AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I wouldn’t! Rance almost shouted it. He hadn’t had anything to do with smuggling ginger for years till Penny came back into his life. If they let him go and kept her in the calaboose, they wouldn’t hurt themselves one bit.
Without turning his head to look at her, he felt Penny’s eyes on him. She had to know what was going through his mind. She also had to know he hadn’t asked her to come back to him. She’d done it on her own, because she couldn’t find any other choice. If he walked away and sold her down the river, how much guilt would he have on his conscience?
He asked himself the same question. Just how big a son of a bitch are you, Rance? How low have you fallen? The clean-cut West Point cavalry officer he’d been once upon a time wouldn’t have let a pal down for anything. But he hadn’t been that fellow for a lot of years. A couple of Lizard bullets had made sure he’d never be that fellow again. And afterwards, he hadn’t even been able to make a go of it as a ginger smuggler after Penny left him the first time, even if some of his buddies had stayed in touch with him on the off chance he might be able to do something for them. He’d turned into a petty grifter, a loser, a drunk. Christ, what else had he turned into on the way down? A Judas?
He sat quietly. Over in the other chair in the interrogation chamber, too far away to touch, Penny let out a soft sigh of relief. He wondered what she would have done had their positions been reversed. Odds were he was better off not knowing.
Penny said, “Superior sir, if you do let me go, I don’t want to go back to the United States. Too many people there want me dead.”
“This is a perspective with which I have some sympathy,” Hesskett said. “It is also, you realize, an argument for keeping you imprisoned.”
“If that’s what you want to do, go ahead-go ahead for both of us.” Now Auerbach spoke before Penny could. “If you don’t care about going back on the bargain you made, go ahead and do that.”
Against a human being, he wouldn’t have had a prayer. Had he been stupid enough to try that argument on his Nazi interrogators, they might have burst a blood vessel laughing. But Lizards, whatever else you said about them, were more honest than people. They didn’t always make bargains in a hurry. When they did make them, they commonly kept them.
Hesskett didn’t show what he was thinking. Lizards rarely did, at least not in ways people could recognize. “Not spending all your lives in prison would be a reward, thinking of how much ginger the two of you had when we caught you,” he said.
Rance tried not to show what he was thinking, either, but couldn’t help leaning forward a little. He knew the start of a dicker when he heard one. “Hey, we did the best we could for you,” he said.
“That’s right,” Penny said. “It’s not our fault all the Nazis in the goddamn world came busting out of that building. And how come your fancy gadgets didn’t tell us they were there?”
“They must not have been using electronics to monitor their surroundings,” Hesskett said. “Had they been using electronics, you would have been warned.”
“Well, they weren’t, and we weren’t, and now you’re trying to blame us for it,” Auerbach said. If he had the Lizard on the defensive, and he thought he did, he’d push him hard.
“What do you think a fitting reward would be?” Hesskett asked.
“Letting us go free, that’s what,” Penny said at once.
“Let us go free someplace where they speak English,” Rance added. He didn’t want to get turned loose in Mexico, not when he knew maybe a dozen words of Spanish, and most of them swear words. He wasn’t jumping up and down at the idea of going back to the USA, either, not after he’d ventilated those goons. Their bosses wouldn’t remember him fondly.
“We do not want you going back to your friends. That would mean going back to smuggling ginger,” Hesskett said. “Where in the lands the Race rules do Big Uglies speak English? I cannot be bothered keeping track of your languages. You should have only one, like us.”
“Austr-” Penny began, but Auerbach gave her such a sharp look, she didn’t finish. Australia was going to be a place where Lizards outnumbered people, if it wasn’t already. Rance didn’t want that.
Hesskett was checking a computer screen. Turning one eye turret away from it and toward Rance and Penny, he said, “Your choices are fewer than I thought. Most of the Tosevites who speak your language are not under the rule of the Race. I do not want to add more Big Uglies to the population of Australia. That is to be our land, in particular.” Auerbach gave Penny a told-you-so look. The Lizard went on, “Perhaps South Africa. It is isolated. You would have a hard time causing the Race great trouble there-and we would be able to keep an eye turret aimed in your direction.”
“Can we think about it?” Auerbach asked. “Can we talk it over, just the two of us?”
Hesskett used the hand gesture that was his equivalent of a headshake. “No. We do not have to give you anything at all. You may say that you tried to aid us, but you failed. You may have South Africa, or you may have a cell each.”
“Not much choice there,” Penny said, and Rance nodded. She looked a question at him. He nodded again. She spoke for both of them: “We’ll take South Africa.”
“You shall be sent there,” Hesskett said. “You shall live out the rest of your days there. You shall not leave, unless by order of the Race. Do you understand this?”
“Exile,” Auerbach said.
“Exile, yes,” Hesskett agreed. “I have heard this word in your language before, but I did not remember it. Now I shall.”
Auerbach tried to remember what he knew of South Africa. Not much, he discovered. Gold and diamonds came to mind. So did the Boer War. Before the Lizards arrived, the South Africans had been on the Allies’ side, but a good many of them wished they’d lined up with the Nazis instead. Whites lorded it over blacks who enormously outnumbered them. It was sort of like the American South, only more so.
He looked down at his arm. Sure as hell, he was the right color to go there. He hadn’t heard much about the place since the fighting ended. Every now and then, there’d been stories about a low-grade guerrilla war. Those had mostly disappeared from the newspapers in the past few years. That probably meant most of the guerrillas had gone to their heavenly reward.
Still, it didn’t seem too bad, especially for a white man-and a white woman. “South Africa,” he said in musing tones. “I think we can make the best of it.”
“Me, too,” Penny said. Auerbach w
asn’t altogether comfortable with her expression. What it seemed to say was, If I find something good, I can always dump this guy. She’d done it before.
Of course, he would have been better off if she’d stayed out of his life once she dumped him. Still, getting laid regularly had its points.
Hesskett said, “Once you are there, we do not provide for you. You will have to make your own way.”
How the hell am I supposed to do that, crippled up like I am? Rance wondered. If the other choice was a cell, though, he supposed he could try. The Lizards’ jail hadn’t been so bad as he’d expected, but he didn’t want to live there the rest of his life.
Penny said, “You can’t just drop us there without a dime in our pockets. We need enough money to keep us going till we can get on our feet.”
That started the haggling again. Auerbach wondered if he could arrange to have his government pension sent to him in Cape Town or wherever the hell he ended up. He didn’t mention that to Hesskett. He did point out his injuries, adding, “These are your fault, too.”
Hesskett wasn’t the best bargainer who ever came down the pike. Few Lizards were good bargainers, not by human standards. By the time Rance and Penny got done with him, he’d promised the Race would support them for six months, with another six months’ help forthcoming if they were still having trouble after that.
“Beats the hell out of jail,” Penny said as the Lizard airplane on which they would fly took off from Mexico City.
“Jail, nothing-beats the hell out of whatever we could think of,” Auerbach said. “Talk about coming up smelling like a rose.” He leaned over and gave Penny a kiss. Maybe she’d dump him, maybe she wouldn’t. Meanwhile, he’d enjoy what he had while it lasted.
Straha would never have got interested in the U.S. space station if it hadn’t been for Sam Yeager. The ex-shiplord knew as much. He’d agreed to stick out his tongue in the station’s direction not so much because he thought anything about it was particularly odd as because his Tosevite friend-a notion he was still getting used to-had asked it of him.
