by neetha Napew
"It shall be done, superior sir," Fiore answered, trotting out a couple of other stock phrases. He got to his feet and approached
the Lizard— not too close, though, because he'd learned that made the guards anxious. He didn't want anybody with a gun anxious about him.
The guards fell in around him, all of them too far away for him to try grabbing one of those guns. He wasn't feeling suicidal this morning — assuming it was morning; only God and the Lizards knew for sure— so he didn't try.
When the Lizards took him to Liu Han's cell, they turned right out the door. This time they turned left. He didn't know whether to be curious or apprehensive, and finally settled for a little of each: heading someplace out of the ordinary might be dangerous, but it gave him the chance to see something new. After being cooped up so long with essentially nothing to see, that counted for a good deal.
The trouble was, just because something was new didn't necessarily make it exciting.
Corridors remained corridors, their ceilings unpleasantly close to his head. Some were bare metal, others painted a flat off-white. The Lizards who passed him in those corridors paid him no more attention than he would have given a dog walking down the street. He wanted to shout at them, just to make them jump. But that would have made the guards jumpy, too, and maybe earned him a bullet in the ribs, so he didn't.
Peering through open doorways was more interesting. He tried to figure out what the Lizards in those rooms that weren't cells were up to. Most of the time, he couldn't. A lot of the aliens just sat in front of what looked like little movie screens. Fiore couldn't see the pictures on them, just that they were in color: the bright squares stood out in the midst of silver and white.
Then came something new: an oddly curved stairway. But as he descended it, Fiore
discovered that while his eyes saw the curve, his feet couldn't feel it, and when he got to the bottom, he seemed lighter than he had up at the top. He shifted his weight back and forth. No, he wasn't imagining it.
Boy, if I'd been this light on my feet, I'd've made the big leagues years ago. he thought. Then he shook his head. Maybe not. His bat had always been pretty light, too.
The Lizards took the weird stairs and the change in weight utterly for granted. They hustled him along the corridors on this level, which didn't seem any different from those up above. At last they took him into one of the rooms with the movie screens.
The Lizard who'd ordered him out of his own cell spoke to the one who waited in there. That one had an even spiffier paint job than the alien who'd come in with the guards. Fiore couldn't follow what the Lizards said as they
talked back and forth, but he heard his own name several times. The Lizards massacred it worse than Liu Han did.
The alien who'd been in the room, surprised him by speaking decent English: "You are the Tosevite male Bobby Fiore, the one mated to the female Liu Han in an exclusive"—the word came out as one long hiss—"arrangement?"
"Yes, superior sir," Fiore answered, also in English. He took a small chance by asking, "Who are you, superior sir?"
The Lizard didn't get mad. "I am Tessrek, senior psychologist." More hisses there. Tessrek went on, "I seek to learn more about this— arrangement."
"What do you want to know?" Fiore wondered if the Lizards had figured out Liu Han was pregnant yet. He or she would have to spell
things out pretty soon if they kept on being dumb about it.
They knew more than he'd thought. Tessrek turned a knob on the desk behind which he was sitting. Out of thin air, Fiore heard himself saying, "Goddamn, who woulda thought my first kid would be half Chink?" Tessrek turned the knob again, then asked, "This mean the female Liu Han will lay eggs— no, will reproduce; you Big Uglies do not lay eggs— the female Liu Han will reproduce?"
"Uh, yeah," Fiore said.
"This is as a result of your matings?" Tessrek twiddled with another knob. The little screen behind him, which had been a blank blue square, started showing a picture.
Stag film, Fiore thought; he'd seen a few in his time. This one was in color good enough for Technicolor, not the grainy black-and-white
typical of the breed. The color was what he noticed first; only half a heartbeat later did he realize the movie was of Liu Han and him.
He took a step forward. He wanted to squeeze Tessrek's neck until the Lizard's strange eyes popped from his head. The murder on his face must have shown even to the guards, because a couple of them hissed a sharp warning and trained their weapons on his midsection. Reluctantly, every muscle screaming to go on, he checked himself.
Tessrek seemed to have no notion of what had rattled his cage. The psychologist went on blithely, "This mating—this spawn, you would say— you and the female Liu Han will care for it?"
"I guess so," Bobby mumbled. Behind the Lizard, the dirty picture went on, Liu Han's face slack with ecstasy, his own intent above her. In a distant way, he wondered how the
Lizards managed to show a movie in a lighted room with no projector visible. He made himself come back to the question. "Yeah, that's what we'll do if you"— things—"let us."
"This will be what you Big Uglies call a— family?" Tessrek pronounced the word with extra care, to make sure Fiore understood him.
"Yeah," he answered, "a family." He tried to look away from the screen, toward the Lizard, but his eyes kept sliding back. Some of his embarrassed anger spilled over into words: "What's the matter, don't you Lizards have families of your own? You gotta come to Earth to poke your snouts into ours?"
