It wasn’t that Ttomalss begrudged his former ward’s happiness. So he told himself, at any rate. Still, seeing her so obviously pleased with the company of her fellow Tosevite got under his scales. If behavior sprang from biology more than from culture, perhaps conflict with the wild Big Uglies was inevitable-a conclusion he would rather not have reached just then.

He did his best to reach a different conclusion. Maybe their happiness together showed that citizens of the Empire and wild Tosevites could get on well despite their cultural differences. That sounded reassuring, but he couldn’t make himself believe it. It would have been a truth had all citizens of the Empire been Tosevites. Had Kassquit been a member of the Race, Frank Coffey would not have been interested in her in the way he was. Tosevite sexuality makes cultural differences less important, he judged. But that was an argument for biological primacy, not against it, and one he wished he had not thought of.

The server brought his zisuili ribs. They were tender and meaty, the sauce that covered them tart on his tongue. He savored them less than he wished he would have. His mind was on other things. Atvar had always been on the optimistic side when it came to dealing with the Big Uglies. If even he feared a clash was inevitable, maybe it was.

Sam Yeager knew the commandant of the Admiral Peary was the sort of man who would have disposed of him like a crumpled paper towel for letting the Lizards know who was responsible for the attack on the colonization fleet. That was one reason Yeager hated talking with Lieutenant General Healey.

And the commandant despised him right back. He knew it. As far as Healey was concerned, he was a traitor and a Lizard-lover, somebody who cared about the Race more than he did about humanity or his own country. Their mutual lack of affection had made their conversation about ginger not long before particularly unpleasant.

Healey could have worked much more easily with the Doctor. Nobody had ever questioned the Doctor’s patriotism. And the Doctor would have figured Healey was a useful tool, and treated him with the respect required to keep him… useful. (Nobody, Yeager was convinced, could have kept Healey happy. The capacity for happiness simply was not in the man.)

But the USA was stuck with one Sam Yeager as ambassador. It meant Lieutenant General Healey had to take him seriously, for his position if not for himself. And it also meant that, now and again, like it or not, Sam had to deal with Healey.

“Are you sure this conversation is secure?” Healey growled. Yeager might have guessed those would be the first words out of his mouth.

“As sure as my instruments will let me be,” he answered. Of course the Race would try to monitor conversations between the ground and the Admiral Peary. The scrambling equipment was human-made, the best around in 1994. That put it a little ahead of anything the Lizards owned. But they had a whole solar system’s worth of electronics here to try to tease signal out of noise. Maybe they could. Sam felt he had to add, “Life doesn’t come with a guarantee, you know.”

“Yes, I am aware of that.” By Healey’s sour rasp, he was wishing he were having this conversation with the Doctor. He muttered something Sam couldn’t make out, which was probably just as well. Then he gathered himself. “Tell me what’s on your mind, Ambassador.” In his own crabbed way, he was making an effort. If he dealt with Sam Yeager the ambassador, he wouldn’t have to think so much about Sam Yeager the man-the man he couldn’t stand.

“I think you would do well to stay alert for anything unexpected.” Sam picked his words with as much care as he could.

“We always do,” Healey said, as if Sam couldn’t be trusted to know that for himself. But then his tone sharpened: “Are you telling me there may be some special reason we need to be alert?” He was narrow. He was sour. He was also professionally competent, however little Yeager cared to acknowledge that.

And Yeager had to answer, “Yes, I’m afraid there may be.”

“Suppose you tell me more,” the commandant rapped out.

“There are… sovereignty issues,” Sam said unhappily. “Free-trade issues. The Race has most-favored-nation status in commerce with the United States. It doesn’t want to see that there are reciprocity issues. If tariffs keep us from carrying on any sort of trade with the planets in the Empire-”

“Then we have a problem,” Healey broke in, and Sam couldn’t disagree with him. Healey went on, “All right, Ambassador. I suppose I have to thank you for the heads-up. I promise you, we won’t be caught napping. Anything else?”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “Out.” He broke the connection. It was his turn to do some muttering. One reason the Admiral Peary had come to Home heavily armed was to remind the Race war with the United States didn’t just mean war within the Sun’s solar system. War could come home to the other worlds the Empire ruled.

Healey was probably the right man to be up there, too. If he had to fight for his ship, he would do it till the Lizards overwhelmed him. Inevitably, they would, but they’d know they’d been in a scrap, too.

They’d never had anybody insist on full equality with them before. They didn’t know how to respond. No, that wasn’t true. They couldn’t see that they needed to agree. That came closer to the truth.

