“Fifty, take it or leave it.” The farmer didn’t sound put out that she’d failed to fall to her knees. But he went on, “For once in my life, I don’t have to haggle. If you won’t pay me what I want, somebody else will—and you won’t get a better price from anyone else around.”
He was almost certainly right. “When the roads and railroads get fixed, you’ll sing a different tune,” Monique said.
“All the better reason to get what I can now, “he answered. “Do you want these beans, or don’t you? Like I say, if you don’t, somebody will.”
“Give me two kilos.” Monique had the money. Her brother Pierre had more money than he knew what to do with, even at the obscene prices for which things were selling nowadays. The Lizards had bought a lot of ginger from him over the years, and Germans and Frenchmen had bought a lot of goods he’d got from the Lizards.
After Monique paid the peasant, she held out her stringbag—a universal French shopping tool—and he poured haricots verts into it. When he stopped, she hefted the sack and glared at him. Grudgingly, he doled out a few more beans. Getting cheated on price was one thing. Getting cheated on weight was something else. Hefting the stringbag again, Monique supposed he’d come close to giving her the proper amount.
She bought potatoes from another farmer, one who refrained from offering to take his price in venery. Of course, his wife, a woman of formidable proportions, was standing beside him, which probably had something to do with his restraint. Then Monique headed back to the vast tent city outside of town that housed the many survivors who’d come through even when their homes hadn’t.
The tent city smelled like a barnyard. She supposed that was inevitable, since it had no running water. The Romans, no doubt, would have taken such odors as an inevitable part of urban life. Monique didn’t, couldn’t. She wished her nose would go to sleep whenever she had to come back.
A boy who couldn’t have been older than eight tried to steal her vegetables. She walloped him on the bottom, hard enough to send him off yowling. If he’d asked her for some, she probably would have given them to him. But she wouldn’t put up with thieves, not even thieves in short pants.
As she’d had to share a flat with her brother and his lover, now she had to share a tent with them. When she ducked inside, she discovered they had company: a Lizard with impressively fancy body paint. He jerked in alarm when she came through the tent flap.
Lucie spoke reassuringly in the Lizards’ language. Monique didn’t speak it, but caught the tone. She wondered if it worked as well on the Lizard as it would have on a human male. Lucie wasn’t much to look at, being pudgy and plain, but she had the sexiest voice Monique had ever heard.
Pierre Dutourd was also pudgy and plain, so they made a good pair, or at least a well-matched one. He was ten years older than Monique, and the difference looked even wider than it was. “How did you do?”
She hefted the stringbag. “Everything is too expensive,” she answered, “but the haricots verts and the potatoes looked pretty good, so I got them.”
“Excuse me,” the Lizard said in hissing French. “Is it that these foods were grown in the local soil?”
“But of course,” Monique answered. “Why?”
“Because, in that case, they are liable to be in some measure radioactive,” the Lizard replied. “Your health would be better if you did not eat them.”
“They are the only food we can get,” Monique said, acid in her voice. “Would our health be better if we starved to death?”
“Well, no,” the Lizard admitted. “But why can you not get more healthful alimentation?”
“Why?” Monique wanted to hit him over the head with the stringbag. “Because the Race has dropped explosive-metal bombs all over France, that’s why.” She turned to Pierre. “Do you always deal with idiots?”
“Keffesh isn’t an idiot,” her brother answered, and patted the Lizard on the shoulder. “He’s just new in Marseille, and doesn’t understand the way things here are right now. He’s been buying and selling down in the South Pacific, till the war disrupted things.”
“Well, he ought to think a little before he talks,” Monique snapped.
“Who is this bad-tempered person?” the Lizard named Keffesh asked Pierre.
“My sister,” he answered. “She is bad-tempered, I agree, but she will not betray you. You may rely on that.”
