“They sure are ugly little critters,” Rasmussen said. “Little’s the word, too. How do things that size go about making so much trouble?”
“They manage, that’s a fact,” Mutt answered. “What I don’t see is, now that they’re here, how we ever gonna get rid of all of ’em? They’ve come to stay, no two ways about that a-tall.”
“Just have to kill ’em all, I guess,” Rasmussen said.
“Good luck!” Mutt said. “They’re liable to do that to us instead. Real liable. You ask me-not that you did-we got to find some other kind of way.” He rubbed his bristly chin. “Only trouble is, I ain’t got a clue what it could be. Hope somebody does. If nobody does, we better find one pretty damn quick or we’re in all kinds of trouble.”
“Like you said, I didn’t ask you,” Rasmussen told him.
II
High above Dover, a jet plane roared past. Without looking up, David Goldfarb couldn’t tell whether it was a Lizard aircraft or a British Meteor. Given the thick layer of gray clouds hanging low overhead, looking up probably wouldn’t have done him any good, either.
“That’s one of ours,” Flight Lieutenant Basil Roundbush declared.
“If you say so,” Goldfarb answered, tacking on “Sir” half a beat too late.
“I do say so,” Roundbush told him. He was tall and handsome and blond and ruddy, with a dashing mustache and a chestful of decorations, first from the Battle of Britain and then from the recent Lizard invasion. As far as Goldfarb was concerned, a pilot deserved a bloody medal just for surviving the Lizard attack. Even Meteors were easy meat against the machines the Lizards flew.
To make matters worse, Roundbush wasn’t just a fighting machine with more ballocks than brains. He’d helped Fred Hipple with improvements on the engines that powered the Meteor, he had a lively wit, and women fell all over him. Taken all in all, he gave Goldfarb an inferiority complex.
He did his best to hide it, because Roundbush, within the limits of possessing few limits, was withal a most likable chap. “I am but a mere ‘umble radarman, sir,” Goldfarb said, making as if to tug at a forelock he didn’t have. “I wouldn’t know such things, I wouldn’t.”
“You’re a mere ‘umble pile of malarkey, is what you are,” Roundbush said with a snort.
Goldfarb sighed. The pilot had the right accent, too. His own, despite studious efforts to make it more cultivated, betrayed his East End London origins every time he opened his mouth. He hadn’t had to exaggerate it much to put on his ‘umble air for Roundbush.
The pilot pointed. “The oasis lies ahead. Onward!”
They quickened their strides. The White Horse Inn lay not far from Dover Castle, in the northern part of town. It was a goodly hike from Dover College, where they both labored to turn Lizard gadgetry into devices the RAF and other British forces could use. It was also the best pub in Dover, not only for its bitter, but also for its barmaids.
Not surprisingly, it was packed. Uniforms of every sort-RAF, Army, Marines, Royal Navy-mingled with civilian tweed and flannel. The great fireplace at one end of the room threw heat all across it, as it had been doing in that building since the fourteenth century. Goldfarb sighed blissfully. The Dover College laboratories where he spent his days were clean modern-and bloody cold.
As if in a rugby scrum, he and Roundbush elbowed their way toward the bar. Roundbush held up a hand as they neared the promised land. “Two pints of best bitter darling!” he bawled to the redhead in back of the long oaken expanse.
“For you, dearie, anything,” Sylvia said with a toss of her head. All the men who heard her howled wolfishly. Goldfarb joined in, but only so as not to seem out of place. He and Sylvia had been lovers a while before. It wasn’t that he’d been mad about her; it wasn’t even that he d been her only one at the time: she was, in her own way, honest, and hadn’t tried to string him along with such stories. But seeing her now that they’d parted did sometimes sting-not least because he still craved the sweet warmth of her body.
She slid the pint pots toward them. Roundbush slapped silver on the bar. Sylvia took it. When she started to make change for him, he shook his head. She smiled a large, promising smile-she was honestly mercenary, too.
Goldfarb raised his mug. “To Group Captain Hipple!” he said.
