Sam Yeager had faced plenty of frustrations on Home. He’d been ready for most of them-he knew what the Lizards were like and what they were likely to do as well as any mere human could. That (along with the Doctor’s bad luck) was why he was the American ambassador today.

But one frustration he hadn’t expected was having the Race know more about what was happening back on Earth than he did.

Things had worked out that way, though. Physicists back on the home planet seemed to be dancing a buck-and-wing about something. (Did anybody back on Earth dance a buck-and-wing about anything any more? Sometimes the phrases that popped into Sam’s head made him feel like an antique even to himself.) The Race had a pretty good idea of what it was. None of the Americans on Home had even a clue.

His own ignorance made Sam call Lieutenant General Healey one more time. He relished that about as much as he would have a visit to the proctologist’s. Sometimes, though, he had to bend over. And sometimes he had to talk to the Admiral Peary ’s commandant. He consoled himself by remembering Healey liked him no better than he liked Healey.

“What’s on your mind, Ambassador?” Healey growled when the connection went through. Then came the inevitable question: “And is this call secure?”

“As far as I can tell, it is,” Yeager answered after checking the electronics in his room one more time.

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Here’s what I want to know: has the ship picked up any transmissions from the Lizards on Earth about human physicists’ recent experiments, whatever they are? And have the Lizards here on Home been blabbing about that kind of thing anywhere you can monitor them? I’d like to find out what’s going on if I can.”

“I don’t remember anything like that.” By the way Healey said it, it couldn’t have happened if he didn’t remember it.

More often than not, Sam would have accepted that just to give himself an excuse to get off the phone with a man he couldn’t stand. That he didn’t now was a measure of how urgent he thought this was. “Could you please check, General? Could you please check as carefully as possible? It’s liable to be very important.”

“How important is very important?” Healey asked scornfully.

“Peace or war important. I don’t think it gets any more important than that. Do you?”

The commandant didn’t answer, not for some little while. Yeager started to wonder if he really did think something else was more important. With Healey, you never could tell. At last, though, he said, “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Thanks,” Yeager said. Again, Healey didn’t answer. A glance at the electronics told Sam the commandant had hung up on him. He laughed. The man was consistent. Yeah, he’s consistently a son of a bitch, jeered the little voice inside Sam’s head.

Talks with Atvar faltered. It was as if both the fleetlord and Sam were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sam wasn’t even sure what the other shoe was, but he had to wait-and he had to seem to know more than he did. At one point, Atvar said, “It would be better for all concerned if this turned out to be a dead end.”

“Do you truly think so?” Yeager said, wondering what this was. “Our belief is that knowledge is never wasted.”

“Yes, I understand that,” the fleetlord answered. “You have this notion of what you call progress, of change as improvement. We think differently. When we think of change, we think of all the things that can go wrong, all the things that will need fixing. We are more realistic than you.”

Sam made the negative gesture. “Meaning no disrespect, but I do not think so. The Race and Tosevites have different histories, that is all. You gained your technology slowly, one piece at a time, and that made you notice the disruptions it caused. We got ours over a couple of long lifetimes. It made things much better for us in spite of the disruptions.”

“Did it?” Atvar asked. “Would the Jews the Deutsche exterminated agree with you? Without your newly advanced technology-railroads, poisons, and so on-the Deutsche could not have done as they did. This is not the only example. Will you deny it?”

“I wish I could,” Sam answered. But that was not what Atvar had asked. Sam Yeager sighed. “No, I will not deny it. It is a truth. But you ignore, for example, the medical advances that allow most of us to live out our full spans without fear of the diseases that killed so many of us not long ago.”

“I do not ignore them,” Atvar said. Yeager thought he meant they also had a black side, as in the experiments Nazi doctors had undertaken while they were getting rid of Jews. But the fleetlord went down a different road: “Will your agriculture keep up with population growth? Will you regulate the number of hatchlings you are allowed to produce? Or will you simply start to starve because you do not think of difficulties until it is too late?”

Those were good questions. Sam had answers for none of them. All he could say was, “Tosevites have also predicted these disasters, but they have not happened yet. If progress continues, perhaps none of them will.”

Atvar’s mouth fell open. He knew Sam well enough to know he would not offend him by laughing at him. “There is such a thing as optimism, Ambassador, and there is such a thing as what we call drooling optimism.”

“We would say wild-eyed optimism,” Sam replied. “But you see optimism in general turning into that kind of optimism sooner than we do.”

