In the Balance

19

Yi Min felt bigger than life, felt, in fact, as if he were the personification of Ho Tei, fat little god of luck. Who would have imagined so much profit was to be made from the coming of the little scaly devils? At first, when they’d raped him away from his home village and then taken him up into the plane that didn’t land, the plane where he weighed nothing and his poor stomach even less, he’d thought them the worst catastrophe the world had ever known. Now, though… He smiled oleaginously. Now life was good.

True, he still lived in this camp, but he lived here like a warlord, almost like one of the vanished Manchu emperors. His dwelling was a hut in name only. Its wooden sides were proof against the worst winter winds. Brass braziers gave heat, soft carpets cushioned his every stride, fine pieces of jade and cloisonne delighted his eye wherever it happened to light. He ate duck and dog and other delicacies. When he wanted them, he enjoyed women who made Liu Han seem a diseased sow by comparison. One waited on his mattress now. He’d forgotten her name. What did it matter?

And all from a powder the scaly devils craved!

He laughed out loud. “What is it, man full of yang?” the pretty girl called from the other room. She sounded impatient for him to join her.

“Nothing-just a joke I heard this morning,” he answered. However full of masculine essence he was, he still had too much hard sense to make a hired mattress partner privy to his thoughts. What one set of ears heard in the afternoon, a score would know by sunrise and the whole world by the next night.

Without false modesty (Yi Min had little modesty, false or otherwise), he knew he was far and away the biggest ginger dealer in the camp, probably in China, maybe in the whole world. Under him (the girl crossed his mind again, but only for a moment) were not only men who grew the spice and others who cured it with lime to make it particularly tasty to the scaly devils, but several dozen scaly devils who bought from him and sold to their fellows, either directly or through their own webs of secondary dealers. How the loot rolled in!

“Will you come soon, Tiger of the Floating World?” the girl said. she did her best to make herself alluring, but she was too much a businesswoman-and too little an actress-to keep a strident note from her voice. What’s keeping you? she meant.

“Yes, I’ll be there in a moment,” he answered, but his tone suggested she wasn’t worth hurrying over. Having a woman resent him for what he made her do fed his own excitement. He wasn’t just taking pleasure that way, but also control.

What should we do when I finally go to her? he wondered: always an enjoyable contemplation. Something she wouldn’t care for-she’d annoyed him. Maybe he’d use her as if she were a boy. He snapped his fingers in delight. The very thing! Women were so proud of the slit between their legs; ignoring it in favor of the other way never failed to irritate them. Besides, it would hurt her a little too, make her remember to treat him as the person of consequence he was.

Warmth flowed through him, tingled across his skin. He felt himself rising. He took one step toward the bedroom, then checked himself. Anticipation was also a pleasure. Besides, let her stew.

After a minute or two, she called, “Please hurry! Longing eats at me.” She played the game, too, but her mah-jongg hand did not have the tiles to beat his.

When at last he judged the moment ripe, he started off to the back part of the dwelling. Before he’d gone three paces, though, a scratching noise came from the front door. He let out a long, angry hiss. That was a scaly devil. The girl’s comeuppance would have to wait. No matter how thoroughly he controlled the devils who bought ginger from him, the illusion remained that he was servant and they masters.

He opened the door. Cold nipped at his fingers and face. A little scaly devil indeed, but not one he’d seen before-he’d grown skilled at telling them, apart, even when, as now, the swaddlings they wore against winter hid their body paint. He’d also grown fluent in their speech. He bowed low, said, “Superior sir, you honor my humble hut. Enter, please, and warm yourself”

“I come.” The little scaly devil skittered past Yi Min. He closed the door after it. He was pleased it had answered him in its own language. If he could do business in that tongue, he wouldn’t have to send away the courtesan. Not only would she have longer to wait, she’d be impressed at how he dealt with the little devils on their terms.

The devil looked around his front room, its eye turrets swiveling independent of each other. That no longer unnerved Yi Min; he was used to it. He studied the scaly devil, the strong color inside its nostrils, the way its clawed hands had a slight quiver to them. Inside, he smiled. He might not know the devil, but he knew the signs. This one needed ginger, and needed it worse every second.

He bowed again. “Superior sir, will you tell me your name, that I may serve you better?”

The little scaly devil hissed, as if suddenly reminded of Yi Min’s presence. “Yes. I am called Drefsab. You are the Big Ugly Yi Min?”

“Yes, superior sir, I am Yi Min.” The Race’s insulting nickname for human beings didn’t bother Yi Min. After all, he thought of its males as little scaly devils. He said, “How may I be of assistance to you, superior sir Drefsab?”

The scaly devil swung both eyes in his direction. “You are the Big Ugly who sells to the Race the powder known as ginger?”

“Yes, superior sir, I am that humble person. I have the honor and privilege to provide the Race with the pleasure the herb affords.” Yi Min thought about asking the little scaly devil straight out whether it wanted ginger. He decided not to; though the devils were more direct about such matters than Chinese, they sometimes found direct questions rude. He did not want to offend a new customer.

“You have much of this herb?” Drefsab asked.

“Yes, superior sir.” Yi Min was getting tired of saying that. “As much as any valiant male could desire. If I may say so, I think I have given more males bliss with powdered ginger than all but a handful of Tosevites.” He used the little devils’ less offensive name for his own kind. Now he did ask: “If the superior sir Drefsab desires a sample of the wares here, I would be honored to provide him with one without expecting anything in return.” This time, he added to himself.

