by neetha Napew
Her words touched off a torrent of abuse from the other involuntary churchgoers. "I'd like to squeeze their skinny necks till those horrible eyes of theirs pop," said a man with a scraggly reddish beard.
"Put 'em in a cage and feed 'em flies," suggested a skinny, swarthy gray-haired woman.
"I wouldn't mind if they bombed us off the face of the Earth here, so long as the Lizards went with us," added a stout, red-faced fellow. "The scaly sons of bitches won't even let us go out to scrounge around for cigarettes." Larssen missed his nicotine fix, too, but Redface sounded as though he'd forgive the Lizards anything, up to and including bombing Washington, if they'd only let him have a smoke. That struck Jens as excessive.
He gave his Pete Smith alias, and was bombarded with the others' names. He wasn't
especially good at matching faces and monickers, and needed a while to remember that the gray-haired woman was Marie and the bleached blonde Sal, that the fellow with the red beard was Gordon and the man with the red face Rodney. Then there were also Fred and Louella and Mort and Ron and Aloysius and Henrietta to keep straight.
"Hey, we still have pews to spare," Rodney said. "Make yourself at home, Pete." Looking around, Larssen saw people had made nests of whatever clothes they weren't wearing. Sleeping wrapped in an overcoat on a hard pew did not strike him as making himself at home, but what choice had he?
He asked, "Where's the men's room?"
Everyone laughed. Sal said, "Ain't no such thing, or powder room neither. No running water, see? We've got— what do you call 'em?"
"Slop buckets," Aloysius said. He wore a farmer's denim overalls; by the matter-of-fact way he spoke, he was more than familiar with such appurtenances of rural life.
The buckets were set in a hall behind a door which stayed sensibly closed. Larssen did what he had to do and got out of there as fast as he could. "My father grew up with a two-seater," he said. "I never thought I'd have to go back to one."
"Wish it was a two-seater," Aloysius said. "Dang sight easier on my backside than squattin' over one o' them buckets."
"What do you folks— what do we. I mean— do to pass the time here?" Jens asked.
"Cuss the Lizards," Sal answered promptly, which brought a chorus of loud, profane agreement. "Tell lies." She batted her eyes at him. "I can make like I was in Hollywood so
good I almost believe it myself." He found that more pathetic than alluring, and wondered how long she'd been cooped up here.
Gordon said, "I've got a deck of cards, but poker's no damn good without real money. I've won a million dollars three or four times and thrown it away again on nothing better than a pair of sevens."
"Do we have four for bridge?" Larssen was an avid contract player. "You don't need to have money to enjoy bridge."
"I know how to play," Gordon admitted. "I think poker's a better game, though." A couple of other people also said they played. At first, Jens was as close to ecstatic as a prisoner could be; study and work had never left him as much time for cards as he would have liked. Now he could play to his heart's content without feeling guilty. But the men and women who didn't know bridge looked so glum that
his enthusiasm faded. Was it really fair for some people to enjoy themselves when others couldn't?
The church door opened. A tall, thin woman with her hair pulled back in a tight bun and her face set in disapproving lines put down a box of canned goods. "Here's your supper," she said, each word clipped as precisely as if by scissors. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her.
"What's eating her?" Larssen said.
"Eating's the word." Sal tossed her head in fine contempt. "She says we're eating the people who live in this miserable little town out of house and home. As if we asked to get stuck here!"
"You notice we're eating out of tin cans," Rodney added, his features darkening even
more with anger. "Nothing but farms around here, but they save all the good fresh food for themselves. We haven't seen any of it, anyhow, that's for sure."
There weren't enough spoons to go around; the town woman either hadn't noticed or hadn't cared that the church held a new arrival. Jens ate with somebody else's, washed in cold water and dried on a trouser leg. Even though he'd given up on hygiene since leaving White Sulphur Springs, that was a new low.
As he chewed on tasteless beef stew, he worried what— if anything— Chicago was eating these days. Rather more to the point, he worried about Barbara. Fiat had at the outside a couple of hundred people for the surrounding countryside to feed. Chicago had three million, and was under Lizard attack, not safely under the Lizards' thumb.
He wished he'd never left for Washington. He'd thought he was going into the worse danger himself, not leaving his wife behind to face it. Like most Americans under the age of ninety, he'd thought of war as something that happened only to unfortunate people in far-off lands. He hadn't thought through all the implications of its coming home to roost.
Something strange happened as he was getting to the bottom of the can of stew. A Lizard skittered into the church, peered down into the box of food the grim-faced woman had brought The alien looked up in obvious disappointment, hissed something that could equally well have been English or its own language. Whatever it was, Larssen didn't understand it.
The people who'd been stuck in church longer did. "Sorry,"
Marie said. "No crabapples in this batch." The
Lizard let out a desolate hiss and slunk away.
"Crabapples?" Larssen asked. "What does a Lizard want with crabapples?"
