“Life’s funny that way,” Goldfarb agreed. “You never can tell how something that seems little will end up changing everything. If you’d missed a phone call you ended up getting, or hadn’t got out of your motorcar five minutes before a drunk smashed it to scrap metal . . .”
“I know.” Walsh nodded vigorously. “It almost tempts you to wonder if bigger things work the same way. What if the French had won on the Plains of Abraham? Or if the Lizards hadn’t come? Or any of a dozen more things that occur to me in the blink of an eye?”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” David said. The mere idea made him open his eyes very wide. Thinking about changes in your life was one thing. You could see where, if things had happened differently or if you’d chosen differently, what happened next went wouldn’t have stayed the same, either. But trying to imagine the same phenomenon on a larger level, trying to imagine the whole world changing because something had happened differently . . . He shook his head. “Too big an idea for me to get my brain around so early in the morning.”
“You should read more science fiction,” Hal Walsh said. “Actually, that’s not the worst thing for somebody in our line of work to do anyhow. It goes a long way toward helping people think lefthanded, if you know what I mean. The more adaptable your mind is, the better the chance you have of coming up with something new and strange while you’re working with Lizard electronics.”
“I suppose there’s something to that,” Goldfarb admitted. “I used to read the American magazine called Astounding, back before the Lizards came. But it stopped getting across the Atlantic then, and I lost the habit.”
“They still print it,” Walsh said. “You can find it in the magazine counter at any drugstore here.” That was an Americanism David had taken a while to get used to; because he was so accustomed to chemist’s, the new word struck him as faintly sinister. His boss went on, “The issues from back before the war would be worth a pretty penny, if you’ve still got any of them.”
“Not likely,” Goldfarb answered. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
“Here in Edmonton, they’re liable to still be stacked up in the odd places, waiting to get shoveled away,” Walsh answered. “Still, though, I do take your point.”
The door opened. In strolled Jack Devereaux. He was never late, but he never looked as if he hurried, either. “Hello, all,” he said, and went to get himself a cup of tea. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“Cut and try,” David Goldfarb said. “A lot of bad language when things don’t go the way we want. Nothing too much out of the ordinary.” He noticed Hal Walsh taking a deep breath and, with malice aforethought, forestalled him: “Oh, and Hal’s getting married. Like I said, nothing important.”
That won him the glare he’d hoped he would get from his boss. It also won him a raised eyebrow from Devereaux. “Really?” the other engineer asked Hal Walsh.
“Yes, really,” Walsh said, still giving David a sour look. “I asked Jane, and she was rash enough to tell me she would.” That sounded as if he was doing some forestalling of his own.
“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard this morning,” the French-Canadian engineer said. “Of course, up till now I hadn’t heard much in the way of news this morning, so I don’t know exactly what that proves.”
“Thank you so much,” Walsh said. “I’ll remember you in my nightmares.”
Still helpfully slanderous, Goldfarb said, “He’s been blaming me—and you, too, because I cut my finger on that sheet metal when I was giving you a hand. If I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have had to take me to the doctor, and she’d still be a happy woman today.”
He supposed he would, one of these days, have to let Moishe Russie know Reuven’s former lady friend would be tying the knot. He wondered how Reuven would take that. His second cousin once removed hadn’t wanted to stay with Dr. Jane Archibald. As far as David was concerned, that meant very poor eyesight on his younger cousin’s part, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He wondered if Reuven had found anyone else after Dr. Archibald left Palestine. Maybe Moishe would tell him.
Meanwhile, he had plenty of work here. He and Devereaux were still refining the design of that speedy new skelkwank-light disk player. He had a side project of his own, too, one that was nothing but a few sketchy notes at the moment but that he hoped would prove important one of these days. Hal Walsh knew he was working on something there, but didn’t yet know what it was. Walsh made a good boss. He didn’t insist on finding out every last detail of what was in his employees’ minds. Goldfarb hoped his notion would reward the younger man’s confidence in him.
Between the disk player and his own idea—with time out for lunch, and for odd bits of banter through the day—his hours at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works went by so fast, he was startled when he realized he could go home. He was also startled to see how dark it had got by the time he went outside, and how chilly the breeze from the northwest was. Autumn was here. Winter wouldn’t wait very long—and winter in Edmonton, he’d already seen, had more in common with Siberia than with anything the British Isles knew by that name.
Naomi greeted him with a kiss when he got home. “You’ve got a letter here from London,” she said.
“Have I?” he said. “From whom?”
“I don’t know,” his wife answered. “Not a handwriting I recognize. Here—see for yourself.” She handed him the envelope.
He didn’t recognize the handwriting, either, though it had a tantalizing familiarity. “Let’s find out,” he said, and tore open the envelope. His voice had gone grim. So had Naomi’s face. She had to be thinking the same thing he was: wondering what Basil Roundbush had to say to him.
“Oh!” they both exclaimed at the same time. Naomi amplified that.
“You haven’t heard from Jerome Jones for a while.”
“So I haven’t,” Goldfarb agreed. “Better him than some other people I’d just as soon not name.”
