But it was already happening back on Earth. Too late to stop it now. And, whatever else happened, he couldn’t imagine an American colonization fleet crossing the light-years and coming down on Home. The Race had the population to spare for that sort of thing. The USA didn’t.

He wondered how much he’d accomplished by coming here. That he’d got here alive was pretty impressive, too. He’d had the audience with the Emperor and the private meeting afterwards. But what had he gained that he couldn’t have got from Reffet and Kirel back on Earth? Anything?

If he had, he was hard pressed to see it. He understood Tom de la Rosa’s frustration. He had plenty of frustration of his own. The Lizards here on Home were less inclined to compromise than the ones back on Earth had been. They thought they were right, and any miserable Big Ugly had to be wrong.

One thing the flight of the Admiral Peary had proved: humans could fly between the stars. The Race couldn’t ignore that. The Lizards would have to be wondering what else might be on the way. Maybe the colonists back on Earth could radio ahead and let Home know other starships were coming, but maybe not, too. If humans wanted to send secret expeditions, they might be able to.

Sam grimaced. The Reich might do that. And any German expedition would come with guns not just handy but loaded. The Nazis owed the Lizards for a defeat. After all this time, would they try to pay them back?

How am I supposed to know? Sam asked himself. All he knew about what the Reich was like these days, he got from the radio bulletins beamed Homeward by America and by the Lizards themselves. It didn’t seem to have changed all that much-and there was one more thing to worry about.

Whenever Jonathan Yeager saw Kassquit, he wanted to ask her if she was happy. She certainly gave all the signs of it, or as many as she could with a face that didn’t show what she was thinking. Frank Coffey seemed pretty happy these days, too. Jonathan had no great urge to ask him if he was. That was none of his business, not unless Coffey felt like making it his business.

Jonathan wondered what the difference was. That he’d been intimate with Kassquit all those years ago? He thought there was more to it than that. He hoped so, anyhow. He had the strong feeling that Major Frank Coffey could take care of himself. He wasn’t nearly so sure about Kassquit. She couldn’t be a Lizard, however much she wanted to, but she didn’t exactly know how to be a human being, either. She was liable to get hurt, or to hurt herself.

And what can you do about it if she does? Jonathan asked himself. The answer to that was only too obvious. He couldn’t do a damn thing, and he knew it. He also knew Karen would grab the nearest blunt instrument and brain him if he tried.

He sighed. He couldn’t blame Karen for being antsy about Kassquit. To his wife, Kassquit was The Other Woman, in scarlet letters ten feet high. Kassquit wasn’t at her best around Karen, either.

It came as something of a relief when Trir said, “Would any of you Tosevites care for a sightseeing tour today?” at breakfast one morning.

“What sort of sights do you have in mind showing us?” Linda de la Rosa asked.

“Perhaps you would like to go to the Crimson Desert?” the guide said. “It has a wild grandeur unlike any other on Home.”

“I want to go,” Tom de la Rosa said. “I would like to see what you term a desert on this world, when so much of it would be a desert on Tosev 3.”

All the Americans volunteered-even Jonathan’s father, who said, “None of the negotiations going on right now will addle if we pause. Pausing may even help some of them.” Jonathan knew his dad wasn’t happy with the way things were going. He hadn’t expected him to come out and say so, though.

Then Kassquit asked, “May I also come? I too would like to see more of Home.”

“Yes, Researcher. You are welcome,” Trir said. “We will leave from in front of the hotel in half a daytenth. All of you should bring whatever you require for an overnight stay.”

“The Crimson Desert,” Karen said musingly. “I wonder what it will be like.”

“Hot,” Jonathan said. His wife gave him a sardonic nod. Had they been going to the desert on Earth, he would have warned her to take along a cream that prevented sunburn. As a redhead, she needed to worry about it more than most people did. But Tau Ceti wasn’t the sun. It put out a lot less ultraviolet radiation. Even in the warmest weather, sunburn wasn’t so much of a worry here.

They boarded the bus that had taken them out to the ranch. The driver left the hotel’s lot and pulled out into traffic. They were off. The bus’ dark windows kept Lizard drivers and passengers in other vehicles from gaping at Big Uglies. It didn’t keep the Americans from looking out. Whenever Jonathan saw a Lizard in a wig-or, every once in a while, a Lizard in a T-shirt-he had everything he could do not to howl with laughter. Then he’d run a hand over his own shaven skull and think about sauces and geese and ganders.

In the halfhearted Lizard way, the bus was air-conditioned. That meant it was hot inside, but not quite stifling. Jonathan’s father started to laugh. “What’s funny, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

“Another bus ride,” his father answered. “I used to think I’d taken the last one when I quit playing ball, but I was wrong.”