He thought Drefsab would leap at that; he’d hardly ever seen a scaly devil in more obvious need of his drug. But Drefsab still seemed to feel like talking. He said, “You are the Big Ugly whose machinations have turned males of the Race against their own kind, whose powders have spread corruption through the shining ships from Home?”

Yi Min stared; no matter how well he’d come to use the devils’ language, he needed a moment to understand Drefsab’s words, which were the opposite, of what he’d expected to hear. But the pharmacist’s reply came fast and smooth: “Superior sir, I do but try to give the valiant males of the Race what they seek.” He wondered what game Drefsab was playing. If the little scaly devil thought to muscle in on his operation, he’d get a surprise. Ginger powder had bought Yi Min the adjutants to several high-ranking officers, and a couple of, the officers themselves. They would clamp down on any scaly devil who got too bold with their supplier.

Drefsab said, “This ginger is a tumor eating at the vitality of the Race. This I know, for it has devoured me. Sometimes a tumor must be cut out.”

Yi Min again had to struggle to make sense of that; he and the scaly devils with whom he’d conversed hadn’t had any occasion to talk about tumors. He was still trying to figure out what the word meant when Drefsab reached inside his protective clothing and pulled out a gun. It spat fire, again and again and again. Inside Yi Min’s hut, the shots rang incredibly loud. As the bullets clubbed him to the carpet, he heard through the reports the girl in the bedroom starting to scream.

At first Yi Min felt only the impacts, not the pain. Then it struck him. The world turned black, shot through with scarlet flames. He tried to scream himself, but managed only a bubbling moan through the blood that flooded into his mouth.

Dimly-ever more dimly-he watched Drefsab take the head off the plump Buddha that sat on a low lacquer table. The stinking little devil knew just where he stowed his ginger. Drefsab took a taste, hissed in delight, and poured the rest of the powder into a clear bag he’d also brought along inside his coat. Then he opened the door and left.

The courtesan kept screaming. Yi Min wanted to tell her to shut up and close the door; it was getting cold. The words would not come. He tried to crawl toward the door himself. The cold reached his heart. The scarlet flames faded, leaving only black.

Harbin was falling. Any day now, the Race would be in the city. It would be an important victory; Harbin anchored the Nipponese line. Teerts would have been gladder of it had the town not been falling around his head.

That was literally true. During the most recent raid on Harbin, bombs hit so close to his prison that chunks of plaster rained down from the ceiling and just missed knocking out what few brains he had left after so long in Tosevite captivity.

Outside, an antiaircraft gun began to hammer. Teerts didn’t hear any planes; maybe the Big Ugly was just nervous. Go ahead, waste ammunition, Teerts thought. Then you’ll have less to fire off when my friends break in here, and then, dead Emperors willing, they won’t have to suffer what I’ve gone through.

He heard a commotion up the hall, orders barked in loud Nipponese too fast for him to follow. One of the guards came up to his cell. Teerts bowed; with this kind of Big Ugly, you couldn’t go far wrong if you bowed and you could go disastrously wrong if you didn’t. Better to bow, then.

The guard didn’t bow back; Teerts was a prisoner, and so deserving only of contempt. Behind the armed man came Major Okamoto. Teerts bowed more deeply to his interrogator and interpreter. Okamoto didn’t acknowledge him, either, not with a bow. He spoke in Teerts’ language as he unlocked the cell door: “You will come with me. We leave this city now.”

Teerts bowed again. “It shall be done, superior sir.” He had no idea how it would be done, or if it could be done, but wondering about such things was not his responsibility. As a prisoner, as had been true in the days before he was captured, his duty was but to obey. Unlike his superiors of the Race, though, the Nipponese owed him no loyalty in return.

Major Okamoto threw at him a pair of black trousers and a baggy blue coat that could have held two males his size. Then Okamoto put a conical straw hat on his head and tied it under his jaws with a scratchy piece of cord. “Good,” the Nipponese said in satisfaction. “Now if your people see you from the sky, they think you just another Tosevite.”

They would, too, Teerts realized dismally. A gun camera, maybe even a satellite photo, might have picked him out from among the swarming masses of Big Uglies around him. Bundled up like this, though, he would be just one more grain of rice (a food he had come to loathe) among a million.

He thought about throwing off the clothes if one of the Race’s aircraft came overhead. Reluctantly, he decided he’d better not. Major Okamoto would make his life not worth living if he tried it, and the Nipponese could spirit him away before his own folk, who were none too hasty, arranged a rescue effort.

Besides, Harbin was cold. The hat helped keep his head warm, and if he threw aside the coat, he was liable to turn into a lump of ice before either the Nipponese or the Race could do anything about it. Okamoto’s hat and coat were made from the fur of Tosevite creatures. He understood why the beasts needed insulation from their truly beastly climate, and wondered why the Big Uglies themselves had so little hair that they needed to steal it from animals.

Outside the building in which Teerts had been confined, he saw more rubble than he ever had before. Some of the craters looked like meteor strikes on an airless moon. Teerts didn’t get much of a chance to examine them; Major Okarnoto hustled him onto a two-wheeled conveyance with a Big Ugly between the shafts instead of a beast of burden. Okamoto spoke to the puller in a language that wasn’t Nipponese. The fellow seized the shafts, grunted, and started forward. The guard strode stolidly along beside the conveyance.

