Teerts snatched up the guard’s rifle and scrambled out through a shattered window. Ahead, the engine was a shattered wreck. Behind, some of the other passenger cars were in flames. The Big Uglies who had managed to escape from them were more interested in rescuing their trapped and endangered comrades than in a male of the Race, especially since he still wore Tosevite-style clothes and from a distance might have looked like one of them.
He knew the rifle would fire once if he squeezed the trigger. He wasn’t sure how to work the bolt. But one shot was more than he’d had since he fell into Nipponese captivity. If all else failed, he could use it on himself. He put more distance between himself and the train wreck as fast as he could. He didn’t know what he’d do for food or ginger, but he didn’t much care. As soon as he found a place that was out of sight of the railway cars, he took off the hideous clothes the Big Uglies had given him and stretched his arms up to the planes and satellites he devoutly hoped were watching.
“Come and get me!” he cried. “Oh, please, come and get me!”
4
Sam Yeager had been staring out the window of the bright yellow DC-3 ever since it took off from Lowry Field outside Denver. He’d never been in an airplane before, and found looking down at the ground from two miles in the air endlessly fascinating.
Ullhass and Ristin kept looking out the window, too, but anxiously. Every time turbulence shook the aircraft, they hissed in alarm. “You are certain this machine is safe to fly?” Ullhass demanded for the dozenth time.
“Hasn’t crashed yet,” Yeager answered, which for some reason did not fully reassure the Lizard POWs. He added, “The pilot wouldn’t take it up if he didn’t think he could bring it down again. Biggest thing we have to worry about is having one of your friends shoot us out of the sky, and everything’s supposed to be taken care of to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Ullhass jerked a clawed thumb at Barbara Yeager, who had the single seat in front of Sam’s on the right side of the aisle. She’d closed the curtain over her window and was snoring gently. “How can she sleep in this trap of death?” the Lizard said indignantly.
“Well, for one thing, being in a family way tires you out so you want to sleep all the time,” Yeager said, “and for another, she doesn’t think this is one-a death trap, I mean. Relax, boys. We’ll be down on the ground pretty soon now.”
He looked out the window again. The endless flat expanse of the Great Plains had given way to rather rougher ground, much of it covered with pine woods. The airliner’s two engines changed their note as it descended, and it bounced a little when the flaps came down.
“What’s that?” Ristin and Ullhass exclaimed together.
Sam didn’t answer; the flaps had caught him by surprise, too. Off to the north, the Arkansas River was a silvery ribbon of water. Here and there, buildings poked out of the forest. More rumblings and thumpings came from under the DC-3. The Lizards started having conniptions again.
The noise and the bumping were enough to wake Barbara. “Oh, the landing gear is down,” she said, stretching, which told Ullhass and Ristin and, incidentally, her husband what was going on.
After one bounce, landing was as smooth as takeoff had been. As soon as the plane rolled to a stop in front of a building made of corrugated sheet metal, a fellow in khaki brought a wheeled ladder up to the door behind the left wing. “Everybody out!” he shouted. He had a rifle on his back, just in case Ullhass and Ristin proved friskier than they looked. The only friskiness they showed was grumbling over how far apart the rungs were on a human-built ladder.
The hot, muggy air hit Sam like a blow when he got down onto the tarmac. He hadn’t played in the Southeast for a good many years; he’d forgotten how sticky and unpleasant it could be.
He stood at the base of the ladder to help Barbara down in case she needed it. She didn’t, but her eyes widened just the same. “Thank goodness the baby’s not due till winter. If I were going to have it in August in this weather, I think I’d sooner die.”
“Come on, let’s get you folks under cover, too,” the guard said, pointing to the door in the airport building through which the Lizards had already gone. As they moved away from the ladder, a couple of colored men in overalls climbed up into the DC-3 to get out their luggage.
It was even hotter inside the building than it had been on the runway. Yeager felt as if he were stuck inside an upside-down frying pan. Ullhass and Ristin strutted around, obviously enjoying the heat. “If it didn’t seem like too much work, I’d strangle them,” Sam said. Barbara nodded. Even the tiny motion made sweat leap out on her forehead.
