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“Yeah, they’ve been doing that for a little while now,” Penny said. “Just don’t be a worrywart, okay? Whatever they’ve got, it doesn’t keep the stuff out-and it won’t keep this stuff out. Relax. Enjoy the ride.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Auerbach said. Penny laughed, but he hadn’t been joking. She had more in the way of balls than he did. He wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He’d been pretty much content to vegetate for years till she bounced back into his life. He didn’t know what to call what he was doing now, but it wasn’t vegetating. He was sure of that.
They crawled over the toll bridge from Rio Grande City south into Ciudad Camargo. The Mexican cops and customs men were working for the Lizards these days, but that didn’t mean they liked yanquis any better than they had before. “Purpose for coming here?” one of them demanded, pencil poised over a form.
“We’re tourists,” Auerbach answered. Penny nodded.
“Ha!” the customs man said. “Everyone who smuggles ginger, he says he’s a tourist.” If he thought he could rattle the Americans, he was barking up the wrong tree. Penny had played these games before, and Rance didn’t much care what happened to him. He leaned back in his seat and relaxed, as Penny had suggested.
Then the customs man whistled shrilly. Up came one of his pals, leading a female German shepherd on a leash. The dog sniffed all around the automobile. Auerbach’s breath came short-but then, it always did. Penny hid whatever jitters she had by lighting a cigarette.
When the dog didn’t start barking its head off, its handler led it away. The customs man waved the Ford forward. As soon as they were out of earshot, Penny turned to Auerbach and said, “See? Piece of cake. If I’m not smarter than a damn Mexican dog-”
“Takes one bitch to outfox another,” Rance said. Penny hit him in the arm, a gesture half friendly, half angry. After a couple of seconds, she decided it was funny and laughed.
Ciudad Camargo was a pleasant little town nestled in a green valley. Lots of cattle and a few sheep grazed in that green valley. The town itself smelled powerfully of manure. The road paralleled the Rio Grande till it got past San Miguel, then went inland. Away from the river, the countryside stopped being pleasant and green and turned into a sun-blasted desert.
“No wonder the Lizards like it here,” Rance said, sweat pouring off him. “Christ, it’s worse than Fort Worth, and I didn’t reckon anything could be.”
“It’s hot, all right,” Penny agreed. “But we’re going looking for Lizards, after all. Aren’t a whole lot of ’em in Greenland.”
“Just don’t let the car boil over,” Auerbach said. “I haven’t seen any other traffic on this miserable road. If we get stuck here, buzzards are liable to pick our bones.” He looked up into the bake oven of the sky. Sure as hell, several broad-winged black shapes floated on the currents of hot air rising from the ground. They didn’t have to work very hard to stay airborne, not in this weather.
“Don’t worry about it,” Penny said, which was like asking him not to worry about the endless gnawing pain in his leg. She could ask, but that didn’t mean she’d get what she asked for.
Smoking one cigarette after another, she drove south with assurance. Every so often, the Ford would go past a farm where a family tried to scratch out a living without enough land, water, or livestock. Back in the States, hardly anyone plowed with mules any more. Here, even having a mule looked to be a mark of some prosperity. Children stared at the battered old Ford as it went by. It was almost as alien to them as one of the Lizard’s starships would have been.
A drunkenly leaning sign marked the border between the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon. The road ran into a bigger, better one running southwest from Reynosa. Penny turned onto that one. It went through a little town called General Bravo, and then, on the eastern bank of a trickle called the San Juan River, an even littler one implausibly called China.
On the western bank of the San Juan sat a Lizard town, tiny and neat and clean, the buildings sharp-edged and perfectly white, the streets all paved, everything in perfect order. The Lizards went about whatever business they had. A couple of them might have turned an eye turret toward the American car. Most paid no attention to it whatever.
“That’s new,” Penny said as she drove out of the Lizard town. “They are settling down to stay, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” Rance said harshly. “They’d be doing that on the other side of the Rio Grande, too, if we hadn’t fought ’em to a standstill.” Peering back over his shoulder hurt, but he did it anyhow. “Wonder if they’ve brought any crops from their planet that’ll grow around these parts. Too early to tell; they haven’t even been here a year yet.”
