Major Coffey had managed. Sam shrugged. No accounting for taste. Kassquit had always fascinated him, but he’d never thought she was especially attractive. He shrugged again. Jonathan would have told him he was wrong-and Karen would have hit Jonathan for telling him that.
Someone knocked on the door. That meant an American stood in the hall. A Lizard would have pressed the button for the door hisser. Sam looked around. Had Dr. Blanchard forgotten something? he wondered hopefully. He didn’t see anything that looked medical. Too bad.
He opened the door. There stood Tom de la Rosa. Sam aimed an accusing forefinger at him. “You‘re not a beautiful woman,” he said.
De la Rosa rubbed his mustache. “With this on my upper lip, I’m not likely to be one, either.”
“Well, come on in anyhow,” Sam said. “I’ll try not to hold it against you.”
“I’m so relieved.” Tom walked past Yeager and over to the window. “You’ve got a nicer view than we do. See what you get for being ambassador?”
Sam had come to take the view for granted. Now he looked at it with fresher eyes. It was pretty impressive, in a stark, Southwestern way. “Reminds me a little of Tucson, or maybe Albuquerque.”
“Somewhere in there,” Tom de la Rosa agreed. “If we don’t get what we need here, you know, Tucson and Albuquerque are going to look a lot more like this. They look a lot more like this now than they did when we went into cold sleep.”
“I do know that,” Sam said. “Arizona and New Mexico are just about perfect country for plants and animals from Home.”
“And if they crowd ours out, I don’t know how we’re going to get rid of them,” Tom said. “The Lizards don’t show a whole lot of give on this one.”
“You’ve got that wrong,” Sam said. De la Rosa sent him a questioning look. He spelled out what he meant: “The Lizards don’t show any give at all on this one. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just making themselves at home-or at Home-on Earth.”
De la Rosa winced at the audible capital letter. When he recovered, he said, “But it’s not right, dammit. They’ve got no business imposing their ecology on us.”
“Starlings and English sparrows in the United States. And Kentucky bluegrass. And Russian thistle, which is what a lot of tumbleweeds are,” Sam said mournfully. “Rats in Hawaii. Mongooses-or is it mongeese? — too. Rabbits and cats and cane toads in Australia. I could go on. It’s not as if we haven’t done it to ourselves.”
“But we didn’t know any better. Most of the time we didn’t, anyhow,” Tom de la Rosa said. “The Race knows perfectly well what it’s doing. It knows more about ecology than we’ll learn in the next hundred years. The Lizards just don’t give a damn, and they ought to.”
“They say they haven’t introduced anything into territory we rule. They say what they do on territory they rule is their business-and if their critters happen to come over the border, they don’t mind if we get rid of them.”
“Mighty generous of them. They’d tell King Canute he was welcome to hold back the tide, too,” Tom said bitterly. “The only thing they wouldn’t tell him was how to go about it.”
“Well, Tom, here’s the question I’ve got for you,” Sam said. “If the Lizards don’t want to change their minds-and it doesn’t look like they do-is this worth going to war to stop?”
“That’s not the point. The point is getting them to stop,” de la Rosa said.
Sam shook his head. “No. They don’t want to. They don’t intend to. They’ve made that as plain as they possibly can. As far as they’re concerned, they’re moving into a new neighborhood, and they’ve brought their dogs and cats and cows and sheep and some of their flowers along with them. They’re just making themselves at home.”
“Bullshit. They understand ecological issues fine. They don’t have any trouble at all,” Tom said. “Look at the fit they pitched about the rats. Have they caught any besides the first two? It‘d serve the Race right if the damn things did get loose.”
“As far as I know, those are the only ones they’ve got their hands on,” Sam said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. Is this something we fight about? Or is it already too late for that? You can’t put things back in Pandora’s box once they’re loose, can you?”
“Probably not.” De la Rosa looked as disgusted as he sounded. “But the arid country on Earth-everywhere from Australia to the Sahara to our own Southwest-is never going to be the same. The least we can do is get an agreement out of them not to introduce any more of their species to Earth. That’s locking the barn door after the horse is long gone, though.”
“I’ve been over this with Atvar before. He’s always said no. I don’t think he’s going to change his mind.” Sam Yeager sighed. He saw Tom’s point. He’d seen with his own eyes what creatures from Home were doing in and to the Southwest-and things had only got worse since he went into cold sleep. He sighed again. “Atvar will tell me the Race is as sovereign in the parts of Earth it rules as we are in the USA. He’ll say we have no right to interfere in what the Lizards do there. He’ll say we complain about being interfered with, but now we’re meddling for all we’re worth. It’s not a bad argument. How am I supposed to answer him?”
“Throw the rats in his face,” Tom suggested. “That will get him to understand why we’re worried.”
“He already understands. He just doesn’t care. There’s a difference,” Sam said. “No matter what happens from our point of view, the Lizards get major benefits by importing their animals and plants. If we try to tell them they can’t, we’re liable to have to fight to back it up. Is this worth a war? ”
Tom de la Rosa looked as if he hated him. “You don’t make things easy, do you?”
“Atvar’s told me the same thing. From him, I take it as a compliment. I’ll try to do the same from you,” Sam said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. The Lizards are changing the planet. I agree with you-that’s what they’re doing. Do we wreck it to keep them from changing it?”
“That’s not a fair way to put things,” Tom protested.
“No? That’s what it boils down to from here,” Sam said. “We can have a damaged ecology, or we can have a planet that glows in the dark. Or else you’ll tell me it’s not worth a war. But nothing short of war is going to make the Lizards change their policy about this.”
Instead of answering, de la Rosa stormed out of the room. Yeager wasn’t particularly surprised or particularly disappointed. Tom was a hothead. You needed to be a hothead to get involved in ecological matters. Every so often, though, even hotheads bumped up against the facts of life. Sometimes the cost of stopping a change was higher than the cost of the change itself.
He looked out the window again. He imagined saguaros putting down deep roots here. He imagined owls nesting in the saguaros, and roadrunners scurrying here and there in the shade of the cactuses snapping up whatever little lizardy things they could catch. He imagined sidewinders looping along. He imagined how the Lizards would feel about all of that-especially the ones who had the misfortune to bump into sidewinders. Would they go to war to keep it from happening? They might.
But it was already happening back on Earth. Too late to stop it now. And, whatever else happened, he couldn’t imagine an American colonization fleet crossing the light-years and coming down on Home. The Race had the population to spare for that sort of thing. The USA didn’t.
He wondered how much he’d accomplished by coming here. That he’d got here alive was pretty impressive, too. He’d had the audience with the Emperor and the private meeting afterwards. But what had he gained that he couldn’t have got from Reffet and Kirel back on Earth? Anything?
If he had, he was hard pressed to see it. He understood Tom de la Rosa’s frustration. He had plenty of frustration of his own. The Lizards here on Home were less inclined to compromise than the ones back on Earth had been. They thought they were right, and any miserable Big Ugly had to be wrong.