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Ristin and Ullhass looked at each other. Obviously, that idea hadn’t occurred to them, and wouldn’t have, either. “Such markings would not be official,” Ullhass said, as if that doomed the notion in and of itself.
But Sam said, “Sure they would. They’d be official U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks. If you’re our prisoners, you should use our marks, right?”
The two Lizards looked at each other again. They took suggestions from superior authority very seriously indeed. “What are these U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks?” Ristin asked.
Yeager was about to tell him to make up his own when he had a better idea-much more than most people, Lizards liked doing as they were told. He said, “You should paint yourselves with red and white stripes and blue stars. That way you’ll look like you’re wearing American flags.”
Ristin and Ullhass talked back and forth in their own language. Sam was getting fluent enough now to follow them pretty well. He hid a smile as he listened to their enthusiasm grow. Before long, Ristin said, “It shall be done.”
When they were through, Yeager thought they looked gaudy as all get out, but nobody’d hired him for base art critic, so he kept his big mouth shut. Ullhass and Ristin were delighted, which was the point of the exercise. In the next few days, several other formerly paintless Lizards started sporting stars and stripes. Sam’s highly unofficial suggestion looked as if it might turn official after all.
Then one day, as Sam was coming out of the room he shared with Barbara, a peremptory hiss stopped him in his tracks. “You are the Tosevite who devised these-these unpleasant prisoner color combinations?” Straha demanded.
“That’s right, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “Is something wrong with them?”
“Yes, something is wrong.” Straha used an emphatic cough to show how wrong the something was. Past that, he looked angry enough to be twitching; he reminded Yeager of nothing so much as a tent-show revival preacher testifying against the evils of demon rum and loose women. “This you have done with the paint, this is wrong. This is a mark the Race does not use. It must be cleansed at once from the scales of the males. It is an-” Yeager hadn’t heard the next word before, but if it didn’t mean something likeabomination, he’d eat his hat.
“Why is that, Shiplord?” he asked, as innocently as he could.
“Because it destroys all order and discipline,” Straha replied, as if to an idiot child. “Body paint shows rank and assignment and seniority; it is not to be used for frivolous purposes of decoration.”
“Shiplord, it does show assignment: it shows that the males who wear it are prisoners of the United States,” Sam said. “If you want it to show seniority, too, the males who have been prisoners longer can wear more stars than the others. Would that be all right?”
He tried to sound quiet and reasonable. All the same, he expected Straha to blow up like a pressure cooker with its safety valve stuck. But the shiplord surprised him: “The trouble with dealing with Tosevites is that one forgets how perspective shifts. Do you understand this?”
“I don’t think I do, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “I’m sorry.”
Straha made an exasperated noise, rather like a water heater with a slow leak. “I explain further, then. With the Race, all is as it has been. We do not casually invent body paint designs. They all fit into a system we have been refining for more than a hundred thousand years.” Yeager knew enough to divide that by two to convert it into Earthly years, but it was still a hell of a long time. Straha went on, “You Big Uglies, though, you just casually invent. You care nothing for large-scale system; all that matters to you is short-term results.”
“We’re at war, Shiplord. We were at war before the Race got here,” Yeager said. “Whatever it takes to win, we’ll do. We change all the time.”
“This we have noticed, to our sorrow,” Straha said. “The weapons with which you fight us now are better than the ones you used when we first came. Ours are still the same. This is what I meant about looking at you from a different perspective. If something suits you for the moment, you will seize upon it, not caring a bit how it accords with what you formerly did. You invent a body-paint pattern on the spur of the moment.” The shiplord hissed again. “I suppose I should be used to that sort of thing, but every now and again it still shocks me. This was one of those times.”
Yeager thought of all the pulp science-fiction stories he’d read where an inventor had an idea one day, built it the next, and mass-produced it the day after that, generally just in time to save the world from the Martians. He’d always taken those with a grain of salt about the size of the Great Salt Flats outside Salt Lake City. Real life didn’t work that way.
