Atvar, the fleetlord of the Race's conquest fleet, and Reffet, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet, were having a disagreement. They had agreed on very little since Reffet brought the colonization fleet to Tosev 3. Atvar was convinced Reffet still had no real understanding of the way things worked on this miserable planet. He didn't know what Reffet was convinced of -- probably that things on Tosev 3 were in fact the way the Race had fondly imagined them to be before sending out the conquest fleet.

"I do not know what you wish me to do, Reffet," he said. They were equals; neither of them was Exalted Fleetlord to the other. They could be, and often were, equally impolite to each other. "No matter what you may believe, I cannot work miracles?" He swiveled his eye turrets this way and that to show exasperation.

Reffet swiveled his eye turrets, too, and hissed for good measure. "I do not see that it is so difficult. The ship the Big Uglies have launched is under very low acceleration. You have plenty of time to send a reconnaissance probe after it and keep it under close, secret observation?"

"And you brought starships across the light-years between Home and here!" Atvar exclaimed. "You must have had good officers and good computers, for you surely were not up to the job unaided." He paced across his office, which had been a suite in Shepheard's Hotel before the Race occupied Cairo. It gave him plenty of room to pace; Tosevites were larger than males and females of the Race, and, naturally, built in proportion to their own size.

"Leave off your insults," Reffet replied with another hiss, an angry one. His tailstump switched back and forth, back and forth. "I repeat, I do not see that what I have asked is so very difficult. As I said, that ship, that Clewis and Lark, is under acceleration of no more than a hundredth of the force of gravity."

"Lewis and Clark." Atvar took no small relish in correcting his colleague and rival over even minute details that shouldn't have mattered to anyone save a Big Ugly. "That it is under tiny acceleration does not matter. That it is under continuous acceleration does. If we are to observe it closely and continually, our reconnaissance must be under acceleration, too. And how, I ask, do you propose to keep that secret? A spacecraft with a working engine is by the nature of things anything but secret."

"By the Emperor!" Reffet burst out. He lowered his eyes to the floor when naming his sovereign. So did Atvar, on hearing the title. From training since hatchlinghood, any member of the Race would have done the same. Still furious, Reffet went on, "These accursed Tosevites have no business flying in space?" He used an emphatic cough to underline his words. "They have no business having instruments that let them detect what we do when we fly in space, either."

Atvar let his mouth fall open in amusement. "Come here, Reffet," he said, walking over to the window. "Come here -- it is safe enough. I intend no tricks, and the riots seem to have quieted down again, so no Big Ugly is likely to be aiming a sniper's rifle in this direction at the moment. I want to show you something."

Suspicion manifest in every line of his forward-sloping body, Reffet came. "What is it?" The suspicion filled his voice, too.

"There." Atvar pointed west across the great river that flowed past Cairo. "Do you see those three stone pyramids, there in the sand?"

Reffet deigned to turn one eye turret in that direction. "I see them. What of it? They look massive, but weathered and primitive."

"They are primitive -- that is my point," Atvar said. "They are as old as any monuments on this world. They were built as memorials to local rulers eight thousand years ago, more or less: eight thousand of our years -- half that many for the years of Tosev 3. Eight thousand years ago, we had already had a planetwide Empire for more than ninety thousand years. We had already conquered the Rabotevs. We had already conquered the Hallessi. We were beginning to wonder if the star Tosev -- this world's star -- had any interesting planets. Here, civilization was just hatching from its egg."

"And it should have taken much longer to hatch, too," Reffet said irritably. "The Big Uglies should still be building monuments much like these, as we were not long after we started gathering in cities?"

"Truth?" Atvar's voice was sad. "They should have. In fact, we thought they had. You will have seen this picture of a Tosevite warrior in full battle regalia before you set out from Home, of course?"

He walked over to the hologram projector and called up an image. He had seen it countless times himself, both before reaching Tosev 3 and since. It showed a hairy Big Ugly in rusty chainmail, armed with sword and spear and iron-faced wooden shield and riding a four-legged beast with a long head, an unkempt mane, and a shaggy tail.