Penny looked over toward him-safe enough, with so little traffic on the road. “You think of all kinds of funny things, don’t you? I was just wondering how many Lizards in that place taste ginger.”
“That’s a sensible thing to wonder,” Auerbach said. “I’m full of moonshine, that’s all. You could have stopped and found out.”
He wasn’t serious. Luckily for him, Penny knew it. “Didn’t want to take the chance,” she answered. “Up ahead, I’ll be dealing with Lizards I know. That’s a lot safer-you bet it is.”
“Okay,” Auerbach said. “I’m just along for the company.” He slid closer to Penny, reached under her pleated cotton skirt, and ran his hand up the inside of her thigh all the way to her panties.
She laughed. “If a gal did that to a guy, he’d drive right off the damn road. We’ll have plenty of time for games later, all right?” She sounded almost like a mother trying to keep a rambunctious little boy in line.
The Lizard air base and antiaircraft missile station sat in the desert about halfway between China and Monterrey. Unlike the new colonists’ center, it had been there a long time; planes from it had undoubtedly flown against the United States during the fighting. The buildings were still neat and clean, but they’d lost something of that razor-edged look newer ones had. The comparison was easy to make, because some buildings close by were new.
“Colonists here, too.” Now Penny didn’t sound so happy. “I hope the Lizards I knew are still around. If they aren’t, that complicates things.” She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
She pulled the Ford to a stop next to one of the shanties of the little human hamlet that had grown up to serve the Lizards and the people who labored for them. When she got out, Auerbach did, too. The fellow behind the battered bar of what turned out to be a tavern looked up and addressed Penny not in Spanish or English but in the Lizards’ language: “I greet you, superior female. I have not seen you for too long.”
“I greet you, Esteban,” Penny answered in the same language. Auerbach followed it haltingly. She went on, “I need to see Kahanass. Is he still here?” When the Mexican nodded, she broke into a grin. “Can you get someone to tell him I am here?”
“It shall be done,” Esteban said, one phrase in the Lizards’ language almost everyone understood. He shouted in Spanish. When a teenage kid stuck his head in the door, he sent him off. Then, to Rance’s relief, he turned out to speak some English: “You want beers?”
“Oh, Christ, yes!” Rance exclaimed. He sucked down a blood-temperature Dos Equis as if it were the nectar of the gods.
Before too long, the teenager came back, a Lizard in tow. “I greet you, Kahanass,” Penny said. “I have things you may want to see, if you have things you can give me.”
Kahanass wore the body paint of a radar operator. “Truth?” he asked, another Lizard word with broad currency among humans. “I did not expect you to come back here with things for me to see, but I will look at them. If I like them, I may have things to give you.” He swung an eye turret toward Auerbach. “Who is this Tosevite? Have I seen him before? I do not think so. Can I trust him?”
“You can trust him,” Penny said. “He and I have mated. He has killed my enemies.”
“It is good,” Kahanass said. “Bring me these things, then, so I may
look at them. If I like them…” His voice trailed away. People who bought and sold ginger spoke in circumlocutions. If someone was listening, if someone was recording, that made proving what they were up to harder.
“It shall be done.” Penny went out and opened the Ford’s trunk, returning with a couple of suitcases.
Kahanass recoiled from them. “Phew! What is that horrible stink?”
“Lighter fluid,” she answered in English. The Lizard evidently understood, for he didn’t ask her to explain. She went on, “It keeps the animals from smelling whatever else is inside. None of it got on whatever else is inside.” She opened a suitcase. “You can tell that for yourself, if you like.”
Kahanass took a taste. He hissed with pleasure. “Yes!” He used an emphatic cough. “Yes, I shall have things. I shall indeed. You wait here. Esteban has a scale. He will weigh out these things and weigh out the pay.”
“It shall be done,” Penny said as the Lizard hurried out of the tavern. She turned to Auerbach. “You see, sweetheart? No trouble at all.”