He and Roundbush both drank. If it hadn’t been for Fred Hipple, the RAF would have had to go on fighting the Lizards with Hurricanes and Spitfires, not jets. But Hipple had been missing since the Lizards attacked the Bruntingthorpe research station during their invasion. The toast was all, too likely to be the only memorial he’d ever get.
Roundbush peered with respect at the deep golden brew he was quaffing. “That’sbloody good,” he said. “These handmade bitters often turn out better than what the brewers sold all across the country.”
“You’re right about that,” Goldfarb said, thoughtfully smacking his lips. He fancied himself a connoisseur of bitter. “Well hopped, nutty-” He took another pull, to remind himself of what he was talking about.
The pint pots quickly emptied. Goldfarb raised a hand to order another round. He looked around for Sylvia, didn’t see her for a moment, then he did; she was carrying a tray of mugs over to a table by the fire.
As if by magic, another woman materialized behind the bar while his head was turned. “You want a fresh pint?” she asked.
“Two pints-one for my friend here,” he answered automatically. Then he looked at her. “Hullo! You’re new here.”
She nodded as she poured beer from the pitcher into the pint pots. “Yes-my name’s Naomi.” She wore her dark hair pulled back from her face. It made her look thoughtful. She had delicate features: skin pale without being pink, narrow chin, wide cheekbones, large gray eyes, elegantly arched nose.
Goldfarb paid for the bitter, all the while studying her. At last, he risked a word not in English:“Yehudeh?”
Those eyes fixed on him, sharply. He knew she was searching his features-and knew what she’d find. His brown, curly hair and formidable nose had not sprung from native English stock. After a moment, she relaxed and said, “Yes, I’m Jewish-and you, unless I’m wrong.” Now that he heard more than a sentence from her, he caught her accent-like the one his parents had, though not nearly so strong.
He nodded. “Guilty as charged,” he said, which won a cautious smile from her. He left her a tip as large as the one Basil Roundbush had given Sylvia, though he could afford it less well. He raised his mug to her before he drank, then asked, “What are you doing here?”
“In England, do you mean?” she asked, wiping the bar with a bit of rag. “My parents were lucky enough, smart enough-whatever you like-to get out of Germany in 1937.I came with them; I was fourteen then.”
That made her twenty or twenty-one now: a fine age, Goldfarb thought reverently. He said, “My parents came from Poland before the First World War, so I was born here.” He wondered if he should have told her that; German Jews sometimes looked down their noses at their Polish cousins.
But she said, “You were very lucky, then. What we went through… and we were gone before the worst. And in Poland, they say, it was even worse.”
“Everything they say is true, too,” David answered. “Have you ever heard Moishe Russie broadcast? We’re cousins; I’ve talked with him after he escaped from Poland. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, there wouldn’t be any Jews left there by now. I hate being grateful to them, but there you are.”
“Yes, I have heard him,” Naomi said. “Terrible things there-but there, at least, they’re over. In Germany, they go on.”
“I know,” Goldfarb said, and took along pull at his bitter. “And the Nazis have hit the Lizards as many licks as anyone else, maybe more. The world’s gone crazy, it bloody well has.”
Basil Roundbush had been talking with a sandy-haired Royal Navy commander. Now he turned-back to find a fresh pint at his elbow-and Naomi behind the bar. He pulled himself straight; he could turn on two hundred watts of charm the way most men fli
cked on a light switch. “Well, well,” he said with a toothy smile. “Our publican’s taste has gone up, it has indeed. Where did he find you?”
Not sporting,Goldfarb thought. He waited for Naomi to sigh or giggle or do whatever she did to show she was smitten. He hadn’t seen Roundbush fail yet. But the barmaid just answered, coolly enough, “I was looking for work, and he was kind enough to think I might do. Now if you will excuse me-” She hurried off to minister to other thirst-stricken patrons.
Roundbush dug an elbow into Goldfarb’s ribs. “Not sporting, old man. You have an unfair advantage there, unless I’m much mistaken.”