To the Lizards, though, Earth must have seemed the embodiment of pulp science fiction run amok. In not a whole lot more than a year, human beings had rolled out long-range rockets, bazookas, and jet planes, to say nothing of the atomic bomb. That didn’t count improvements to already existing items like tanks, either. And by all accounts, poison gas, which dated back to World War I, was new and nasty to the Lizards.
“So you’ll forgive the other prisoners here for using American-style body paint, then?” Sam asked.
“I am not a prisoner; I am a refugee,” Straha said with dignity. “But yes, I forgive it. I was hasty when I condemned it out of hand, but haste, for the Race, is to be actively discouraged. The captive males may wear any sort of marking Tosevite authorities suggest.”
“Thank you, Shiplord,” Yeager said. As Lizards went, Straha seemed like a pretty adaptable guy. If you actively discouraged haste, though, you didn’t make life any easier for yourself, not on Earth, you didn’t.
Teerts sometimes felt guilty about what happened to Tokyo. Millions of intelligent beings dead, and all because he’d warned of what the Nipponese Tosevites were attempting.
The guilt never lasted long, though. For one thing, the Big Uglies would have blown up a similar number of males of the Race without a qualm. For another, the way the Nipponese had treated him deserved revenge.
He wasn’t flying in the eastern region of the main continental mass any more. His commanders realized his life would end quickly-or perhaps slowly-if the Nipponese captured him again. Now he undertook missions for the Race from an airfield almost halfway round Tosev 3 from Nippon. France, the local Big Uglies called the place.
“These are the toughest Big Uglies you’ll face in the air,” Elifrim, the base commander, told him. “Our friends across the ocean who fight the Americans might argue, but take no notice of them. The Deutsche fly jets more dangerous than any others the Tosevites use, and the British had airborne radar before we invaded their island.”
“I don’t mind facing them in the air, superior sir,” Teerts answered. “I can shoot back at them now.” He remembered too well lying in Tosevite hands, unable to strike his Nipponese captors. He’d never known or imagined such loneliness, such helplessness.
“Shoot first,” Elifrim urged. “That’s what I mean: you could take your time with the Big Uglies before, but not so much now. The other thing is, you’ll want to use your cannon more and your
missiles less.”
“Why, superior sir?” Teerts asked. “I can kill with my missiles from much greater range. If the Big Uglies’ weapons systems are better than they were before the Nipponese captured me, I ought to be more cautious about closing with them, not more eager to do it.”
“Under normal circumstances, you would be right,” the base commander answered. “When it comes to Tosev 3, though, precious little is normal, as you’ll have discovered for yourself. The problem, Flight Leader, is that stocks of air-to-air missiles are dwindling planetwide, and we haven’t found a way to manufacture more. We have plenty of shells for the cannons, though, from our own factory ships and from Tosevite plants here in France and in Italia and the U.S.A. That’s why we prefer you to use the guns.”
“I-see,” Teerts said slowly. “How good is this Tosevite ammunition we’re using? I hate trusting my life to something the Big Uglies turn out.”
“We had some quality control problems at first,” Elifrim said; Teerts wondered how many males had ended up dead as a result of such an innocuous-sounding thing. The commandant went on, “Those are for the most part corrected now. Several Tosevite aircraft have been brought down using shells of Tosevite manufacture.”
“That’s something, anyhow,” Teerts said, somewhat reassured.
Elifrim reached into a desk drawer and drew out two shell casings. Teerts had no trouble figuring out which chunk of machined brass had traveled from Home and which was made locally: one was gleaming, mirror-finished, while the other had a matte coating, with several scratches marring its metal.
“It looks primitive, but it works,” Elifrim said, pointing to the duller casing. “Dimensionally, it matches ours, and that’s what really counts.”
“As you say, superior sir.” Teerts was less than enthusiastic about using those shell casings in his killercraft, but if the Race had plenty of them and a dwindling supply of both proper shells and missiles, he didn’t see that he had much choice. “Are the armorers satisfied with them?” Armorers were even fussier about guns than pilots.
