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“Thanks. You, too,” he answered. He hadn’t put a move on her, not yet; he still had hopes of making it home to Barbara. But day by day not yet was rising higher in his thoughts than hadn’t put a move on her And when he did (if I do, he halfheartedly reminded himself), he was pretty sure-no, he was sure-she’d come across. Once or twice, she’d put what might have been a move on him.
A couple of other people also wished him luck. The Lizard just waited for him to arrive, then fell in behind him. Outside the church, cold smote. His eyes filled with tears; he’d been inside the gloomy building so long that sun sparkling off snow was almost overpoweringly bright.
His guards marched him along to the store the Lizards used as their Fiat headquarters. As soon as he went inside, he started to sweat; the place was at the bake-oven heat the aliens enjoyed. The three who had brought him there hissed blissfully. He wondered how they escaped pneumonia from the drastic temperature shifts they endured whenever they went in or out. Maybe pneumonia bugs didn’t bite Lizards. He hoped they wouldn’t bite him.
The guards led him back to the table where Gnik had interrogated him before. The Lizard lieutenant or whatever he was waited there now. He was holding something Lizardy in his left hand. Without preamble, he said, “Open your mouth, Pete Smith.”
“Huh?” Jens said, taken aback.
“Open your mouth, I say. You do not understand your own speech?”
“No, superior sir. Uh, I mean, yes, superior sir.” Larssen gave that up as a bad job and opened his mouth; with guns all around him, he had no real choice.
Gnik started to reach up with the gadget in his-left hand, then paused. “You Big Uglies are too tall,” he said peevishly. Nimble as his Earthly reptilian namesake, he scrambled, up onto a chair, put the muzzle of the gadget into Larssen’s mouth, squeezed a trigger.
The Lizardy thing hissed like a snake. A jet of something stung Jens on the tongue. “Ow!” he exclaimed, and involuntarily pulled back. “What the devil did you just do to me?”
“Injected you,” Gnik answered; at least he didn’t seem angry about Jens’ retreat. “Now we will find out the truth.”
“Injected me? But…” When Larssen thought about injections, he thought about needles. Then he took a long look at Gnik’s scaly hide. Would a hypodermic pierce it? He didn’t know. The Lizards’ only easily available soft tissue was inside their mouths. Some sort of compressed gas jet must have forced the drug into his system. But what was it? “Find out the truth?” he asked.
“New from our base.” Goik was one smug Lizard. “You will not lie to me. You cannot lie to me. The injection will not permit it.”
Uh-oh, Jens thought. The sweat that sprang out on his forehead now had nothing to do with the hot, dry interior of the store. He felt woozy; he needed a distinct effort of will not to see double. “May I sit down?” he said. Gnik jumped off the chair he’d used. Larssen sank into it. His legs did not seem to want to support him. Why not? he thought vaguely. I always supported them.
Gnik stood and waited for a few minutes, presumably to let the drug take full effect. Larssen wondered if he’d throw up all the canned goods he’d been eating lately. His mind felt detached from his body; it was almost as if he were looking down on himself from the ceiling.
Gnik asked, “What is your name?”
What is my name? Jens wondered. What a good question. He wanted to giggle, but didn’t have the energy. What had he been calling himself lately, anyhow? Remembering was a triumph. “Pete Smith,” he said proudly.
Gnik hissed. He and the other Lizards talked among themselves for a couple of minutes. The officer swung his turreted eyes back toward Larssen. “Where you going when we catch you on that-thing?” He still couldn’t remember the name for a bicycle.
“To, to visit my cousins west of, of, Montpelier.” Sticking to his story wasn’t easy for Jens, but he managed. Maybe he’d already told it so many times that it felt true for him. And maybe the Lizards’ drug wasn’t as good as they thought it was. In a pulp science-fiction story, it was easy enough to imagine something one day, create it the next, and use it the day after that. Reality was different, as he’d found out time and again at the Met Lab: nature usually proved less tractable than pulp writers made it out to be.
