Having watched a lot of chicks hatching, Sam knew it didn’t happen instantly. Sure enough, the tears in the shells hadn’t got much bigger before the front doorbell rang. Jonathan dashed off to the door, and returned a moment later with Karen. “I greet you, Senior Ordnance Specialist,” Sam said in the language of the Race, eyeing her body paint. With both Barbara and Jonathan there, he conscientiously didn’t eye the skin on which the body paint was displayed. That wasn’t easy-she was a pretty redhead, and freckled all over-but he managed.

“I greet you, superior sir,” she answered in the same language. Like Jonathan, like the rest of the younger generation, she couldn’t remember a time when the Lizards hadn’t been around. She and he studied their language at UCLA the same way they studied math or chemistry. Despite aping the Race, they took Lizards more for granted than Sam or Barbara ever would.

Four people crowding around the incubator made looking in harder than ever. Karen happened to have the best view when the first Lizard’s snout poked out of the shell. “Look!” she said. “He’s got a little horn on the end of his nose.”

“It’s not a horn, it’s an egg tooth,” Sam said. “Turtles and snakes and ordinary small-l lizards have ’em, too, to help them hatch. It’ll drop off in a few days.”

Little by little, the baby Lizards (hatchlings sounded reproachfully in his mind, in the language of the Race) fought their way free of the eggs that had confined them. They were a light greenish brown, lighter than they would be as adults. Their scaly hides glistened with the last fluids from the eggs, though the lightbulbs in the incubators swiftly dried them. “Their heads look too big,” Jonathan said.

“So did yours, when you were first born,” Sam said. Barbara nodded. Jonathan looked embarrassed, though Karen’s head had undoubtedly looked too big for her body when she was a newborn, too.

Hearing voices above them, the Lizard hatchlings turned their tiny eye turrets toward the people. Sam wondered what he looked like to them. Nothing good, evidently; they skittered around the bottom of the incubator, looking for somewhere to hide. Jonathan hadn’t done that when he was a baby. And thank God, too, Sam thought.