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.”