“Being here is a necessary component of my research,” Ttomalss answered angrily. “I am trying to determine how well the Big Uglies can be made to conform to our practices if those are inculcated into them from hatchlinghood. Just as one intending fraud goes to a computer for access to resources, I have brought the hatchling here for access to the Race undiluted by contact with the Tosevites. Such would be most difficult to arrange down on the surface of Tosev 3.”
“You’ve certainly given the rest of us undiluted olfactory contact with the wretched little creature,” Tessrek said. “The scrubbers up here are designed to eliminateour wastes from the air, not its, and some of those odors have proved most persistent and most disgusting.” He added an emphatic cough.
The hatching made a noise that, if you were in a charitable mood, you might have recognized as an emphatic cough. Perhaps you didn’t need to be in a charitable mood; Tessrek’s eyes swung sharply toward the little Tosevite, then moved away as if to say he refused to acknowledge what he’d just heard.
Triumphantly, Ttomalss said, “There, you see? The hatching, despite its deficiencies, is being socialized toward our usages even at this early stage in its development.”
“It was just another in the series of loud, unpleasant sounds the creature emits,” Tessrek insisted. “It held no intelligible meaning whatsoever.” To show he meant what he said, he let out a second emphatic cough.
Now Ttomalss looked anxiously toward the hatchling. Even he would have been willing to concede it did not know the meanings of the noises it made in imitation of his. It seemed likely to learn meanings by observing what the beings around it did in response to the stimuli varying sounds evoked. But despite his knowledge, he would have yielded a pay period’s wages to have it come out with another emphatic cough.
He didn’t think it was going to happen. But then, just when he’d given up hope, the little Tosevite did make a noise that sounded like an emphatic cough-sounded more like one, in fact, that its first effort had.
“Coincidence,” Tessrek declared, before Ttomalss could say a thing. Yet no matter how dogmatically certain he sounded, he did not presume to tack yet a third emphatic cough on behind his assertion.
“I think not,” Ttomalss said. “This is how the Big Uglies go about acquiring language. Since we are the language possessors with whom the hatchling is in constant contact, it is imitating our repertoire of sounds. Eventually, I believe, it will attach mental signification to the sounds it uses: in other words, it will begin to speak intelligibly.”
“The Big Uglies have enough trouble doing that no matter what language they use,” Tessrek said. But he did not try directly refuting Ttomalss, from which Ttomalss inferred he conceded the point.
Ttomalss said, “Since video and audio monitors constantly record the activities in this chamber, I want to thank you for adding to our store of data concerning Tosevite language acquisition.”
Tessrek hissed something unpleasant and departed more quickly than he’d come in. Ttomalss let his mouth fall open in a long laugh, which he thought well-earned. The Tosevite hatchling emitted one of the squeals it used in place of a sensibly quiet gesture. Sometimes those squeals, so unlike any sound the Race made, annoyed Ttomalss no end. Now he laughed even harder. The hatchling had understood his mirth and responded with its own.
For the benefit of the recorders, he emphasized that point aloud, adding, “This growing level of successful interspecies communication appears to me to warrant further serious investigation.” He looked at the little Tosevite with something more nearly approaching warmth than he ever remembered showing it. “Let’s see them try to take you away from me now. Even if you are a nuisance, you’re too valuable to give back to the Big Uglies.”
20
Jens Larssen peered out the window of the farmhouse where he’d taken shelter for the past several days. That was what he’d been doing lately: peering out the window and waiting for the searchers to give up and go away. “They aren’t going to catch me,” he muttered. “I’m too smart for them. I won’t let them catch me.”
He was pretty sure he could have outrun pursuit from Denver and made it to Lizard-held territory. Pursuit wasn’t the only problem, though. People would have been waiting for him out east. He hadn’t forgotten telegraph and telephone lines (even if those were likely to be down, could you take the chance?) and radio and even carrier pigeons. They’d know he was coming, oh yes they would.