A two-horse team pulling a covered wagon a lot like the one in which they’d traveled from Chicago to Denver left from the other side of the building. A moment later, so did another one, and a moment after that another one still. “What are those all about?” Barbara asked, pointing.
“Come on-you people and the POWs go in the next one,” the guard answered. “We send ’em out in all different directions to keep the Lizards from swooping down and tryin’ a rescue while we move the prisoners to their camp.”
“Where is this camp, anyway?” Yeager asked.
“Hot Springs, maybe sixty miles west and a little south of here,” the fellow answered.
“Haven’t ever been there,” Yeager said.
A gleam of mischief in her eye, Barbara said. “What with your baseball and all, I thought you’d been everywhere, Sam.”
Yeager shook his head. “I played in El Dorado in the Cotton States League back maybe ten years ago, the year after I broke my ankle. The league went under partway through the season. Hot Springs wasn’t in it then, though I hear it joined up after the league started up again a few years later.”
The Negroes had already stowed their suitcases in the back of the wagon and had made themselves invisible again. Yeager had forgotten what things were like in the South, how many colored people there were and how they mostly got the short end of the stick. He wondered if they wouldn’t have been just as well pleased to see the Lizards win the war. The Lizards would treat everybody, white and black, like niggers.
After flying more than nine hundred miles from Denver to Little Rock in a little over five hours, Sam and Barbara and the Lizards took two days to go the sixty miles from Little Rock to Hot Springs. All the same, Yeager didn’t complain. Till they got there, he was essentially on leave. It was pretty country, too: pine woods more than halfway to Hot Springs, after which black gum and sweet gum began to predominate in the bottomlands by the creeks. Everything smelled green and alive and growing.
Arkansas didn’t seem to have seen a lot of war. When he asked the wagon driver about that, the fellow said, “The Lizards bombed the aluminum plants over there by Bauxite pretty good when they first got here, but those are going again now. Otherwise it ain’t been too bad.”
“Just looking at the highway tells me that,” Barbara said, and Sam nodded. They’d passed only a few wrecked, rusted cars dragged off to the side of US 70. Most of them had their hoods gaping open, as if visiting an automotive dentist-whatever was useful in their engine compartments had been salvaged.
By the time the wagon got into Hot Springs, Sam envied Ristin and Ullhass their scaly hides. Mosquitoes had made him and Barbara miserable, but didn’t seem to bother the Lizards. “Maybe we do not taste good to them,” Ristin said.
“I wish I didn’t,” Yeager answered darkly.
Hot Springs was a medium-sized town, tucked in among the deep green slopes of the Ouachita Mountains. US 70 entered it from the northeast, and swung south past what the driver called Bathhouse Row, where in happier times people had come from all over the world to bathe in the springs that gave the town its name and its fame. The wagon rolled past the greensward of Arlington Park, the limestone-and-brick Fordyce Bathhouse, the plastered Quapaw Bathhouse with its red tile roof and mosaic dome, and the Hot Springs National Park administrative building before turning left on Reserve and stopping at the magnificent
five-story towers of the Army and Navy General Hospital.
The wagon pulled past the one-story white stone front and up under an awning that led into one of the towers. “We’re here, folks,” he announced. He looked back over his shoulder at the Lizard POWs. “You’ll want to stay under the awning when you go inside.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ristin answered, though whether he actually wanted to obey remained an open question. But Lizard aerial intelligence was uncannily good, so if you were smart you revealed as little as you could to the sky. Yeager wondered where the decoy wagons were unloading their feigned prisoners.
He left his bags in the wagon, helped Barbara down, and hurried after his charges into the hospital building. Barbara followed him. Inside there, Ullhass and Ristin were talking in a mixture of English and their own language with a bright-looking man some years younger than Sam who wore captain’s bars. Sam waited for the officer to notice him, then saluted and said, “Sergeant Samuel Yeager reporting from Denver as ordered, sir, with my wife Barbara and the Lizard prisoners Ristin and Ullhass.”