“No doubt you have come out with another truth,” Atvar said. “As for me, I can speak only as a male of the Race. And one of the things I have to say is this: from the Race’s perspective, your optimism leads to arrogance. You think you can ask for anything you want and everything will somehow turn out all right. I must tell you that that is not a truth, nor will it ever be.” He added an emphatic cough.

“When you brought the conquest fleet to Tosev 3, you expected to find a bunch of sword-swinging barbarians,” Sam said.

“Truth. We did,” Atvar said. “I do not disagree. This is so.”

“Forgive me, Fleetlord, but I have not finished,” Sam said. “Instead of being sword-swinging barbarians, we were as you found us-”

“Barbarians with aircraft and landcruisers,” Atvar broke in.

That stung. It also held some truth, more than Sam Yeager really cared to acknowledge. Refusing to acknowledge it, he went on as he had intended: “We were advanced enough to fight you to a standstill. You recognized some of us as equals, but you never truly meant it, not down in your livers, not even when we began to get ahead of you technologically. As long as we could not get out of our own solar system, you had some justification for this. But since we are talking here in Sitneff…”

“Everything you have said is a truth. It makes you more dangerous, not less. Why should we not try to rid ourselves of you while we still have the chance? If we do not, how long will it be before you try to get rid of us?”

There was the rub. The Race had always seen humans as nuisances. Now it saw them as dangerous nuisances. “We will fight to defend ourselves,” Sam warned.

“That is not the issue,” Atvar said. “Any species will fight to defend itself. You will fight to aggrandize yourselves. You will, but you will not do it at our expense.”

“Was the conquest fleet fighting in self-defense?” Sam asked acidly.

“In the end, it certainly was,” the fleetlord said, and Sam laughed in surprise. Atvar went on, “We had-and we paid for-a mistaken notion of where you Tosevites were in terms of technology. We knew as much before we landed on your planet. But if you had been what we thought you were, would you not agree you would have been better off if we had conquered you?”

Had the Lizards brought Earth from the twelfth century to the late twentieth in a couple of generations… “Materially, no one could possibly say we would not have been,” Sam answered.

“There. You see?” Atvar said.

Sam held up a hand. “Excuse me, Fleetlord, but again I had not finished. The one thing you would have taken away from us forever is our freedom. Some of us would say that is too high a price to pay.”

“Then some of you are fools,” Atvar said with acid of his own. “You had freedom to murder one another, starve, and die of diseases you did not know how to cure. It is easy to speak of freedom when your belly is full and you are healthy. When you are starving and full of parasites, it is only a word, and one without much meaning.”

That held some truth-more, again, than Yeager cared to admit. But just because it held some truth did not mean it was a truth. Sam said, “The Greeks invented democracy-snoutcounting, if you like-more than fifteen hundred of our years before your probe came to Tosev 3: more than three thousand of yours. They were full of diseases. They were hungry a lot of the time. They fought among themselves. But they did it anyway. They believed-and a lot of us have always believed since-that no one has the right to tell anyone else what to do just because of who his sire was.”

“Snoutcounting.” As usual, Atvar filled the word with scorn. “My opinion remains unchanged: it is nothing to be proud of. And is this vaunted freedom of yours worth having when it is only the freedom to starve or to die or to impose your superstition on others by force?”

“Who brought reverence for the spirits of Emperors past to Tosev 3?” Yeager inquired.

“That is not superstition. That is truth,” Atvar said primly, sounding as certain as a missionary evangelizing an islander in the South Seas.

“Evidence would be nice,” Sam said.

The fleetlord winced, but he answered, “We at least have the evidence of a long and prosperous history. Your superstitions have nothing whatever-nothing but fanaticism, I should say.”

“We are a stubborn lot,” Sam admitted.

“You are indeed.” Atvar used an emphatic cough.

Sam said, “What you do not seem to understand is that we are also stubborn in the cause of freedom. Suppose you had sent the conquest fleet right after your probe and conquered us. You could have done it. No one would say anything else, not for a moment. Suppose you had, as I say. Do you not think that, once we learned about modern technology from you, we would have risen to regain our independence?”

He had often seen Atvar angry and sardonic. He had hardly ever seen him horrified. This was one of those times. The fleetlord recoiled like a well-bred woman who saw a mouse (which reminded Sam that the Lizards had yet to exterminate the escaped rats). Visibly gathering himself, Atvar said, “What a dreadful idea!” He used another emphatic cough. “You realize you may not have done your species a favor with this suggestion?”