His suspicions about the pilot had eased, but hadn’t gone away. Johnson got the idea Healey’s suspicions never went away. Well, he was going to feed one that had nothing to do with him. “Sir,” he answered, “I’ve found a Lizard spy ship.” He explained how that had happened.

When he was done, Healey let out along, clearly audible sigh. “I don’t suppose we ought to be surprised,” the commandant said at last. “The scaly sons of bitches have to be wondering what we’re up to out here.”

“Shall I shoot it up, sir?” Johnson asked. “That would give ’em a good poke in the eye turret.”

To his surprise, Healey said, “No. For one thing, we don’t know if this is the only machine they’ve sent out. They’re suspenders-and-belt… critters, so odds are it isn’t. And if you do, they’ll know what’s happened to it. We don’t want to give them any excuse to start a war out here, because odds are we’d lose it. Hold fire. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir. Hold fire,” Johnson agreed. “What do I do, then? Just wave to the Lizards and go on about my business?”

“That’s exactly what you do,” Healey answered. “If you’d opened up on it without asking for orders, I would have been very unhappy with you. You did the right thing, reporting in.” Maybe he sounded surprised Johnson had done the right thing. Maybe the radio speaker in the hot rod was just on the tinny side. Maybe, but Johnson wouldn’t have bet on it.

He asked, “Sir, can we operate in a fishbowl?”

“It’s not a question of can, Johnson,” Brigadier General Healey answered. “It’s a question of must. As I said, we shouldn’t be surprised the Lizards are conducting reconnaissance out here. In their shoes, I would. We’ll just have to learn to live with it, have to learn to work around it. Maybe we’ll even be able to learn to take advantage of it.”

Johnson wondered if his superior had gone out of his mind. Then he realized that Lizard spaceship he was next to wasn’t just taking pictures of what the Lewis and Clark and its crew were up to. It also had to be monitoring the radio frequencies people used. Maybe Healey was trying to put a bug in the Lizards’ ears-or would have been, if they’d had ears.

If that was what he was up to, Johnson would play along. “Yes, sir,” he said enthusiastically. “They can look as much as they please, but they won’t be able to figure out everything that’s going on.”

Brigadier General Healey chuckled, an alien sound from his lips. “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“No, sir,” Johnson said. “I wouldn’t mind at all.” Behind him, Lucy Vegetti snickered. He turned around and gave her a severe look. She laughed at him, mouthing, You can’t act for beans.

“Anything else?” Healey barked. When Johnson said there wasn’t, the commandant broke the connection. That was in character for him, where the chuckle hadn’t been-hadn’t even come close.

“So we just go on about our business?” Lucy asked. “That won’t be so easy, not for some of the things we’ll need to do sooner or later.”

Johnson shrugged; his belt held him in his seat. He’d spent his adult life in the service; he knew how to evaluate military problems. “Yes and no,” he said. “If you know the other guy is watching, you can make sure he only sees what you want him to see, and sometimes you can lead him around by the nose. What’s really bad is when he’s watching and you don’t know he’s there. That’s when he can find out stuff that hurts you bad.”

“I can see how it would be.” The mineralogist sounded thoughtful. “You make it seem so logical. Every trade has its own tricks, doesn’t it?”

“Well, sure,” Johnson answered, surprised she needed to ask. “If we hadn’t had some notion of what we were doing, we’d all be singing the Lizard national anthem every time we went to the ballpark.”

She laughed. “Now there’s a picture for you! But do you know what? Some of the Lizard POWs who ended up settling in the States like playing baseball. I saw them on the TV news once. They looked pretty good, too.”

“I’ve heard that,” Johnson said. “I never saw film of them playing, though.”

“More important to worry about what they’re doing out here,” Lucy said. “And whatever it is, they’ll have a harder time doing it because you were on the ball. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” he said in some confusion. He wasn’t used to praise for what he did. If he carried out his assignments, he was doing what his superiors expected of him, and so didn’t particularly deserve praise. And if he didn’t carry them out, he got raked over the coals. That was the way things worked. After a moment, he added, “I never would have spotted it if you hadn’t sent me out this way, so I guess you deserve half the credit. I’ll tell General Healey so, too.”

They spent the next little while wrangling good-naturedly about who deserved what, each trying to say the other should get it. Finally, Lucy Vegetti said, “The only reason we did come out here was to get a look at that asteroid shaped like a zucchini. Can we still get over there?”

Johnson checked the gauges for the main tank and the maneuvering jets, then nodded. “Sure, no trouble at all.” He chuckled. “Now I can’t stop halfway there and say, ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but we just ran out of gas on this little country road in the middle of nowhere.’ ”

They were in the middle of nowhere, all right, far more so than they could have been anyplace on Earth. The very idea of a road, country or otherwise, was absurd here. Lucy said, “I didn’t figure you for that kind of guy anyway, Glen. You’re not shy if you’ve got something on your mind.”

“I’ve got something on my mind, all right,” he said.

“Maybe I’ve got something on mine, too,” she answered. “Maybe we could even find out-after we give this asteroid the once-over and after we get back to the Lewis and Clark.”

“Sure,” Johnson agreed, and swung the nose of the hot rod away from the Lizard spy craft and toward the asteroid that interested Lucy.

Vyacheslav Molotov had disliked dealing with Germans longer than he’d disliked dealing with Lizards. On a personal level, he disliked dealing with Germans more, too. He made allowances for the Lizards. They were honestly alien, and often were ignorant of the way things were supposed to work on Earth. The Germans had no such excuses, but they could make themselves more difficult than the Lizards any day of the week.

Paul Schmidt, the German ambassador to Moscow, was a case in point. Schmidt was not a bad fellow. Skilled in languages-he’d started out as an English interpreter-he spoke good Russian, even if he did always leave the verb at the end of the sentence in the Germanic fashion. But he had to take orders from Himmler, which meant his inherent decency couldn’t count for much.

Molotov glared at him over the tops of his reading glasses. “Surely you do not expect me to take this proposition seriously,” he said.

“We could do it,” Schmidt said. “Between us, we could split Poland as neatly as we did in 1939.”

“Oh, yes, that was splendid,” Molotov said. Schmidt recognized sarcasm more readily than a Lizard would, and had the grace to flush. Molotov drove the point home anyhow: “The half of Poland the Reich seized gave it a perfect springboard for the invasion of the Soviet Union a year and a half later. How long would we have to wait for your panzers this time? Not very, unless I miss my guess.”

“Reichs Chancellor Himmler is prepared to offer an ironclad guarantee of the integrity of Soviet territory after this joint undertaking,” the German ambassador told him.

He didn’t laugh in Schmidt’s face. Why he didn’t, he couldn’t have said: some vestige of bourgeois politesse, perhaps. “In view of past history, the Soviet Union is not prepared to accept German guarantees,” he said.

Schmidt looked wounded. Like any Nazi, he thought a wave of the hand sufficed to relegate history to the rubbish bin. A miracle the Americans haven’t gone Nazi, Molotov thought. But Schmidt said, “Surely you cannot say you like having the aliens on your western border.”