“Talk is cheap,” John said.

“That’s what I just told you,” Yeager answered. “But how many laws are you guys breaking by holding me here like this, not letting me see my lawyer, not letting me know what the charges against me are, or even if there are any charges against me?”

“National security,” Charlie intoned, as if reciting Holy Writ.

Yeager might have guessed he would say that. Yeager had, in fact, guessed he would say that. And he had a comeback ready: “If it turns out you’re right and everything works out okay, you guys are heroes. But if things go wrong, who’s going to end up with egg on his face? You guys will, because whoever’s over you sure as hell isn’t going to sit still and take the blame.”

“That’s not for you to worry about, Lieutenant Colonel,” Fred said. “That’s for us to worry about-and do we look worried?”

“No,” Sam admitted. “But the point is, maybe you ought to.”

“Crap,” Charlie said: a man of strong opinions and limited vocabulary. John and Fred didn’t contradict him-and, dammit, they didn’t look worried. Sam had to hope he’d planted some seeds of doubt… and that planting seeds of doubt mattered.

Because of the time he’d spent in space, Jonathan Yeager was going to graduate from UCLA a couple of quarters later than he would have otherwise. That had been the biggest thing on his mind when he got back to Gardena-till his father disappeared. He and his mother both knew, or thought they knew, why his father had disappeared. If they went to the papers, they might raise enough of a stink to get his dad released. They hadn’t done it, not yet. The stink they would raise might turn out to be a lot bigger and messier than that.

And so, now that classes had started again, Jonathan drove up to Westwood every day feeling as if he were in limbo. He didn’t know where his dad was, or when-or if-he might return. The police were supposed to be looking for Sam Yeager. So was the Army. So was the FBI. Nobody’d had any luck. Jonathan feared nobody was likely to have any luck, either.

He felt in limbo at UCLA, too. Because he’d dropped a couple of quarters behind, he wasn’t in so many classes with his friends-they’d gone on, and he hadn’t. What he’d learned from Kassquit and from the Race was and would be immensely valuable to him, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that fit into the university curriculum.

That was on his mind as he left his modern political science class-modern, of course, meaning since the coming of the Lizards- and headed out to the grass between Royce Hall and Powell Library to eat the ham sandwich and orange and cookies he’d brought from home. Brown-bagging it was cheaper than buying lunch from any of the campus greasy spoons, and his mom had started watching every penny since his dad hadn’t come home from Desert Center. “After all,” she’d said once, “you never know, I might disappear next.”

He was just sitting down when Karen walked by. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he waved. “Hi!” he said. “You got a few minutes?”

She paused, obviously thinking it over. They’d been an item-they’d been more than an item; they’d been drifting toward getting married-till he went up to the starship to instruct Kassquit about Tosevite sexual customs. Since then… since then, things had been tense, no two ways about it. He’d known they would be when he rode the shuttlecraft into space. He hadn’t known the war between the Reich and the Race would strand him up there for so long-which only made things between Karen and him that much tenser.

At last, though frowning, she nodded. “How are you?” she asked, leaving the walkway to sit down beside him. “Any word about your father?” She sounded genuinely worried there. They’d known each other since high school, and she’d always got on well with his folks.

“Nothing,” Jonathan answered with a grimace. “Zero. Zip. Zilch. I wish to God there were.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and brushed a lock of red hair back from her face. Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks and shoulders; she sunburned if you looked at her sideways. Despite that, she wore a flesh-colored halter top to show off the body paint that alleged she was a military communications specialist: like a lot of people of their generation, she was as passionately interested in the Lizards as was Jonathan. After a moment, she found another safe question to ask: “How are Mickey and Donald?”

She’d been there when they hatched from their eggs. Jonathan supposed that was a breach of security, but he hadn’t cared at the time, and his father had let him get away with it. “They’re fine,” he answered. “Growing like weeds, and learning new words all the time.” He hesitated, then plunged: “You know they always think it’s hot when you come over to see them.”

“Do they?” Karen’s voice wasn’t hot; it was colder than winter in Los Angeles ever got. “I like seeing them. I like seeing your mom, too. You… that hasn’t worked out so well since you got back, and you know it hasn’t.”

Jonathan’s sack lunch lay by him, forgotten. “Go easy,” he said. “I’ve told you and told you-what happened up there wasn’t what I thought it was going to be when I left.”

