“Hi, Lacey,” he answered now. “What’s up?”

“We have a deal with Random House,” she said crisply. Sam’s jaw dropped. Then she told him how much it was for. His jaw dropped farther, all the way down onto his chest. “I hope that’s satisfactory,” she finished.

“My God,” he said, and she laughed out loud. He tried to come up with something more coherent. The best he could do was, “How did you manage that?”

“Well, I didn’t do anything to the acquiring editor that left a mark,” she said, which made him laugh in turn. She went on, “They’re excited about it, in fact. They must be, or they wouldn’t have made that offer. They said it was high time you told your own story.”

He couldn’t very well have told it before this unless he’d done it before he went into cold sleep. That hadn’t even occurred to him back then. Now the book would feel like history to everybody who read it. “My God,” he repeated.

“I hope that means you’re pleased,” Lacey Nagel said.

“I’m more than pleased-I’m flabbergasted,” Sam told her.

“Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a while,” she said.

“I’m not surprised,” Sam said without rancor. “I know the way I talk is old-fashioned as all get-out these days.” Saying all get-out was old-fashioned these days, too.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lacey said. “No matter how you say it, what you have to say will be right up to the minute.”

“I hope so.” He still felt a little-more than a little-dizzy. “I was working on it when you called.”

“Oh-oh!” she said. “That means you want to wring my neck for interrupting you.”

He shook his head. Lacey Nagel couldn’t see that; his phone didn’t have a video attachment, which only proved how old-fashioned he was. “Oh, no,” he said. “If you’ve got news like that, you can call me any old time. Thank you. I don’t think I said that before. Thank you!” He added an emphatic cough. When he walked back to the computer, his feet didn’t touch the carpet once.

Karen Yeager walked softly around Jonathan. The two of them and Sam Yeager all had book deals now, but Jonathan’s dad had got his more than a month before either one of them. That didn’t bother her much. But she could see how it got under her husband’s skin. She laughed at herself. She’d almost thought of it as getting under Jonathan’s scales-proof, as if she needed proof, she’d spent too much time around the Race.

Jonathan hadn’t said much about the way he felt, but he didn’t need to. Spells of alternating gloom and bad temper said it for him. He’d come in second to his old man again, and he didn’t like it one damn bit.

Hearing the doorbell came as a relief. “Who’s that? What does he want?” Jonathan said, grumpy still.

“One easy way to find out.” Karen opened the door. “Oh, hello, Mickey! Come in.”

“Thanks,” Mickey said. Karen waved him to a chair. They’d bought a couple adapted to a Lizard’s shape. But Mickey sat down in an ordinary armchair. “I’m more used to these damn things.” He swung one eye turret toward Karen, the other toward Jonathan. “And whose fault is that?”

“Well, we could blame the federal government,” Karen said. “It’s a handy target-and it is where Jonathan’s dad got your eggs.”

Mickey shook his head. He did that as naturally as most Lizards shaped the negative gesture. “Too big a target. I need to blame people, not a thing.”

“We’ve already apologized,” Jonathan said. “There’s not much else we can do about it now. And you’ll have the last laugh-even with our cold sleep, odds are you’ll outlive us by plenty.”

“Your father already told me the same thing,” Mickey said. Most of the time, that would have been fine. Now… Now, Jonathan made a noise down deep in his throat. He didn’t want to hear that his father had got there ahead of him one more time. Mickey went on, “Yeah, I’ll live a long time. But what will I live as ? A curiosity? Hell, I’m a curiosity even to myself.”

“Would you like to be a curiosity with a drink?” Karen asked.

“Sure. Rum and Coke,” Mickey said. As she went to the kitchen, he added, “You Yeagers, all of you, you’re my family-all the family I’ve got, except for Donald. The only problem with that is, I shouldn’t have any family, and if I did have a family, it shouldn’t be full of humans.”

Karen brought him the drink, and scotch for her and Jonathan. “Well, we’ll try not to hold it against you,” she said.

Both his eye turrets turned sharply toward her. Then he realized she was joking, and chuckled-a rusty imitation of the noise a human would make. “Donald would have bitten you for that,” he said, sipping.

“Donald may resent people, but he’s piled up a hell of a lot of money making them laugh,” Jonathan said.

Mickey shrugged. “I’ve piled up a hell of a lot of money, too. I’ve got nothing against money-don’t get me wrong. Life’s better with it than without it. But Donald was right about what he told you the day you came down from the Commodore Perry — the fellow who said it can’t buy happiness knew what he was talking about. That makes Donald angrier than it does me. Instead of biting them, he makes them laugh-and then he laughs at them for laughing at him.”