The captain returned the salute. “Pleased to meet you, Sergeant, Mrs. Yeager.” He had a New York accent. “I’m Benjamin Berkowitz.” He glanced down at some papers stuck in a clipboard. “General Groves speaks highly of your abilities with the Lizards, Yeager. From what I’ve heard, any praise from him is high praise. How did you get so good with them? Were you a translator or something like that before the war?”
“No, sir, I was a baseball player.” Sam’s face heated as he admitted, “All I knew about creatures from outer space before the war, sir, I got from reading science fiction.”
Berkowitz grinned. It made him look like a kid. “You know what, Sergeant? I’m just the same way. You know what else? That starts us out two jumps ahead of everybody else, because our minds are flexible.” He looked down at the papers in the clipboard again. “We’ve got you and your wife and the POWs assigned to rooms 427 and 429 upstairs. Why don’t you get settled in tonight-supper’s at 1800, about half an hour from now-and report with the Lizards at 0800 tomorrow.”
“That sounds fine, sir,” Sam said. “Uh-our bags are still in the wagon, sir.”
“Somebody will carry them up for you,” Berkowitz said. “Your job is to ride herd on your friends here.”
A room in a hospital wasn’t going to be as nice as an apartment across the street from the University of Denver, but Yeager was in no position to argue. He hoped Barbara wouldn’t mind the change too much. She wasn’t in the Army, but it still jerked her around.
When he and his companions trudged up to the fourth floor, the rooms proved bigger than he’d expected. The window to 429 had iron bars fitted-on the inside, so they wouldn’t show from the air-which meant that one was intended for the Lizards.
A Negro in khaki brought up the luggage. Sam pulled a half-dollar out of his pocket. The black man shook his head. “Sergeant, I’m in the Army, jus’ like you. This here’s my job.”
“I don’t care if you’re a congressman, buddy. You do that kind of work in this kind of weather, you ought to get something special for it.” Yeager tossed the man the half-dollar. He picked it out of the air with an infielder’s smoothness, sketched a salute, and went down the hall whistling something Dixieland.
Drawn by the noise in the hallway, a Lizard came out of room 431 to see what was going on. He had the fanciest body paint Sam had ever seen. Ristin and Ullhass hadn’t kept themselves painted for months, which made the contrast all the more striking: this male’s body gleamed with spirals and swirls of silver and gold and red.
Ullhass and Ristin turned and stared, their eye turrets swiveling toward the fancily painted Lizard as if drawn to him by magnets. Then they started spluttering honorifics Yeager had never heard before: “Supreme sir!” “Splendid Shiplord!” “How did you come here, splendid sir?”
Barbara didn’t follow the Lizards’ language as well as Sam, but tone and gesture spoke volumes by themselves. “That’s animportant Lizard,” she said quietly.
“No kidding,” Yeager murmured back. His two scaly buddies were reacting to the fellow with the bright paint job the way a couple of bobby-soxers would have reacted to Frank Sinatra. He walked over to the Lizard, gave forth with his best interrogative cough, and said, “May I ask your name and rank?” He didn’t use any of the formal titles of respect Ullhass and Ristin had employed; the Lizard was, after all, a prisoner.
The male turned from his two fellow aliens to Yeager. “You speak our language as well as any Tosevite I have heard,” he said, and added the emphatic cough. Sam grinned a wide, foolish grin, as if he’d just knocked in the game-winning run in the bottom of the ninth. The Lizard went on, “I am Straha, shiplord of the206th Emperor Yower. Former shiplord, I should say-no more, thanks to the exalted incompetence of Atvar the fleetlord.”
Yeager stared. How the devil had the Americans bagged a shiplord? From what he knew, a lot of them stayed up in outer space where nothing human could touch them, let alone capture them. Ristin said, “This is our third-highest male, superior sir, in all the fleet. Above him are only the shiplord of the bannership and the exalted fleetlord himself.”
