Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  “What sort of truth?” Kassquit asked, bewildered. “That you are ignorant?”

  “He will never admit that,” Sam Yeager said with a barking Tosevite laugh.

  Another insult? Evidently not, for Jonathan Yeager laughed, too, laughed and said, “No—truth that things having to do with the Race are fun.”

  “Fun.” Kassquit chewed on the word. She knew what it meant, of course, but she’d never thought of applying it to the Race or the way the Race lived. More bewildered than ever, she asked, “Why?”

  “Good question,” Sam Yeager said cheerfully. “I never have been able to figure it out myself.” Then he waved one of his hands—one of his fleshy, soft-skinned hands, so like hers—back and forth, palm out. “I do not intend you to take that seriously.”

  “You never intend anyone to take anything you say seriously,” Jonathan Yeager said, and both Big Uglies laughed. Then the younger one turned his face back toward Kassquit. He too had to move his whole head. Kassquit watched in fascination. The wild Tosevites took such motions utterly for granted, while she’d never failed to feel self-conscious about them. But then, they all used those motions, while she was the only individual she knew who did. Jonathan Yeager went on, “Of course the Race is fun. It is new and exciting and fascinating. Is it any wonder that I think as l do?”

  Alien, Kassquit thought. She might share biology with these Big Uglies—every move they made reminded her she did share biology with them—but she would never have put new and exciting and fascinating all in the same sentence. “I do not understand,” she confessed.

  “Do not worry about it,” Sam Yeager said. “It is a wonder that my hatchling thinks at all, let alone that he thinks in any particular way.”

  “Thank you,” Jonathan Yeager said, with an emphatic cough obviously intended to mean he was doing anything but thanking the older Tosevite. No male of the Race would have used the cough that way, but Kassquit understood it.

  So did Sam Yeager, who started laughing again. He said, “A lot of Tosevite males and females of about my hatchling’s age feel the same way about the Race as he does. The Race is new on Tosev 3, which to many Big Uglies automatically makes it exciting and fascinating. And the Race is powerful. That makes it exciting and fascinating, too.”

  Kassquit understood the connection between power and fascination. That connection had helped make the Rabotevs and Hallessi into contented citizens of the Empire. It would, she hoped, help do the same for the Big Uglies. The connection between novelty and fascination still eluded her. So did another connection: “Why would Tosevites”—she didn’t want to call Big Uglies Big Uglies, even if Sam Yeager casually used the term—“be so interested in the Race, when you are constantly concerned with reproduction, which matters to the Race only during the mating season?”

  “I am sorry, superior female, but I did not follow all of that,” Jonathan Yeager said.

  “I did. I will translate,” Sam Yeager said. Turning to his hatchling, he spoke in their own language—English, Kassquit had learned it was called. Jonathan Yeager coughed and flushed; his change in color was easily visible on the monitor. Sam Yeager returned to the language of the Race: “I think you embarrassed him, partly because, at his age, he is constantly concerned with reproduction”—the younger Yeager let out another indignant, wordless squawk, which the older one ignored—“and partly because it is not our usual custom to talk so frankly about reproductive matters with strangers.”

  “Why not?” Kassquit was confused again. “If they concern you all the time, why do you not talk about them all the time? And why did you yourself talk about them with me in our last conversation?”

  “Those are good questions,” Sam Yeager admitted. “As for the second, I guess I was taken by surprise when I found out you were a Tosevite like me. For the first, I do not have an answer as good as I might like. One reason is that we mate in private, I suppose. Another is that we usually form mating pairs, and try to make those pairings permanent. Mating outside a pair is liable to destroy it.”

  “Why?” Kassquit asked again.

  “Because it shows a lack of trust inside the pair,” Sam Yeager answered. “Since the Race raised you, you probably would not understand.”

  “Maybe I do,” Kassquit said slowly. “You are speaking of a competition for attention, are you not?” She remembered how jealous she’d been of Felless when the female of the Race began taking away Ttomalss’ attention, which she’d largely had to herself till the colonization fleet arrived.