So he’d been waiting for them to give up and quit looking for him. Sooner or later, they’d figure he’d got caught in a snowstorm and frozen to death, or that he’d managed a clean getaway, or else the war would heat up and they’d forget all about him and go off to fight. Then he’d start moving again. The time, he judged, was nearly ripe.
He laughed. “They aren’t going to catch me,” he repeated. “Hell, they were right in this house and they didn’t have a clue.”
He’d been smart. He was a physicist-he was supposed to be smart. He’d picked a house with a storm cellar in it. Whenever prying eyes came around, he’d ducked down into the cellar. He’d even tied a throw rug to a chair near the cellar door so it kept that door covered up after he went down below. He’d heard combat boots thumping up above his head, but none of the soldiers had had a hint that he was sitting in the darkness with his finger on the trigger of his Springfield in case anything had gone wrong.
He laughed again. The soldiers hadn’t had the brains to look beyond the ends of their noses. He’d expected nothing different, and he’d been right. “I usually am,” he said. “If those fools would have listened to me-” He shook his head. They hadn’t listened. The Lizards would.
Even though they hadn’t been physicists, the people who’d built this farm had been pretty smart, too. They weren’t around, though, so they hadn’t been smart enough to escape the Lizards. Or maybe they hadn’t been lucky enough. You never could tell. Whichever way it was, they were gone.
But they’d left behind that storm cellar, stocked with enough home-canned goodies to feed a platoon for a month. That was how it seemed to Jens, anyhow. Beef, pork, chicken, vegetables-they didn’t seem to have had any fruit trees, and he missed sweets till he came upon a gallon jar of tapioca pudding. The wife of the house must have made a lot more than she could use right away, and put up the rest. He ate tapioca till it started coming out of his ears.
He’d found cigarettes down there, too, but he hadn’t smoked any. The odor would linger in the house. When he got on the road again-ah, that was another matter. He looked forward to it, although the first couple of times he’d lit up after going without for a long time, he’d been like Tom Sawyer after Huck Finn gave him his first pipe.
He walked over to the window that looked across the fields toward US 40. It was snowing again, not so hard as it had back when he was a kid in Minnesota but plenty hard enough to cut way back on visibility. In a way, that was bad, because he couldn’t tell who, if anybody, was out there. He didn’t think anybody was. The highway had been quiet since that search party stomped through the house, and that was days ago now. And the snow could work for him, too. It would make him harder to spot, and harder to recognize if somebody did spot him.
“Well, then, time to get moving,” he said. He was just the Denver side of Limon. Once he made it past there, he’d be getting close to frontier country. He’d have to be careful again: the frontier meant soldiers. But unless he had it all wrong, they’d be worrying about Lizards, not about him.
And he didn’t have it all wrong. He couldn’t have it all wrong. The only mistake he’d made was not doing something like this a hell of a lot sooner. He went down into the storm cellar and hauled out his bicycle. As soon as he was on the road, he lit up a King Sano. Yeah, it made him halfway want to puke, but goddamn did it taste good.
The Russies had been buried alive before, first in the bunker under a Warsaw block of flats and then in the submarine that brought them from Poland to England. That didn’t mean Moishe enjoyed
repeating the process. There were, however, worse choices these days.
A sandy-haired naval officer named Stansfield commanded the HMSSeanymph. “Welcome aboard,” he’d said as, somewhere off the coast of Portugal, or perhaps Spain, Moishe, Rivka, and Reuven transferred to his boat from the freighter that had brought them down from England. “I’d wager you’ll be glad to submerge for a spell.”
Like a lot of military types Moishe had met-Poles, Nazis, Englishmen, Lizards-he seemed almost indecently offhanded about the implications of combat. Maybe the only way he could deal with them was not to think about them. Moishe had answered, “Yes,” and let it go at that.
When the British decided to send him to Palestine, getting him and his family there hadn’t looked like a problem. The Lizards hadn’t acted very interested in attacking ships. But then the Americans had touched off atomic bombs, first in Chicago and then in Miami. When Moishe thought of Chicago, he thought of gangsters. He’d never heard of Miami before it abruptly ceased to be.