Tosevites streamed out of Harbin toward the east, fleeing the expected fall of the city. Disciplined columns of Nipponese soldiers contrasted with the squealing, squalling civilians all around them. Some of those, females hardly larger than Teerts, bore on their backs bundles of belongings almost as big as they were. Others carried burdens hung from poles balanced on one shoulder. It struck Teerts as a scene from out of the Race’s prehistoric past, vanished a thousand centuries.

Before long, the guard got in front of the manhandled conveyance and started shouting to clear a path for it. When that failed, he laid about him with the butt end of his rifle. Squeals and squalls turned to screams. Teerts couldn’t see that the brutality made much difference in how fast they went.

Eventually they reached the train station, which was noisier but less chaotic than the surrounding city. The Race had repeatedly bombed the station. It was more debris than building, but somehow still functioned. Machine-gun nests and tangles of wire with teeth kept everyone but soldiers away from the trains.

When a sentry challenged him, Major Okamoto flipped up Teerts’ hat and said something in Nipponese. The sentry bowed low, answered apologetically. Okamoto turned to Teerts. “From here on, we walk. No one but Nipponese-and you-permitted in the station.”

Teerts walked, Okamoto on one side of him and the guard on the other. For a little while, a surviving stretch of roof and wall protected them from the biting wind. Then they were picking their way through stone and bricks again, with snow sliding down from a gray, dreary sky.

Out past the station in the railroad yard, troops were filing onto a train. Again a sentry challenged Okamoto on his approach, again he used Teerts as his talisman to pass. He secured half a car for himself, the guard, and his prisoner. “You are more important than soldiers,” he smugly told Teerts.

With a long, mournful blast from its whistle, the train jerked into motion. Teerts had shot up Tosevite trains when he was still free. The long plumes of black smoke they spat made them easy to pick out, and they could not flee, save on the rails they used for travel. They’d been easy, enjoyable targets. He hoped none of his fellow males would think the one he was riding a tempting target.

Major Okamoto said, “The farther from Harbin we go, the more likely we are to be safe. I do not mind losing my life for the emperor, but I am ordered to see that you safely reach the Home Islands.”

Teerts was willing to lay down his life for his Emperor, the Emperor, but not for the parvenu Big Ugly who claimed the same title. Given a choice, he would have preferred not to lay down his life for anyone. He’d been given few choices lately.

The train rattled eastward. The ride was tooth-jarringly rough; the Race hit the rails themselves as well as the trains that rolled on them. But the Big Uglies, as they’d proved all over the planet, were resourceful beings. In spite of the bombs, the railroad kept working.

Or so Teerts thought until, some considerable time after the train had pulled out of Harbin, it shuddered to a stop. He hissed in dismay. He knew from experience what a lovely, tasty target a stopped train was. “What’s wrong?” he asked Major Okamoto.

“Probably you males of the Race have broken the track again.” Okamoto sounded more resigned than angry; that was part of war. “You are sitting by the window-tell me what you see.”

Teerts peered through the dirty glass. “I see a whole swarm of Tosevites working at the curve ahead.” How many Big Uglies labored there? Hundreds certainly, more likely thousands. No one carried anything more impressive than a pick, a shovel, or a crowbar. If one of the Race’s aircraft spied them, a strafing run would leave great red steaming pools in the snow.

But if no aircraft came over, the Big Uglies could perform astonishing feats. Before he came to Tosev 3, Teerts had taken machinery for granted. He’d never imagined that masses of beings armed with hand tools could not only duplicate their results but also work nearly as fast as they did.

He said, “Forgive the ignorant question, superior sir, but how do you keep them from perishing of cold or from being injured at this hard, dangerous work?”

“They are only Chinese peasants,” Major Okamoto said with chilling indifference. “As we use them up, we seize as many more as we need to do what must be done.”

For some reason, Teerts had expected the Big Uglies to treat their own kind better than they did him. But to the Nipponese, the Tosevites here were not of their own kind, however much alike they seemed to a male of the Race. The reasons for distinction at a level lower than the species,as a whole were lost on Teerts. Whatever they were, though, they let the Nipponese treat their laborers like pieces of the machines in whose place they were used, and with as little concern about their fate. That was something else Teerts hadn’t imagined before he came to Tosev 3. This world was an education in all sorts of matters where he would have preferred continued ignorance.

The vast swarms of workers (Teerts thought not so much of people as of the little social hive-creatures that occasionally made nuisances of themselves back on Home) drew back from the railroad track after a surprisingly short time. The train rolled slowly forward.

Three or four laborers lay in the snow, too worn to move on to the next stretch of broken track. Nipponese guards-males dressed far more warmly than those in their charge-came up and kicked at the exhausted peasants. One managed to stagger to his feet and rejoin his comrades. The guards picked up crowbars and methodically broke in the heads of the others.

Teerts wished he hadn’t seen that. He already knew the Nipponese had no compunctions about doing dreadful things to him if he failed to cooperate or even failed to be useful to them. Yet now he discovered that having knowledge confirmed before his eyes was ten times worse than merely knowing.

The train picked up speed after it passed the repaired curve. “Is this not a fine way to travel?” Okamoto said. “How swiftly we move!”