Most of that was in English, so Barbara caught it, too. It was her turn to gape. “What’s he doing here?” she asked, a split second ahead of her husband.
“Whatare you doing here, Shiplord?” Sam asked in the Lizard’s language. He granted Straha his title, but not the flowery language that went with it.
The Lizard didn’t take offense. He said, “When the Russkis set off their plutonium bomb-you know about this?” He waited for Yeager to say he did, then went on, “And when other parts of our campaign were botched and mishandled, I alone had the courage to stand up and propose that we replace the inept exalted fleetlord. My motion had large majority, but not the three parts in four our law requires. It was defeated.”
“Oh, lord,” Yeager said softly. The scene sounded like something out of South America or the Balkans. Somehow he hadn’t imagined the Lizards with political squabbles of their own. It made them seem much more-human. He switched back to their language: “What happened then?”
“I knew the exalted incompetent would have his revenge,” Straha said. “Nowhere in the conquest fleet would I be safe from his injustice. And so, with my pilot, I brought my shuttle down and gave myself into the hands of you Tosevites here.”
“God, it’s almost like Rudolf Hess flying to England,” Barbara said when Sam translated that.
“Yeah, it sure is,” he said, and, sticking to English, went on, “I wonder if we have the spaceship he flew down in. If we do, I wonder if we can make one like it. If we can do that-”
“If you can, you will be a greater danger to the Race,” Ristin said in the same language. Sam wondered why he didn’t translate that for Straha. Maybe he wasn’t happy with him for giving the U.S.A. that kind of chance.
Letting that go, Yeager gave his attention back to Straha. “Shiplord, now that you are here with us, what will you do?”
“I have already begun,” the alien answered. “I have made one radio broadcast telling the males of the Race that this war will be lost because of the stupidity of the males who lead them-either that, or this planet will be wrecked in the fighting. I tell them the best thing for them to do would be to give up to the males of the empires in whose lands they are situated.”
“Do you?” Yeager said with something like delight. Lizard POWs had broadcast to their comrades before, but they were the alien equivalent of dogfaces: nobody to take seriously on account of who they were. But Straha was a big wheel. If he was turning collaborator-the world might become a very interesting place.
The recording of the broadcast was scratchy, full of hisses and pops and bursts of static. Tosevite radio equipment left a great deal to be desired, and the Big Uglies’ broadcasts were vulnerable to interference from their star and from atmospheric electrical phenomena. Nonetheless, the message being sent was perfectly co
mprehensible, and made Atvar perfectly furious.
Straha was saying, “-because our campaign has been misadmimstered at the highest level, we have no hope of the victory for which the Emperor sent us forth. We have been betrayed by the arrogance and overconfidence of the exalted fleetlord, who consistently refuses to listen to advice from those who know better than he. And if we cannot win this war, what must we do?”
“Getting rid of traitors would be a good first step,” Kirel said savagely.
“Who could have imagined this?” Atvar agreed. “To be captured in battle is one thing, and no disgrace. To flee to the enemy, especially when the enemy is not of the Race… such has never been done in all our history, not since the Empire first covered all of Home.” In his mind, breaking a precedent a hundred thousand years old was a crime as appalling as betraying the Race.
Straha’s ranting had gone on while Atvar and Kirel vented their fury. The fleetlord ran the recording back and let it play once more: “We must make the best terms with the Tosevites we can. I am treated well here by the Americans, though I was a shiplord in the force that vainly tried to overcome them. Males of lower rank enjoy treatment equally good here, as is true in many of the other empires on this world. Take yourselves out of danger you should never have been in.”
Atvar stabbed out a clawed forefinger and turned off the recording. “How many of our males will hear this poisonous nonsense?” he demanded.
Kirel looked unhappy. “Some of these broadcasts are on our entertainment frequencies: no doubt the Big Uglies learned those from prisoners. Others-translations-use the frequencies the Tosevites more commonly employ, and are no doubt intended to boost their morale. Exalted Fleetlord, my opinion is that both uses are extremely damaging to us.”
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