"Yes, of course I have seen that image," Reffet said. "It is one of those our probe took sixteen hundred years ago. From it, we assumed the conquest would be easy."

"So we did," Atvar agreed. "But the point is, in those intervening sixteen hundred years -- eight hundred of this planet's revolutions -- the Tosevites somehow developed industrial civilization. However much you and I and every other member of the Race may wish they had remained primitive, the sorry fact is that they did not. We have to deal with that fact now."

"It was not planned thus." Reffet made that an accusation. The Race moved by plans, by tiny incremental steps. Anything different came hard.

Atvar had been dealing with the Big Uglies for more then forty of his years. By painful necessity, he'd begun to adapt to the hectic pace of Tosev 3. "Whether it was planned or not, it is so. You cannot crawl back into your eggshell and deny it."

Reffet wanted to deny it. Again, every line of his body showed as much. So did the big breath of air he sucked deep into his lung. "I think I would rather deal with the Tosevites than with you," he snarled. "I know they are aliens. With you, I cannot tell whether you have become half alien or are simply addled like an egg gone bad."

That did it. Atvar drew in a deep, angry breath of his own. It brought the stinks of Cairo -- the stinks of Big Uglies and of their food and their wastes, as well as the stinks from the hydrocarbon-burning engines they had developed themselves -- across the scent receptors in his tongue. "Go away," he told Reffet, and added an emphatic cough of his own. "I have not the time to deal with your stupidity. Whatever the Big Uglies in that spacecraft do, they will not do it soon. I am facing a serious uprising in the subregion of the main continental mass called China. I have to deal with that now. I will deal with the American spacecraft as I find the chance, or when it becomes urgent. Meanwhile, good day."

"You have turned into a Big Ugly," Reffet said furiously. "All you care about is the immediate. Anything that requires forethought is beyond you."

"Tosev 3 will do that to a male -- unless it kills him first," Atvar answered. Then he paused. Both his eye turrets swung thoughtfully toward Reffet. "Have you any notion how many casualties the Big Uglies' continual revolts have cost us?"

"No, I do not?" Reffet sounded peevish. As far as Atvar was concerned, Reffet sounded peevish far too often. The fleetlord of the colonization fleet went on, "Had you done a proper job of conquering this planet, I would not have to concern myself with such things -- and neither would you."

I will not bite him, Atvar thought. I will not tear his belly open with my fingerclaws. But he hadn't known such temptation to pure, cleansing violence since a ginger-induced mating frenzy in Australia. Fortunately, he had no ginger coursing through him now, nor could he smell any females' pheromones. That let him stay his usual rational self. "Deal with things here as they are, Reffet," he said, "not as you wish they would be. Our casualties have been heavy, far heavier than anyone could possibly have anticipated before we left Home. Like it or not, that is a truth."

"Very well. That is a truth." Reffet still sounded peevish. "I do not see how it is a truth to concern me, however. I am in charge of colonists, not soldiers."

"All you care about is the immediate," Atvar said, waggling his jaw as he dropped it to turn his laugh nasty. He took malicious pleasure in bouncing the other fleetlord's words off his snout. "Anything that requires forethought is beyond you."

"Very well." Now Reffet sounded condescending. "What fresh nonsense is this?"

"It is no nonsense at all, but something we would have had to face sooner or later during our occupation of Tosev 3," Atvar answered. "It might as well be now. Have you noticed that this is a world consumed by war and rebellion, that the Big Uglies in the regions we occupy continually try to overthrow our rule, and that the Tosevites' independent not-empires -- the SSSR, the Greater German Reich, the United States, and also the weaker ones like Nippon and Britain -- train large numbers of their inhabitants as soldiers year after year?"

"I have noticed it," Reffet admitted, "but you are the fleetlord of the conquest fleet. Soldiers are your responsibility."

"Truth," Atvar said. "They are. This is not Home, where, save in a Soldiers' Time of preparation for conquest, we have no soldiers, only police. Here, we will need soldiers continuously, for hundreds of years to come. Where shall we get them, if we do not begin the training of males, and possibly females as well, from among your precious colonists?"