Teerts had crossed the gulf between the stars at half the speed of light-admittedly, in cold sleep. He ranged the air above this main landmass of Tosev 3 at speeds far greater than sound. How, then, was he supposed to be impressed with this wheezy train? The only conveyance next to which it seemed fast was the one in which the poor straining Tosevite had hauled him to the station.

But that latter sort of conveyance was what the Race had expected to find all over Tosev 3. Maybe the train, decrepit as it appeared to Teerts, was new enough to be marvelous to the Big Uglies. He knew better than to contradict Major Okamoto, anyhow. “Yes, very fast,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could feign.

Through the dirty window, Teerts watched more Tosevites-Chinese peasants, he supposed-struggling to build new defensive lines for the Nipponese. They were having a tough time; the miserable local weather had frozen the ground hard as stone.

He had no idea how sick he’d become of the train, of its endless shaking, of the seat that did not conform to his backside because it made no provision for a tailstump, of the endless jabber from the Nipponese troops in the back of the car, of the odor that rose from them and grew thicker as the journey went on. He even came to miss his cell, something he had not imagined possible.

The journey seemed to stretch endlessly, senselessly. How long could it take to traverse one small part of a planetary surface? Given fuel and maintenance for his killercraft, Teerts could have circumnavigated the whole miserable world several times in the interval he needed to crawl across this tiny portion of it.

He finally grew fed up-and incautious-enough to say that to Major Okamoto. The Big Ugly looked at him for a moment, then asked, “And how fast could you go if someone kept dropping bombs in front of your aircraft?”

After heading east for a day and a half, the train swung south. That puzzled Teerts, who said to his keeper, “I thought Nippon lay in this direction, across the sea.”

“It does,” Okamoto answered, “but the port Vladivostok, which is nearest to us, belongs to the Soviet Union, not to Nippon.”

Teerts was neither a diplomat nor a particularly imaginative male. He’d never thought about the complications that might arise from having a planet divided up among many empires. Now, being forced to stay on the train because of one of those complications, he heaped mental scorn on the Big Uglies, though he realized the Race benefited from their disunity.

Even when the train came down close by the sea, it did not stop, but rumbled through a land Major Okamoto called Chosen. “Wakarimasen,” Teerts said, working on his villainous Nipponese: “I do not understand. Here is the ocean. Why do we not stop and get on a ship?”

“Not so simple,” Okamoto answered. “We need a port, a place where ships can safely come into land, not be battered by storms.” He leaned across Teerts, pointed out the window at the waves crashing against the shore. Home’s lakes were surrounded by land, not the other way round; they seldom grew boisterous.

Shipwreck was another concept that hadn’t crossed Teerts’ mind till he watched this bruising ruffian of an ocean throwing its water about with muscular abandon. It was fascinating to see-certainly more interesting than the mountains that flanked the other side of the track-at least until Teerts had a really horrid thought: “We need to go across that ocean to get to Nippon, don’t we?”

“Yes, of course,” his captor answered blithely. “This disturbs you? Too bad.”

Here in Chosen, farther from the fighting, damage to the railway net was less. The train made better time. It finally reached a port, a place called Fusan. Land ended there, running out into the sea. Teerts saw what Okamoto had meant by a port: ships lined up next to wooden sidewalks that ran out into the water on poles. Big Uglies and goods moved on and off.

Teerts realized that, primitive and smoky as this port was, a lot of business got done here. He was used to air and space transportation and the weight limits they imposed; one of these big, ugly Big Ugly ships could carry enormous numbers of soldiers and machines and sacks of bland, boring rice. And the Tosevites had many, many ships.

Back on the planets of the Empire, transportation by water was an unimportant sidelight; goods flowed along highways and railroads. All the interdiction missions Teerts had flown on Tosev 3 were against highways and railroads. Not once had he attacked shipping. But from what he saw in Fusan, the officers who gave him his targets had been missing a bet.

“Off,” Okamoto said. Teerts obediently descended from the train, followed by the Nipponese officer and the stolid guard. After so long on the jouncing railway car, the ground seemed to sway beneath his feet.

At his captor’s orders, he walked up a gangplank and onto one of the ships; the claws on his toes clicked against bare, cold metal. The floor (the Big Uglies had a special word for it, but he couldn’t remember what the word was) shifted under his feet. He jumped into the air in alarm. “Earthquake!” he shouted in his own language.

That was not a word Major Okamoto knew. When Teerts explained it, the Nipponese let out a long string of the yips the Big Uglies used for laughter. Okamoto spoke to the guard in his own tongue. The guard, who had hardly said three words all the way down from Harbin through Chosen, laughed loudly, too. Teerts glared at one of them with each eye. He didn’t see the joke.

Later, when out of sight of land the ship really started rolling and pitching, he understood why the Big Uglies had found his startlement at that first slight motion funny. He was, however, too busy wishing he was dead to be amused himself.

A rowboat took Colonel Leslie Groves across the Charles River toward the United States Navy Yard. The Charlestown Bridge, which had spanned the river and connected the yard with the rest of Boston on the southern bank, was nothing but a ruin. Engineers had repaired it a couple of times, but the Lizards, kept knocking it down.

The ferryman pulled up under what had been the northern piers of the bridge. “Heah y’aah, friend,” he said in broad New England accents, pointing to a set of rickety wooden stairs that led up to Main Street.