  “Yes, that is exactly what I am speaking of,” Sam Yeager replied. “Perceptive of you to gasp it when you have not known it yourself.”

  “You think not, do you?” Kassquit said. “This proves only that you do not know everything there is to know.” She did not hide her bitterness. Part of her didn’t want to show it to a couple of wild Big Uglies. The rest didn’t care about the embarrassment in that. After all, when would she see them or deal with them again? Who else that she knew would ever see them or deal with them? And showing someone, anyone, that bitterness was such a relief.

  Sam Yeager bared his teeth in the Tosevite expression of amiability. “I never said I did know everything, superior female. I have spent a lot of years having it proved to me that I do not. But I know I am ignorant, which puts me ahead of some of the males and females who think they are smart.”

  “You speak in paradoxes, I see,” Kassquit answered, which for some reason made the Big Ugly laugh again. Annoyed, Kassquit said, “I must go, for I have an appointment. Farewell.” Abruptly, she broke the connection.

  After a moment, she sighed in relief. It was over. But then she stood up, and stood taller and straighter than usual. No small pride filled her. She had given as good as she’d got. She was sure of that. She had seen the wild Big Uglies face-to-face, and she had prevailed.

  As Sam Yeager and his son left the Race’s consulate in Los Angeles and headed for his car, he turned to Jonathan and asked, “Well, what did you think of that?”

  “It was pretty strange, Dad,” Jonathan answered, and Sam could hardly disagree. His son went on, “It was interesting, too, I guess. I got to practice the language some more. That’s always good.”

  “You spoke well. And you look a lot more like a Lizard than I do, too,” Yeager said. “That’s one of the big reasons I brought you along: to give her somebody who might look halfway familiar to deal with. Maybe it helped some. I hope so.” He shook his head. “That poor kid. Listening to her, seeing her, makes me feel terrible about what we’re doing to Mickey and Donald.”

  “Her face is like Liu Mei’s,” Jonathan said as they got to the car. “It doesn’t show anything.”

  “Nope,” Sam agreed, sliding behind the wheel. “I guess what they say is, you have to learn how to use expressions when you’re a baby, or else you don’t. Since the Lizards’ faces don’t move much, the kids they took couldn’t do that.” He glanced over at his son. “Were you just looking at her face?”

  Jonathan coughed and spluttered a little, but rallied fast: “I’ve seen lots of bare tits before, Dad. They’re not such a big deal for me as they would have been for you when you were my age.”

  And that was undoubtedly true. Sam sighed as he started the engine. “Having ’em out in the open so much takes away some of the thrill, I think,” he said. His son looked at him as if he’d started speaking some language much stranger than that of the Race. So he was: to Jonathan, he was speaking the language of the nostalgic old-timer, a tongue the young would never understand.

  Proving as much, Jonathan changed the subject. “She seems pretty smart,” he said.

  “Yeah, she does.” Sam nodded as he got on the southbound freeway for the ride back to Gardena. “That probably helps her. I bet she’d be a lot crazier if she were stupid.”

  “She didn’t seem all that crazy to me,” his son said. “She acts more like a Lizard than a person, yeah, but heck, half my friends do that.” He chuckled.

  So did Sam Yea
ger, but he shook his head while he did it. “There’s a difference. Your friends are acting, as you said.” He’d been married to Barbara for quite a while, and most of the time he automatically kept his grammar clean. “But Kassquit isn’t—acting, I mean. The Race is all she knows. As best I can tell, we’re the first Big Uglies she’s ever seen face-to-face. We’re at least as strange to her as she is to us.”

  He watched Jonathan think about that and slowly nod. “No ordinary person would have come out and talked about, uh, reproduction like that.”

  “Well, it would have been surprising, anyhow,” Sam said. “But she thinks about it the way the Lizards would. She can’t help that—they’ve taught her everything she knows.” He took a hand off the wheel to remove his uniform cap—he’d gone to the consulate in full regalia—and scratch his head. “Still, she’s not made the way they are. She can’t even be as old as you are, Jonathan. If she’s like anybody else your age, she’s going to get urges. I wonder what she does about them.”