“I know,” she said. “It lasted longer, so you had more fun than you figured you would when you left. But you went up there intending to have fun. That’s the long and short of things, isn’t it, Jonathan?”

He admitted what he could scarcely deny: “That’s some of it, yeah. But it’s not all. It was almost like what fooling around with a real Lizard would be. We both learned a lot from it.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Karen said.

“I didn’t mean it like that, darn it,” Jonathan said. “Now she’s thinking about coming down here to see what life among the Big Uglies is like, and all she ever wanted to do before was stay on the starship and pretend she was a Lizard.”

“And what would she do if she did come down here?” Karen demanded. “Whatever it was, would she do it with you?”

Jonathan’s ears heated. That had nothing to do with the weather, even though the day, like a lot of allegedly early-autumn days in Los Angeles, was well up into the eighties. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s research, is what it is.”

“Is that what you call it?” Karen said. “How would you like it if I were doing research like that?” She laced the word with scorn.

And Jonathan knew he wouldn’t like it for hell. He took a deep breath. “There’s one way that wouldn’t happen, even if Kassquit did come down to Earth,” he said.

“Sure there is-if she landed in Moscow,” Karen said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Jonathan said. “Not even close. She knows about marriage-I don’t think she really understands it, but she knows what it means. That’s why”-he blushed again-“that’s why my dad wasn’t up there being experimental, if you know what I mean.”

“And so?” Karen said.

“And so…” Jonathan plunged: “And so, if I were engaged to you, it wouldn’t be the same as married, but it would be on the way to the same thing, and she’d see that it meant she and I couldn’t do, uh, anything any more.” He brought the words out in a quick, almost desperate rush.

Karen’s eyes widened-widened more, in fact, than Jonathan had ever seen them do. Ever so slowly, she said, “Are you asking me to marry you?”

“Yeah.” Jonathan nodded, feeling very much as if he’d just gone off the high board without bothering to see if there was any water in the pool. “I guess that kind of is what I’m doing. Will you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.” Karen shook her head, not in rejection but in bemusement. “If you’d asked me before you went up to the starship the last time, I’d’ve said yes in a minute. Now…? Now it sounds more like you’re asking me to marry you to give you an excuse not to fool around with Kassquit than for any other reason, and I don’t think I like that very much.”

“That isn’t why,” Jonathan protested, though it had sounded like why to him, too. He did his best to make it sound like something else: “It was the only way I could think of to tell you I’m sorry about what happened up there and that there isn’t anybody but you I want to spend my life with.” His mother wouldn’t have approved of his ending a sentence with a preposition. Right this minute, he didn’t care whether his mother would have approved or not.

And this time he’d said the right thing, or something close to it. Karen’s expression softened. “That’s… very sweet, Jonathan,” she said. “I’ve thought for a long time that we might one day. Like I say, I used to like the idea-but things changed when you went up there. I’m going to have to sort that out.”

“We weren’t engaged or anything.” Jonathan thought about adding that he’d used some of the things Karen had taught him with Kassquit. But, not being of a suicidal bent, he didn’t.

“No, not really,” Karen said, “but we were as close as makes no difference-I thought so, anyway.”

That had teeth, sharp ones. Jonathan considered explaining again how he’d done everything he’d done with Kassquit purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Again, he thought better of it. What he did say was just as inflammatory, though he didn’t realize it at the time: “Come to think of it, maybe you’d better not marry me. It might not be safe for you.”

“What do you mean, not safe?” Karen asked. “I know you’re crazy, but I never thought you were especially dangerous.”

“Thanks-I think.” He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t told her about this when he found out about it after he got back from the starship. He hadn’t told anybody. The son of an officer, he knew secrets could leak if you started running your mouth. But he was afraid his father had disappeared because of what he knew. Didn’t that mean he, Jonathan, had an obligation to make sure the secret couldn’t be wiped out? And Karen could be counted on. After all, she knew about the hatchlings, didn’t she?

The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. His father had insisted on that for as long as he could remember. Here as other places, his old man looked to have a point.

“You still haven’t told me what you meant,” Karen reminded him.

“Well…” Jonathan did his best to temporize. “I’ve got some idea of why my dad disappeared, and it has to do with something he knew and something he told me.”

“Something he knew?” Karen echoed, while people worrying about nothing but classes and lunch walked back and forth only a few feet away. “Something he knew that he wasn’t supposed to, you mean? Sounds like something out of a spy story.”