“Thanks,” Sam said, feeling about ten feet tall. “Soon as I got the chance to have anything to do with the Lizards besides shooting at ’em, I knew that’s what I wanted. They’re-fascinating, you know what I mean?”
Goddard shook his head. “What they know, the experience they have-that’s fascinating. But them-” He laughed self-consciously. “A good thing Vesstil’s not around right now. He’d be insulted if he knew he gave me the creeps.”
“He probably wouldn’t, sir,” Yeager said. “The Lizards mostly don’t make any bones about us giving them the creeps.” He paused. “Hmm, come to think of it, he might be insulted at that, sort of like if a Ku-Kluxer found out some Negroes looked down their noses at white men.”
“As if we don’t have the right to think Lizards are creepy, you mean.”
“That’s right.” Sam nodded. “But snakes and things like that, they never bothered me, not even when I was a kid. And the Lizards, every time I’m with one of them, I’m liable to learn something new: not just new for me, I mean, but something nobody, no human being, ever knew before. That’s pretty special. In a way, it’s even more special than Jonathan.” Now he laughed the nervous laugh Goddard had used before. “Don’t let Barbara found out I said that.”
“You have my word,” the rocket scientist said solemnly. “But I do understand what you mean. Your son is an unknown to you, but he’s not the first baby that ever was. Really discovering something for the first time is a thrill almost as addictive as-as ginger, shall we say?”
“As long as we don’t let the Lizards hear us say it, sure,” Yeager answered. “They sure do like that stuff, don’t they?” He hesitated again, then went on, “Sir, I’m mighty glad you decided to move operations back here to Hot Springs. Gives me the chance to be with my family, lets me help Barbara out every now and then. I mean, we haven’t even been married a year yet, and-”
“I’m glad it’s worked out well for you, Sergeant,” Goddard said, “but that’s not the reason I came down here from Couch-”
“Oh, I know it’s not, sir,” Sam said hastily.
As if he hadn’t spoken, Goddard went on, “Hot Springs is a decent-sized city, with at least a little light manufacturing. We’re not far from Little Rock, which has more. And we have all the Lizards at the Army and Navy General Hospital here, upon whom we can draw for expertise. That has proved much more convenient than transferring the Lizards up to southern Missouri one by one.”
“Like I said, it’s great by me,” Yeager told him. “And we’ve moved an awful lot of pieces of the Lizard shuttlecraft down here so we can study ’em better.”
“I worried about that,” Goddard said. “The Lizards always knew about where Vesstil brought Straha down. We were lucky we concealed and stripped the shuttlecraft as fast as we did, because they tried their hardest to destroy it. They easily could have sent in troops by air to make sure they’d done the job, and we’d have had the devil’s own time stopping them.”
“They don’t go poking their snouts into everything the way they did when they first landed here,” Sam said. “I guess that’s because we’ve hurt ’em a few times when they tried it.”
“A good thing, too, or I fear we’d have lost the war by now.” Goddard rose and stretched, though from his grimace that hurt more than it made him feel good. “Another incidental reason for coming to Hot Springs is the springs. I’m going to my room to draw myself a hot bath. I’d gotten used to doing without such things, and almost forgot how wonderful they are.”
“Yes, sir,” Yeager said enthusiastically. The fourth-floor room in the Army and Navy General Hospital he shared with Barbara-and now Jonathan-didn’t have a tub of its own; washing facilities were down at the end of the hall. That didn’t bother him. For one thing, Goddard was a VIP, while he was just an enlisted man doing what he could for the war effort. For another, the plumbing on the Nebraska farm where he’d grown up had consisted of a well and a two-holer out back of the house. He didn’t take running water, cold or especially hot, for granted.
Walking up to his room was a lot more comfortable in winter than it had been in summertime, when you didn’t need to soak in the local springs to get hot and wet. As he headed down the hall toward room 429, he heard Jonathan kicking up a ruckus in there. He sighed and hurried a little faster. Barbara would be feeling harassed. So would the Lizard POWs who also lived on this floor.
When he opened the door, Barbara sent him a look that went from hunted to relieved when she saw who he was. She thrust the baby at him. “Would you try holding him, please?” she said. “No matter what I do, he doesn’t want to keep quiet.”
“Okay, hon,” he said. “Let’s see if there’s a burp hiding in there.” He got Jonathan up on his shoulder and started thumping the kid’s back. He did it hard enough to make it sound as if he were working out on the drums. Barbara, who had a gentler touch, frowned at that the way she usually did, but he got results with it. As now-Jonathan gave forth with an almost baritone belch and a fair volume of half-digested milk. Then he blinked and looked much happier with himself.
“Oh, good!” Barbara exclaimed when the burp came out. She dabbed at Sam’s uniform tunic with a diaper. “There. I got most of it, but I’m afraid you’re going to smell like sour milk for a while.”
“World won’t end,” Yeager said. “This isn’t one of your big spit and polish places.” The smell of sour milk didn’t bother him any more. It was in the room most of the time, along with the reek that came with the diaper pail even when it was closed-that reminded him of the barnyard on his parents’ farm, not that he ever said so to Barbara. He held his little son out at arm’s length. “There you go, kiddo. You had that hiding in there where Mommy couldn’t find it, didn’t you?”
Barbara reached for the baby. “I’ll take him back now. If you want.”
“It’s okay,” Sam said. “I don’t get to hold him all that much, and you look like you could use a breather.”
“Well, now that you mention it, yes.” Barbara slumped into the only chair in the room. She wasn’t the pert girl Sam had got to know; she looked beat, as she did most of the time. If you didn’t look beat most of the time with a new kid around, either something was wrong with you or you had servants to look beat for you. There were dark circles under her green eyes; her blond hair-several shades darker than Sam’s-hung limp, as if it were tired, too. She let out a weary sigh. “What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette and especially a cup of coffee.”
“Oh, Lord-coffee,” Yeager said wistfully. “The worst cup of joe I ever drank in the greasiest greasy spoon in the lousiest little town I ever went through-and I went through a lot of ’em… Jeez, it’d go good right now.”
“If we had any coffee to ration, we ought to share it between soldiers in the front lines and parents with babies less than a year old. No one else could possibly need it so badly,” Barbara said. Frazzled as she was, she still spoke with a precision Sam admired: she’d done graduate work at Berkeley in medieval English literature before the war. The kind of English you heard in ballparks didn’t measure up alongside that.
Jonathan wiggled and twisted and started to cry. He was beginning to make different kinds of racket to show he had different things in mind. Sam recognized this one. “He’s hungry, hon.”
“By the schedule, it’s not time to feed him yet,” Barbara answered. “But do you know what? As far as I’m concerned, the schedule can go to the devil. I can’t stand listening to him yell until the clock says it’s okay for him to eat. If nursing makes him happy enough to keep still for a while, that suits me fine.” She wriggled her right arm out of the sleeve of the dark blue wool dress she was wearing, tugged the dress down to bare that breast. “Here, give him to me.”
Yeager did. The baby’s mouth fastened onto her nipple. Jonathan sucked avidly. Yeager could hear him gulping down the milk. He’d felt funny at first, having to share Barbara’s breasts with his son. But you couldn’t bottle-feed these days-no formula, no easy way to keep things as clean as they needed to be. And after you got used to breast-feeding, it didn’t seem like such a big thing any more, anyhow.