“Much better,” his wife agreed. “We’d still be in Northern Ireland if it weren’t for his help, and I always thought he was rather a nice chap from what I remember of him during the first round of fighting.”
“Did you?” David asked in a peculiar, toneless way.
“Yes, I did.” Naomi stuck out her tongue at him. “Not like that, though.” She made as if to poke him in the ribs. “What does the letter say? I’ve been waiting since the postman brought it.”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Goldfarb said, at which his wife did poke him in the ribs. He threw his hands in the air. “Give over! I surrender. Here, I’ll read it. ‘Dear David,’ he says, ‘I trust this finds you and your lovely wife and family well and flourishing.’ ”
“No wonder I liked him,” Naomi remarked.
“Yes, he always did have a smooth line. A lot of girls fell for it,” David said, which got him a dirty look. He held up the letter and went on, “ ‘I am doing as well as can be expected for one with such a dissolute past. You may perhaps be interested to learn that a certain unfriend of yours has had his own unsavoury past, or something of the sort, catch up with him—so it would appear, at any rate.’ ”
He looked up from the page. His wife made little pushing motions. “Don’t stop,” she said. “For God’s sake, go on.”
“I love it when you talk to me like that,” David said, which made Naomi give him a good push—exactly what he’d had in mind. “Oh,” he went on. “The letter. I thought you meant something else.” He glanced down at it. “Where was I? Oh, yes . . . ‘A certain—often a very certain, by all indications—Group Captain Roundbush is in hospital and not expected to pull through, the brakes to his Bentley having failed whilst he was negotiating a curve at a high turn of speed. Signs are that his brakes were encouraged to fail. “A highly professional job,” someone from Scotland Yard writes on a report that just chanced to cross my desk.’ ”
“I wish I could say I was sorry,” Naomi said at last.
“So do I,” Gol
dfarb agreed. “But I can’t, because I’m not. There’s a bit more here: ‘Not everyone is altogether displeased at this development, because his faction had close ties to the Reich, and the Reich, being more radioactive than not these days, is no longer seen as our stalwart bulwark against the Lizards. What our stalwart bulwark against the Lizards shall be now, I have no idea, but seeing Roundbush hoisted by his own hooked-cross petard doubtless pleases you more. As ever, Jerome.’ ” Goldfarb kissed his wife. “And do you know what, sweetheart? He’s right.” He kissed her again.
16
Kassquit stooped slightly to look at herself in the mirror. She made the affirmative gesture. Maybe the wild Tosevites weren’t so daft to let their hair grow after all. She liked the way it framed her face. True, it did make her look less like a female of the Race, but she worried less about that than she had before she started meeting wild Big Uglies. She no longer saw any point to denying her biological heritage. It was part of her, no matter how much she still sometimes regretted that.
She looked down at herself. She was also growing hair under her arms and at the joining of her legs. That last patch still perplexed her. In long-ago days, had such little tufts of hair helped Tosevites’ semi-intelligent ancestors find one another’s reproductive organs? Animals both on Home and here on Tosev 3 often used such displays. Maybe this was another one. Kassquit couldn’t think of any other purpose the hair might serve.
The telephone hissed, distracting her. “Junior Researcher Kassquit speaking,” she said. “I greet you.” She sometimes startled callers who knew she was an expert on Big Uglies but were unaware she was of Tosevite descent herself.
But this time the startlement went the other way. The image that appeared in her monitor was that of a Big Ugly—and not just any Big Ugly. “And I greet you, superior female,” Jonathan Yeager said formally. Then he twisted his face into the Tosevite expression of amiability and went on, “Hello, Kassquit. How are you? It is good to see you again.”
Her own face showed little. By the nature of things, it couldn’t show much. Considering how she felt, that was probably just as well. Her voice, however, was another matter. She made it as cold as she could: “What do you want?”
“I wanted to say hello,” he answered. “I wanted to say it face to face. I fear I made you unhappy when I told you I was going to enter into a permanent mating arrangement—to get married, we say in English—with Karen Culpepper. I arranged this call from the Race’s consulate here in Los Angeles to apologize to you.”
Sudden hope leaped in her. “To apologize for entering into this arrangement with the Tosevite female?”
“No,” Jonathan Yeager answered. “I am not sorry about that. But I am sorry if I did make you unhappy. I hope you will believe me when I say I did not intend to.” He paused, then pointed at her from the screen. “You have let your hair grow since I was up in the starship with you.”
“Yes.” Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She forgot—well, almost forgot—to be angry at him as she asked, “What do you think?” The opinions of members of the Race about her appearance meant little to her: they had no proper standards of comparison. Jonathan Yeager, on the other fork of the tongue, did.
“I like it,” he said now, and used an emphatic cough. “Hair does usually seem to add to the attractiveness of a female—even though you were attractive before.”
“But not so attractive as to keep you from seeking a permanent mating arrangement with this other female.” Kassquit could not—and did not bother to—hide her bitterness.
The American Big Ugly who had been her mating partner sighed. “I have known Karen Culpepper for many years. We grew to maturity together. We come from the same culture.”