Gnik hissed again. Maybe he wasn’t convinced the drug was everything it was supposed to be-or maybe he had been convinced Jens was lying through his teeth and had got a nasty shock when he didn’t come out with something new under the drug. Not only was the Lizard stubborn, he was sneaky as well. “Tell me more of the male of this grouping of yours, this cousin Osscar.” He put a hiss in the middle of the name, too.
“His name is, is Olaf,” Larssen said, scenting the trap just in time. “He’s my father’s brother’s son.” He quickly rattled off the names of the fictitious Olaf’s equally fictitious family. He hoped that would keep Gnik from trying to trip him up with them; it also helped fix them in his own mind.
The Lizards went back to talking to one another again. After a while, Gnik returned to English. “We still do not find this-these-cousins of yours anywhere about.”
“I can’t help that,” Larssen said. “For all I know, maybe it’s because you’ve killed them. But I hope not.”
“More probably because their neighbors do not tell us who they are.” Did Gnik sound conciliatory? Larssen hadn’t heard conciliation in a Lizard’s voice often enough to be sure. “Some of you Big Uglies do not care for the Race.”
“Why do you suppose that is?” Jens asked.
“It is a puzzlement,” Gnik said, so seriously that Larssen knew he really was puzzled. Are they that stupid? he wondered. But the Lizards weren’t stupid, not even slightly, or they’d never have been able to come to Earth, never have been able to make and drop their atomic bombs. They were sure naive, though. Had they expected to be welcomed as liberators?
Even under the mildly euphoric buzz of the not-quite-truth drug, Larssen worried a little. Suppose the Lizards decided to let him go and then followed him while he tried to find his cousins’ farm? That would be the best way to make him out a liar. Or would it? He could always point to a ruined one and claim Olaf et mythical cetera had lived there.
The Lizards were chattering back and forth one more time. Gnik cut off debate with a sharp motion of his hand. He swung his eyes toward Larssen. “What you say with the drug in you must be true. So my superiors have told me; thus, so it must be. And if it is true, you is-are-no danger to the Race. You may go. Take up the things that are yours and travel on, Pete Smith.”
“Just like that?” Larssen blurted. An instant later, he bit his tongue, which made him yelp-it was sore. But did he want the Lizard to change its mind? Like hell he did! His next question was distinctly more practical: “Where’s my bike?”
Gnik understood the word, even if he couldn’t recall it. “It will go to where you are bei
ng kept. Go there now yourself to take up the things that are yours.”
Along with the drug-induced euphoria, Jens now had his own genuine variety. He put his cold-weather gear back on, all but floated over the snow back to the Baptist church. Questions rang out “What happened?” “What’d they want with you?”
“They’re letting me go,” he said simply. He was still absorbing the magnitude of his own luck. Back in White Sulphur Springs, Colonel Groves-or was it General Marshall? — had told him the Lizards were worse than Russians for depending on their higher-ups to tell them what to do. Gnik’s higher-ups had told him he had a real live truth drug here, and as far as he was concerned, that made it Holy Writ. As long as the higher-ups were right, it was a good enough system. When they were wrong…
Half the people in the church came running forward to pound his back and shake his hand. Sal’s kiss was so authoritative, his arms automatically tightened around her. She molded herself to him, ground her hips against his crotch. “Lucky bastard,” she whispered when she finally pulled away.
“Yeah,” he muttered, dazed. All at once, he wanted not to leave… at least for one night. But no. If he didn’t get out while he could, the Lizards were liable to wonder why-and liable to change their minds. That did not bear thinking about.
He pushed through the friendly little crowd to get his belongings from the pew he’d come to call his own. As he slung his knapsack over his shoulders, he noticed for the first time the men and women who’d hung back from offering best wishes. Not to put too fine a point on it, they looked as if they hated him. Several-women and men both-turned away so he would not see them cry. He all but ran toward the doorway. No, even if the Lizards allowed it, he could not stay another night, not for Sal and all her blowsy charms. Even a few seconds of that envy and rage were more than he could stand.