Shaking his head, Sam left his room. He went down to the lobby, where he found Tom de la Rosa and Frank Coffey good-naturedly arguing about, of all things, a blown call in the 1985 World Series. De la Rosa rounded on him as he came up. “What do you think, Sam? Was the guy safe or out?”

“Beats me,” Sam said. “I’d been on ice for years.”

“So had that stupid umpire,” Coffey said. “The only difference is, they ran him out there anyway.”

Yeager looked around. There weren’t any Lizards close by-just a couple of guards at the door. But the Race was bound to have bugged the area. He would have, in the Lizards’ place. Any edge you could get was better than none. He said, “Come on back up to my room, gentlemen, if you’d be so kind.” The Lizards had bugs there, too. The difference was, those bugs didn’t work-Sam didn’t think they did, anyhow.

“What’s up?” Tom asked. Yeager only shrugged, pointed at a wall, and tapped his own ear. The Lizards could have all the bugs they wanted down here, but they wouldn’t get everything that was going on.

De la Rosa and Coffey certainly knew what Sam was saying. They kept on hashing out the blown call-or maybe the good call, if you believed Tom-all the way up the elevator. By the time they got off, Sam found himself wishing he’d seen the play. He wondered if people back on Earth were still arguing about it, too.

But everyone’s manner changed when the three of them got back to the hotel room. “What’s up?” de la Rosa asked again, this time in a much less casual tone of voice.

Before answering, Sam checked the bug sniffer. Only after he saw everything was green did he ask what was on his mind: “Which is better, a treaty that doesn’t give us everything we ought to have or a fight to make sure we get it?”

“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?” Frank Coffey quoted.

De la Rosa grinned at him. “You’re a lot of things, Major, but I’ll be damned if I can see you as a melancholy Dane.”

“You’re right-I’m too cheerful,” Coffey said. De la Rosa and Yeager both made faces at him.

“It’s a serious question, though.” Sam got back to business. “It looks more and more as if the Lizards aren’t going to give us full equality all over the Empire. So what do we do about that? Do we settle for something less, or do we go to war and blow everything to hell and gone?”

“Can’t very well phone home for instructions, can you?” de la Rosa said.

“Not unless I want to go back into cold sleep till the answer comes in twenty-odd years from now,” Yeager answered. “And there’s not much point to sending out an ambassador if you’re going to do it all by radio, is there?”

“You’re the man on the spot,” Coffey agreed. “In the end, it all comes down to you.”

Sam knew that. He wished Frank Coffey hadn’t put it so baldly. He wished the Doctor had revived. He wished for all sorts of things he wouldn’t get. The weight lay on his shoulders. He was responsible for billions of lives scattered among four different species. Nobody since the Emperor who’d sent the conquest fleet to Earth had borne that kind of burden-and the Lizard hadn’t known he bore it.

“If we accept an inferior treaty now, maybe we can get it fixed when we’re stronger,” Tom said. “We’re getting stronger all the time, too.”

“Other side of that coin is, maybe the Lizards will think they have a precedent for holding us down,” Coffey said. “What are your orders, Ambassador?”

He was a military man. To him, orders were Holy Writ. Sam had lived in that world for a long time. He understood it, but he didn’t feel bound by it, not any more. He said, “The first thing my orders are is out of date. Tom said it: I can’t phone home. I’m the man on the spot. If my orders tell me to insist on complete equality no matter what and I see that means war, I’m going to think long and hard before I follow them.”

“Are you saying you won’t follow them?” Coffey asked. That was a dangerous question. If he saw somebody wantonly disobeying orders… well, who could guess what he might do?

“No, I’m not saying I won’t follow them,” Yeager answered carefully. “But war on this scale is something nobody’s ever imagined, not even the people who were around when the conquest fleet landed.” He was one of those people. There were a few more up on the Admiral Peary. Back on Earth? Only the oldest of the old, and even they would have been children back then.

A good many Lizards who’d been active then were still around. That wasn’t just on account of cold sleep, either. They lasted longer than people did. But did they understand what they might be setting in motion? Sam didn’t think so.

“What will make up your mind, one way or the other?” Frank Coffey didn’t want to let it alone. He was capable. He was dutiful. He made Sam want to kick him in the teeth.

Still picking his words with care, Sam said, “If they say, ‘You have to do it our way, or we’ll go to war with you right now,’ I don’t see that I have any choice. We let them know we’ll fight. You can’t let them get away with that kind of threat. If they think they can, they’ll own us.”