Jonathan caught Karen’s eye. He nodded slightly. So did she. That made more sense than she wished it did. It also went a long way towards explaining the urgency of Donald’s performance on You’d Better Believe It. Something not far from desperation surely fueled it.

“Do you laugh at us, too?” Karen asked.

“Sometimes. Not quite so often. I still want to be one of you more than Donald does,” Mickey answered. “Yeah, I know that’s silly, but it’s how I was raised. I speak English as well as I can with this mouth, but I have an accent when I use the Race’s language. Ain’t that a kick in the head?”

“Kassquit speaks the Race’s language as well as she can with her mouth,” Jonathan said. “It’s the only one she knows. She never learned any of ours.”

“That’s a damn shame.” Mickey added an emphatic cough, but a lot of human English-speakers these days would have done the same thing. “You could have done worse. I’ve never said anything different. Donald may have-but Donald doesn’t always even take himself seriously, so why should you?”

Before either Karen or Jonathan could answer, the doorbell rang again. “Grand Central Station around here,” Karen said. When she opened the door, she found Donald out there on the walkway. “Well! What can I do for you?”

“May I come in?” he asked. “Please?” Mockery danced in his voice.

“Of course.” Karen stepped aside. “You’re always welcome here. We’re not angry at you. We never have been, no matter what you’ve decided to think about us.”

“How… Christian of you.” That was more mockery, now flaying rather than dancing. But Donald started slightly when he saw Mickey. “Ah, my Siamese twin. The only Lizard on four planets as screwed up as I am-except he won’t admit it.”

“Oh, I admit it,” Mickey said. “How could I do anything else? It’s true, for Christ’s sake. The difference is, I don’t think we can do anything about it now, and I don’t think there’s much point to getting upset about the way it happened.”

“Why not? They’re to blame.” Donald pointed to Karen and Jonathan. “Them and old Sam.”

“We’ll take some of the blame for the way you turned out-some, but not all,” Jonathan said. “You have to blame yourself, too.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Mickey said. Donald let out an angry hiss. Like some of the purely human noises Kassquit made when she was furious or surprised, that one seemed instinctive in the Race.

“Can I fix you a drink to go with everyone else‘s?” Karen asked Donald. She gave him her sweetest smile. “No need to check it for rat poison, I promise.”

“Meow,” he said. “Most of the time, I get paid for being rude-though there are some people for whom I’d do it for nothing. I’d love one, thanks. Whatever he’s having.” He pointed to Mickey’s rum and Coke. “You Yeagers made damn sure our tastes would be the same, didn’t you?”

“In a word, no,” Karen answered over her shoulder as she went back into the kitchen. “It did work out that way a lot of the time, but not always. It often does with two brothers, especially when they’re the same age.”

“Brothers? How do you know we’re brothers?” Donald said. “All we were when you got us was a couple of eggs. They could have come from anywhere-from two different anywheres. For all you know, they did.”

Now Karen and Jonathan looked at each other in consternation. They and Jonathan’s father had always assumed the eggs they’d got from the government came from the same female. Karen realized Donald was right: they had exactly zero proof of that. She wondered if the people who’d got the eggs from the Lizards had any idea whether they belonged together. After seventy years, she couldn’t very well ask. Odds were none of those people was still alive.

“If you want to know bad enough, there’s genetic testing,” Jonathan said.

“I’ve talked about it. The Race thinks I’m some kind of a pervert for caring one way or the other,” Donald answered. “But I do care-and there’s one more thing that’s your fault. I’m a goddamn human being with scales, that’s what I am. I already told you I watch Rita’s tits, didn’t I? Yeah, I thought so. I shouldn’t give a damn. I know I shouldn’t give a damn. But I do. I can’t help it. It’s how I was raised. Thanks a lot, both of you.” He raised his glass in a scornful salute, then gulped the drink.

“I watch women, too,” Mickey confessed. “I keep thinking they’re what I ought to want even though I can’t really want anything unless I smell a female’s pheromones. Even then, half of me thinks I ought to be mating with a pretty girl, not with a Lizard.”

Oh, Lord. They’re even more screwed up than Kassquit is, Karen thought miserably. As far as she knew, Kassquit had never wanted to lie down with a Lizard. But then, the Race didn’t parade sex out in front of everybody and use it to sell everything from soap to station wagons the way people did. Except during mating season, Lizards were indifferent-and after mating season, they tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. With humans, the titillation was always out there. Mickey and Donald had responded to it even if they couldn’t respond to it… and if that wasn’t screwed up, what the devil would be?