Damn it, hewas sharp, to have identflied the accent or placed her looks so quickly. “Me?” Goldfarb said. “You’re a fine one to talk of advantages, when you’ve got everything in a skirt from here halfway to the Isle of Wight going all soppy over you.”
“Whatever could you be talking about, my dear fellow?” Roundbush said, and stuck his tongue in his cheek to show he was not to be taken seriously. He gulped down his pint, then waved the pot at Sylvia, who had at last come back. “Another round of these for David and me. If you please, darling.”
“Coming up,” she said.
Roundbush turned back to the Royal Navy man. Goldfarb asked Sylvia, “When did she start here?” His eyes slid toward Naomi.
“A few days ago,” Sylvia answered. “You ask me, she’s liable to be too fine to make a go of it. You have to be able to put up with the drunken, randy sods who want anything they can get out of you-or into you.”
“Thanks,” Goldfarb said. “You’ve just made me feel about two inches high.”
“Blimey, you’re a gent, you are, next to a lot of these bastards,” Sylvia said, praising with faint damn. She went on, “Naomi, her way looks to be pretending she doesn’t notice the pushy ones, or understand what they want from her. That’s only good for so long. Sooner or later-likely sooner-somebody’s going to try reaching down her blouse or up her dress. Then we’ll-”
Before she could say “see,” the rifle-crack of a slap cut through the chatter in the White Horse Inn. A Marine captain raised a hand to his cheek. Naomi, quite unperturbed, set a pint of beer in front of him and went about her business.
“Timed that well, I did, though I say so my own self,” Sylvia remarked with more than a little pride.
“That you did,” Goldfarb agreed. He glanced over toward Naomi. Their eyes met for a moment. He smiled. She shrugged, as if to say,All in a day’s work. He turned back to Sylvia. “Good for her,” he said.
Liu Han was nervous. She shook her head. No, she was more than nervous. She was terrflied. The idea of meeting the little scaly devils face-to-face made her shiver inside. She’d been a creature under their control for too long: first in their airplane that never came down, where they made her submit to one man after another so they could learn how people behaved in matters of the pillow; and then, after she’d got pregnant, down in their prison camp not far from Shanghai. After she’d had her baby, they’d stolen it from her. She wanted her child back, even if it was only a girl.
With all that in her past, she had trouble believing the scaly devils would treat her like someone worth consideration now. And she was a woman herself, which did nothing to ease her confidence. The doctrine of the People’s Liberation Army said women were, and should be, equal to men. In the top part of her mind, she was beginning to believe that. Down deep, though, a lifetime of teachings of the opposite lesson still shaped her thoughts-and her fears.
Perhaps sensing that, Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “It will be all right. They won’t do anything to you, not at this parley. They know we hold prisoners of theirs, and what will happen to those prisoners if anything bad happens to us.”
“Yes, I understand,” she said, but she shot him a grateful glance anyhow. In matters military, he knew what he was talking about. He’d served as political commissar in the first detachment of Mao’s revolutionary army, commanded a division in the Long March, and been an army chief of staff. After the Lizards came, he’d led resistance against them-and against the Japanese, and against the counterrevolutionary Kuomintang clique-first in Shanghai and then here in Peking. And he was her lover.
Though she’d been born a peasant, her wits and her burning eagerness for revenge on the little devils for all they’d done to her had made her a revolutionary herself, and one who’d risen quickly in the ranks.
A scaly devil emerged from the tent that his kind had built in the middle of thePan Jo Hsiang Tai- the Fragrant Terrace of Wisdom. The tent looked more like a bubble blown from some opaque orange shiny stuff than an honest erection of canvas or silk. It clashed dreadfully not only with the terrace and the walls and the elegant staircases to either side, but also with everything on theCh’iung Hua Tao, the White Pagoda Island.
Liu Han stifled a nervous giggle. Peasant that she was, she’d never imagined, back in the days before the little scaly devils took hold of her life and tore it up by the roots, that she would find herself not just in the Imperial City inside Peking, but on an island the old Chinese Emperors had used as a resort.