"What?" Reffet cried. "This is madness! It is nothing but madness! My colonists are colonists. How can they become fighters?"

"The males I command managed," Atvar said. "I am certain I can recruit trainers from among them. Think, Reffet." He didn't bother being sardonic, not any more; the more he thought on this, the more important it looked. "How, long can the Race endure here on Tosev 3 without soldiers to defend us?"

Reffet did think. Reluctantly, Atvar gave him credit for it. After a pause, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet said, "It could be that you are correct. I shall not commit myself further than that without analysis from my experts. If you would also convene a panel of your experts to examine the issue, I should be grateful."

With any other member of the Race on or near Tosev 3, Reffet could have given an order and heard It shall be done as reply. Having to make a polite request of Atvar surely grated on him. Atvar knew having to make a request of Reffet grated on him. Here, the request was nothing if not reasonable. "I will do that, and soon," Atvar promised. "It is something we need to examine, as I said."

"So it is." Like Atvar's, Reffet's temper seemed to be cooling. He said, "If it proves we must do this thing, it will make us different from the members of the Race back on Home and inhabiting Rabotev 2 and Halless 1."

"Males of the conquest fleet are already different from all other members of the Race," Atvar replied. "My hope is that, over the course of hundreds of years, we will gradually incorporate all the Big Uglies into the Empire and assimilate them to our way of doing things. If we succeed there, the differences between those of the Race here on Tosev 3 and those living on the other worlds of the Empire will gradually disappear."

"By the Emperor, may it be so," Reffet said. He and Atvar cast down their eyes again. Then, half talking to himself, Reffet went on, "But what if it is not so?"

"That is my nightmare," Atvar told him. "That has been my nightmare since we first discovered the Big Uglies' true nature. They change faster than we do. They grow faster than we do. They are still behind us, but not by so much as they were when we came to Tosev 3. If they, or some of them, remain hostile, if they look like they are passing us..." His voice trailed away.

"Yes?" Reffet prompted. "What then?"

"We may have to destroy this world, and our own colony on it," Atvar answered unhappily. "We may have to destroy ourselves, to save the Race."

Under an acceleration of .01g, Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson had to wear a seat belt to stay in his chair. His effective weight was just over a pound and a half -- not enough for muscles used to Earth's robust gravity to notice. Any fidgeting at all would have sent him bouncing around the Lewis and Clark's control room. Bouncing around in a room full of instruments wasn't recommended.

He turned to Colonel Walter Stone, the American spaceship's chief pilot. "This is the best seat in the house," he said.

"You'd best believe it, Johnson," Stone answered. The two of them might have been cousins: they were both lean, athletic men in their early middle years; both crew cut; both, by coincidence, from Ohio. Johnson had started in the Marines, Stone in the Army Air Corps. Each looked down his nose at the other because of that.

At the moment, though, Johnson wasn't interested in looking anywhere except out through the panoramic window. It was double-coated to reduce reflection; peering out through it was about as close as a man could come to looking out on bare space. He saw more stars than he had since another guy after the same girl sucker-punched him in high school.

The Lewis and Clark was aimed roughly in the direction of Antares, the bright red star at the heart of Scorpio. The Milky Way was near its thickest there, and all the more impressive for not being dimmed and blurred by the lights and air of Earth. But Johnson didn't pay much attention to the stars liberally sprinkled thereabouts. Instead, leaning forward in his seat, he peered farther south, toward a region that, even against the black sky of space, wasn't so heavily populated.

He suddenly pointed. "That's it! At least, I think that's it."

Walter Stone looked at him in bemusement. "Which one? And what's it supposed to be, anyhow?"

"That faint orange one there." Johnson pointed again. "I think that's Epsilon Indi, the star the Lizards call Halless. They rule a planet that goes around that star."

"Ah." Enlightenment filled Stone's craggy features. "You look farther west, and up closer to the equator, you can spot Tau Ceti, too. That's the place the little scaly bastards call Home." A moment later, he said "Home." again, this time in the language of the Race. Returning to English, he went on, "And Epsilon Eridani's farther west still. Rabotev is the Lizard name. Nothing to make either one of 'em stand out much. They're just stars like the sun, a little smaller, a little cooler. Epsilon Indi's quite a bit smaller and cooler."

