up to the Commodore Perry. That probably suited her father-in-law’s taste for irony. The Americans weren’t heading back to Earth, not yet. They were traveling as a group to try to persuade their younger countrymen to let Sam Yeager go back.

“Are all you Tosevites strapped in?” asked the shuttlecraft pilot, a dark-skinned Rabotev named Pellakrenk. One by one, the Americans said they were. Pellakrenk made the affirmative gesture. “Good,” he-she? — said. “The launch corridor rapidly nears.”

Humans would have spoken of a launch window. The image in the Race’s language worked just as well. It made Karen think of the shuttlecraft flying along a hallway connecting Sitneff to the Commodore Perry.

“I commence countdown,” Pellakrenk announced, and did. When the Rabotev got to zero, the shuttlecraft roared away from the field. Karen felt as if several large, unfriendly people were sitting on her chest. Each breath was a struggle.

Through the roar of the rocket motor, Jonathan asked, “You okay, Dad?”

“Yeah,” Sam Yeager answered-as much a grunt of effort as a word. After a pause for breath, he asked a question of his own: “How you doing, Melanie?”

“One gravity… was bad enough,” Melanie Blanchard said. “This… is worse.”

“Soon no gravity at all,” Pellakrenk said in fair English. Unlike the Rabotev who’d brought the first load of Americans down to Home, this one didn’t pretend ignorance of the humans’ language.

When acceleration cut out, Karen gulped. She sternly told her stomach to behave itself. It did, after a few unpleasant minutes when she wondered whether it would listen. She wouldn’t have wanted to go weightless if she had morning sickness. That thought made her sympathize with Kassquit, which wasn’t something she did every day.

“Everybody okay?” Dr. Blanchard asked. “I’ve got airsick bags if you need ’em. Don’t be shy. Speak up. We don’t want the nice folks who’re giving us a ride to have to clean up this shuttlecraft.”

“What you mean?” Pellakrenk asked. Maybe Rabotevs didn’t suffer from nausea in weightlessness. It troubled the Race much less than it did humans.

Nobody answered the pilot. Nobody asked Dr. Blanchard for an airsick bag, either. Frank Coffey and Jonathan kept gulping for a while after Karen’s stomach settled down, but all they did was gulp. Karen turned her head and looked out a window. The sky had turned black. She could see the curve of Home if she craned her neck a little. Columbus was right, she thought. Planets are round.

“Commodore Perry calling the shuttlecraft from Sitneff. Do you read me, shuttlecraft from Sitneff?” The voice, that of a human speaking the language of the Race, crackled from the speaker near Pellakrenk’s head.

“This is the shuttlecraft from Sitneff,” the pilot answered. “Your signal is loud and clear.”

“Good,” the human said. “Your trajectory looks fine. Let me speak to Ambassador Yeager, if you would be so kind.”

“It shall be done,” Pellakrenk said, and passed Sam Yeager the microphone.

“I’m here. We’re all here,” Karen’s father-in-law said in English. “Nice of you to want to talk to me.” Pellakrenk probably wouldn’t notice the jab there. Karen did. She was sure the other Americans on the shuttlecraft did, too.

If the radioman on the Commodore Perry did, it didn’t faze him. “Glad to hear it,” was all he said. Karen had trouble figuring out what was bothering him. If the shuttlecraft carried explosives instead of passengers, it could get past the starship’s defenses, yes. But the little ship could carry explosives and passengers without any trouble. If the Empire wanted to start a war, it wouldn’t worry about the lives of the diplomats who’d been in Sitneff.

Docking was smooth. The Rabotev’s odd hands danced over the controls for the maneuvering jets. The shuttlecraft’s docking collar engaged with the air lock on the Commodore Perry with a smooth click. “We are here,” Pellakrenk announced. “I shall wait for you. If your plans change and you decide not to return with me, I trust you will let me know of this.”

“It shall be done, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” Karen promised.

The outer airlock door, to which the docking collar was connected, swung inward. One by one, the Americans unstrapped and glided into the air lock. When they’d all left the shuttlecraft, the door closed behind them. Tom de la Rosa said, “My God! The air’s the right temperature.” And it was. For the first time since going down to Sitneff, Karen wasn’t too damn hot.

When the inner airlock door opened, a blond woman in coveralls with a captain’s bars on the shoulders floated just inside. “Hello,” she said politely. “I’m Captain Benn. Please follow me to Lieutenant General Chesneau’s office.”

“No guided tour?” Jonathan asked.

Captain Benn just shook her head. “No,” she answered.