  “What can she do, up there by herself?” Jonathan asked.

  “What anybody by himself, or by herself, can do.” Sam raised an eyebrow. “Sooner or later, you find out it doesn’t grow hair on the palm of your hand.”

  That made Jonathan turn red and clam up for the rest of the drive back home. Sam used the quiet to do some thinking of his own. Not only seeing Kassquit, but also listening to her trying so hard to be something she couldn’t be, did bring on guilt about Mickey and Donald. No matter how hard he and his family tried to raise them up as people, they would never be human beings, any more than Kassquit could really be a Lizard.

  And what would happen when they met Lizards, as they surely would one day? Would they be as confused and dismayed as Kassquit had been at the prospect of talking with a couple of genuine human beings? Probably. He didn’t see how they would be able to help it.

  It wasn’t fair. They hadn’t asked to be hatched in an incubator on his service porch. But nobody, human or Lizard, had any say about where he got his start in life. Mickey and Donald would have to make the best of it they could, as did everybody else on four worlds. And Sam and his family would have to help.

  He hoped he’d stay around to help. Being fifty-seven had a way of putting that kind of thought in his mind. He was in pretty good shape for his age, but every time he shaved in the morning the first glance in the mirror reminded him he wouldn’t be here forever. Barbara could take over for him if he went too soon (somehow, contemplating his own death was easier than thinking about hers), and Jonathan, and whomever Jonathan married. He hoped that would be Karen. She was a good kid, and she and Jonathan had been thick as thieves lately.

  After a moment, he shook his head. “Back to business,” he muttered. Business was getting a summary of the conversation Jonathan and he had had with Kassquit down on paper, and adding his impressions to it. He was glad he’d talked with his son. It helped him clarify his own thoughts.

  He had to use the human-made computer to draft his report. With the one he’d got from the Lizards, he couldn’t print in English, but was stuck with the language of the Race. Kassquit might have found a report in the Lizards’ language interesting, but it wouldn’t have amused his superiors.

  When he finished the report and pressed the key that would print it, a glorified electric typewriter hammered into life. The printer hooked up to the Lizard-built computer was a lot more elegant, using powdered carbon and a skelkwank light to form the characters and images it produced. You needed a powerful magnifier to tell its output was made up of tiny dots and didn’t come from a typewriter or even from set type.

  He read through the report, made a couple of small corrections in ink, and set it aside. The printer kept humming till he turned it off. He started to turn off the computer, too, but changed his mind. Instead, he hooked himself up to the U.S. network. He hadn’t tried visiting the archive that stored signals traffic from the night the colonization fleet was attacked for quite a while. The more he learned about that, the better his chances of nailing the culprit and passing what he knew on to the Lizards.

  They’ll never figure out whether it was the Nazis or the Russians, not on their own they won’t, he thought. The Lizards were less naive than they had been when they came to Earth, but humans, long used to cheating one another, still had little trouble deceiving them. And, because the Lizards weren’t human, they often missed clues that would have been obvious to a person.

  “There we go,” Sam muttered, as the name of the archive appeared on his screen. He waited for the table of contents to come up below it, so he could find exactly which transcripts would be most useful to him. The list took its own sweet time appearing; compared to the Race’s machine, this one was slow, slow.

  Instead of the contents list, he got a blank, dark screen. Pale letters announced, CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.

  “You cheap piece of junk,” he snarled, and whacked the side of the case that held the screen. That didn’t change the message, of course. It did go a little way toward easing his annoyance. The Lizards’ computer worked all the time. The machine made in the USA broke down if he looked at it sideways.

  But he was a stubborn man. He wouldn’t have spent eighteen years riding trains and buses through every corner of the bush leagues if he hadn’t been stubborn. He wouldn’t have risen to lieutenant colonel, either, not when he’d joined the Army as a thirty-five-year-old private with full upper and lower dentures. And he wouldn’t have got so far with the Lizards, either.