"No, we have none," Tessrek said, "not in your sense of word. With us, females lay eggs, raise hatchlings, males do other things."
Fiore gaped at him. More than his
surroundings, more than the shamelessness with which the Lizards had filmed his lovemaking, the simple admission brought home how alien the invaders were. Men might build spaceships one day (Sam Yeager had read about that rockets-to-Mars stuff all the time; Bobby wondered if his roommate was still alive). Plenty of men were shameless, starting with Peeping Tom. But not knowing what a family was...
Oblivious to the turmioil he'd created, Tessrek went on, "The Race needs to learn how you Big Uglies live, so we rule you better, easier. Need to understand to— how do you say?— to control, that that word I want?"
"Yeah, that's it, all right," Fiore said dully. Guinea pig ran through his head, again and again. He'd had that thought before, but never so strong. The Lizards didn't care that he knew they were experimenting with him; what could he do about it? To them, he was just an
animal in a cage. He wondered what guinea pigs thought of the scientists who worked on them. If it was nothing good, he couldn't blame them.
"When will the hatchling come out?" Tessrek asked.
"I don't know exactly," Fiore answered. "It takes nine months, but I don't know how long it's been since she caught. How am I supposed to tell you? You don't even turn off the lights in my room."
"Nine— months?" Tessrek fiddled with something on his desk. The dirty movie disappeared from the screen behind him, to be replaced by Lizard squiggles. Those changed as he did more fiddling. He turned one of his eye turrets back toward them. "This would be one and one-half years of the Race? One year of the Race, I tell you, is half a Tosev year, more or less."
Bobby Fiore hadn't juggled fractions in his head since high school. The trouble he'd had with them then had helped convince him he'd be better off playing ball for a living. He needed some painful mental work before he finally nodded. "Yeah, I think that's right, superior sir."
"Sstrange." Another word Tessrek turned into a hiss. "You Big Uglies take so long to give birth to your hatchlings. Why is this?"
"How the devil should I know?" Fiore answered; again he had the feeling of taking a test he hadn't studied for. "It's just the way we are. I'm not lying, superior sir. You can check that one with anybody."
"Check? This means confirm? Yes, I do that." The Lizard psychologist spoke Lizard talk into what loo
ked like a little microphone. Different squiggles went up on the screen. Fiore wondered if it was somehow writing down
what Tessrek said. Hell of a gadget if it could do that, he thought. The Lizard went on, "I do not think you lie. What is the advantage to you on this question? But I wonder why you Tosevites are so, not like Race and other species of the Empire."
"You oughta talk to a scientist or a doctor or somebody." Fiore scratched his head. "You say you Lizards lay eggs?"
"Of course." By his tone, Tessrek implied that was the only thing a right-thinking creature could possibly do.
Bobby thought back to the chickens that had squawked and clucked in a little coop behind his folks' house in Pittsburgh. Without those chickens and their eggs, he and his brothers and sisters would have gone hungry a lot more than they did, but that wasn't why they came to mind now. He said, "An egg can't get any bigger once you lay it. When the chick
inside— or I guess the baby Lizard, too— is too big for the eggshell to hold it any more, it has to come out. But a baby inside a woman has more room to grow."
Tessrek brought both eyes to bear on him. He'd learned a Lizard did that only when you'd managed to get its full attention (he'd also learned its full attention wasn't always something you Wanted to have). The psychologist said, "This may be worth more study." He made it sound like an accolade.
He leaned close to the microphone, went back into his language. Again, the screen showed fresh Lizard writing. It really was a note-taker, Fiore realized. He wondered what else it could do— besides showing movies that should never have been made.
Tessrek said, "You Big Uglies are of the kind of Tosevite creature where the female feeds the hatchling with a fluid that comes out of her
body?" It wasn't exactly a question, even though he made the interrogative noise at the end: he already knew the answer.
Bobby Fiore had to take a mental step backward and work out what the Lizard was talking about. After a second, the light bulb went on. "With milk, you mean, superior sir? Yeah, we feed babies milk." He'd been a bottle baby himself, not nursed, but he didn't complicate the issue. Besides, what had the bottle held?
"Milk. Yes." Now Tessrek sounded as if Bobby had admitted humans picked their noses and fed babies on boogers, or else like a fastidious clubwoman who for some reason had to talk about syphilis. He paused, pulled himself together. "Only the females do this, am I correct? Not the males?"
"No, not the males, superior sir." Imagining a baby nursing at his flat, hairy tit made Fiore
squeamish and also made him want to laugh. And it rammed home, just when he was starting to get used to the Lizards again, how alien they were. They didn't have a clue about what being human meant. Even though Liu Han and he had to use some Lizard words to talk with each other, they used them in a human context they both understond just because they were people, and probably used them in ways the Lizards would have found nonsensical.
That made him wonder how much Tessrek, in spite of his fluent English, truly grasped of the ideas he mouthed. Passing information back and forth was all very well; the Lizard psychologist's grasp of the language was good enough for that. But once he had the information, how badly would he misinterpret it just because it was different from anything he was used to?