Groves scrambled out of the rowboat. The steps squeaked under his weight, though he, like most people, was a good deal lighter than he would have been had the Lizards stayed away. The fellow in the boat was backing oars, heading south across the river for his next ferry run.

As Groves turned right onto Chelsea Street, he reflected on how natural his ear found the Boston accent, though he’d not heard much of it since his days at MIT more than twenty years before. The country had been at war then, too, but with a foe safely across the ocean, not lodged, all through the United States itself.

Naval ratings with rifles patrolled the long, high wall that separated the Navy Yard from the town behind it. Groves wondered how useful the fence was. If you stood on Breed’s Hill (where, history books notwithstanding, the Americans and British had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill), you could look right down into the Yard. The colonel was, however, long used to security for security’s sake. As he approached, he tapped the shiny eagle on the shoulders of his overcoat. The Navy guards saluted and stood aside to let him enter.

The Yard was not crowded with warships, as it had been before the Lizards came. The ships-those that survived-were dispersed up and down the coast, so as not to make any one target too attractive to bombardment from the air.

Still berthed in the Navy Yard was the USS Constitution. As always, seeing “Old Ironsides” gave Groves a thrill. In his MIT days, he’d toured the ship several times, and almost banged his head on the timbers belowdecks: any sailor much above five feet tall would have knocked himself silly running to his battle station; Glancing at the tall masts that probed the sky, Groves reflected that the Lizards had made the whole Navy as obsolete as the tough old frigate. It was not a cheery thought.

His own target lay a couple of piers beyond the Constitution. The boat tied up there was no longer than the graceful sailing ship, and much uglier: slabs of rust-stained iron could not compete against Old Ironsides’ elegant flanks. The only curves sweeter than a sailing ship’s, Groves thought, are a woman’s.

The sentry who paced the pier wore Navy uniform, but not quite the one with which Groves was familiar. Nor was the flag that flapped from the submarine’s conning tower the Stars and Stripes, but rather the Union Jack. Groves wondered if any Royal Navy vessels had used the Boston Navy Yard since the Revolution took Massachusetts off George III’s hands.

“Ahoy the Seanymph!” he called as he strode up to the sentry. He was close enough now to see that the man carried a Lee-Enfield rifle, not the Springfields of his American counterparts.

“Ahoy yourself,” the sentry answered; his vowels said London, not Back Bay. Make yourself known, sir, if you’d be so kind.”

“I am Colonel Leslie Groves, United States Army. Here are my identification documents.” He waited while the Englishman inspected them, carefully comparing his photograph to his face. When the sentry nodded to show he was satisfied, Groves went on, “I am ordered to meet your Commander Stansfield here, to pick up the package he’s brought to the United States.”

“Wait here, sir.” The sentry crossed the gangplank to the Seanymph’s deck, climbed the ladder to the conning tower, and disappeared below. He came out again a couple of minutes later. “You have permission to come aboard, sir. Watch your step, now.”

The advice was not wasted; Groves did not pretend to be a sailor. As he carefully descended into the submarine, he was glad he’d lost some weight. As things were, the passage seemed alarmingly tight.

The long steel tube in which he found himself did nothing to ease that feeling. It was like peering down a dimly lit Thermos bottle. Even with the hatch open, the air was closed and dank; it smelled of metal and sweat and hot machine oil and, faintly in the background, full heads.

An officer with three gold stripes on the sleeves of his jacket came forward. “Colonel Groves? I’m Roger Stansfield, commanding the Seanymph. May I see your bona fides, please?” He examined Groves’ papers with the same care the sentry had given them. Returning them, he said, “I hope you will forgive me, but it has been made quite clear that security is of the essence in this matter.”

“Don’t worry about it, Commander,” Groves said easily. “The same point has been impressed upon me, I assure you.”

“I don’t even precisely know what it is I’ve ferried over to you Yanks,” Stansfield said. “All I know is that I’ve been ordered to treat the stuff with the utmost respect, and have obeyed to the best of my ability.”

“Good.” Groves still wondered how he’d gotten roped into this atomic explosives project himself. Maybe the talk he’d had with the physicist-Larssen? was that the name? — had linked him and uranium in General Marshall’s mind. Or maybe he’d complained once too often about fighting the war from behind a desk. He wasn’t behind a desk any more, and wouldn’t be for God only knew how long.

Stansfield said, “Having turned this-material-over to you, Colonel Groves, is there any way in which I can be of further assistance?”

“You’d have made my life a hell of a lot easier, Commander, if you could have sailed your Seanymph to Denver instead of Boston,” Groves answered dryly.

“This is the port to which I was ordered to bring my boat,” the Englishman said in a puzzled voice. “Had you wanted the material delivered elsewhere, your chaps upstairs should have told the Admiralty as much; I’m sure we would have done our best to oblige.”

Groves shook his head. “I’m pulling your leg, I’m afraid.” No reason for a Royal Navy man to be familiar with an American town that, to put it mildly, was not a port. “Colorado is a landlocked state.”

“Oh. Quite.” To Groves’ relief, Stansfield didn’t get mad. His grin showed pointed teeth that went well with his sharp, foxy features and hair that was somewhere between sandy and red. “They do say the new class of submarines was to have been capable of nearly everything, but that might have challenged it even had the advent of the Lizards not scuttled its development.”