What he thought of those places didn’t much matter, though. The Lizards must have thought ships had something to do with their destruction, because from then on they’d started hitting them a lot harder than they ever had before. Moishe didn’t know how many times his eyes had flicked to the air on the long, rough haul down from England. It was, he realized, a pointless exercise. Even if he spotted a Lizard fighter-bomber, what could he do about it? That didn’t keep him from looking anyhow.
Diving with theSeanymph had seemed reassuring at first. Not only was he out of sight of the Lizards, he was also out of the waves that had made the passage something less than a traveler’s delight No rolling and pitching, down however many meters they were.
That was just as well, too, for the submarine was not only cramped but also full of pipes and projecting pieces of metal and the rims of watertight doors, all of which could bang heads or shins or shoulders. In a proper design, Moishe thought, most of those projections would have been covered over by metal sheeting or hidden away behind walls. He wondered why they hadn’t been. In his halting English, he asked Commander Stansfield.
The naval officer blinked at the question, then answered, “Damned if I know. Best guess I can give you is that S-class boats are built in such a tearing hurry, no one cares about anything past getting them out there to sink ships. Give us another couple of generations of engineering and the submarines will be much more comfortable to live in. Compared to what we had in the last war, I’m told, this is paradise.”
To Russie’s way of thinking, paradise was not to be found in a narrow, smelly, noisy metal tube lit by dim orange lights so that it resembled nothing so much as a view of the Christian hell. If this was an improvement, he pitied the men who had put to sea in submarines about the time he was born.
He, Rivka, and Reuven shared what normally would have been the executive officer’s cabin. Even by the dreadful standards of the Warsaw ghetto, it would have been cramped for one and was hideously crowded for three. When set against the sailors’ triple-decker bunks, though, it seemed a luxury flat. A blanket attached with wires to one of the overhead pipes gave some small semblance of privacy.
In Yiddish, Rivka said, “When we went from Poland to England, I was afraid to be the only woman on a ship full of sailors. Now, though, I don’t worry. They aren’t like the Nazis. They don’t take advantage.”
Moishe thought about that. After a little while, he said, “We’re on the same side as the English. That makes a difference. To the Nazis, we were fair game.”
“What’s ‘fair game’ mean?” Reuven asked. He remembered the ghetto as a time of hunger and fear, but he’d been away from it most of a year now. In the life of a little boy, that was a long time. His scars had healed. Moishe wished his own dreadful memories would go away as readily.
After being submerged for what he thought was most of a day-though time in tight, dark places had a way of slipping away from you if you didn’t hold it down-theSeanymph surfaced. Hatches let in fresh air to replace the stale stuff everyone had been breathing over and over again. They also let in shafts of sunlight that clove straight through the gloom inside the submarine. No winter sun in London or Warsaw could have shone so bright.
“We’ll lay over in Gibraltar to recharge our batteries and pick up whatever fresh produce they have for us here,” Commander Stansfield told Moishe. “Then we’ll submerge again and go on into the Mediterranean to rendezvous with the vessel that will take you on to Palestine.” He frowned “That’s what the plan is, at any rate. The Lizards are strong around much of the Mediterranean. If they’ve been as vigorous attacking ships there as elsewhere-”
“What do we do then?” Moishe asked.
Stansfield grimaced. “I don’t precisely know. I gather your mission is of considerable importance: it must be, or it wouldn’t have been laid on. But I’ve neither fuel nor supplies to take you there, I’m afraid, and I don’t really know where I should acquire more. Here, possibly, though I should have to get authority from London first. Let us hope it does not come to that.”
“Yes,” Moishe said. “Let us.”
He and his family stretched their legs on the deck of theSeanymph a few times while she resupplied. The sun beat down on them with a vigor it seldom found in summer in more northerly climes. Like those of the sailors, their skins were fish-belly pale. Before long, they began to turn pink.
The Germans and Italians had bombed Gibraltar, back when the war was a merely human affair. The Lizards had bombed it since, more persistently and more precisely. Nonetheless, it remained in British hands. No great warships used the harbor, as they had in earlier days, but Moishe spotted a couple of other submarines. One looked considerably different in lines from theSeanymph. He wondered if it was even a British boat. Could the Axis powers be using a harbor they’d tried to destroy?
