Harry Turtledove: Down to Earth

Before Yeager could answer, Jonathan came running back onto the service porch. “Karen’s on her way,” he reported breathlessly. “She says not to let them hatch before she gets here.”

“Fine with me,” Sam said. “Did she tell you how we were supposed to manage that?” Jonathan glared at him. He’d been glared at by professionals, from managers and umpires all the way up to generals and a couple of presidents. He wasn’t about to let his son faze him. He pointed down into the incubator. “Look-the Lizard inside the other egg’s starting to poke his way out, too.”

They jockeyed for position in front of the incubator; it wasn’t easy for all of them to see at once. Sure enough, both eggshells had holes in them now. Jonathan said, “Those are more tears than cracks. The shells look kind of leathery, don’t they, not hard, like hens’ eggs are.”

“As hens’ eggs are,” Barbara said, and then, under her breath, “Honestly, I don’t know what they teach people these days.”

Having watched a lot of chicks hatching, Sam knew it didn’t happen instantly. Sure enough, the tears in the shells hadn’t got much bigger before the front doorbell rang. Jonathan dashed off to the door, and returned a moment later with Karen. “I greet you, Senior Ordnance Specialist,” Sam said in the language of the Race, eyeing her body paint. With both Barbara and Jonathan there, he conscientiously didn’t eye the skin on which the body paint was displayed. That wasn’t easy-she was a pretty redhead, and freckled all over-but he managed.

“I greet you, superior sir,” she answered in the same language. Like Jonathan, like the rest of the younger generation, she couldn’t remember a time when the Lizards hadn’t been around. She and he studied their language at UCLA the same way they studied math or chemistry. Despite aping the Race, they took Lizards more for granted than Sam or Barbara ever would.

Four people crowding around the incubator made looking in harder than ever. Karen happened to have the best view when the first Lizard’s snout poked out of the shell. “Look!” she said. “He’s got a little horn on the end of his nose.”

“It’s not a horn, it’s an egg tooth,” Sam said. “Turtles and snakes and ordinary small- l lizards have ’em, too, to help them hatch. It’ll drop off in a few days.”

Little by little, the baby Lizards ( hatchlings sounded reproachfully in his mind, in the language of the Race) fought their way free of the eggs that had confined them. They were a light greenish brown, lighter than they would be as adults. Their scaly hides glistened with the last fluids from the eggs, though the lightbulbs in the incubators swiftly dried them. “Their heads look too big,” Jonathan said.

“So did yours, when you were first born,” Sam said. Barbara nodded. Jonathan looked embarrassed, though Karen’s head had undoubtedly looked too big for her body when she was a newborn, too.

Hearing voices above them, the Lizard hatchlings turned their tiny eye turrets toward the people. Sam wondered what he looked like to them. Nothing good, evidently; they skittered around the bottom of the incubator, looking for somewhere to hide. Jonathan hadn’t done that when he was a baby. And thank God, too, Sam thought.

He reached in to grab one of the Lizards. It hissed and snapped at him. Also unlike Jonathan as a newborn, it had a mouthful of sharp little teeth. He jerked his hand back. “Where are those leather gloves?” he asked.

“Here.” Barbara handed them to him. He slipped them on, then caught one of the Lizard hatchlings behind the head, as if it were a corn snake back on the Nebraska farm where he’d grown up. It couldn’t get away and it couldn’t bite, though it tried to do both. He carried it up the hall to the spare room that wasn’t spare any more. When he set it down, it scurried into one of the many hiding places he’d set up in the room: an upside-down bucket with a doorway cut into the side. Carefully closing the door behind him, he went back and captured the other hatchling. “All right, we’ve got ’em,” he said as he started up the hall with that wiggling little Lizard. “Now we get to make something of ’em.”

Felless was doing her best to talk sense into an official from the Great German Reich ’s Ministry of Justice: an inherently thankless task. “If you do not do more than you have to control ginger smuggling into lands ruled by the Race, it is only natural that we have retaliated as we have,” she told the Big Ugly. “Is it not just that we should assist the passage of Tosevite drugs into the Reich ?”

The official, a deputy minister named Freisler, listened as his secretary translated Felless’ words into the guttural language of the Deutsche, which she had not bothered to learn. He spoke with what sounded like passion. The secretary’s reply, however, was all but toneless: “Herr Freisler rejects this equivalence out of hand. He warns that drug smugglers seized inside the Reich , whether Tosevites or belonging to the Race, will be brought before People’s Courts and will be subjected to the maximum punishment allowed by law.”

“Will be killed, you mean,” Felless said with distaste. The secretary wagged his head up and down, the equivalent of the Race’s affirmative hand gesture. The Deutsche had a habit of killing anyone of whom they did not approve completely; even for Big Uglies, they were savage.

And to think I was fool enough to specialize in the Race relations with newly conquered species. Felless let out a soft hiss of self-derision. When she’d wakened from cold sleep after the colonization fleet got to Tosev 3, she’d discovered that hundreds of millions of Tosevites remained unconquered, the Deutsche among them. She’d also discovered that the Big Uglies, independent and conquered both, were far more alien to the Race than either the Rabotevs or the Hallessi.

And she’d discovered ginger, which was an irony in its own right. Thanks to the Tosevite herb, her own mating behavior had acquired a frenzied urgency not far removed from that of the Big Uglies. The same was true of other females who tasted, which was the greatest reason the Race tried so hard to suppress the trade. Even as she argued against ginger to this Freisler creature, she craved a taste herself.

She took a breath to tear the Big Ugly limb from rhetorical limb, but her telephone hissed for attention before she could speak. “Excuse me,” she told the secretary, who nodded. She took the phone from her belt. “Felless speaking.”

“I greet you, Senior Researcher,” a male said into her hearing diaphragm. “Slomikk speaking here.”

“I greet you, Science Officer,” Felless replied. “What news?”

“I am pleased to inform you that both hatchlings from your clutch have lost their egg teeth within a day of the normal period,” Slomikk said.

“That is indeed good news,” Felless replied. “I am glad to hear it. Out.” She broke the connection and returned the phone to its belt pocket.

“What good news is this?” the Deutsch secretary inquired.

Perhaps he was politely interested-perhaps, but not probably. What he was probably doing was seeking intelligence information. Felless did not care to give him any. “Nothing of great importance,” she said. “Now… your superior there was attempting to explain why circumstances that apply to the Race should not apply to the Reich. So far, his explanations have merely been laughable.”

When that was translated, the Big Ugly named Freisler let out several loud, incoherent splutters, then said, “I am not accustomed to such rudeness.”

“No doubt: you have made the Tosevites who came before you afraid,” Felless said sweetly. “But I do not fall under your jurisdiction, and so cannot be expected to waste time on fear.”