  And so, even though he kept swearing under his breath, he patiently reconnected the computer to the network and navigated toward that archive again. This time, he didn’t even get the archival name before he lost his connection.

  He scowled and stared at the dark screen with the now familiar message on it. “Junk,” he repeated, but now he sounded less sure whether the fault lay inside his computer. Maybe the chain connecting him to that distant archive—actually, he didn’t know how distant it was, only that it existed—had some rusty links in it.

  He wondered if he ought to report the problem. He didn’t wonder for long, though. While his security clearance was high enough to give him access to that archive, he had no formal need-to-know. Nobody above him would be happy to find out he’d been snooping around in things that were formally none of his business. The powers that be would frown all the harder because he’d already established a reputation for snooping.

  “Hell with it,” he said, and this time he did turn off the computer. Maybe the simplest explanation was that somebody somewhere had made a tidy profit selling the U.S. government—or would it be the phone company?—some lousy wiring.

  He was making himself a bologna sandwich (he’d got sick of ham) when a car stopped in front of the house. The sound of the closing door made him look up from pickles and mayonnaise. A young man he’d never seen before was walking across the lawn toward the front porch. Another one sat in the car, waiting.

  The one coming up to the house had his right hand in the pocket of his blue jeans. After somebody had taken some potshots at the house, that triggered an alarm bell in Sam. He hurried to the hutch in the front room and pulled out his .45.

  Barbara came into the front room from the direction of the bedroom. She’d spotted the guy, too, and was going to find out what he wanted. When she saw the automatic in Sam’s hands, her eyes opened enormously wide. He used it to motion her away.

  Up on the porch came the stranger. Before he could knock, Sam opened the front door and stuck the .45 in his face. “Take that hand out of your pocket real nice and slow,” he said pleasantly, and then, over his shoulder, “Honey, call the cops.”

  “Sure, Pop, anything you say,” the young man answered. “You’ve got the persuader there, all right.” But his hand moved swiftly, not slowly, and had a pistol in it as it cleared his pocket.

  He must have thought Yeager would hesitate long enough to let him shoot first. It was the last mistake he ever made. The .45 jerked a
gainst Sam’s wrist as he fired. The young man went down. He wouldn’t get up again, either, not after taking one between the eyes at point-blank range. He kept jerking and twitching, but that was only because his body didn’t know he was dead yet.

  Tires screaming, the car in which he’d come roared away. Barbara and Jonathan came dashing out at the sound of the shot. “Thank God,” Barbara said when she saw Sam standing. She turned away from the corpse on the porch. “Christ! I haven’t seen anything like that since the fighting. The police are on the way.”

  “Good. I’ll wait for ’em right here,” Sam said.

  They arrived a couple of minutes later, lights flashing, siren yowling. “What the hell happened here?” one of them asked, though he was talking more about why than about what—that was obvious.

  “Somebody shot at this house from the street last year, Sergeant,” Yeager answered. He explained what he’d seen and what he’d done, finishing, “He tried to draw on me, and I shot him. His pal took off as soon as I did.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant Colonel, I’ve got your side of it,” said the sergeant, who’d been taking notes. He turned to his partner. “See just what the guy was holding, Clyde.”

  “Right.” The other cop used his handkerchief to pick up the weapon. It was a .45 nearly identical to Sam’s. Clyde looked up at Yeager. “He was loaded for bear, all right. Lucky you were, too.” He glanced over at the sergeant. “If this isn’t self-defense, I don’t know what the devil it is.”

  “A hell of a mess on this guy’s porch,” the sergeant said. He looked back to Yeager. “No charges I can see, Lieutenant Colonel. Like Clyde says, this one looks open-and-shut. But don’t leave town—we’re going to have about a million questions for you, maybe more once we find out who this character is and what he had in mind.”

  “If I get orders to go, I’ll have to follow them,” Yeager said. “I’ve got to report this to my superiors, too.”