What she did transmit was, I see that you have done a good deal of thinking on these matters. Do I understand that you have been dealing with the Race since the conquest fleet came to Tosev3?

Yes, the Tosevite answered. In fact, I was interested in non-Tosevite intelligences even before the conquest fleet got here.

Kassquit studied the words on the screen. Sam Yeager wrote the language of the Race well, but not as a male of the Race would have: every so often, the syntax of his own language showed through. That was what had first made her suspect he was a Big Ugly. Did his message mean what it looked to mean, or had he somehow garbled it? Kassquit decided she had to ask. How could you have known of non-Tosevite intelligences before the conquest fleet came? she wrote. Big Uglies had no space travel of their own up till that time.

No, we had no space travel, Sam Yeager agreed. But we wrote a lot of fiction about what it might be like if Tosevites met all different kinds of intelligent creatures. I used to enjoy that kind of fiction, but I never thought it would come true till the day the Race shot up the railroad train I was riding.

“How strange.” Kassquit spoke the words aloud, and startled herself with the sound of her own voice. The more she learned about the species of which she was genetically a part, the more alien it seemed to her. She wrote, Such things would never have occurred to the Race before spaceflight.

So I gather Sam Yeager replied. We speculate more than the Race does, or so it seems.

Is that good or bad? Kassquit wrote.

Yes. The unadorned word made her stare. After a moment, in a separate message, Sam Yeager went on, Sometimes differences are not better or worse. Sometimes they are just different. The Race does things one way. Big Uglies do things a different way-or sometimes a lot of different ways, because we are more various than the Race.

If it hadn’t been for that variability, Kassquit knew the Race would easily have conquered Tosev 3. The majority of the planet’s inhabitants, the majority of the regions of its land surface, had fallen to the conquest fleet with relatively little trouble. But the minority… The minority had given, and continued to give, the Race enormous difficulties.

Before Kassquit could find a way to put any of that into words, SamYeager wrote, I have to leave now-time for my evening meal. I will be in touch by message and by telephone-if you care to talk with me-and I hope to see you in person before too long. Goodbye.

Goodbye, Kassquit answered. She got up from her seat in front of the computer, took off the artificial fingerclaws one by one, and set them in a storage drawer near the keyboard. It wasn’t time for her evening meal, or anywhere close to it. All the ships in the conquest fleet-and now in the colonization fleet, too-kept the same time, independent of where in their orbit around Tosev 3 they happened to be. Intellectually, Kassquit understood how time on the surface of a world was tied to its sun’s apparent position, but it had never mattered to her.

She hoped she would hear from Sam Yeager again soon. Such hope surprised her; she remembered how frightened she’d been at first of the idea of communicating with a wild Big Ugly. But he looked at the world in a way so different from the Race, he gave her something new and different to think about in almost every message. Not even Ttomalss did that.

And Sam Yeager, just because he was a Big Ugly, knew her and knew her reactions, or some of them, better than even Ttomalss could. In some ways, Kassquit suspected Sam Yeager knew her better than she knew herself. She made the negative hand gesture. No. He knows what I would be, were I an ordinary Big Ugly.

But wasn’t she some of that anyhow? She shrugged helplessly. How was she supposed to know?

Reuven Russie had thought he knew a good deal about medicine. His father was a doctor, after all; he’d had the benefit of insight and training no one starting from scratch could hope to equal. And he’d attended the Moishe Russie Medical College, learning things from the Race that human physicians wouldn’t have discovered for themselves for generations. If that didn’t prepare him for practice, what could?

After his first few hectic weeks of working with his father, he began to wonder if anything could have prepared him for the actual work of medicine. Moishe Russie laughed when he complained about that, laughed and remarked, “The Christians say, ‘baptism by total immersion.’ That’s what you’re going through?”

“Don’t I know it?” Reuven said. “The medicine itself isn’t all that different from what I thought it would be. The diagnostic tests work the same way, and the results are pretty clear, even if the lab you use isn’t as good as the one attached to the college.”

“Isn’t it?” Moishe Russie’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

“Not even close,” Reuven told him. “Of course, the technicians are only human.” He didn’t realize how disparaging that sounded till he’d already said it.

Now his father’s laugh held a wry edge. “You’d better get used to dealing with human beings, son. We mostly do the best we can, you know.”

“Yes, I do,” Reuven said. He glanced around his father’s office, where they were talking. It was a perfectly fine place, with palm trees swaying in the breeze just outside the window; with Moishe Russie’s diplomas, one of them in the language of the Race, in frames on the wall; with shelves full of reference books; with a gleaming microscope perched on a corner of the desk.

And yet, to Reuven’s eyes, it was as if he’d fallen back through time a century, maybe even two. The plaster on the walls was uneven and rough. It was at home, too, but he noticed it more here because he contrasted it to the smooth walls of the Moishe Russie Medical College. The microscope seemed hopelessly primitive next to the instruments he’d used there. And books… He enjoyed reading books for entertainment, but electronics were much better for finding information in a hurry. His father had access to some electronics, but didn’t display them where his patients could see them. He didn’t seem to want people to know he used such things.

That was part of the problem Reuven had been having in adjusting: pretending to know less than he did. The other part lay in the patients themselves. He burst out, “What do I do about the little old men who come in every other week when there’s nothing wrong with them? What I want to do is boot them out on the street, but I don’t suppose I can.”

“No, not really,” Moishe Russie agreed. “Oh, you could, but it wouldn’t do you much good. They’d come back anyhow: either that or they’d go bother some other doctor instead.”

“I’ve been looking over the files,” Reuven said. “Looks like we’ve got some patients other doctors have run off.”

“I’m sure we do,” his father said, nodding. “And they have some of ours, too-I try to be patient, but I’m not Job. Sometimes all the little old men and women really want is for someone to tell them, ‘Don’t worry. You’re really all right.’ And”-he grinned at Reuven-“you’re a hero to a lot of them, you know?”

Reuven shrugged in some embarrassment. “Yes, I do know. I don’t think it’s worth making a fuss over.”

“I know you don’t, but you have to remember: you grew up here in Jerusalem, not in Warsaw or Minsk or Berlin,” Moishe Russie said. “Being a Jew is easy here. It wasn’t so easy back in Europe, believe me. And a Jew who walks away from something important so he doesn’t have to go worship the spirits of Emperors past”-he used the language of the Race for the phrase-“deserves to have people notice.”

“If we had advertisements, you could use it in them: ‘genuine Jewish doctor,’ I mean,” Reuven answered. “But it doesn’t make me any smarter. If it does anything, it makes me stupider.”