“The colonel needs to get word to the partisans,” Rachel said. “Sooner or later, those bastards ought to get what’s coming to ’em.” She brought out the word as casually as any cavalry trooper might have; Auerbach didn’t think of it as a woman swearing till he listened to the sentence over again inside his head. Even if she had curves, Rachel was a cavalryman, all right.

“That’s what needs doing,” Penny Summers said with a vigorous nod. “Oh yes indeed.”

“Seems funny, talking about American partisans,” Rachel said. “I mean, we saw the Russians hiding in the woods in the newsreels before the Lizards came, but to have to do that kind of stuff ourselves-”

“Funny to you, maybe, but you’re from Kansas,” Auerbach answered. “You come from Texas the way I do, or from Virginia like Lieutenant Magruder, and you’ll know about bushwhacking, ’cause odds are you’re related to somebody who did some of it during the States War.” He touched his sleeve. “Good thing this uniform isn’t blue the way it used to be. You come out of the South, your part of the country’s been invaded before.”

Rachel shrugged. “For me, the Civil War’s something out of a history book, that’s all.”

“Not to Southerners,” Auerbach said. “Mosby and Forrest are real live people to us, even nowadays.”

“I don’t know who they are, but I’ll take your word for it,” Penny said. “Thing of it is. If we can do that, we ought to. Can Colonel Nordenskold get in touch with the partisans?”

“Oh, yeah,” Auerbach said, “and do you know how?” He waited for her to shake her head, then set a finger by the side of his nose and grinned. “Carrier pigeons, that’s how. Not even any radio for the Lizards to intercept, and they haven’t figured it out yet.” He knew he was talking too much, but the chance to see Penny Summers act like a real live human being led him to say a little more than he should.

She bounced up off her stool now. “That’s terrflic. Let’s go talk with the colonel right this minute.” It was as if she’d flicked a switch inside herself, and everything she’d turned off over the past months came back to life all at once. It was quite a thing to see.Hell of a woman there, Auerbach thought, and then, a moment later,and she’s a civilian, too.

Colonel Morton Nordenskold made his headquarters in what still said it was Lamar’s First National Bank. Back in the twenties, some sort of spectacular robbery had happened there; Lamar natives talked about it even now. There weren’t a lot of Lamar natives left any more, though. Soldiers and refugees dominated the town now.

No sentries stood outside the bank. Half the town away, a couple of dummies from Feldman’s tailor shop, dressed in Army uniform from helmet to boots, guarded a fancy house. If the Lizards came by with bombers, the hope was that they’d hit there instead of the real HQ. So far, they hadn’t bothered either one.

Inside, where reconnaissance couldn’t spot them, two real live soldiers came to attention when Auerbach walked through the door with Rachel and Penny. “Yes, sir, you can see the colonel now,” one of them said.

“Thanks,” Auerbach said, and headed for Nordenskold’s office.

Behind him, one of the sentries turned to the other and said, not quite quietly enough, “Look at that lucky son of a bitch, will you, walkin’ out with two o’ the best-lookin’ broads in town.”

Auerbach thought about going back and calling him on it, then decided he liked it and kept on toward the colonel’s office.

The Tosevite hatchling made a squealing noise that grated in Ttomalss’ hearing diaphragms. It reached up for the handle of a low cabinet, grabbed hold on about the third try, and did its best to pull itself upright. Its best wasn’t good enough. It fell back down, splat.

Ttomalss watched curiously to see what it would do next. Sometimes, after a setback like that, it would wail, which he found even more irritating than its squeals. Sometimes it thought a fall was funny, and let out one of its annoyingly noisy laughs.

Today, rather to Ttomalss’ surprise, it did neither of those. It just reached up and tried again, as deliberate and purposeful an action as he’d ever seen from it. It promptly fell down again, and banged its chin on the floor. This time, it did start to wail, the cry it made to let the world know it was in pain.

When it did that, it annoyed everyone up and down the corridor of the starship orbiting above Tosev 3. When the other males researching the Big Uglies got annoyed, they grew more likely to side against Ttomalss in his struggle to keep the hatchling and keep studying it rather than returning it to the female from whose body it had emerged.

“Be silent, foolish thing,” he hissed at it. The hatchling, of course, took no notice of him, but continued to make the air hideous with its howls. He knew what he had to do: he stooped and, being careful not to prick its thin, scaleless skin with his claws, held it against his torso.

After a little while, the alarming noise eased. The hatchling liked physical contact. Young of the Race, when newly out of the eggshell, fled from anything larger than they were, instinctively convinced it would catch and eat them. For the first part of their lives, Big Uglies were as immobile as some of the limestone-shelled creatures of Home’s small seas. If they got into trouble, the females who’d ejected them (and a hideous processthat was, too) had to save them and comfort them. With no such female available here, the job fell to Ttomalss.

The hatchling’s cheek rubbed against his chest. That touched off its sucking reflex. It turned its head and pressed its soft, wet mouth against his hide. Unlike a Tosevite female, he did not secrete nutritive fluid. Little by little, the hatchling was realizing that faster than it had.

“A good thing, too,” Ttomalss muttered, and tacked on an emphatic cough. The little Tosevite’s saliva did unpleasant things to his body paint. He swung down an eye turret so he could look at himself. Sure enough, he’d have to touch up a spot before he was properly presentable. He hadn’t intended to demonstrate experimentally that body paint was not toxic to Big Uglies, but he’d done it.

He turned the other eye turret down, studied the hatchling with both eyes. It looked up at him. Its own eyes were small and flat and dark. He wondered what went on behind them. The hatching had never seen itself, nor its own kind. Did it think it looked like him? No way to know, not until its verbal skills developed further. But its perceptions would have changed by then, too.

He watched the corners of its absurdly mobile mouth curl upwards. Among the Tosevites, that was an expression of amiability, so he had succeeded in making it forget about its hurt. Then he noticed the cloth he kept around its middle was wet. The Tosevite had no control over its bodily function. Interrogations suggested Big Uglies did not learn such control for two or three of their years-four to six of those by which Ttomalss reckoned. As he carried the hatchling over to a table to clean it off and set a new protective cloth in place, he found that a very depressing prospect.

“Youare a nuisance,” he said, adding another emphatic cough.

The hatchling squealed, then made a noise of its own that sounded like an emphatic cough. It had been imitating the sounds Ttomalss made more and more lately, not just emphatic and interrogative coughs but sometimes real words. Sometimes he thought it was making those noises with deliberate intent. Tosevites could and did talk, often to excess-no doubt about that.

When the hatchling was clean and dry and content, he set it back down on the floor. He tossed the soaked cloth into an airtight plastic bin to prevent its ammoniacal reek from spreading, then squirted cleansing foam on his hands. He found the Tosevites’ liquid wastes particularly disgusting; the Race excreted neat, tidy solids.