The little devil turned one turreted eye toward Liu Han, the other toward Nieh Ho-T’ing. “You are the men of the People’s Liberation Army?” it asked in fair Chinese, and added a grunting cough at the end of the sentence to show it was a question: a holdover from the usages of its own language. When neither human denied it, the scaly devil said, “You will come with me. I am Essaff.”
Inside the tent, the lamps glowed almost like sunlight, but slightly more yellow-orange in tone. That had nothing to do with the material from which the tent was made; Liu Han had noticed it in all the illumination the little scaly devils used. The tent was big enough to contain an antechamber. When she started to go through the doorway, Essaff held up a clawed hand.
“Wait!” he said, and tacked on a different cough, one that put special emphasis on what he said. “We will examine you with our machines, to make sure you carry no explosives. This has been done to us before.”
Liu Han and Nieh Ho-T’ing exchanged glances. Neither of them said anything. Liu Han had had the idea of sending beast-show men whose trained animals fascinated the scaly devils to perform for them-with bombs hidden in the cases that also held their creatures. A lot of those bombs had gone off. Fooling the little devils twice with the same trick was next to impossible.
Essaff had the two humans stand in a certain place. He examined images of their bodies in what looked like a small film screen. Liu Han had seen its like many times before; it seemed as common among the little devils as books among mankind.
After hissing like a bubbling pot for a minute or two, Essaff said, “You are honorable here in this case. You may go in.”
The main chamber of the tent held a table with more of the scaly devils’ machines at one end. Behind the table sat two males.
Pointing to them in turn, Essaff said, “This one is Ppevel, assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass-China, you would say. That one is Ttomalss, researcher in Tosevite-human, you would say-behavior.”
“I know Ttomalss,” Liu Han said, holding emotion at bay with an effort of will that all but exhausted her. Ttomalss and his assistants had photographed her giving birth to her daughter, and then taken the child.
Before she could ask him how the girl was, Essaff said, “You Tosevites, you sit down with us.” The chairs the scaly devils had brought for them were of human make, a concession she’d never seen from them before. As she and Nieh Ho-T’ing sat, Essaff asked, “You will drink tea?”
“No,” Nieh said sharply. “You examined our bodies before we came in here. We cannot examine the tea. We know you sometimes try to drug people. We will not drink or eat with you.”
Ttomalss understood Chinese. Ppevel evidently did not. Essaff translated for him. Liu Han followed some of the translation. She’d learned a bit of the scaly devils’ speech. That was one reason she was here instead of Nieh’s longtime aide, Hsia Shou-Tao.
Through Essaff, Ppevel said, “This is a parley. You need have no fear.”
“You had fear of us,” Nieh answered. “If you do not trust us, how can we trust you?” The scaly devils’ drugs did not usually work well on people. Nieh Ho-T’ing and Liu Han both knew that. Nieh added, “Even among our own people-human beings, I mean-we Chinese have had to suffer under unequal treaties. Now we want nothing less than full reciprocity in all our dealings, and give no more than we get.”
Ppevel said, “We are talking with you. Is this not concession enough?”
“It is a concession,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “It is not enough.” Liu Han added an emphatic cough to his words. Both Ppevel and Essaff jerked in surprise. Ttomalss spoke to his superior in a low voice. Liu Han caught enough to gather that he was explaining how she’d picked up some of their tongue.
“Let us talk, then,” Ppevel said. “We shall see who is equal and who is not when this war is over.”
“Yes, that is true,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “Very well, we shall talk. Do you wish this discussion to begin with great things and move down to the small, or would you rather start with small things and work up as we make progress?”
“Best we start with small things,” Ppevel said. “Because they are small, you and we may both find it easier to give ground on them. If we try too much at the beginning, we may only grow angry with each other and have these talks fail altogether.”
“You are sensible,” Nieh said, inclining his head to the little scaly devil. Liu Han listened to Essaff explaining to Ppevel that that was a gesture of respect. Nieh went on, “As we have noted”-his voice was dry; the People’s Liberation Army had noted it with bombs-“we demand that you return the girl child, you callously kidnapped from Liu Han here.”
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