Second Contact by Harry Turtledove Page A

realized they were doing so, they might have stopped. They did not approve of change of any sort.
    Reuven scrawled notes. Shpaaka was a clear, well-organized lecturer; clarity and organization were Lizardly virtues. The male knew his material backwards and forwards. He also had, in the large vision screen behind him, a teaching tool that would have made any human instructor jealous. It showed what he was talking about in color and in three dimensions. Seeing wasn’t just believing. It was understanding, too.
    Laboratory work meant shifting back and forth between the metric system and the one the Lizards used, which was also based on powers of ten but used different basic quantities for everything but temperature. More lectures followed, on pharmacology and biochemistry. The Lizards did not teach surgery, not having had enough experience with humans to be confident of the result.
    By the end of the day, Reuven’s brain felt pounded flat, as it did by the end of almost every day. He shook his hand to work the writer’s cramp out of it. “Now I get to go home and study,” he said. “I’m so glad to live the exciting life of a student—a party every night.” He rolled his eyes to show how seriously he expected everyone to take that.
    He got a few tired groans from his classmates. Jane Archibald rolled her eyes, too, and said, “At least you have a home to go to, Reuven. Better than the bleeding dormitory, and that’s a fact.”
    “Come along and have supper with me, if you like,” Reuven said—a not altogether disinterested offer, as she was easily the best-looking girl at the medical college, being blond and pink and emphatically shaped. Had she come from the Reich , she would have been the perfect Aryan princess . . . and would, no doubt, have been horrified to get such an invitation from a Jew.
    As things were, she shook her head, but said, “Maybe another time. I’ve got too much swotting tonight to spare even a minute.”
    He nodded sympathetically; every student could sing that song almost every night. “See you in the morning,” he said, and turned to head back to his parents’ house. But then he paused—Jane was biting her lip. “Is something wrong?” he asked, hastily adding, “I don’t mean to pry.”
    “You’re not,” she said. “It’s only that, every now and then, the idea of having a home where you’re comfortable strikes me as very strange. Over and above the dormitories, I mean.”
    “I understood what you meant,” he said, his voice quiet. “Australia had a hard time of it.”
    “A hard time of it? You might say so.” Jane’s nod sent golden curls bouncing up and down. “An atomic bomb on top of Sydney, another one on Melbourne—and we’d hardly even been in the fight against the Lizards till then. They just took us out and took us over.”
    “That’s what happened here, too, more or less,” Russie said, “though without the bombs.”
    He might as well have kept quiet. Jane Archibald went on as if he had, saying, “And now, with the colonization fleet here at last, they’re going to build cities from one end of the desert to the other. Bloody Lizards like it there—they say it’s almost as nice and warm as Home.” She shuddered. “They don’t care—they don’t care at all—that we were there first.”
    Reuven wondered how much her ancestors had cared that the aborigines were there first. About as much as his own ancestors had cared that the Canaanites were in Palestine first, he supposed. Mentioning the subject struck him as unwise even so. Instead, he asked, “If you hate the Lizards so much, what are you doing here?”
    Jane shrugged and grimaced. “Not a hope in hell of fighting them, not down in Australia there isn’t. Next best thing I can do is learn from them. The more I know, the more use I’ll be to the poor downtrodden human race.” Her grin was wry. “And now I’ll get down from my soapbox, thank you very much.”
    “It’s all right,”