“Too bad,” Groves said sincerely. “Now I have to transport the stuff myself.”

“Perhaps we can make matters a bit easier,” Stansfield said. One of the Seanymph’s ratings fetched up a canvas knapsack, which he presented to Groves with a flourish. Stansfield went on, “This arrangement should make rather easier transporting the saddlebag contained inside, which is, if you’ll forgive the, vulgarity, bloody heavy. I’d not be surprised to learn it was lined with lead, though I’ve been studiously encouraged not to enquire.”

“Probably just as well.” Groves knew the saddlebag was lined with lead. He didn’t know how well the lead would shield him from the radioactive material inside; that was one of the things he’d have to find out the hard way. If this mission took years off his life but helped defeat the Lizards, the government had concluded that was a worthwhile price to pay. Having served that government his entire adult life, Groves accepted the estimation with as much equanimity as he could muster.

He shrugged on the knapsack. His shoulders and back did indeed feel the weight. If he had to haul it around for a while, he might even end up somewhere close to svelte. He hadn’t been anything but portly-or worried about it-since his West Point days.

“I assume you have plans on how to reach, ah, Denver with your burden there,” Stansfield said. “I do apologize, for my limited ability to help you in that regard, but we are only a submarine, not a subterrene.” He grinned again; he seemed taken with the idea of sailing to Colorado.

“Can’t talk about that, I’m afraid,” Groves said. “By rights, I shouldn’t even have told you where I’m going.”

Commander Stansfield nodded in understanding sympathy. He would have been even more sympathetic, Groves thought, had he known just how sketchy the American’s plans were. He’d been ordered not to fly toward Denver; a plane was too likely to get knocked down. Not many trains were running, and even fewer cars. That left shank’s mare, horseback, and luck-and as an engineer, Groves didn’t take much stock in luck.

Complicating matters further was the stranglehold the Lizards had on the Midwest. Here on the coast, they were just raiders. But the farther inland you went, the more they seemed to have settled down to stay.

Groves wondered why the aliens didn’t pay more attention to the ocean and to the land that lay alongside it. They hit land and air transportation all over the world, but ships still had a decent chance of getting through. Maybe that said something about the planet they came from. Groves shook his head. He had more immediate things to worry about.

Not least of them was the battle breaking out right around halfway between here and Denver. If that went wrong, not only would Chicago surely fall, but the United States would be hard pressed to put up more than guerrilla resistance to, the Lizards anywhere outside the East Coast. For that matter, getting to Denver might not matter if the battle went wrong, though Groves knew he’d keep going until he was either dead or ordered to turn aside.

He must have looked grim, for Commander Stansfield said, “Colonel, I’ve heard it said that your Navy bans alcohol aboard its vessels. Fortunately, the Royal Navy observes no such tiresome custom. Would you care for a tot of rum to fortify you for the journey ahead?”

“Commander, I’d be delighted, by God,” Groves said. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure-I thought it might do you some good. Wait here, if you please; I’ll be back directly.”

Stansfield hurried down the steel tube of the hull toward the rear of the submarine-aft, Groves supposed it was called in proper naval jargon. He watched the British officer lean into a little chamber off to the side of the main tube. His cabin, Groves realized. Stansfield didn’t need to lean very far; the cabin had to be tiny. Bunks were stacked three deep, with bare inches between them. All things considered, the Seanymph was a claustrophobe’s nightmare brought to clattering life.

The squat brown glass jug in Commander Stansfield’s hand gurgled encouragingly. “Jamaican, than which there is none finer,” he said, puffing the cork. Groves could almost taste the thick, heavy aroma that rose from it. Stansfield poured two healthy tots, handed one glass to Groves.

“Thanks.” Groves took it with appropriate reverence. He raised it high-and almost barked his knuckles on a pipe that ran along the low ceiling. “His Majesty, the King!” he said gravely.

“His Majesty the King,” Stansfield echoed. “Didn’t think you Yanks knew to make that one.”

“I read it somewhere.” Groves knocked back the rum at a gulp. It was so smooth, his throat hardly knew he swallowed it, but it exploded in his stomach like a mortar round, throwing warmth in all directions. He looked at the empty glass with genuine respect. “That, Commander, is the straight goods.”

“So it is.” Stansfield sipped more sedately. He proffered the bottle once more. “Another?”

Groves shook his head. “One of those is medicinal. Two and I’d want to go to sleep. I appreciate the offer, though.”

“You have a clear notion of what’s best for you. I admire that.” Stansfield turned so he faced west. The motion was quite deliberate; Groves imagined-as he was supposed to imagine-the Royal Navy man peering out through the sub’s hull and across two thousand miles of dangerous country to the promised land of Denver, high in the Rockies. After a moment, Stansfield added, “I must say I don’t envy you, Colonel.”

Groves shrugged. With the heavy canvas knapsack on his shoulders, he felt like Atlas, trying to support the whole world. “The job has to be done, and I’m going to do it.”

Rivka Russie scratched a match against the sole of her shoe. It flared into life. She used it to light, first one shabbas candle, then the other. Bowing her head over them, she murmured the Sabbath blessing.

The puff of sulfurous smoke from the matchhead filled the little underground room and made Moishe Russie cough. The fat white candles were a sign he and his family had survived another week without the Lizards’ finding them. They also helped light the bunker where the Russies sheltered.