By the way Keffesh’s eye turrets swung back and forth, he didn’t want to rely on anything. He stuck out his tongue at Pierre, as a human being might have pointed with an index finger. “It could be,” he said. Now that he’d started speaking French, he seemed content to stick with it. “But may I rely on you? If you cannot bring in food and have to eat supplies that are possibly contaminated, how is it that you will be able to bring in supplies of the herb my kind craves so much?”
Lucie laughed. Monique didn’t know what, if anything, that did to Keffesh; it certainly would have got any human male’s complete and undivided attention. Lucie said, “That is very simple. There is little profit in food. There is great profit in ginger. Of course ginger will move where food would not.”
“Ah,” Keffesh said. “Yes, that is sensible. Very well, then.”
Monique shook her head and set down the sack of vegetables. She had no doubt Lucie was right. What did that say about the way things worked in the world? That the coming of the Lizards hadn’t changed things much? Of all the conclusions she contemplated, that was odds-on the most depressing.
Rance Auerbach contemplated another perfect Tahitian day. It was warm, a little humid, with clouds rolling across the blue sky. He could look out the window of the apartment he shared with Penny Summers and see the even bluer South Pacific. He turned away from the lovely spectacle and lit a cigarette. Smoking made him cough, which hurt. He’d lost most of a lung and taken other damage from a Lizard bullet during the fighting. Doctors told him he was cutting years off his life by not quitting. Too goddamn bad, he thought, and took another drag.
He limped into the kitchen and got himself a beer. “Let me have one of those, too, will you?” Penny called from the bedroom when she heard him open it.
“Okay.” His voice was a ruined rasp. He popped the top off another beer. Walking back to give it to her hurt, too. Another bullet from the same burst of fire had left him with a shattered leg. “Here you go, babe.”
“Thanks,” she told him. She was also smoking a cigarette, in quick, nervous puffs. She grabbed the beer and raised it high. “Here’s to crime.”
He drank—he would have drunk to anything—but he laughed, too. “Didn’t know there was any such thing in Free France.”
“Ha,” she said, and brushed a lock of dyed blond hair back off her cheek. She was in her early forties, a few years younger than Rance, and could pass for younger still because of the energy she showed. “Now, the next interesting question is, how much longer will there be a Free France now that there’s a real France again?”
“You expect the froggies to sail out here with gunboats and take over?” After a long sentence, Rance had to pause and suck in air. “I don’t think that’s awful goddamn likely.”
“Gunboats? No, neither do I. But airplanes full of clerks and cops?” Penny grimaced. “I wouldn’t be half surprised. And they’re liable to kill the goose that laid the golden egg if they do.”
As far as power went, Free France was a joke. It couldn’t hold out for twenty minutes if the Empire of Japan or the USA or the Race decided to invade it. But none of them had, because a place under nobody’s thumb, where people and Lizards could make deals without anybody looking over their shoulders, was too useful to all concerned. How would that look, though, to a pack of functionaries back in Paris?
Not good. “We came here to get out from under,” Rance said in his Texas drawl. “What do we do if that doesn’t work?”
“Go somewheres else,” Penny answered at once. Her Kansas accent was as harsh as his was soft. “I’m thinkin’ about it. How about you?�
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“Yeah.” He was surprised at how readily he admitted it. Tahiti, with no laws to speak of, with shameless native girls who didn’t bother covering their tits half the time, had been awfully attractive—till he got here. One thing nobody mentioned about the native girls was how often they had hulking, bad-tempered native boyfriends. And, with no law to speak of, he often felt like a sardine in a tank full of sharks. “Where have you got in mind?”
“Well, like you said, if the froggies get their hands on this place, they’ll squeeze it till its eyes pop,” Penny said. “So what I was figuring was maybe going back to France. It’s a lot bigger than Tahiti, you know? They won’t have half the cops and things they need to keep an eye on everybody, on account of the Nazis have been doing so much of that for so long.”
“If I had a hat, I’d take it off to you,” Rance said. “That’s one of the sneakiest things I ever heard in all my born days. Of course, there’s a good deal to France, if you know what I mean. You have any place in particular in mind, or just sort of all over the country?”