"Yeah." Glen Johnson nodded. "What I wouldn't give to be able to pay a call on the Lizards one of these days, you know what I mean?"

"Oh, yes?" Stone nodded, too. "I know exactly what you mean. I'd say the line for that particular craving forms on the left."

"But they can come here, so it's important that we figure out how to go there," Johnson said. "Look at history. The people who discovered other people usually came off pretty well. The ones who got discovered didn't have such a happy time of it. The Spaniards got rich. The Indians ended up slaving for them. No way in hell the Indians could have sailed to Spain, except in Spanish ships."

"Yeah. That's interesting, isn't it?" Stone didn't sound as if he liked the way it was interesting. Then he stabbed out a finger at Johnson. "But what about the Japs? What about the goddamn Japs, huh? They got discovered instead of the other way round, and they're still in business."

"Yes, sir, that's right, they are, damn them. But you know how come they're still in business?" Without giving Stone a chance to answer, Johnson continued, "They're still in business because they wised up in a hurry. They learned everything they could from us and England and Germany and France, and inside of nothing flat they had their own factories going and they were making their own steamships and then they could damn well sail wherever they pleased. They started playing the same game everybody else was."

"Yeah, and then the slant-eyed sons of bitches chose to sail for Pearl Harbor and give us one right in the nuts," Stone growled. Like most purely human conflicts, the one between the USA and Japan had gone by the boards when the Lizards attacked. It was gone, but not forgotten.

"Oh, hell, yes, sir," Johnson said. "But that's the point: they were able to sail across the Pacific and kick us when we weren't looking. If we're able to do that to the Lizards one of these days, we won't be so bad off. Even if we don't do it, we won't be so bad off, because we can."

"I see what you're saying," Stone told him. The chief pilot waved around the Lewis and Clark's control room. "This isn't a bad first step, is it?"

"It's a lot better than what we would have had if the Lizards hadn't come, I'll tell you that," Johnson answered. "I wonder if we would even have been in space by now." He shrugged. "No way to tell, I guess." He didn't say so aloud, but he thought of the Lewis and Clark as the equivalent of the first Japanese-built coastal steamer, which had surely been a clumsy, makeshift vessel that barely dared sail out of sight of land. It was very fine in its way, but what he wanted were battleships and aircraft carriers out on the open sea.

Stone coughed. "You're not supposed to be here to start a bull session, you know. You're supposed to be here to learn how to fly this thing in case Mickey and I both wake up dead one morning."

"Sir, the only controls that are a whole lot different from ones I've used before are the ones for the reactor -- and if I have to mess with those, we're all in a lot of trouble," Johnson said. The motor sat at the end of a long boom to minimize the risk for the rest of the Lewis and Clark if anything went wrong with it.

"One of the reasons you're learning is that we're all liable to be in a lot of trouble," Stone pointed out. "Face it: you came aboard because you were curious about us, right?" Johnson could hardly argue with that; it was the Gospel truth. Stone waited to see if he'd say something anyhow, then nodded when he didn't. "Uh-huh. Okay, you aren't the only one. What if the Lizards send a present after us? What are we going to do about it?"

"Or the Germans," Johnson said.

Stone shook his head now. "They can't catch us, not any more. This may not sound like a hot ship--.01g? Wow!" He had a gift for the sardonic. "We tack on a whole four inches to our velocity every second. Doesn't sound like much, does it? It adds up, though. At the end of a day, we're going five miles a second faster than we were when that day started. Regular rockets kick a lot harder to start with, but once they're done kicking, it's free fall the rest of the way. The Nazis don't have any constant-boost ships, though I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts they're working on them now. The Lizards, damn them, do."

"All right," Glen Johnson said agreeably. "Suppose they come after us at, say, .1g? That's ten times our acceleration. We can run, we can't hide, and we can't even dodge -- the Lewis and Clark is about as maneuverable as an elephant on roller skates. So what do we do then? Besides go down in flames, I mean?"