Rivka lifted the ceremonial cloth cover from a braided loaf of challah. “I want some of that bread, Mama!” Reuven exclaimed.

“Let me slice it first, if you please,” Rivka told her son. “Look: we even have some honey to spread on it.”

All the comforts of home. The irony of the phrase echoed in Moishe’s mind. Instead of their flat, they sheltered in this secret chamber buried under another Warsaw apartment block. In further irony, the bunker had been built to shelter Jews not from the Lizards but from the Nazis, yet here he used it to save himself from the creatures who had saved him from the Germans.

And yet the words were not entirely ironic. The vast majority of Warsaw’s Jews lived far better under the Lizards than they had when Hitler’s henchmen ruled the city. The wheat-flour challah, rich with eggs and dusted with poppy seeds, would have been unimaginable in the starving Warsaw ghetto-Russie remembered too well the chunk of fatty, sour pork for which he’d given a silver candlestick the night the Lizards came to Earth.

“When will I get to go out and play again?” Reuven asked. He looked from Rivka to Moishe and back again, hoping one of them would give him the answer he wanted.

They looked at each other, too. Moishe felt himself sag. “I don’t know exactly,” he told his son; he could not bring himself to lie to the boy. “I hope it will be soon, but more likely the day won’t come for quite some time.”

“Too bad,” Reuven said.

“Don’t you think we could-?” Rivka broke off, tried again: “I mean, who would betray a little boy to the Lizards?”

Moishe usually let his wife run their household, not least because she was better at it than he was. But now he said, “No,” so sharply that Rivka stared at him in surprise. He went on, “We dare not let him go up above ground. Remember how many Jews were willing to betray their brethren to the Nazis for a crust of bread regardless of what the Nazis were doing to us? People have cause to like the Lizards, at least compared to the Germans. He wouldn’t be safe where anybody could see him.”

“All right,” Rivka said. “If you think he’d be in danger up there, here he’ll stay.” Reuven let out a disappointed howl, but she ignored him.

“Anyone who has anything to do with me is in danger,” Moishe answered bitterly. “Why do you think we never get to talk to the fighters who bring our supplies?” The door to the bunker was concealed by a sliding plasterboard panel; with the panel closed, the entranceway looked like a blank wall from the other side.

Russie wondered if the anonymous men who kept his family in food and candles even knew whom they were helping. He could easily imagine Mordechai Anielewicz ordering them to take their-boxes down and leave them in the basement without telling them whom the things were for. Why not? What the men didn’t know, they couldn’t tell the Lizards.

He made a sour face: he was learning to think like a soldier. All he’d wanted to do was heal people and then, after the Lizards came like a sign from heaven, set people free. And the result? Here he was in hiding and thinking like a killer, not a healer.

Not too long after supper, Reuven yawned and went to bed without his usual fuss. In the dark, closed bunker, night and day no longer had much meaning for the little boy. Had the fighters not furnished the place with a clock, Moishe would have had no idea of the hour, either. One day he’d forget to wind it and slip into timelessness himself.

The shabbas candles were still burning. By their light, Moishe helped Rivka wash the supper dishes (though without electricity, the bunker had running water). She. smiled at him. “The time you lived by yourself taught you some things. You’re much better at that than you used to be.”

“What you have to do, you learn to do,” he answered philosophically. “Hand me that towel, would you?”

He’d just slid the last dish into its stack when he heard noise in the cellar next to the hidden bunker: men moving about in heavy shoes. He and Rivka froze. Her face was frightened; he was sure his was, too. Had their secret been betrayed? The Lizards wouldn’t shout “Juden heraus!” but he didn’t want to be caught by them any more than by the Nazis.

He wished he had a weapon. He wasn’t altogether a soldier yet, or he’d have had the sense to ask for one before he sealed himself away here. Too late to worry about it now.

The footsteps came closer. Russie strained his ears, trying to pick out the skitters and clicks that would have meant Lizards were walking with the humans. He thought he did. Fear rose up in him like a smothering cloud.

The people-and aliens? — stopped just on the other side of the plasterboard barrier. Moishe’s eyes flicked to the candlesticks that held the Sabbath lights. These were of pottery, not silver like the one he’d given up for food. But they were heavy, and of a length to serve as bludgeons. I won’t go down without a fight, he promised himself.

Someone rapped on the barrier. Russie grabbed for a candlestick, then caught himself: two knocks a pause, then another knock was the signal Anielewicz’s men used when they brought him supplies. But they’d just done that a couple of days before, and the bunker still held plenty. They seemed to have a schedule of sorts, and even though the signal was right, the timing wasn’t.

Rivka knew that, too. “What do we do?” she mouthed silently.

“I don’t know,” Moishe mouthed back. What he did know, though he didn’t want to dishearten his wife by saying so, was that if the Lizards were out there, they were going to take him. But the footsteps receded. Had he really heard skitterings after all?

Rivka raised her voice to a whisper. “Are they gone?”

“I don’t know,” Russie said again. After a moment, he added, “Let’s find out.” If the Lizards knew he was here, they didn’t need to wait for him to come out.

He picked up a candlestick, lit candle still inside (the cellar was as dark as the bunker would have been without light), unbarred the door, took half a step forward so he could slide aside the plasterboard panel. No box of food sat in front of it… but an envelope lay on the cement floor. He scooped it up, replaced the concealing panel, and went back into his hidey-hole.

