“Don’t know,” Yeager answered. “I’ve never been in a war before, and I’m only a little fellow in this one.” He thought back to his ballplaying days, and to all the signs he and his teammates had stolen. Mutt Daniels was a genius at that kind of thing. He wondered how-and if-Mutt was doing these days.
Straha shifted to yet another frequency. An excited-sounding Lizard was relaying a long, involved message. “Ah, that is most interesting,” Straha said when he was done.
“I didn’t follow all of it,” Sam confessed, embarrassed at having to say that after Straha had praised his grasp of the Lizards’ tongue. “Something about ginger and calculator fraud, whatever that is.”
“Not calculator fraud-computer fraud,” Straha said. “I do not blame you for not understanding completely. You Big Uglies, while technically far more advanced than you have any business being, as yet have no real grasp of the potential of computing machines.”
“Maybe not,” Yeager said. “Sounds like we don’t have any grasp of how to commit crimes with them, either.”
Straha’s mouth dropped open in amusement. “Committing the crime is easy. Males in the payroll section diverted payments to ginger purveyors into accounts of which only they and the purveyors-and, of course, the computers-were aware. Since no one else knew these accounts existed, no one not party to the secret could access them. The computers would not announce their presence; it was, in essence, a perfect scheme.”
“We have a saying that there’s no such thing as a perfect crime,” Yeager remarked. “What went wrong with this one?”
Straha laughed again. “Nothing is accident-proof. A male in the accounting section who was not part of the miscreants’ scheme was investigating a legitimate account. But he made a mistake in entering the number of that account and found himself looking at one of the concealed ones. He recognized it at once for what it was and notflied his superiors, who began a larger investigation. Many males will find themselves in difficulties because of it.”
“Hope you won’t be angry if I tell you that doesn’t make me too unhappy,” Sam said. “Who would have thought the Race would turn out to have drug fiends? Makes you seem almost human-no offense.”
“I shall endeavor to take none,” Straha replied with dignity.
Yeager kept his face straight; Straha was getting pretty good at interpreting human expressions, and he didn’t want the Lizard to see how funny he thought that was. He said, “I wonder if we have any way to use the news, maybe make some of your people think males who aren’t ginger tasters really are. Something like that, anyhow.”
“You have an evilly twisted mind, Sam Yeager,” Straha said.
“Thank you,” Sam answered, which made Straha first jerk both eye turrets toward him and then start to laugh as he understood it was a joke. Yeager went on, “You might talk with some of our propaganda people, maybe ask if they want you to broadcast about it. Who knows what kind of trouble you might stir up?”
“Who indeed?” Straha said. “I shall do that.” It wasn’t quiteIt shall be done, the Lizards’ equivalent forYes, sir, but it was more deference than Sam had ever got from Straha before. Little by little, he was earning respect.
When his shift was done, he started to go upstairs to see Barbara and Jonathan, but ran into Ristin and Ullhass in the hospital lobby. Those two Lizard POWs were old buddies; he’d captured them back in the summer of 1942, when the Lizard invasion was new and looked irresistible. By now, they seemed well on the way to becoming Americans, and wore their official U.S. prisoner-of-war red-white-and-blue body paint with considerable pride. They’d also picked up pretty good English over the last couple of years.
“Hey, Sam,” Ristin said in that language. “Baseball this afternoon?”
“Yes,” Ullhass echoed. “Baseball!” He added an emphatic cough.
“Maybe later-not now,” Sam said, to which both Lizards responded with steam-whistle noises of disappointment. With their fast, skittery movements, they made surprisingly good middle infielders, and had taken to the game well. Their small size and forward-sloping posture gave them a strike zone about the size of a postage stamp, too, so they were good leadoff men-well, leadoff males-even if they seldom hit the ball hard.
“Good weather for a game,” Ristin said, doing his best to tempt Sam. A lot of soldiers played ball when they were off duty, but Ristin and Ullhass were the only Lizards who joined in. With Yeager’s endless years of bush-league experience, everybody was glad to see him out there, and people had put up with his Lizard pals for his sake. Now Ullhass and Ristin were starting to get noticed for the way they played, not for their scaly hides.
“Maybe later,” Sam repeated. “Now I want to see my wife and son. If you don’t mind too much.” The Lizards sighed in resignation. They knew families mattered to Tosevites, but it didn’t feel real to them, any more than Yeager understood in his gut how much their precious Emperor meant to them. He headed for the stairs. Ristin and Ullhass started practicing phantom double plays. Ristin, who mostly played second, had a hell of a fast pivot.