Tessrek said, "If you males do not give—
milk— to hatchlings, what point to staying by them and by females?"
"Men help women take care of babies," Fiore-answered, "and they can feed babies, too, once the babies start eating real food. Besides, they usually make the money to keep families going."
"Understand what you Big Uglies do; not understand why" Tessrek said. "Why males want to stay with females? Why you have families, not males with females at random, like the Race and other species we know?"
In an abstract way, Bobby thought males with females at random sounded like fun. He'd enjoyed himself with the women with whom the Lizards had paired him before he'd ended up with Liu Han. But he enjoyed being with her, too, in a different and maybe deeper sense.
"Answer me," Tessrek said sharply.
"I'm sorry, superior sir. I was trying to figure out what to say. I guess part of the answer is that men fall in love with women, and the other way round, too."
"Love." Tessrek used the word with almost as much revulsion as he had when he said milk. "You Big Uglies talk loudly of this word. You do not ever make this a word with a meaning. You, Bobby Fiore, tell me what this love word means."
"Uh," Fiore said. That was a tall order for a poet, a philosopher, or even Cole Porter, let alone a minor-league second baseman. As he would have at the plate overmatched against Bob Feller, he gave it his best shot: "Love is when you care about somebody and want to take care of them and want them to be happy all the time."
"You say what I want why" the Lizard psychologist said with a discontented hiss. "Is because you Big Uglies mate all the time, use mating as social bond, form families because of this mating bond?"
Fiore was anything but an introspective man. Nor had he ever spent much time contemplating the nature of the family: families were what you grew up in, and later what you started for yourself. Not only that, all the talk about sex, even with a Lizard, embarrassed him.
"I guess maybe you're right," he mumbled. When he thought about it, what Tessrek had to say did make some sense.
"I am right," Tessrek told him, and added the emphatic cough. "You help me show the disgusting habits of you Big Uglies are to blame for you being so strange, so— what is word?— so anomalous. Yes, anomalous. I
prove this, yes I do." He spoke in his own language to the guards, who started marching Fiore back to his cell.
As he went, he reflected that while the Lizards were massively ignorant of humanity, they and people weren't so different in some ways: just like a lot of people he'd known, Tessrek was using his words to prop up an idea the Lizard had already had. If he'd said just the opposite, Tessrek would have found some way to use that, too.
20
Jens Larssen's neck muscles tensed under the unaccustomed weight of the tin hat on his head. He was developing a list to the right from the slung Springfield he'd been issued. Like most farm kids, he'd done some plinking with a .22, but the military rifle had a mass and heft to it unlike anything he'd ever known.
Technically, he still wasn't a soldier. General Patton hadn't impressed him into the Army—"Your civilian job is more important than anything you can do for me," he'd rumbled— but had insisted that he be armed: "We've got no time to coddle noncombatants." Jens knew an inconsistency when he heard one, but hadn't had any luck convincing the major general.
He looked at his watch. The greenly glowing hands showed it was just before four A.M. The night was dark and cloudy and full of
blowing snow, but it was anything but peaceful. More engines added their roar and the stink of their exhaust to the air every moment. The second hand ticked round the dial. A minute before four... half a minute...
His watch was synchronized pretty well, but not perfectly. At— by his reckoning— 3:59:34, what seemed like every cannon in the world cut loose. The low clouds glowed yellow for a few seconds from all the muzzle flashes packed together. The three-inch howitzers and the 90mm antiaircraft cannon pressed into service as field guns roared again and again, as fast as their crews could keep the shells coming.
As he'd been told, Jens yelled as loud as he could, to help equalize the pressure on his ears. The noise was lost in the overwhelming cacophony of the guns.
Lizard counterbattery fire began coming in a
couple of minutes later. By then the tanks and men of Ration's force were already on the move. The American artillery barrage eased up as abruptly as it had begun. "Forward to the next firing position!" an officer near Larssen screamed. "The Lizards zero in on you fast if you stay, in one place too long."
Some of the howitzers were on their own motorized chassis. Halftracks towed most of the rest of the artillery pieces. A few were either
horse-drawn or pulled by teams of soldiers. If the advance went as Patton planned (hoped, Jens amended to himself), those would soon fall behind. For the moment, every shell counted.
"Come on, you lugs— get your butts in gear!" a sergeant yelled with the dulcet tones of sergeants all through history.
"You think you're scared, just wait'll you see the goddamn Lizards when we hit 'em." That
was the gospel according to Patton. Whether it was the gospel truth remained to be proved. Along with, the men around him, Jens tramped off toward the west.
Airplanes roared low overhead carefully husbanded against this day of need and now to be expended, win or die Larssen waved at the planes as they darted past; he didn't think many of the pilots would be coming back. If attacking Lizard positions in the snowy dark wasn't a suicide mission he didn't know what was.