"To eat "em," Sal said. "You know the spiced ones in jars, the ones that go so nice with a big ham at Christmas time? The Lizards are crazy about 'em. They'd give you the shirt off their backs for a crabapple, except they mostly don't wear shirts. But you know what I mean."
"I guess so," Larssen said. "Crabapples. Isn't that a hell of a thing?"
"Gingersnaps, too," Gordon put in. "I saw a couple of 'em damn near get into a fight one time over a box of gingersnaps."
Marie said, "They look a little like gingerbread men, don't they? They're not all that far from the right color, and the paint they wear could
do for icing, don't you think?"
It was, without a doubt, the first time a Baptist church had ever resounded to the strains of "Run, run, as fast as you can! You can't catch me— I'm the gingerbread man!" Laughing and cheering one another on, the prisoners made up verses of their own. Some were funny, some were obscene, some— the best ones— were both.
Jens flogged his muse, sang, "I've blown up your cities, and I've shot up your roads, and I can take your crabapples, too, I can!" He knew it wasn't very good, but the chorus roared out: "Run, run, as fast as you can! You can't catch me— I'm the gingerbread man!"
When at last they ran out of verses, Sal said, "I hope that sour old prune who brings us our food is listening. 'Course, she probably thinks having a good time is sinful, especially in church."
"If she had her way, the Lizards would shoot us for having a good time in here," Mort said.
Sal chuckled. "One thing is, the Lizards don't pay no more attention to what she wants than we do. Other thing is, she don't know what all goes on in here, neither."
"Got to make our own fun," Aloysius agreed. "Ain't nobody gonna do it for us. Never thought how much I liked my radio till I didn't have it no more."
"That's true; that's a fact," several people said together, as if they were echoing a preacher's amens.
The short winter day wore on. Darkness poured through the windows and seemed to puddle in the church. Rodney walked over to the box the local woman had brought. "God damn her," he said loudly. "She was supposed to bring us more candles."
"Have to do without," Marie said. "No use complaintng about it. We'll get by as long as we don't run out of coal for the furnace."
"And if we do," Aloysius said, "we'll be frozen hard enough that we won't start to stink till they get around to buryin' us.
"
That cheerful thought pretty well halted conversation. Sitting huddled in his overcoat in the darkness, Larssen thought how important the discovery of fire had been, not just because it heated Neanderthal man's caves but because it lit them as well. A man with a torch could go out at midnight unafraid, knowing it would show him any lurking danger. And electricity had all but banished night altogether. Now the age-old fears proved not dead but merely sleeping, ready to rouse whenever precious light was lost.
He shook his head. The best way he could think of to fight the night terrors was to sleep
through them. Sleep was what day-loving animals did in the dark— stay cozy and quiet so nothing dangerous could find them. He stretched out on the hard pew. It wouldn't be easy.
After a long spell of tossing and turning and twisting— and once almost rolling onto the floor— he managed at last to fall asleep. When he woke, he almost fell off the pew again before he remembered where he was. He looked at his wrist The luminous dial on his watch said it was half past one.
The inside of the church was absolutely dark. It was not, however, absolutely quiet. He needed a few seconds to identify the noises floating up from a few rows behind him. When he did, he was surprised his ears didn't glow brighter than his watch. People had no business doing that in church!
He started to sit up and see who was
screwing on the pews, but paused before he'd even leaned onto one elbow. For one thing, it was too dark for him to tell anyway. And was it any of his business? His first shock had sprung straight from the heart of his upper Midwestern Lutheran upbringing. But when he thought about it a little, he wondered how long most of these people had been cooped up together and where else they were supposed to go if they wanted to make love. He lay back down.
But sleep would not return. The whispered gasps and moans and endearments, the small creaking of the pew itself, shouldn't have been enough to keep him awake. They weren't, not really, not by themselves. Listening to them, though, smote him with the realization of how long it had been since he'd slept with Barbara.
He hadn't even looked at another woman in his erratic journey back and forth across the
eastern half of the United States. Pedaling a bicycle a good many hours a day, he thought wryly, was liable to take the edge off other physical urges. Besides, it was cold. But if just then Sal or one of the other women in here had murmured a suggestion to him, he knew he would have pulled his pants down (if not off) without a moment's hesitation.
Then he wondered what Barbara was doing about such matters. He'd been gone a long time, a lot longer than he'd thought when he set out in: the late, lamented Plymouth. She might think he was dead. (For that matter, she might be dead herself, but his mind refused to dwell on that).
He'd never imagined he needed to worry about whether she'd stay faithful. But then, he'd never thought he needed to worry about whether he would, either. The middle of the night on a cold, hard pew was hardly the time or place for such thoughts. That didn't keep
him from having them.
It did keep him from going back to sleep for a long, long lime.
"So," Zolraag said. Moishe Russie knew the Lizard's accent was the main thing that stretched the word into a hiss, but the knowledge didn't make it sound any less menacing. The governor went on, "So, Herr Russie, you will no longer for us speak on the radio? This is your measure of— what is the Deutsch word— gratitude, is that it?"