“How’s Marseille sound to you?” Penny asked.
Auerbach made motions of tipping the hat he wasn’t wearing and sticking it back on his head. “Are you out of your ever-loving mind?” he demanded. “Do you remember what happened to us the last time we were in Marseille? The Germans almost gave us a blindfold and a cigarette and lined us up against the wall and shot us.”
“That’s right,” Penny said placidly. “So what?”
“So what?” Rance would have screamed, but he didn’t have the lungs for it. Perhaps because he couldn’t make a lot of noise, he had to think before saying anything else. After thinking, he felt foolish. “Oh,” he said. “No more Nazis, right?”
Penny grinned at him. “Bingo. See? You’re not so dumb after all.”
“Maybe not. But maybe I am. And maybe you are, too,” Rance said. “Didn’t Marseille have an explosive-metal bomb land on its head?”
“Yeah, I think it did,” Penny answered. “But so what again? Some of the ginger dealers’ll still be around. And if the place got shaken up good, that gives us a better chance to set up shop there.”
Rance thought about it. At first, it sounded pretty crazy. Then he liked the idea. After that, though, he hesitated again. “Going to be plenty of Lizards in Marseille, or in whatever’s left of it,” he remarked.
“I hope so,” Penny exclaimed. “You think I want to sell all the ginger we’ve got to a bunch of cooks in a restaurant?”
But Rance was shaking his head. “That’s not what I meant. You wait and see—there’ll be lots of Lizards all over France, pretending they’re not telling the Frenchmen what to do. If they weren’t there, how long would it be before the Nazis were telling the Frenchmen what to do again?”
“Oh.” Now Penny saw what he was driving at.
“That’s right,” Auerbach said. “If there are official-type Lizards all over France—and you can bet your bottom dollar there will be—they aren’t going to be real happy with us. Go ahead—tell me I’m wrong.”
Penny looked glum. “Can’t do it, goddammit.”
“Good.” Rance knew he had relief in his voice. The Lizards had arrested both of them in Mexico for selling ginger, and tried to use them in Marseille to trap a smuggler (Rance still thought of him as Pierre the Turd, though he knew that couldn’t possibly have been the guy’s right name). The Germans had fouled that up, but the Race had been grateful enough to set Rance and Penny up in South Africa—where they’d gone into the ginger business again, and barely managed to escape a three-cornered firefight with enough gold to come to Tahiti.
But Penny still looked discontented. “We can’t stay here forever, either, even if the real French don’t clamp down on the Free French. We aren’t doing enough business; we’re too small. And everything is expensive as hell.”
“Do you want to try going back to the States?” Auerbach asked. “We haven’t done anything illegal there. American law doesn’t care about ginger one way or the other.”
“If we went home, I wouldn’t be worrying about the law,” Penny said.
Rance could only nod about that. She’d come back into his life, years after they broke up, because she was on the run from ginger-smuggling associates she’d stiffed; they hadn’t been happy with her for keeping the fee she got from the Lizards instead of turning it over to them. And they weren’t happy with Rance, either: he’d killed a couple of their hired thugs who’d come to his apartment to take the price for that ginger out of Penny’s hide.
He sighed, which made him cough, which made him wince, which made him take another swig of beer to try to put out the fire inside him. It didn’t work. It never worked. But he drank an awful lot, as he had ever since he was wounded. Enough hooch and he didn’t feel things so much.
Penny said, “If we can’t stay here and we can’t go to France and we can’t go to the States, what the hell can we do?”
“We can stay here quite a while, if we sit tight,” Auerbach answered. “We can go back to the States, too, and not have anybody notice us—if we sit tight.”
“I don’t want to sit tight.” Penny paced around the bedroom. She paused only to light another cigarette, which she started smoking even more savagely than she had the first one. “All the time I lived in Kansas, I spent sitting tight. That was the only thing people knew how to do there. And I’ll sit tight when I’m dead. In between the one and the other, I’m going to live, dammit.”
