To her relief, Regeya did not press her. He said, “I am going to go now. I am using a telephone at the Race’s consulate in Los Angeles, and it is expensive for me. If you want to get in touch with me again, my name is Sam Yeager. I decided to call just to say hello. I tell you the truth when I say that I had no ideal would be speaking with another Tosevite.”

“I am not a Tosevite, not in the same sense you are,” Kassquit said, once more with considerable pride. “As I told you, I am a citizen of the Empire, and glad of it.” Now she broke the connection. She did not think it would offend the Big Ugly-the other Big Ugly-for Sam Yeager (not Regeya) had already said he was going.

A wild Tosevite… Her hand moved in the gesture of negation. The two of them might be similar genetically, but in no other way. His accent, his alien way of looking at things, made that perfectly clear.

But, in some ways, genetics and genetic predispositions did matter. Regeya had, for instance, unerringly focused on her sexuality as an important difference between herself and the Race. Ttomalss, looking at the issue from the other side of the divide, had proved far less perceptive.

Kassquit wondered what the Big Ugly looked like.

It does not matter, she told herself. He probably had hair all over his head, which would make him even uglier than Tosevites had to be. His face would be snoutless, his skin scaleless. He could not help being ugly, given all that. But she remained curious about the details.

On the telephone, he seemed much as he did in his electronic messages: clever, and possessed of a quirky wit very different from the way males and females of the Race thought. She should have despised him for being what he was. She tried, but could not do it. He intrigued her too much.

He is a relation, she thought. In a way, he is the closest relation with whom I have ever spoken. She shivered, though the air in her chamber was not cold, or even cool: it was adjusted to the warmth the Race found comfortable. She’d never known air of a different temperature. She’d never known anyone but males and females of the Race, either-not till now, she hadn’t. She shivered again.

Over lamb chops and carrots and mashed potatoes, Jonathan Yeager listened to his father in fascination. “That’s amazing,” he said. “They’re holding her prisoner up there, and she doesn’t even know she is one.”

His father shook his head. “Are Mickey and Donald prisoners?”

“No,” Jonathan said. “We’re raising them to see how much like people they’ll turn into. They’re guinea pigs, I guess, but they’re not…” Shoveling in another forkful of potatoes let him make the pause less awkward than it might have been otherwise. “Okay. I see where you’re going.”

“The girl up there is a guinea pig, too,” his mother said.

“That’s right.” Now his father nodded. “Twenty years ago, the Lizards started doing what we’re doing now. I wonder what sort of experiments they’ve run on her.” He sipped from a glass of Lucky Lager. “Makes me think twice about what we’re doing with the baby Lizards-seeing the shoe on the other foot, I mean.”

“It certainly does,” Jonathan’s mother said. “That poor girl-brought up to be as much like a Lizard as she could?” She shuddered. “If she’s not completely out of her mind, it’s God’s own miracle.”

“She sounded sensible enough,” his father said. “She doesn’t know what being a human is like. What bothers her most, I think, is that she can’t be as much like the Race-like the rest of the Race, she’d probably say-as she’d like.”

“If that’s not crazy, what is?” his mother returned. His father took another sip of beer, in much the same way as Jonathan had eaten those mashed potatoes.

“We ought to set her free,” Jonathan exclaimed: the idea blazed in him. “We-the United States, I mean-ought to tell the fleetlord we know they’ve got her and they have to let her go.”

He expected his mother and father to catch fire, too. Instead, they looked at each other and then at him. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Jonathan,” his mother said after a moment.

“What? Why not?” he demanded. “If I’d been living up there all this time, I’d sure want to be free.”

“No.” His father shook his head in a way that could only mean he was ready to lock horns on this one. “If you’d been living up there all this time, you’d want what Kassquit wants: to be more like a Lizard. You play games about imitating the Race. With her, it’s not a game. It’s the real thing.”

Jonathan started to get angry at that. A couple of years earlier, he would have for sure. His old man had a lot of damn nerve saying his study of the Race was only a game. But, he had to admit, trying to live like the Lizards wasn’t the same as never having seen, never even having talked to, another human being in his life. “Well, maybe,” he said grudgingly-from him, a large concession.

His father must have seen that he’d been on the point of blowing up, because he leaned across the kitchen table and set a hand on Jonathan’s for a moment. “You’re growing up,” he said, which almost caused trouble again, because Jonathan was convinced he’d already grown up. But then his dad said something that distracted him: “Besides, if you look at it the right way, Kassquit’s our ace in the hole.”

“Huh?” Jonathan said.

“I don’t follow that, either,” his mother added. With a pointed look at Jonathan, she went on, “I’m more polite about the way I say it, though.”

His father grinned. He always did when he put one over on Jonathan’s mom, not least because he didn’t do that very often. He said, “Suppose the Race finds out we’ve got Mickey and Donald. What will the fleetlord do? Scream his head off, that’s what, and probably tell us to give ’em back before he sends in the Lizard Marines.”

“Oh, I get it!” Jonathan said excitedly. “I get it! That’s hot, Dad! If he says, ‘Give ’em back,’ we can answer, ‘Why should I? You’ve had this girl for years.’ ” His old man could be sneaky, no two ways about it.

But Jonathan’s mother said, “I don’t like that, Sam. It turns the girl into nothing but a pawn.”

“Hon, we both just told Jonathan that Kassquit’s never, ever going to have a normal life or anything close to it,” his father said. “She’s been the Lizards’ pawn ever since they got hold of her. If she turns out to be our pawn, too, what’s so bad about that?”

“I don’t know,” his mother answered. Her gaze went down the hail toward Mickey and Donald’s room. “It’s different somehow, thinking of that being done to a human being rather than a Lizard.”

“That’s what the Race would say, too, Mom, except they’d put it the other way round,” Jonathan said.

“He’s not wrong, hon,” his father said. His mother still didn’t look happy, but she finally nodded. His father went on, “And speaking of Mickey and Donald…” He got up from the table and put his dishes in the sink, then pulled a knife from the drawer next to it and opened the refrigerator. “Time they had their supper, too.”

Jonathan also got up. “I’ll feed ’em, Dad, if you want me to.”

“Thanks.” His father nodded. “I’m glad you help with the chores around here, believe me I am, but I’ll take care of this. I was the one who got ordered to raise them, after all, so I will.”

“Well, I’ll come along, if that’s okay,” Jonathan said. “I like Lizards, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He tapped himself on the chest. With the weather warm, he didn’t bother wearing a shirt. This week, his body paint declared him an electronic instruments repairmale.

His father paused while slicing corned beef. (Jonathan sometimes thought the hatchlings ate better than he did. But then, the government paid for all their food, while his folks had to shell out for what went down his throat.) “Sure. Come right ahead. Be good for the little guys to know people visit sometimes, that we aren’t just the gravy train.”