"Gratitude is the word, yes, Excellency," Russie said, sighing. He'd known this day was coming. Now it had arrived. "Excellency, not a Jew in Warsaw is ungrateful that the Race delivered us from the Germans. Had you not come when you did, there might be no Jews left in Warsaw. So I have said on the radio for
your benefit. So much I would say again."
The Lizards had shown him the extermination camp at Treblinka. They'd shown him the much bigger one at Oswiecim— the Germans called it Auschwitz— which had just been starting up when they came. Both places were worse than anything he'd imagined in his worst nightmares. Pogroms, malignant neglect: those were standard tools in the anti-Semite's kit. But murder factories... his stomach twisted whenever he thought of them.
Zolraag said, "If you are gratitudeful, we expect you to show this in ways of usefulness to us."
"I thought I was your friend, not your slave," Russie answered. "If all you want of me is to repeat the words you say, better you should find a parrot. There must be one or two left in Warsaw."
His defiance would have been more impressive, even to himself, if he hadn't had to go back and explain to Zolraag what a parrot was. The Lizard governor took a while to get the whole idea. "One of these animals, then, would speak our message in your words? This could be done?" He sounded astonished; maybe Home didn't have any animals that could learn to talk. He also sounded excited. "You Tosevites would listen to such an animal?"
Russie was tempted to say yes: let the Lizards make laughing-stocks of themselves. Reluctantly, he decided he had to tell the truth instead; that much he owed to the beings who had saved his people. "Excellency, human beings would listen to a parrot, but only to be amused, never to take it seriously."
"Ah." Zolraag's voice was mournful. So was the Lizard's whole demeanor. His office was heated past what Russie found comfortable,
yet he still draped himself in warm clothing. He said, "You know our studio has been repaired after the damage the Deutsch raiders caused."
"Yes." Russie also knew the raiders had been Jews, not Nazi. He was glad the Lizards had never figured that out.
Zolraag went on "You know you are now in good health."
"Yes," Moishe repeated. Suddenly the governor reminded him of a rabbi laying out a case for his interpretation of a Talmudic passage: this was so, and that was so, and therefore... He didn't like the therefore he saw ahead. He said, "I will not go on the radio and thank the Race for destroying Washington."
The irrevocable words, the ones he'd tried so long to evade, were spoken at last. A large lump of ice seemed to grow in his belly in
spite of the overheated room He had always been at the Lizards' mercy, just as before he and all the Warsaw Jews were at the mercy of the Germans. A quick gesture from the governor and Rivka would be a widow.
Zolraag did not make the gesture— not yet, anyhow. He said, "I do not understand your trouble. Surely you did not object to the identical bombing of Berlin, which helped us take this city from the Deutsche. How does the one differ from the other?"
It was so obvious— but not to the Lizards. Looked at dispassionately, the distinction wasn't easy to draw. How many Germans incinerated in Berlin had been women children old men people who hated everything for which the regime centered there stood? Thousands upon thousands surely. Their undeserved deaths were as appalling as anything Washington had suffered.
But that regime itself was so monstrous that no one— least of all Moishe Russie— could look at it dispassionately. He said, "You know the kinds of things the Germans did. They wanted to enslave or kill all their neighbors." Rather like you Lizards he thought. Saying that out loud, however, seemed less than expedient. He went on, "The United States, though, has always been a country where people could be freer than they are anywhere else."
"What is this freedom?" Zolraag asked. "Why do you esteem it so?"
A quotation from a scripture not his own ran through Russie's mind: Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? Unlike the Roman, Zolraag seemed to want a serious answer. That only made Russie the sadder for him; he suspected he would be explaining music to a deaf man.
Nonetheless, he had to try. "When we are free, we may think as we like, believe as we like, and do as we like so long as what we do does not harm any of our neighbors."
"All this you would enjoy under the beneficent rule of the Race." No, Zolraag heard no music.
"But we did not— do not— choose to come under the rule of the Race, beneficent or not," Russie said. "Another side of freedom is being able to choose our o
wn leaders, our own rulers, rather than having them forced upon us."
"If you enjoy the other freedom, how could this one possibly matter?" Zolraag sounded all at sea. Though he and Moishe both used a hodgepodge of Lizard and German words, they did not speak the same language.
"If we cannot choose our own leaders, we keep the other freedoms only on sufferance,
not because they are truly ours," Russie replied. "We Jews, we know all about having freedom taken away from us at a ruler's whim."
"You still have not answered my very first question," the Lizard governor insisted. "How can you condone our bombing of Berlin while you condemn the bombing of Washington?"
"Because, Excellency, of all the countries on this world, Germany had the least freedom of either kind and, when you came, was busy trying to take away whatever freedom its neighbors possessed. That's why most of the countries— empires, you would say, though most of them aren't— had banded together to try to defeat it. The United States, now, the United States gives its citizens more freedom than any other country. In hurting Berlin, you were helping freedom; in hurting Washington, you were taking it away." Russie spread his hands. "Do you understand what I am trying to