"If we have to, we fight," Stone answered. "That's what I was coming to. The fighting controls are right here." He pointed. "We've got machine guns and missiles for close-in defense. None of that stuff is much different than what you used on the Peregrine, so you know what it can do."

"Nuclear tips on the missiles and all?" Johnson asked.

"That's right," the senior pilot said, "except you carried two and we've got a couple dozen. And that doesn't say anything about the mines." He pointed to another rank of switches.

"Mines, sir?" Johnson raised an eyebrow. "Now you've got me: I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about."

"There are five of them, one controlled by each switch here," Stone explained. "They're the strongest fusion bombs we can build... and they're equipped with the most sensitive timers we've got. If we know the Lizards are trying to come up our rear ends, we leave them behind, timed to explode right when the enemy ship is closest to them. Maybe we nail it, maybe we don't, but it's sure as hell worth a try."

"Even if we don't wreck it, we might fry its brains." Johnson grinned. "I like that. Whoever thought of it has a really sneaky mind."

"Thank you," Walter Stone said.

Johnson's eyebrows jumped. "Was it you?"

Stone grinned at him. "I didn't say that. I said, 'Thank you.' Here, let's fire up the simulator and see what you do if the Lizards decide to take a whack at us after all."

The simulator was a far cry from the Link machines on which Johnson had trained before the Lizards came. Like so much human technology, it borrowed -- stole, really -- wholesale from things the Race knew and people hadn't back in 1942. The end result was something like a game, something like a God's-eye view of the real thing, with the Lewis and Clark reduced to a glowing blip on a screen, the hypothetical Lizard pursuit ship another blip, and all the things they might launch at each other angry little sparks of light.

Johnson "lost." the Lewis and Clark six times in a row before finally managing to save the ship with a perfectly placed mine. By then, sweat soaked his coveralls and slid away from his forehead in large, lazy drops. "Whew!" he said. "Here's hoping the Lizards don't decide to come after us, because we're sure as hell in trouble if they do."

"Amen," Stone answered. "You will get better with practice, though -- or you'd better get better, anyhow."

"I can see that," Johnson said. "First couple of missions I flew, the only thing that kept me from killing myself was fool luck." He paused, eyeing the man who was training him. "You practice on this thing a lot, don't you?"

"Every day, every chance I get," Stone said solemnly.

"I figured you would. It's as close as you can come to the real McCoy," Johnson said. The senior pilot nodded once more. Johnson took a deep breath. "Okay. With all the practice you put in, how often do you win?"

"A little less than half the time," Stone replied. "The goddamn Lizards can do more things than we can. Nothing's going to change that. If you can't handle the notion -- well, too bad."

"They shot me down," Johnson said.

"Me, too." Walter Stone reached over and slapped Johnson on the back. Without the safety strap, the blow would have knocked Johnson out of his chair. Stone went on, "We had to be crazy, going up against the Lizards in those prop jobs?"

"They were what we had, and the job needed doing," Johnson said. The life expectancy of a pilot who'd flown against the Lizards during the fighting was most often measured in hours. If Johnson hadn't been wounded when the Lizards knocked his plane out of the sky, if he hadn't spent a lot of his time afterwards flat on his back, odds were he would have gone up again and bought himself the whole plot instead of just a piece of it. He didn't care to dwell on those odds.

Stone said, "I think we've put you through the wringer enough for one day. Why don't I turn you loose a couple minutes early so you can make it down to the mess hall before shift change?"

"Thank you, sir," Johnson said, and unbuckled his belt. "My next shift back here with you, I want another go at the simulator."

"You wouldn't be much use to me if you didn't," Stone told him. "Somehow or other, I think that can be arranged."

Catching one of the many handholds in the control room, Johnson swung toward the mess hall; at .01g, brachiating worked much better than walking. He almost approached eagerness. For good stretches -- sometimes even for hours at a time -- he could forget he was never going home again.

Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yeager was muttering at the Lizard-built computer on his desk. Sorviss, a male of the Race who lived in Los Angeles, had been doing his best to restore Yeager's full access to the Race's computer network. So far, his best hadn't been good enough. Sam had learned a great deal on the network pretending to be a male of the Race named Regeya. As Sam Yeager, human being, he was allowed to visit only a small part of the network.

