That was a serious question, seriously meant. After a little thought, Reuven raised his hand. When Shpaaka recognized him, he said, “Superior sir, I do not know if you will be able to prevent them altogether. We cannot; we have never been able to. We do work to keep them to a minimum.”
“You Tosevites are, in many circumstances, more readily satisfied than we would be,” Shpaaka returned. Reuven glowered; the Lizard had asked for advice, but then what had he done with it? Mocked it, nothing else. Shpaaka seemed to realize his discontent, saying, “In matters pertaining to desire, perfect success may be more difficult to obtain than elsewhere.”
“Permission to speak, superior sir?” an Argentine student named Pedro Magallanes asked. When he got it, he said, “Do the other races in your Empire ever have, ah, problems of this sort?”
“Only in rare instances, due to one hormonal imbalance or another,” Shpaaka replied. “The same holds true for the Race. Until becoming acquainted with you Tosevites, we thought it must necessarily hold true for any intelligent species. Now we discover it does not even necessarily hold true for ourselves. I would appreciate the irony more were it less painful.”
That he noticed it at all spoke well for him. The human rulers of the Greater German Reich and the Soviet Union could not recognize irony if it cocked its leg and pissed on their ankles; of that Reuven was certain.
“You Tosevites have had long practice controlling continuous reproductive urges,” Shpaaka went on. “Since we are newcomers to the business, we shall probably end up borrowing from you: yes, I know, another irony.”
Shpaaka’s students whispered and murmured to one another. The Lizard affected not to notice, an indulgence he seldom granted them. Bahadur Singh, a turbaned Sikh, spoke to Reuven in English: “This will drive the Lizards to distraction-assuredly, to distraction-for some time to come.” His eyes glowed. “Maybe my country can use the distraction to make itself free.”
“It could be so.” Reuven didn’t really think it likely. The Lizards, distracted or not, would do whatever they had to do to hold on to India. But Bahadur Singh had hope. Reuven had no hope that Palestine could ever shake off the Lizards’ yoke. Even if it could, it would be torn between Arabs and Jews. The aliens’ rule was about as good as anyone here could hope for, having at least the advantage of disinterest.
Most of the time, Reuven took that for granted. Now, when he looked at it, he found it depressing. Couldn’t people get along well enough so they didn’t need to have disinterested aliens keeping them from quarreling with one another?
His quiet laugh was rueful. His father would have known better even than to bother shaping the question in his own mind. If Poland hadn’t taught that the only possible answer was, Of course not, you fool, what would? The squabbles in Palestine even under Lizard rule should have driven the point home with a sledgehammer.
Before he let it depress him too much, a student from the Soviet Union named Anna Suslova asked, “Permission to speak, superior sir?” Reuven sometimes wondered how she’d got into the medical college, and whether someone capable had taken the entrance exams for her. She often seemed out of her depth here. The question she put to Shpaaka showed how her mind worked: “Superior sir, why not punish ginger users so severely, fear of punishment keeps females from using the drug?”
“We have been trying to do this with our males since we came to Tosev 3,” Shpaaka replied. “We have not succeeded. By all indications, ginger causes pleasure even more acute in females. How likely is it that we will eliminate its use among them through intimidation?”
Maybe he’d thought that sardonic rejoinder would quash Anna Suslova. If so, he had misjudged her. With a toss of her head, she replied, “It could be that you have not yet made the punishment severe enough to intimidate properly.”
“Yes, it could be,” Shpaaka admitted. “But it could also be that we are not so fond of spilling one another’s blood as Tosevites often seem to be.”
Anna Suslova tossed her head again. “In an emergency, superior sir, one does what is immediately necessary and worries about its consequences later. Had the Soviet Union not followed this principle, is it not likely my not-empire would be under the rule of the Race today?”
“Yes, I suppose that is likely,” Shpaaka said. “My opinion is, many of the Tosevites of your not-empire would be happier were that so.”
Where he hadn’t before, he got through to the Russian girl with that. She glared at him, furious and not even trying to hide it. For a Lizard, he was good at recognizing human facial expressions, but he didn’t call her on this one. Reuven Russie scratched his head. If he’d justified the Race’s rule in Palestine on the grounds of utility for the human population, how could he avoid extending the principle over the whole planet?
He contributed little to the discussion for the rest of the period.
Liu Han looked out from the window of her suite in the Biltmore Hotel at the wide street and the automobiles that packed it to the point where hardly any of them could move. With no small reluctance, she turned to her daughter and said, “I am beginning to believe that the Americans’ constant boasting about their prosperity is not boasting, but is a simple statement of fact.”
“They eat well,” Liu Mei said. Then she corrected herself: “They have plenty to eat, and they eat whenever they like. I see that, even if I do not care for much of their food. They have many more motorcars and televisors and radios than we do. They have more room than we do. This is a large city, not so large as Peking but still large, but it does not feel crowded. All these things do make for prosperity, yes. Who could disagree?”
“I myself disagreed,” Liu Han said. “This hotel is a hotel for rich people. Anyone can see that. The Americans do not bother pretending otherwise. Any country will treat rich people, important people, well, no matter how it treats its workers and peasants. You cannot judge how prosperous the United States is by the way the American ruling classes treat us.”
“I understand that, Mother.” Liu Mei’s voice showed amusement, even if her face did not. “It is good, though, that the Americans treat us as important people. They cannot be treating us as rich people, for we are not.”
“No, we are not rich people,” Liu Han agreed. “We should have trouble paying for a day’s stay in this hotel, let alone a stay of weeks like the one they are giving us. But we have been enough other places and seen enough other things for me to be sure they are not simply showing us their best, as we have sometimes done for foreign visitors over the years.”
She thought of televisors and radios and motorcars, as Liu Mei had. She thought of machines to wash dishes, which she’d seen in some of the homes she’d visited, and machines to wash clothes, which she’d seen in almost all of the homes. Those machines were like proletarians who could not be oppressed and so would never need to rise up in revolution against their capitalist overlords.
And she thought of something simpler, something far more fundamental. In every house she visited, she made sure she asked to use the toilet. And every house boasted one, sometimes more than one, not just a squatting-style toilet like those some rich men in China had, but a veritable porcelain throne. And every house boasted not just the cold running water that made the toilet flush but also hot, hers to command at the turn of a tap. If that was not prosperity, what was?
Liu Mei said, “And all the books they have! So many more people have libraries of their own here than back home. That major’s house, for instance, had more bookshelves than I was able to count.”
“Yes, I remember,” Liu Han said, more than a little discontentedly. When she and Liu Mei went to visit Major Yeager, she’d thought the books that packed his house another attempt at deception-a Potemkin village, the Russians called it: something meant to be seen but not used. But when she plucked a book off a shelf at random, Yeager had talked animatedly about it in both English and the language of the Race. Liu Han sighed. “His wife is a scholar. Maybe that helps account for it.”