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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 somebod
y.” 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?”