"You son of a bitch," he told the screen, which said ACCESS DENIED in large red letters -- Lizard characters, actually.

He was picking up the telephone to let Sorviss know his latest effort had failed when his son Jonathan burst into the study. Yeager frowned; he didn't like getting interrupted while he was working. But what Jonathan said made him forgive the kid: "Come quick, Dad -- I think they're hatching!"

"Holy smoke!" Sam put the phone back on its hook and sprang to his feet. "They're three days early."

"When President Warren gave them to you, he said the best guess for when they'd hatch might be ten days off either way." Jonathan Yeager spoke with the usual impatience of youth for age. He'd turned twenty not too long before. Sam Yeager didn't like thinking of it in those terms; it reminded him he'd turned fifty-six not too long before. Jonathan was already on his way up the hall. "Are you coming or not?" he demanded.

"If you don't get out of the way, I'll trample you," Sam answered.

Jonathan laughed tolerantly. He was a couple of inches taller than his father, and wider through the shoulders. If he didn't feel like being trampled, Sam would have had a devil of a time doing it. The overhead light gleamed off Jonathan's shaved head and off the body paint adorning his chest and belly: by what it said, he was a landcruiser-engine mechanic. Young people all over the world imitated Lizard styles and thought their elders stodgy for clucking.

Sam's wife Barbara was standing in front of the incubator. The new gadget made the service porch even more crowded than it had been when it held just that washing machine and drier and water heater. "One of the eggshells already has a little hole in it," Barbara said excitedly.

"I want to see," Sam said, though getting close to the incubator in that cramped little space wasn't easy. He went on, "I grew up on a farm, remember. I ought to know something about how eggs work."

"Something, maybe," Barbara said with a distinct sniff, "but nobody -- nobody on Earth, anyhow -- has ever watched a Lizard egg hatch till now."

As she often did, she left him struggling for a comeback. While he was struggling, Jonathan gave him something else to think about: "Dad, may I call Karen to come over and watch them with us?"

His girlfriend was as fascinated by the Race as he was. She wore body paint, too, often with nothing but a tiny halter top to preserve the decencies. She didn't shave her head, though some girls did. But that wasn't what made Yeager hesitate. He said, "You know I didn't get these eggs to entertain you... or Karen."

"Of course I know that," his son said indignantly. "Do you think I'm addled or something?" That bit of slang had made it from the Lizards' language into English.

"No, of course not," Sam answered, doing his best to remember how touchy he'd been when he was twenty. "But it's liable to be important not to let anyone know we have Lizard eggs -- or hatchlings, which is what we'll have pretty darn quick now." Eighteen years of minor-league ball and twenty in the Army had given him a vocabulary that could blister paint at forty paces. Around his wife and son, he did his best not to use too much of it.

Jonathan rolled his eyes. "What are you going to do, Dad, hide them in the garage whenever people or males of the Race come over?"

"When males of the Race come over, I just might," Sam said. But he sighed. His son had a point. His orders were to raise the baby Lizards as much like human beings as he could. How was he supposed to do that if they never met anybody but his family and him? With another sigh, he nodded. "Okay, go ahead. But when she gets here, I'm going to have to warn her she can't blab."

"Sure, Dad." Jonathan was all smiles now that he'd got his way. "This is so hot!" The Race liked heat. That made it a term of approval. He sprinted for the telephone.

Worry in her voice, Barbara said, "Sooner or later, the Race is going to find out that we have these hatchlings. There'll be trouble when that happens?'

"I expect you're right," Yeager said. "But it'll be trouble for the government, not trouble for us. If we have to give them up, we have to give them up, that's all. No point to worrying too much ahead of time, right?"

"Right," Barbara said, but she didn't sound convinced.

Sam didn't know that he was convinced, either, but he forced whatever worries he had down to the bottom of his mind. "Let me have a look, will you?" he said, as he had a moment before. "I'm the only one in the house who hasn't seen the eggs this morning."