Ullhass’ mitt was even more battered than Yeager’s, but that wasn’t his problem. He lunged at the ball with the glove, as if he were trying to push it away rather than catch it. Not surprisingly, he didn’t catch it. “Stupid egg-addled thing,” he said in his own language as he stooped to pick the ball up off the grass, and added the emphatic cough to show he really meant it.
Yeager felt a surge of pride at how automatically he understood what the Lizard was saying. He wasn’t any big brain; he’d had his third stripe only a few days. He hadn’t been a prof before the Lizards came, either. He’d been an outfielder for the Decatur Commodores of the Class B Three-I League; the only reason the draft hadn’t grabbed him was that he wore full dentures, uppers and lowers, a souvenir of the 1918 influenza epidemic that had almost killed him, and had left him so weak and debilitated that his teeth rotted in his head.
But prof or no, he’d been an avid reader ofAstounding and the other science-fiction pulps. After the Lizards came, the Army didn’t care any more whether you had teeth; all they worried about was a pulse-if you had one, you were in. So, when his unit captured some Lizards back in Illinois, he’d volunteered to try to communicate with the things… and here he was in Denver, working hand in hand not only with the aliens but also with the high foreheads who were taking what Ullhass and Ristin knew and using it to help build an atomic bomb for the U.S.A.Not bad for an overage ballplayer, he thought.
Ullhass threw the baseball to Ristin. Ristin was a better natural athlete than the other Lizard, or maybe just smarter. He’d figured out how to catch with a glove, anyhow: let the ball come to him, then close his meat hand over it to make sure it didn’t get out.
He still threw funny, though; Sam had to jump high to catch his next fling. “Sorry, superior sir,” Ristin said.
“Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s keeping score.” Yeager brushed back into place a lock of dark blond hair that had escaped from under the fore-and-aft Army cap he wore. He threw Ullhass the ball. But for the nature of his friends, it was an all-American scene: three guys playing catch on a college campus on a bright summer’s day. You didn’t get any more Norman Rockwell than that-except Norman Rockwell had never painted a Lizard with a baseball glove.
Just to add to theSaturday Evening Post quality of the scene, here came Barbara. Sam waved and grinned enormously, partly because he was always glad to see her and partly because she was wearing the calico blouse and blue jeans in which she’d married him up in the great metropolis of Chugwater, by God, Wyoming. Even for Yeager, who in seventeen years of pro ball thought he’d seen every small town in the U.S. of A., that had been a new one.
He wondered how long she’d be able to keep wearing those jeans. Not that they didn’t look good on her-she was a little on the lean side, but she definitely had hips and a pert posterior-but her pregnancy was just beginning to show with her clothes off. As best as he could tell, they’d started Junior their wedding night.
“Hi, honey,” he said as she drew near. “What’s up?” The question came out more seriously than he’d expected; she wasn’t smiling as she usually did.
“General Groves sent me out to find you himself,” she answered. “You’ve got new orders, he said.”
“New orders?” Sam pulled a face. “I was just thinking how much I liked what I was doing here. Did he say what they were?”
Barbara shook her head. Her hair, a couple of shades darker than his, flew around her head. “I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said he wanted to give them to you in person.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Yeager said. Any time a general gave a sergeant orders in person, something out of the ordinary was going on, maybe something liable to get the sergeant killed. But if General Groves wanted to see him, he couldn’t very well say no. He turned to Ullhass and Ristin, speaking in the mix of English and Lizard he usually used with them: “Come on, boys, let’s go see what the exalted projectlord wants with me.”
Ristin’s mouth fell open in a Lizardy chuckle. “You’re a funny Big Ugly, superior sir.” He used the Lizards’ slang name for people as unselfconsciously as Sam saidLizard instead ofmale of the Race around him.
The two humans and two Lizards strolled across the University of Denver campus toward Science Hall. A couple of times, people they knew waved to them. Ullhass and Ristin waved back as casually as Barbara and Sam did; they were an accepted part of the Met Lab staff by now. Technically, they remained prisoners, but nobody worried much about their trying to escape.
Groves was a big enough wheel to rate a guard outside his office: the same guard who’d been assigned to Jens Larssen for a while. Yeager didn’t hold that against him. “Morning, Oscar,” he said. “You want to keep an eye on these two tough guys while the general tells me whatever he tells me? Try to keep ’em from stealing all our secrets here.”
“Sure, Sam,” Oscar answered. Even without his rifle, Yeager would have bet on him against Ristin and Ullhass both; dark and quiet he might be, but he’d seen nasty action somewhere-he had the look. Now he nodded to Barbara. “Morning, ma’am.”
“Good morning, Oscar,” she answered. She spoke more precisely than Sam did. Hell, she spoke more precisely than most people did. She’d been a graduate student in medieval English out at Berkeley before the war; that was where she’d met Jens.
Oscar turned back to Sam. “Go on in. General Groves, he’s expecting you.”
“Okay, thanks.” Yeager turned the doorknob, feeling the same willies he’d had whenever a manager called to him in a certain tone of voice after a game.Oh, God, he thought.Where have they gone and traded me to now?
He went through the door, closed it after him. General Groves looked up from the notes he was scribbling on a typed report. Sam came to attention and saluted. “Sergeant Samuel Yeager reporting as ordered, sir,” he said formally.
“At ease, Yeager. You’re not in trouble,” Groves said, returning the salute. He waved to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit down if you care to.” When Sam had, Groves went on, “Is it your opinion that we’ve wrung just about everything your two scaly accomplices know about nuclear physics out of them?”
“Yes, sir, I’d say that’s probably true,” Yeager answered after a moment’s thought.
“Good. I’d have thrown you out of here on your ear if you’d tried to tell me anything else,” Groves said. By the way the muscles shifted in his big shoulders, he’d meant it literally. “The United States can still learn a lot about the Lizards from Ullhass and Ristin, though, even if what we learn has nothing directly to do with the Metallurgical Laboratory. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”
“No doubt about it, sir,” Yeager said. “The more we know about the Lizards, the better. They’ll still be around from now on even if we manage to beat them, and that’s not counting this colonization fleet of theirs. It’s due in-what? — twenty years?”
“That’s about right, yes.” General Groves looked intently across the desk at Sam. “The way you answered that last question convinced me these are absolutely the right orders for you: you casually came to the same conclusion a staff of government experts has needed months to reach.”
Probably comes from reading science fiction,Yeager thought. He didn’t say that out loud; he had no idea how Groves felt about that Buck Rogers stuff. He did say, “You haven’t told me what the orders are, sir.”
“So I haven’t.” Groves glanced down at some papers behind hisIN basket that Yeager couldn’t see. “We’ve established a center for interrogation and research on Lizard POWs down in Arkansas. I’m going to send Ristin and Ullhass there, and I’m ordering you to accompany them. I think you can best serve your country by using your rapport with the Lizards, and that’s the place for you to do it.”