What Karen saw on the way to the commandant’s office were… corridors. They looked a lot like the corridors in the Admiral Peary. They were painted light green instead of gray, but so what? They had handholds so people could pull themselves along while weightless. They had convex mirrors at intersections to help prevent collisions. They had doors set into them. All the doors were closed. The Americans up from Sitneff saw not another living soul besides Captain Benn.

“Have we got the plague?” Karen asked.

“We’re only following orders,” Captain Benn answered, which probably meant yes.

An open doorway was a surprise. Stenciled on the door were the words OFFICE OF THE COMMANDANT. “Oh, boy,” Sam Yeager said. “We’re here.”

They went in. Another surprise was the appearance of Lieutenant General Chesneau. Karen had expected a J. Edgar Hoover-jowled bulldog of a man, stamped from the mold that had produced Lieutenant General Healey. But Chesneau was small and thin-faced and didn’t look as if he bit nails in half for fun. His voice was a light tenor, not a bass growl. Mildly enough, he said, “Hello. Pleased to meet all of you. So you’re the people who’ve made my life so much fun since I got here, are you?”

He couldn’t have been more disarming if he’d tried-and he no doubt was trying. Sam Yeager said, “Well, General, no offense, but you’ve made my life a whole lot of fun since you got here, too.”

Chesneau looked pained. When he said, “Ambassador, I am sorry about that,” he sounded as if he meant it. But he went on, “You wore the uniform for a long time, sir. I’m sure you understand the need to follow orders.”

“He also understands when not to follow them,” Karen said. “Do you?”

“In that sense, I hope so,” the commandant answered, not raising his voice at all. Yes, he was trying to be disarming. “Whether that sense applies here may be a different question. And it’s because the ambassador chose not to follow them on one particular occasion that I have the orders I do.” Something tightened in his jawline. However soft he sounded, steel lay underneath.

“I did it. I’ll stand by it,” Sam Yeager said. “Here’s a question for you, General. Suppose, back in the 1960s, that the Lizards found out we’d done what we’d done to them without finding out any of us gave a damn about it. What do you think they would have done to us? You ask me, the answer is, whatever they wanted to. Back then, we weren’t strong enough to stop them. Slow them down, maybe, but not stop them.”

Will Chesneau believe that? Karen wondered. The commandant was somewhere around fifty, which meant he’d been born in the early 1980s. He’d grown up with the USA pulling ahead of the Race, not struggling desperately to get even. Did he understand what things had been like twenty years after the conquest fleet arrived?

All he said now was, “Maybe.” He looked at the people from the Admiral Peary one after another, then spoke to Sam Yeager: “You must inspire tremendous loyalty in those who know you, Ambassador. It’s not a small gift.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here,” Karen’s father-in-law answered. “What’s going on is, your orders are such a bad mistake, everybody can see it but you.”

“No offense, sir, but the ambassador’s right,” Frank Coffey told Lieutenant General Chesneau. “What he’s done here is plenty to earn him a ticket back home all by itself. Those other things a long time ago… You can argue about them. I admit that-you can. But for one thing, arguing means there’s lots to be said on both sides. And for another, nobody can argue about what he’s done here. The Race was thinking hard about a preventive war against us. It might have started by the time you got here if not for him. Meaning no disrespect to the Doctor, but I don’t think he could have held it off as long as Sam Yeager did.”

Chesneau pursed his lips. “We did not expect that we would find Colonel Yeager holding the position he does,” he admitted. Then his jawline tightened again. “So-you say you’ll all stay on Home if the ambassador doesn’t go back to Earth? I am going to tell you, this is your one and only chance to change your minds. Anybody?”

He waited. He very visibly waited. Karen knew she and Jonathan weren’t going to say anything. Coffey? The de la Rosas? Dr. Blanchard? How could you be sure? How could you blame anybody who didn’t want to die on Home?

But no one said a word. Chesneau’s jaw tightened once more, this time, Karen judged, as a bulwark against astonishment. The commandant inclined his head to Sam Yeager. “What I told you before still holds, Ambassador-double, I’d say.”

“Thanks.” Yeager’s voice was husky. He nodded to his colleagues. “Thanks,” he repeated, more huskily still.

“You did the right thing,” Karen said. “We should be able to do the same.”

“Touching,” Lieutenant General Chesneau said dryly. “Last chance, people. Going once… Going twice… Gone.”

“If Dad’s not going anywhere, we’re not going anywhere, either,” Jonathan said. One by one, the men and women who’d come down from the Admiral Peary nodded.

Lieutenant General Chesneau eyed them in bemusement. Sam Yeager said, “Just for the record, you ought to know this wasn’t my idea.”

“Truth,” Karen said in the Lizards’ language, and added an emphatic cough. Her colleagues made the affirmative gesture. She eyed Chesneau. Plainly, he did understand the word, the cough, and the gesture. That was something, anyhow.