“This chance for what?” Barbara asked. “To go into space, or to go into…?” She broke off, grimacing. “Now you’ve got me doing it.”

“Sooner or later, the Nazis will run out of upper stages and orbiting bombs,” Sam said. “Then it’ll be safe for the Lizards to let Jonathan come home.”

“In the meantime, I’ll go out of my mind worrying,” Barbara said.

“He’s fine,” Yeager said. “He’ll be fine.” He’d been saying that all along. Sometimes, on good days, he managed to convince himself for a little while. Most of the time, he was as nearly out of his mind with worry as his wife was. Long training in the minor leagues and in the Army had taught him not to show whether or not things were going his way at any given moment. That didn’t mean he lacked feelings, only that he kept them inside more than Barbara did.

“He never should have gone up there.” Barbara glanced at the message-the very reassuring message-on the computer screen, shook her head, and strode out of the study.

Yeager left the connection to the Race’s electronic network and went back to review messages he’d received in the past. The one he’d got from Straha a little before the Germans attacked Poland stuck in his mind. He examined it yet again, trying to extract fresh meaning from the shiplord’s oracular phrases.

He had no great luck. He’d been wondering for some time whether his own superiors had it in for him. He had to wonder, since none of the people who’d tried to do bad things to his family and him suffered any great punishment. Some of those people hadn’t suffered anything at all that he knew of-the fellow with the Molotov cocktail, for instance.

And how had Straha got wind of this? Probably from the hard-nosed fellow who did his errands for him. Sam wouldn’t have wanted to wind up on that guy’s bad side, not even a little he wouldn’t.

The next interesting question was, how much did the Lizard’s man Friday know about such things? Sam realized he might know a great deal. To work for Straha, he had to have a pretty high security clearance. He also had to know a good deal about the Race. Put those together, and the odds were that he knew quite a bit about Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yeager.

“How can I find out what he knows?” Yeager muttered. Inviting the fellow over and pumping him while they drank beer didn’t strike him as the best idea he’d ever had. He didn’t think it would do any good, and it would make the man suspicious. Of that Sam had no doubt whatever. Anybody who did what Straha’s factotum did was bound to be suspicious for a living.

I’ll have to operate through Straha, Yeager realized. He started to telephone the defector, but then checked himself. Straha hadn’t phoned him, but had used the Race’s electronic network to pass on the message. Did that mean Straha thought his own phone was tapped, or did he worry about Yeager’s? Sam didn’t know, and didn’t care for either alternative.

He reconnected to the Lizards’ network and asked, Did you learn of my difficulties with my superiors from your driver?

He stared at the screen, as if expecting the answer to appear immediately. As a matter of fact, he had expected the answer to appear immediately, and felt foolish because of it. Straha had a right to be doing something other than sitting around waiting for a message from a Big Ugly named Sam Yeager.

As long as Yeager was hooked up to the Race’s electronic network, he checked the news feeds the Lizards were giving one another. By what they were saying, they’d squashed Germany flat, and everything was over but for the mopping up. Scattered Deutsch units still refuse to acknowledge their inevitable defeat, but their resistance must soon come to an end.

That wasn’t the song the Nazis were singing. The Race hadn’t been able to knock out all their radio transmitters. They claimed they were still advancing in Poland. They also claimed to have smashed the ground attacks the Lizards had made into southern France. Since the Lizards had stopped talking about those attacks a couple of days before, Yeager suspected German radio was telling the truth there.

It probably didn’t matter, though. A map came up on the screen, showing where the Lizards had tossed explosive-metal bombs at the Reich. Showing where the Race hadn’t sent them probably would have resulted in fewer marks on the display. Germany and its European puppets were going to glow in the dark for a long time to come. Before long, the Nazis would have to run out of men and equipment… wouldn’t they?

The Race didn’t show maps of where German explosive-metal bombs had hit. With his connections, Sam had seen some: rather more accurate versions than the papers were printing. Poland was wrecked, of course, but the Germans’ submarines had managed surprisingly heavy blows against the new cities that had sprung up in Australia and the Arabian peninsula and North Africa-with the strong German presence in the Mediterranean, those last had been hit repeatedly. Without a doubt, the Reich had suffered and was suffering worse, but the Lizards had taken a pounding.

While that thought was still going through his mind, he got the warning hiss that told of an electronic message arriving. He checked to see who’d sent it: it could have been from Straha from Kassquit, relaying news from Jonathan; or from Sorviss, the Lizard exile who’d first gained access to the network for him. He hadn’t yet used what he’d got from Sorviss, so he couldn’t very well give him any proper answer.

But the message turned out to be from Straha. Yes, I received this information, this warning, from Gordon, the ex-shiplord wrote. I hope you will use it wisely.

I thank you, Yeager wrote back. I think I can do that.

He chuckled under his breath. “What a liar I’m getting to be in my old age,” he muttered. He knew what Straha meant by using the information wisely: staying out of things his own superiors thought were none of his business. He’d never been good at that, not when his itch to know wanted scratching. If things went wrong with what he was about to try, he’d land in even more hot water.

With a snort, he shook his head. People had already tried to kill him and burn down his house. How could he get into worse trouble than that?

After turning off the Lizard-made computer he used to join the Race’s electronic network, he removed his artificial finger-claws and turned on the larger, clumsier American-built machine he used much less often. Its only advantage he could see was that it used a keyboard much like an ordinary typewriter’s.

Even though it was made in the USA, it used a lot of technology adapted from what the Race also used. When he inserted the skelkwank disk he’d got from Sorviss, the computer accepted it without any fuss. The Lizard was convinced his coding would defeat any traps mere inexperienced humans could devise. Sam was interested in seeing if he was right.

Somewhere in the rudimentary American computer network lay an archive he’d tried to access a couple of times before, an archive of communications and radio intercepts covering the time just before and after the surprise attack that had done the colonization fleet so much harm. Less harm than the Germans have done it now, he thought, but that wasn’t really what mattered, not any more. What mattered was that he’d tried repeatedly to access the archive and failed every time. And bad things had happened after every try, too.

By now, he wanted to know what was in there as much for his own sake as because he wanted to see whoever’d bombed the colonization fleet punished. Curiosity killed the cat, he thought. His own curiosity might well have come close to killing him. But the proverb had another line, too. Satisfaction brought it back.

There was the archive. He’d made it this far a couple of times-and the screen had gone blank as he’d been disconnected from the network. The first time, he’d thought that an accident. He didn’t think so any more.