As he started for the market square, he laughed again. He wasn’t likely to have much immediate interest in animals from Home, and neither was any other Polish Jew. How likely were they to divide the hoof and chew a cud? Not very, which put them beyond the pale as far as he was concerned.

People and a few Lizards crowded the square. Since Mordechai wasn’t shopping, he ignored the frantic haggling in Yiddish and Polish and, every now and then, the hisses and pops of the language of the Race. He strode up to the building from which the Lizards administered this stretch of Poland-along with the shadow governments of the Jews and Poles. The guards in front of the building were alert, as they had reason to be. “What do you want?” one of them asked in passable Polish.

The male didn’t recognize him. Well, that was all right; he had trouble telling one Lizard from another. “I just saw an animal…” he began, also sticking to Polish-he could do a better job of describing the creature in that tongue than in the Race’s.

“Ah,” the guard said when he was through. “That is a beffel. They will run wild. ‘Crazy as a beffel on a leash’ is a saying in our language.”

“A beffel,” Mordechai repeated-now he had a name for the beast. “What good is it? Do you eat it, or is it just a pet?”

“Eat a beffel? What an ignorant Tosevite you are.” The guard’s mouth dropped open in amusement. So did his partner’s. “No. It is only a pet, as you say.”

“All right. I am ignorant-I’d never seen one till now. It was fighting a cat,” Anielewicz said. “Are they going to start running loose all over the place now?”

“I would not be surprised,” the guard replied. “They get to be nuisances back on Home. So do tsiongyu.”

“What’s a tsiongi?” Mordechai asked.

“Another kind of pet, larger,” the guard said. “You speak some of our language, to know the singular when you hear the plural.”

“Truth,” Anielewicz answered, shifting to the language of the Race. “So: are we to be overrun with animals from Home?”

“If we so choose,” the Lizard replied. “We rule this part of Tosev 3. We have the right to bring in the beasts on which we feed-and we are doing that, too-and the beasts that are our friends. What business do you have to say otherwise?”

That was a pretty good question, although the male sounded arrogant even for one of his kind. Mordechai didn’t try to answer it. Instead, he asked a question of his own: “How will your animals like the winters here in Poland?”

By the way both guards winced, he knew he’d struck a nerve. “We cannot know that until we find out by experiment,” said the one who was doing the talking. “The hope is that they will do well. I certainly hope this. Our beasts are better eating than your Tosevite animals.”

“Truth.” The other guard proved he could talk.

Anielewicz wondered if he needed to go inside and talk with Bunim. He decided he didn’t. He’d learned everything he needed to know from the regional subadministrator’s guards. Bunim wouldn’t stop bringing his kinds of animals into Poland just because Mordechai asked him to. Europeans had brought cows and pigs and dogs and cats to America and Australia. Why wouldn’t the Race bring its creatures to Earth? The Lizards had come to stay, after all.

And the Poles probably wouldn’t mind the new domestic animals one bit. They didn’t have to worry about keeping kosher. Mordechai chuckled, wondering how soon some strange meat would start turning up in Polish farmwives’ pots and how soon Polish leather makers would start tanning new kinds of hide. Sooner than the Lizards expect, he thought. Yes, the Poles were very likely to turn into-what did the Westerns imported from the United States call cattle thieves? Rustlers, that was it. And an old joke about the recipe for chicken stew floated through his mind. First, steal a chicken.

“Do you need anything else?” the first guard asked.

If that wasn’t a hint for Anielewicz to clear out, he’d never heard one. “No. I thank you for your time,” he said, and made his way back across the Bialut Market Square. These days, he was always in the habit of keeping an eye open for possible assassins: amazing what a burst of submachine-gun fire through the door would do. Now, though, he also kept an eye out for befflem and tsiongyu. He wouldn’t have known a tsiongi if it walked up and bit him, not really, but any sort of alien animal that wasn’t a beffel would do for one till he knew better.

No doubt because he was on the lookout for the Race’s pets, he saw none as he went back to the flat. All the way there, though, he kept thinking about how the beffel had laid up that cat. Cats were tough; not many Earthly animals their size could take them on and win. What did that say about how rugged other beasts from Home were liable to be? Did it say anything at all? Nobody could predict a cow from a cat, so why was he trying to figure out what the Race’s equivalent of a cow would be like from extremely brief acquaintance with a beffel?

Then he paused, smiling in spite of himself. The Lizardy creature had squeaked most endearingly. He wondered what sort of pet a beffel would make for a human being. Would it accept a person as a master, or would it think he was a large, fearsome wild animal?

His son Heinrich would like to know the answer to that question, too. Heinrich couldn’t see a stray dog without saying, “Can we keep it?” The answer, in a flat none too big for the people who lived in it, was inevitably no, but that didn’t keep him from asking.

Over supper-chicken soup with dumplings-Mordechai talked about the beffel. Sure enough, Heinrich exclaimed, “What a great-sounding animal! I want one! Can we get one, Father?”

Before Anielewicz could answer, Heinrich’s older sister Miriam said, “A thing that looks like a little Lizard? That’s disgusting! I don’t want anything that looks like a Lizard here.” She made a horrible face.

“A beffel looks about as much like a Lizard as a cat or a dog looks like a person. It’s about so long”-Mordechai held his hands thirty or forty centimeters apart-“and goes on all fours.”

“Like a regular lizard-not like one of the Race, I mean?” His daughter sounded no happier. “That’s even worse.”

“No, not like a regular lizard, either,” Anielewicz said. “Sort of like what a dog or a cat would be if a dog or a cat had scales and eye turrets.” Predictably, that entranced Heinrich and even interested his older brother David, but left Miriam cold.

“There’s no point in worrying about these creatures now,” Bertha Anielewicz said, spreading warning looks all around. “We don’t have them, and as far as we know, we can’t get them. We don’t even know”-she eyed Heinrich-“if we’d want one.”

“I know!” her younger son exclaimed.

“You’ve never even seen one,” Bertha said.

But that was the wrong way to go about things, and Mordechai knew it. “For now, I don’t think people can have befflem, so there’s nothing we can do about that,” he told Heinrich. “Anyhow, I just saw this one by luck. I don’t know if I’ll ever see another one, so there’s no point worrying about it, is there?”

“If I find one, can I keep it?” Heinrich asked.

“I don’t think you’re going to,” his mother said, “but all right.” Heinrich grinned from ear to ear. Bertha looked confident. Mordechai wished she would have given him the chance to speak first. But she hadn’t, and now they were both stuck with her answer.

Kassquit was as happy as the anomalous combination of her birth and her upbringing let her be. She hadn’t fully realized how much she missed Ttomalss till he returned from the Greater German Reich. Of all the males of the Race, he came closer to understanding her than any other. Having him around, having him here to talk to, was far better than staying in touch by telephone and electronic message.

“In a way, though,” he said as they sat down together in the starship’s refectory, “my absence may well have helped you mature. You might not have confronted Tessrek had I been here, for instance; instead, you would have left the disagreeable task to me. But you did it, and did it well.”