Second Contact
him.
    To keep from dwelling on might-have-beens, he hurried into the house. Photographs in the hallway that led to the bathroom marked the highlights of his career: him in dress uniform just after being promoted from sergeant to lieutenant; him weightless, wearing olive-drab undershirt and trousers, aboard an orbiting Lizard spaceship—overheated by human standards—as he helped dicker a truce after a flare-up; him in a spacesuit on the pitted surface of the moon; him in captain’s uniform, standing between Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon.
    He grinned at that last one, which he sometimes had to explain to guests. If he hadn’t been reading the science-fiction pulps, and especially Astounding , he never would have become a specialist in Lizard-human relations. Having been overrun by fact, science fiction wasn’t what it had been before the Lizards came, but it still had some readers and some writers, and he’d never been a man to renounce his roots.
    He showered quickly, shaved even more quickly, and put on a pair of chinos and a yellow cotton short-sleeved sport shirt. When he got a beer from the refrigerator, Barbara gave him a piteous look, so he handed it to her and grabbed another one for himself.
    He’d just taken his first sip when the door opened. “I’m home!” Jonathan called.
    “We’re in the kitchen,” Yeager said.
    Jonathan hurried in. At eighteen, he hurried everywhere. “I’m hungry,” he said, and added an emphatic cough.
    “Make yourself a sandwich,” Barbara said crisply. “I’m your mother, not your waitress, even if you do have trouble remembering it.”
    “Take your tongue out of the ginger jar, Mom. I will,” Jonathan said, a piece of slang that wouldn’t have meant a thing before the Lizards came. He wore only shorts that closely matched his suntanned hide. Across that hide were the bright stripes and patterns of Lizard-style body paint.
    “You’ve promoted yourself,” Sam remarked. “Last week, you were a landcruiser driver, but now you’re an infantry small-unit group leader—a lieutenant, more or less.”
    Jonathan paused with his salami sandwich half built. “The old pattern was getting worn,” he answered with a shrug. “The paints you can buy aren’t nearly as good as the ones the Lizards—”
    “Nearly so good,” his mother broke in, precise as usual.
    “Nearly so good, then,” Jonathan said, and shrugged again. “They aren’t, and so I washed them off and put on this new set. I like it better, I think—brighter.”
    “Okay.” Sam shrugged, too. People his son’s age took the Lizards for granted in a way he never could. The youngsters didn’t know what the world had been like before the conquest fleet came. They didn’t care, either, and laughed at their elders for waxing nostalgic about it. Recalling his own youth, Sam did his best to be patient. It wasn’t always easy. Before he could stop himself, he asked, “Did you really have to shave your head?”
    That flicked a nerve, where talk about body paint hadn’t. Jonathan turned, sliding a hand over the smooth and shining dome of his skull. “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked, the beginning of an angry rumble in his voice. “It’s the hot thing to do these days.”
    Along with body paint, it made people look as much like Lizards as they could. Hot was a term of approval because the Lizards liked heat. The Lizards liked ginger, too, but that was a different story.
    Sam ran a hand through his own thinning hair. “I’m going bald whether I want to or not, and I don’t. I guess I have trouble understanding why anybody who’s got hair would want to cut it all off.”
    “It’s hot,” Jonathan repeated, as if that explained everything. To him, no doubt, it did. His voice lost some of that belligerent edge as he realized his father wasn’t insisting that he let his hair grow, only talking about it. When he didn’t feel challenged, he could be rational enough.
    He took an enormous bite from his

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