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Auerbach laughed, but he sounded shaky even to himself. He felt shaky, too, as he had after combat against the Lizards. Reaction setting in, he thought. He was shaky; the.45 trembled in his hand. Deciding neither of the thugs was going to give him any more trouble, he put the safety back on.
From the bedroom, Penny called, “Cops are on the way. You were right-I wasn’t the first one who got through to them.” A minute or so later, Rance heard sirens coming closer. The police cars stopped in front of the apartment building.
Four cops in blue uniforms came running up the stairs, all of them carrying pistols. The first policeman into the apartment looked, whistled, and said over his shoulder, “We ain’t gonna need the ambulance, Eddie, just the coroner’s meat wagon.” He turned to Auerbach. “All right, buddy, what the hell happened here?”
Rance told him what had happened, though he made it sound as if he thought the dead men in his living room were a couple of ordinary robbers, not hired muscle for the ginger smugglers. Another policeman-Eddie? — stepped around the bodies and went to talk with Penny in the bedroom. After a while, he and the cop who’d been talking with Auerbach (his name was Charlie McMillan) put their heads together.
McMillan said, “You and your lady friend tell the same story. I don’t reckon we’ve got any reason to charge you with anything, not when those boys came busting into your place.”
One of the other Fort Worth policemen had stooped beside the bodies. He said, “They’re both packing, Charlie.”
“Okay.” McMillan eyed Rance in a speculative way. “Mighty fine shooting for somebody who’d just got knocked on his ass. Where’d you learn to handle a weapon like that?”
“West Point,” Auerbach answered, which made the policeman’s eyes widen. “I was in the Army till the Lizards shot me up a few months before the fighting stopped. I can’t get around very fast any more-hell, I can’t hardly get around at all any more-but I still know what to do with a.45 in my hand.”
“He sure as hell does,” the cop by the body said. “These boys are history. I don’t make either one of them. You recognize ’em, Charlie?”
McMillan sauntered over and looked at the corpses. As he lit a cigarette, he shook his head. “Sure don’t. They’ve got to be from out of town. I’d know any strongarm boys of our own who were trying to pull jobs like this.” He turned back toward Auerbach. “They picked the wrong guy to start on, that’s for sure.”
“That’s a fact,” the other cop agreed. “You’re not going to charge these folks?”
“Charge ’em? Hell, no.” McMillan shook his head almost hard enough to make his hat fall off. “Ought to be a bounty on sons of bitches like these. All I’m going to do is take Mr. Auerbach’s formal statement, and his lady friend’s, and then wait for the coroner to come take his pictures and haul the bodies away.”
“Okay. Sounds good to me,” the cop by the corpses said. It sounded good to Auerbach, too. Off the hook, he thought.
McMillan took out a notebook and a pen. Before he started taking the statement, he remarked, “Maybe their prints’ll tell us who they are. Little Rock may know, even if we don’t.” He stubbed out his cigarette, then said, “All right, Mr. Auerbach, tell it to me again, only slow and easy this time, so I can get it down on paper.”
Auerbach was less than halfway through his statement when a rangy fellow the policemen all called Doc ambled into his apartment. He had a physician’s black bag in one hand and a camera with a flash in the other. After looking at the bodies, he sadly shook his head and said, “That rug’s never gonna be the same.”
As if his words were some kind of signal, Rance’s landlord came in on his heels. He took one look and said, “You get the cleaning bill, Auerbach.”
“I knew you’d tell me that, Jasper,” Auerbach answered. “Have a heart. If they’d shot me, you’d have to pay it yourself.”
“They damn well didn’t, so you can damn well fork over,” the landlord said. The cops rolled their eyes. Auerbach let out a racking sigh. This was a fight he knew he was going to lose.
A couple of husky coroner’s assistants carried the bodies downstairs one at a time on stretchers. The coroner left with them. Jasper was already gone; he’d said what he came to say. Charlie McMillan finished getting statements. Then he and his pals took off, too, leaving Auerbach alone in the apartment with the blood-soaked carpeting.
After putting a couple of ice cubes in a glass, Rance poured whiskey over them. While Penny was building her own drink, he took a long pull at his and said, “You know what? Tahiti sounds pretty goddamn good.”
“Amen,” Penny said, and finished her whiskey at a gulp.
Kassquit wished Ttomalss would return from the surface of Tosev 3. He had never been gone for so long before. None of the other males on the orbiting starship truly treated her like a member of the Race. Up till now, Ttomalss had served as a buffer between her and them. Now, whenever she let herself out of her compartment, she had to deal with them herself. As a result, she left the compartment as seldom as she could.
Even worse than the long-familiar researchers were the males and females from the colonization fleet. As far as they were concerned, she was nothing but a Big Ugly-a barbarian at best, a talking animal at worst. She’d pined for Home; everything she’d read and viewed made her pine for Home. But the males and females new-come from the world at the center of the Empire were far more callous toward her than those more familiar with Tosev 3 and its natives. That hurt.
It hurt so much, she would have spent all her time in her compartment if she could. Unfortunately for her, the Race had long ago determined it was more efficient to gather males and females in one place to eat than to distribute food to each compartment in which someone dwelt or worked.
She’d taken to eating her meals at odd times, times shifted away from those during which males and females normally crowded the galley. That minimized friction with those who did not care for her. Try as she would, though, she could not eliminate it altogether.
One day, she was heading back from the galley when she almost collided with a male named Tessrek, who skittered around a corner straight into her path. She barely managed to stop in time. Had she failed, the collision would of course have been her fault. “I beg your pardon, superior sir,” she said from the posture of respect.
“Watch where you plant your large, homely, flat feet,” Tessrek snapped. He had never cared for her. Ttomalss had told her Tessrek hadn’t cared for the previous Tosevite infant he’d tried to rear, either.
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Kassquit replied now. All she wanted to do was end the conversation and return to the lonely peace of her compartment.
But Tessrek was in no mood to let her off so easily. “ ‘It shall be done, superior sir,’ ” he echoed, imitating her intonation as best he could with his different mouthparts. “Down
on Tosev 3, they have animals that can be trained to talk. How do I know you are not just another such animal?”
“By whether what I say makes sense,” Kassquit answered, refusing to let Tessrek see he had made her angry. “I can imagine no other way to do it, superior sir.” Sometimes a soft reply made him give up his attempts to disconcert or simply to hurt her.
It didn’t work this time. “You are only a Big Ugly,” Tessrek said. “No one cares about your imaginings. No one cares about your kind’s imaginings.”
A female from one of the ships of the colonization fleet walked past as Kassquit was doing her best to come up with another polite answer instead of telling Tessrek to flush himself down the waste-disposal opening in his compartment. “My imaginings, such as they are, are not typical of those of Big Uglies, superior sir,” she said. “They are much closer to those of the Race, because…”
Her voice trailed away as she realized, a little slower than she should have, that Tessrek was no longer paying her any attention. Both his eye turrets were fixed on the female who had just gone by. The scales on top of his head rose into a crest, something Kassquit had never seen before on any male. He stood up straight-unnaturally straight for a male of the Race, almost as straight as Kassquit herself. With a peculiar wordless hiss, he hurried after the female.
Her eye turrets swiveled so she could look back at him. She hissed, too, a lower, softer sound than his, and bent into a posture similar but not identical to the posture of respect, a posture that left her head low and her rump high. Tessrek moved into place behind her. Kassquit got a brief glimpse of an organ that, like the male’s erectile scales, she had never seen before. It reminded her a little of the sort of organ male Tosevites possessed. And Tessrek used it rather as she had seen male Tosevites use theirs in the recordings that fascinated and disgusted her at the same time.