Kassquit, of course, hadn’t grown to maturity with anybody. She had no idea what doing so would mean. She suspected she was missing something because of that, but she couldn’t do anything about it. For that matter, she sometimes suspected that the way she’d been raised left her missing all sorts of social and emotional development most Big Uglies took for granted, but she couldn’t do anything about that, either.
She said, “Would you have found it impossible to stay up here and spend all your time with me?” She hadn’t asked him that while he was aboard the starship. She hadn’t known how much his leaving would hurt till he’d gone—and then it was too late.
“I am afraid I would,” he answered. “Would you have found it impossible to come down to Tosev 3 and spend all your time here?”
“I do not know,” she said. “How can I know? I have never experienced the surface of Tosev 3.” She sighed. “But I do understand the comparison you are making. It could be that you are speaking a truth.”
“I thank you for that,” Jonathan Yeager said. “You were, I think, always honest with me. And I did try to be honest with you.”
Maybe he had. Back then, though, she hadn’t understood everything he’d meant, not down in her liver she hadn’t. Did she now? How could she be sure? She couldn’t, and knew it. But she understood more now than she had then. She was sure of that. With another sigh, she said, “You will do as you will do, and I shall do as I shall do. That is all I can tell you right now.”
“It is a truth,” the American Big Ugly said, nodding as his kind did to agree. “I wish you well, Kassquit. Please believe that.”
“And I . . . wish you well,” she replied. That was more true than otherwise—the most she would say about it. She took a deep breath. “Have we anything more to say to each other?”
“I do not think so,” Jonathan Yeager said.
“Neither do I.” Kassquit broke the connection. Jonathan Yeager’s image vanished from her monitor. She sat staring at the screen, waiting for a storm of tears to come. They didn’t. Not weeping seemed somehow worse than weeping would have. After a moment, she realized why: she had finally accepted that Jonathan Yeager wouldn’t be coming back.
I have to go on, she thought. Whatever I do, it will have to be in that context. If I seek another wild Big Ugly for sexual pleasure, I shall have to respond to him, not to my memories of Jonathan Yeager. She wondered how she could do that. She wondered if she could do it. Of course you can. You have to. You just figured that out for yourself. Have you already started to forget?
She probably had. Emotional issues arising from sexual matters were far more complex, and far more intense, than any she’d known before Jonathan Yeager came into her life. That, she feared, was also part of her biological heritage. She’d done her best to pretend that heritage didn’t exist. Now—she ran a hand across her hairy scalp—she was beginning to accept it. She wondered if that would result in any improvement. All she could do was see what happened next.
What happened next was that the telephone hissed again. “Junior Researcher Kassquit speaking,” she said again, seating herself in front of the monitor. “I greet you.”
“And I greet you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said. “How are you today?”
“Oh, hello, superior sir.” Kassquit did a token job of assuming the position of respect—no more was needed while she was sitting down. Ttomalss might have asked the question as a polite commonplace, but she gave it serious consideration before answering, “All things considered, I am pretty well.”
“I am glad to hear it,” Ttomalss said. “I was listening to your conversation with Jonathan Yeager. I think you handled it with an emotional maturity to which many wild Big Uglies could only hope to aspire.”
“I thank you,” Kassquit said. Then, once the words were out of her mouth, she wasn’t so sure she thanked him after all. This time, she spoke with considerable care: “Superior sir, I understand why you monitored my life so closely when I was a hatchling and an adolescent: I was, after all, an experimental subject. But have I not proved your experiment largely successful?”
“There are times when I think you have,” her mentor answered. “Then again, there are other times when I think I may have failed despite my best efforts. When I see you imitating wil
d Tosevites, I do wonder whether environment plays any role at all in shaping an individual’s personality.”
“I am a Tosevite. It cannot be helped,” Kassquit said with a shrug. “I am having to come to terms with that myself. But have we not established that I am also a citizen of the Empire, and able to provide important and useful services for the Race? In fact, can I not provide some of those services precisely because I am at the same time a citizen of the Empire and a Big Ugly?”
She waited anxiously to hear how he would respond to that, and felt like cheering when he made the affirmative gesture. “Truth hatches from every word you speak,” he replied. “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to discover how seriously you take your obligations as a citizen of the Empire.”
“Of course I take them seriously,” Kassquit said. “Unlike a good many members of the Race—if I may speak from what I have seen—I take them seriously because I do not take them for granted.”
“That is well said,” Ttomalss told her. He used an emphatic cough. “Your words could be an example and an inspiration for many males and females of the Race.”
“Again, superior sir, I thank you,” Kassquit said. “And I am also pleased to have the privileges that come with citizenship in the Empire.”
She waited once more. Ttomalss said, “And well you might be. Say what you will for the wild Big Uglies, but you are part of an older, larger, wiser, more sophisticated society than any of theirs.”
“I agree, superior sir.” Kassquit couldn’t smile so that her face knew about it, as a wild Big Ugly could, but she was smiling inside. “And would you not agree, superior sir, that one of the privileges of citizenship is freedom from being arbitrarily spied upon?”
Ttomalss opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again: “You are not an ordinary citizen of the Empire, you know.”
“Am I less than ordinary?” Kassquit asked. “If I am, how am I a citizen at all?”
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