“I bet you never expected to take one on another world,” Jonathan said.

“Well, that’s a fact,” Sam Yeager agreed. “All the same, though, a bus ride is a bus ride. Some things don’t change. And I keep looking for greasy spoons by the side of the road. I don’t suppose the Race knows anything about chop-suey joints or hot-dog stands.”

“Probably a good thing they don’t,” Jonathan said.

“Yeah, I suppose,” his father said. “But it hardly seems like a road trip without ’em. I’ve been spoiled. I have this idea of how things are supposed to work, and I’m disappointed when they turn out different.”

“You probably expect flat tires, too,” Jonathan said.

His father nodded. “You bet I do. I’ve seen enough of them. Heck, I’ve helped change enough of them. I wonder what the Lizards use for a jack.”

“Let’s hope we don’t find out,” Jonathan said. To his relief, his father didn’t argue with him.

They had no trouble getting to the Crimson Desert. The bus rolled south and east out of Sitneff, into open country. By any Earthly standards, that would have been desert. By the standards of Home, it wasn’t. It was nothing but scrub. Treeish things were few and far between, but smaller plants kept the ground from being too barren. Every once in a while, Jonathan spotted some kind of animal scurrying along, though the bus usually went by too fast to let him tell what the creature was.

Mountains rose ahead. The bus climbed them. The road grew steep and narrow; Jonathan got the feeling not a whole lot of vehicles came this way. He hadn’t thought Home would have roads to nowhere, but the one they were on sure gave that feeling. Up and up it went. The bus’ engine labored a little. The driver turned off the air conditioning, but it kept getting cooler inside the bus anyhow. It might have dropped all the way down into the seventies. It was the coolest Jonathan had been anywhere on Home this side of the South Pole.

A few minutes later, they came to what was obviously the crest of the grade. Trir said, “This is the third-highest pass on all of Home.” Without checking an atlas, Jonathan had no idea whether she was right, but nothing about the place made him want to disbelieve her.

The bus seemed relieved to find a downhill slope. The driver knew her business. She never let it get going too fast, but she was never too obvious about riding the brakes, either. The change in the weather on the other side of the mountains was immediate and profound. Before long, three or four Americans and Kassquit all called for the driver to turn the air conditioning on again. With a sigh, she did. It suddenly seemed to be fighting a much more savage climate.

“There!” Trir pointed ahead, out through the windshield. “Now you can see why this place got its name.”

Jonathan craned his neck for a better look. Sure enough, the cliffsides and the ground were of a reddish color, brighter than rust. He wouldn’t have called most of it crimson, but he wouldn’t have revoked anyone else’s poetic license, either. And color names didn’t translate perfectly between the Race’s language and English to begin with.

Down went the bus, into the middle of the desert. By the noises the air conditioning made, it was working harder and harder. By the way sweat ran down Jonathan’s face, it wasn’t working hard enough. “How hot is it outside?” he asked.

“Probably about fifty-five hundredths,” Trir answered.

The Race divided the distance between water’s freezing and boiling points into hundredths-the exact equivalent of Celsius degrees. The USA still routinely used Fahrenheit. Jonathan was struggling to do the conversion in his head when Frank Coffey spoke in horrified English: “Jesus! That’s just the other side of 130!”

It could get that hot on Earth… just barely. But Trir spoke as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. What was that line about mad dogs and Englishmen? Noel Coward had never heard of Lizards when he wrote it.

Ten minutes later, the bus stopped. Air like a blast furnace rolled inside. It’s a dry heat, Jonathan thought in something not far from despair. That worked fine when the temperature was in the nineties. Over a hundred, it wore thin. At the moment, all it meant was that Jonathan would bake instead of boiling.

Trir seemed perfectly happy. “Is it not a bracing climate?” she said. “Come out, all of you, and look around.” She skittered out of the bus and down onto the ground.

Major Coffey wasn’t the only human being who said, “Jesus!” But they’d come all this way. There wasn’t-Jonathan supposed there wasn’t-much point just to staying in the bus. He got to his feet and went out into the Crimson Desert.

Jesus! didn’t begin to do it justice. Jonathan found he had to keep blinking almost as fast as he could. If he didn’t, his eyeballs started drying out. In between blinks, he looked around. The place did have a stark beauty to it. Wind and dust had carved the crimson cliffs into a cornucopia of crazy shapes. Not all the shades of red were the same. There were bands and twists of rust and scarlet and crimson and carmine and magenta. Here and there, he spotted flecks of white all the brighter for being so isolated. Tau Ceti beat down on him out of a greenish blue sky.