When the crew dogged the hatches, Moishe felt a pang, as if he were being dragged unwilling into a cave. After the spirited Mediterranean sun, the dim interior lamps seemed particularly distressing. A couple of hours later, though, he’d got used to the orange twilight once more.
Time crawled on. The sailors were all either asleep or busy keeping the submarine running. Moishe had slept as much as he could, and he was useless on the boat. That left him as bored as he’d ever been in his life. In the bunker under the Warsaw ghetto flats, he’d passed a lot of time making love with Rivka. He couldn’t do that here.
Keeping Reuven out of mischief helped occupy him. His son was every bit as bored as he was, and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to go out and get under people’s feet “It’s not fair!” he said, again and again. He was probably right, but not right enough to be turned loose.
TheSeanymph sailed east, altogether cut off from the outside world. Moishe wondered if traveling between worlds in a Lizard spaceship was anything like this. If it was, he pitied the Lizards. They had to endure it for a lot longer than mere hours.
When the submarine surfaced, it was black night outside. That made transferring Moishe and his family safer, but also harder. “Like trying to find a black cat in a coal cellar at midnight,” Commander Stansfield grumbled. “And we’re not even certain the cat is here.”
“How well can you find where you are going when this ship is underwater?” Russie asked.
“Boat,” Stansfield corrected absently. “That is the rub, of course. If we’re a couple-or more than a couple-of miles from where we ought to be, we might as well have sailed to Colorado.” He smiled, as if at some remembered joke. Whatever it was, it made no sense to Moishe. Stansfield went on, “It’s a clear night. We can read our positions from the stars and move at need. But dawn will be coming before too long-now that we’re further south, night ends earlier than it would in British waters-and I’m not keen on being spotted around here.”
“No. I understand this,” Moishe said. “Can you sail back to Gibraltar all under the sea?”
“We’ll use the diesels to charge the batteries,�
� the Royal Navy man answered. After a moment, Russie realized that wasn’t a fully responsive reply. TheSeanymph had sailed into danger to take him and his family where they were supposed to go.
Stansfield was getting out the sextant when a sailor came down from the conning tower and said, “Sir, we’ve spotted a ship maybe half a mile to port. No sign she knows we’re anywhere about. Is that the one we want?”
“It’s not likely to be anybody else,” Stansfield said. “And if it happens to be, he won’t go telling tales out of school. We’ll make certain of that.” Moishe hadn’t heard the idiom before, and needed a moment to figure out what it meant. Yes, Stansfield was a military man-he talked with complete equanimity of killing people.
TheSeanymph glided quietly toward the waiting ship. Moishe wished he could go up on deck to help, but realized he would be as much underfoot there as Reuven was down below. He hated waiting for others to decide his fate. That had happened too often in his life, and here it was again.
Shoes clattered on the rungs of the iron ladder that led up to the conning tower. “Captain’s compliments, sir, ma’am,” a sailor said, “and please to get your things and come along with me.” He actually saidfings andwiv, but that didn’t bother Moishe, who had trouble with theth sound himself. He and Rivka grabbed their meager bundles of belongings and, shooing Reuven ahead of them, climbed up to the top of the conning tower.
Moishe peered out into the darkness. A tramp steamer bobbed alongside theSeanymph. Even in the darkness, even to Moishe’s inexperienced eye, it looked old and dingy and battered. Commander Stansfield came over and pointed. “There she is,” he said. “That’s theNaxos. She’ll take you the rest of the way to the Holy Land. Good luck to you.” He held out a hand. Moishe shook it.
With a rattling of chains, theNaxos lowered a boat. Moishe helped his wife and son into it, then put in what they’d brought with them, and last of all climbed in himself. One of the sailors at the oars said something in a language he didn’t understand. To his amazement, Reuven answered in what sounded like the same language. The sailor leaned forward in surprise, then threw back his head and shouted loud laughter.
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