Now that Jonathan was gone, Barbara had a little more room to move on the service porch. As she stepped aside, Yeager lifted the lid on top of the incubator and peered down. The two eggs inside, both a good deal larger than hen’s eggs, were yellow, speckled with brown and white; he would have bet they got laid in sand. Sure enough, one shell showed a small hole. “Will you take a look at that?” he said softly.

Barbara had already taken a look at that. Her question-typical of her questions-was very much to the point: “Do you really think we’ll be able to take care of them, Sam?”

“Well, hon, we managed with Jonathan, and he turned out okay,” Yeager said.

“I see three things wrong with that as an answer,” she said crisply. She ticked them off on her fingers: “Number one, we’re twenty years older than we were then. Number two, there are two of these eggs, and there was only one of him. And number three, not to belabor the obvious, they’re Lizards. It won’t be like raising babies.”

“It’s supposed to be as much like raising babies as we can make it,” Sam replied. “That’s why we’ve got the job, not a fancy lab somewhere. But yeah, you’re right; from everything I’ve read, it won’t be the same.”

“From everything I’ve read, too.” Barbara set a hand on his arm. “Are they really going to be like little wild animals till they’re three or four years old?”

He did his best to make light of it, saying, “What, you don’t think Jonathan was?” Instead of letting her hand rest quietly on his sleeve, she started drumming her fingers there. He coughed sheepishly, then sighed. “From everything I’ve been able to pick up, that’s about right. They don’t learn to talk as fast as babies do, and they’re able to move around by themselves as soon as they hatch. If that doesn’t make them little wild animals, I don’t know what would. Except we’re supposed to do our best to turn them into little tame animals instead.”