Up on the fourth floor, Jonathan was telling the world in no uncertain terms that he didn’t care for something or other it had done to him. Listening to him yowl, Sam was glad the Lizards who lived up there weren’t around to hear the racket. It sometimes drove him a little squirrely, and he was a human being.
The crying stopped, very suddenly. Sam knew what that meant: Barbara had given the baby her breast. Sam smiled as he opened the door to their room. He was fond of his wife’s breasts, too, and figured the kid took after his old man.
Barbara looked up from the chair in which she was nursing Jonathan. She didn’t seem as badly beat up as she had just after he was born, but she wasn’t what you’d call perky, either. “Hello, honey,” she said. “Shut the door quietly, would you? He may fall asleep. He’s certainly been fussing as if he was tired.”
Sam noted the precise grammar there, as he often did when his wife talked. He sometimes envied her fancy education; he’d left high school to play ball, though an insatiable curiosity had kept him reading this and finding out little fragmented pieces of that ever since. Barbara never complained about his lack of formal schooling, but it bothered him anyhow.
Sure enough, Jonathan did go to sleep. The kid was growing; he took up more room in the cradle now than he had when he was first born. As soon as Sam saw he would stay down after Barbara put him in there, he touched her on the arm and said, “I got a present for you, hon. Well, really it’s a present for both of us, but you can go first with it. I’ve been saving it all morning long, so I figure I can last a little longer.”
The buildup intrigued her. “Whatdo you have?” she breathed.
“It’s not anything fancy,” he warned. “Not a diamond, not a convertible.” They both laughed, not quite comfortably. It would be a long time. If ever, before you could start thinking about driving a convertible. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a new corncob pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco, then handed them to her with a flourish. “Here you go.”
She stared as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. “Where did you get them?”
“This colored guy came around early this morning, selling ’em,” Sam answered. “He’s from up in the northern part of the state, where they grow some tobacco. Cost me fifty bucks, but what the heck? I don’t have a whole lot of things to spend money on, so why not?”
“It’s all right with me. It’s better than all right with me, as a matter of fact.” Barbara stuck the empty pipe in her mouth. “I never smoked one of these before. I probably look like a Southern granny.”
“Babe, you always look good to me,” Yeager said. Barbara’s expression softened. Keeping your wife happy was definitely worth doing-especially when you meant every word you said. He tapped at the tobacco pouch with his index finger. “You want me to load the pipe for you?”
“Would you, please?” she said, so he did. He had a Zippo, fueled now not by lighter fluid but by moonshine. He h
ad no idea how he’d keep it going when he ran out of flints, but that hadn’t happened yet. He flicked the wheel with his thumb. A pale, almost invisible alcohol flame sprang into being. He held it over the bowl of the pipe.
Barbara’s cheeks hollowed as she inhaled. “Careful,” Sam warned. “Pipe tobacco’s a lot stronger than what you get in cigarettes, and-” Her eyes crossed. She coughed like somebody in the last throes of consumption. “-you haven’t smoked much of anything lately,” he finished unnecessarily.
“No kidding.” Her voice was a raspy wheeze. “Remember that bit inTom Sawyer? ‘First Pipes-“I’ve Lost My Knife,” ’ something like that. I know just how Tom felt. That stuff isstrong.”
“Let me try,” Sam said, and took the pipe from her. He drew on it cautiously. He knew about pipe tobacco, and knew what any tobacco could do to you when you hadn’t smoked for a while. Even taking all that into account, Barbara was right; what smoldered in that pipe was strong as the devil. It might have been cured and mellowed for fifteen, maybe even twenty minutes-smoking it felt like scraping coarse sandpaper over his tongue and the inside of his mouth. Spit flooded from every salivary gland he owned, including a few he hadn’t known were there. He felt dizzy, almost woozy for a second-and he knew enough not to draw much smoke down into his lungs. He coughed a couple of times himself. “Wowie!”
“Here, give it back to me,” Barbara said. She made another, much more circumspect, try, then exhaled. “God! That is to tobacco what bathtub gin was to the real stuff.”
“You’re too young to know about bathtub gin,” he said severely. Memories of some pounding headaches came back to haunt him. He puffed on the pipe again himself. It wasn’t a bad comparison.
Barbara giggled. “One of my favorite uncles was a part-time bootlegger. I had quite a high-school graduation party-from what I remember of it, anyway.” She took the pipe back from Sam. “I’m going to need a while to get used to this again.”