“I might have known you were going to say that,” Rance remarked. “Hell, I did know you were going to say it. But it doesn’t help right now, you know?”
Penny set her hands on her hips and exhaled an angry cloud of smoke. “Okay, hotshot, you’re so goddamn smart, you keep thinking up reasons why we can’t do this, that, or the other thing—what do you figure we ought to do?”
“If I had my druthers, I’d go back to the States,” Auerbach said slowly. “I’ve got a little pension waiting for me, and—”
Penny laughed a flaying, scornful laugh. “Oh, yeah. Hell of a life you were living back there. You just bet it was, Rance.”
His ears heated. He’d had that miserable little apartment in Fort Worth, and he’d been drinking himself to death an inch at a time there. For excitement, he’d go down to the veterans’ hall and play poker with the other fellows who’d been left wrecked but not quite dead. They’d all heard one another’s stories endless times: often enough to keep a straight face while pretending to believe the juiciest parts of the lies the other fellows told.
If he went back, he’d fall into that same rut again. He knew it. That was how he’d lived for a long time. Life with Penny Summers was a great many things, but a rut never. A roller coaster, perhaps—Christ, a roller coaster certainly—but not a rut.
“Tahiti just won’t be the same,” he said mournfully. “No matter what happens, it won’t be the same. And our gold won’t stretch as far as we hoped it would.” Down in Cape Town, he’d almost got killed on account of that gold. But it wasn’t enough, no matter how much blood had been spilled over it.
“What does that leave, then?” Penny said. “England’s too close to the Nazis to be comfortable, and the same people do business in Canada as in the USA.”
He pointed an accusing finger at her. “I know what’s up. You want to go back to France, and you don’t give a good goddamn how stupid it is.”
For once, he caught Penny without a snappy comeback, from which he concluded he was dead right. His girlfriend did laugh again, this time ruefully. “If you were younger and dumber, I’d take you to bed with me, and by the time I was through you’d swear going back there was your idea.”
“If I was younger and dumber, I’d be a lot happier. Either that or dead, one.” Rance drank the last beer in the bottle. “You want to take me to bed anyhow? Who knows how dumb I’ll be afterwards?”
Penny reached up to the back of her neck and undid the halter top she was wearing. She pulled down her wh
ite linen shorts, kicked them off to one side, and stood there naked. Her body had yielded very little to time. “Why the hell not?” she said. “Come here, guy.”
Afterwards, they lay side by side, sweaty and sated. Auerbach reached out with a lazy hand and tweaked her nipple. “What the hell,” he said. “You talked me into it.”
“How about that?” Penny answered. “And I didn’t even have to say anything. I must not know what a persuasive gal I am.”
That made Rance laugh. “Every woman ever born is persuasive that way, if she feels like using it. Of course”—he watched Penny cloud up, and hastened to amend his words—“some are more persuasive than others.”
The clouds went away. Penny turned practical: “We shouldn’t have much trouble getting into France, and our papers probably won’t have to be too good. The Frenchies’ll take a while to figure out what they’re supposed to be doing. We should make quite a killing.”
“Terrific,” Rance said. “Once we do it, we can retire to Tahiti.” Penny poked him in the ribs, and he supposed he deserved it.
Felless was perfectly happy to leave the eggs she’d laid—the second clutch from ginger-inspired matings—in the local hatching room. She hoped she would soon be able to leave the new town in the Arabian peninsula herself. As was her way, she made no secret of what she hoped.
One of the locals said, “You could have stayed in Marseille. That, at least, would have shut you up when a bomb burst there.”
“Who addled your egg?” Felless retorted. “A bomb bursting here would have been the best thing that could happen to this place.”
That made all the locals in the luggage shop where Felless was trying to find something she liked hiss with derision. She didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, the new town was nothing but a small town back on Home dropped onto the surface of Tosev 3. Its males and females certainly struck her as provincial and clannish. They shouldn’t have; they’d come from all over the homeworld of the Race. But only a few years on Tosev 3 had united them against the world outside the borders of their settlement.
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