“What is it?” Rivka asked when he was back inside.

“A note or letter of some sort,” he answered, holding up the envelope. He tore it open, pulled out the folded sheet of paper inside, and held it close to the candlestick so he could see what it said. The one great curse of this underground life was never having either sunlight or electric light by which to read.

The candle sufficed for something short, though. He unfolded the paper. On it was a neatly typed paragraph in Polish. He read the words aloud for Rivka’s benefit: “Just so you know, your latest message has been received elsewhere and widely circulated. Reaction is very much as we had hoped. Sympathy for us outside the area has increased, and certain parties would have red faces under other circumstances. They still would like to congratulate you for your wit. Suggest you let them continue to lavish their praises from a distance.”

“That’s all?” Rivka asked when he was through. “No signature or anything?”

“No,” he answered. “I can make a pretty good guess about who sent it, though, and I expect you can, too.”

“Anielewicz,” she said.

“That’s what I think,” Moishe agreed. The note had all the hallmarks of the Jewish fighting leader. No wonder it was in Polish: he’d been thoroughly secular before the war. Being typewritten made it harder to trace if it fell into the wrong hands. So did its elliptical phrasing: someone who didn’t know for whom it was intended would have trouble figuring out what it was supposed to mean. Anielewicz was careful every way he could think of. Moishe was sure he wouldn’t know how the note had got down to the bunker.

Rivka said, “So the recording got abroad. Thank God for that. I wouldn’t want you known as the Lizards’ puppet.”

“No; thank God I’m not.” Moishe started to laugh. “I’d like to see Zolraag with his face all red.” After what the Lizard governor had done to him, he wanted Zolraag both embarrassed and furious. From what the note said, he was getting his wish.

One of the things with which the bunker had been stocked was a bottle of slivovitz. Till now, Moishe had ignored it. He pulled it off the high shelf where it sat, yanked out the cork, and poured two shots. Handing one glass to Rivka, he raised the other himself.

“Confusion to the Lizards!” he said.

They both sipped the plum brandy. Fire ran down Moishe’s throat. Rivka coughed several times. Then she lifted her glass. Quietly, she offered a toast of her own: “Freedom for our people, and even, one day, for us.”

“Yes.” Moishe finished the slivovitz. One of the Sabbath candles went out, filling the bunker with the smell of hot tallow-and cutting the light inside almost in half. New shadows swooped.

“The other one will go soon,” Rivka said, watching that flame approach the candlestick, too.

“I know,” Moishe answered gloomily. Up where Reuven could not knock them over, two little oil lamps burned. But for being made out of tin, they probably weren’t much different from the ones the Maccabees had used when they took the Temple in Jerusalem away from Antiochus and his Greeks. The tiny amount of light they gave made Moishe think they were primitive, anyhow.

He carefully refilled them all the same. Waking up in absolute blackness in the crowded little underground room was a nightmare he’d suffered only once. The dreadful groping search for a box of matches made him vow never to go through it again. He’d lived up to the vow so far.

Reuven, Rivka, and he all shared one crowded bed. He gently rolled his son against the far wall. Reuven mumbled and thrashed, but didn’t wake up. Moishe got into bed next to him, held up the covers so Rivka could slide in, too.

His hand brushed her hip as he let the blankets down over them. She turned toward him. The lamps gave just enough light to let him see the questioning look on her face. The touch had been as much an accident as a caress, but he drew her to him just the same. The questioning look turned to a smile.

Later, they lay nestled together like spoons, her backside warm against the bottom of his belly. It was a gentle way to make love, and one not likely to disturb their son. Moishe stroked Rivka’s hair. She laughed quietly. “What’s funny?” he asked. He could hear sleepiness blur his voice.

She laughed again. “We didn’t do-this-so much when we were first married.”

“Well, maybe not,” he said. “I was just starting medical school and busy all the time, and then the baby came…”

And now, he thought, what else is there to do? It’s too dark to read much, we’re both sleeping a lot-if we didn’t take our pleasure from each othet we’d be as cross as a couple of bears cooped up down here.

He didn’t think saying he enjoyed Rivka’s body because there wasn’t anything else to do would endear him to her. Instead, he said with mock severity, “Most women, I hear, kvetch because their husbands don’t pay them enough attention. Are you complaintng because I pay you too much?”

“I didn’t think I was complaintng.” She moved away from the edge of the bed, and against him. Pressed tight against her firm flesh, he felt himself begin to rise again. So did she. Without a word, she raised a leg enough to let him slip himself back into her. Her breath sighed out when he did.

No hurry, he thought. We aren’t going anywhere. Unhurriedly, he tried to make the best of where they were.

The door to Bobby Fiore’s cell hissed open. It wasn’t the usual time for food, as well as he could judge without any clock. He looked around hopefully. Maybe the Lizards were bringing in Liu Han.

But no. It was only Lizards: the usual armed guards and another one, the latter with more elaborate body paint than the others. He’d figured out that was a mark of status among them, just as a man who wore a fancy suit was likely to be a bigger wheel than one in bib overalls and a straw hat.

The Lizard with the expensive paint job said something in his own language, too fast for Fiore to follow. He said as much, I don’t understand being a phrase he’d found worth memorizing. The Lizard said, “Come-with,” in English.

“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 looked 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.