Another science fiction question, though this one at least has some TG content.

I own the Ace Double Novel from the 1950s containing Cosmic Checkmate, by Charles DeVet and Katherine McLean. That's Ace's title -- they were always changing titles, probably in hopes of tricking potential buyers who'd already read the stories -- for an expansion of a magazine story or novella called "The Second Game", written by DeVet.

The "complete novels" in Ace's Doubles were often relatively short works; this was one such, coming in around 120 pages. An expanded edition, Second Game (no "the"), was issued in paperback in 1981, which is why I'm writing. Has anyone here read the later version?

The origins and time frame in which it was originally written are almost painfully obvious: Earth and the other human-settled planets are matched against a warlike nation that is culturally fanatical about a native game that's very much like chess.

(I found the game differences clever: except for the pawns ("pukts" here), the primary determination as to how pieces can move and capture is determined by the square of the 13x13 board that they're on at the time. One can see how simply learning the rules and optimum strategies could take years, especially since this is being written in an era with practically no public computer access.)

Our story deals with a human spy sent there, a game expert who tries to establish himself as an unknown master; his gimmick is that he promises to defeat the opponent in the second of two games -- having discovered the opponent's psychological and game-related weaknesses in the first one.

Anyway, the interesting part from the TG point of view is that while the male aliens are totally humanoid to the point of being visually indistinguishable from those of Earth, the women look like boys -- the narrator calls them "youths" -- except that every seven years from puberty through menopause, they physically develop temporarily into women who can carry, bear and then nurse a child. (It's explained that their ancestors developed in an environment where the predators were so menacing that the female body structure was at a serious disadvantage in being able to escape. After they evolved, the "youths" greatly outnumbered the men at first, but by the time of the story the numbers had evened out, with serious consequences for their culture.)

The story takes place just after at least one enemy leader -- the one who captures our hero -- has discovered that Earth women are fertile with alien men, and that they breed true (i.e., full-time girls). (He had done his own clandestine recon mission, and came back with a willing wife who had his child.) So now the alien men have a more serious reason to conquer, and it turns out they have a planet-destroying weapon that can do it. As the story turns out, all the men of the conquering planet end up with full access to Earth women.

The question I was left with is whether anything came of the alien "youths"? In the shorter version, they're basically swept under the rug and never heard from again. (Admittedly, their survival isn't really part of the "moral" of the story, as summarized at the end.) I was wondering if anyone knew whether the question was addressed in the longer one.

Eric

(I've tried to find it in local library catalogs, but they weren't buying obscure SF paperbacks back then, so no luck. It's long out of print, of course. Amazon's subvendors do have copies available, but I'm reluctant to buy a story I already have just to answer the one question.)