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He wiped sweat from his face before putting back on the broad-brimmed Stetson Watkins had lent him. “I can see how Desert Center got its name,” he said. “Weather only a Lizard could love.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “I like it pretty well myself-I’ve lived in these parts more than thirty years. Of course, I was born up in St. Paul, so I got sick and tired of snow in a big fat hurry.”
“I can see that.” Sam let out a small sigh. He’d never played in St. Paul; it belonged to the American Association, only one jump down from the majors, and one jump up from any league where he had played. If he hadn’t broken his ankle on that slide into second down in Birmingham… He sighed again. Plenty of ballplayers might have made the big leagues if they hadn’t got hurt. It was more than twenty years too late to worry about that now.
He yanked his mind back to the business at hand. Something-a small-“1” lizard? — scurried away from his horse’s hooves and disappeared into the shade under a cactus. When he looked up, he saw a few buzzards wheeling optimistically through the sky. Other than that, the land might have been dead: nothing but sagebrush and cacti scattered not too thickly over the pale yellow dirt. Their sharp-edged shadows seemed to etch themselves into the ground.
Somehow, the landscape didn’t look quite the way Sam had thought it would. After a couple of minutes, he put his finger on why. “None of those tall cactuses,” he said. “You know the kind I mean: the ones that look like a man standing there with his hands up.”
Victor Watkins nodded. “Saguaros. Yeah, you don’t see that many of ’em this side of the Colorado River. Over in Arizona, now, they’re all over the damn place.”
“Are they?” Yeager said, and the local nodded again. Sam went on, “Hardly seems as if anything much could live here.”
“Well, it’s after ten in the morning,” Sheriff Watkins said. “Pretty much all the critters are laying in burrows or under rocks or anywhere they can go to get out of the sun. Come here around sunup or sundown and you’ll see a lot more: jackrabbits and kangaroo rats and snakes and skunks and I don’t know what all. And there are owls and bobcats and coyotes”-he pronounced it keye-oats- “at night, and sometimes deer down from the mountains. In spring, after we get a little rain, it’s real pretty country.”
“Yeah?” Yeager knew he sounded dubious. Thinking of this country as pretty any time struck him as being on the order of thinking Frankenstein handsome because he’d put on a new suit.
But Watkins said, “Hell, yes. Flowers and butterflies all over the place. You even get toads breeding in the mud puddles and croaking away like mad.”
“If you say so.” Sam couldn’t really argue; he hadn’t been in these parts just after some rain. From what he could see, they didn’t get rain any too often. Something large enough to be startling buzzed past his nose. “What was that?” he asked as it zipped away. “June bug?”
“Nope. Hummingbird.” Watkins glanced over at Yeager. “Listen, remember to drink plenty of water. That’s what we’ve got it along for. Heat like this, it just pours out of you.” He swigged from one of his canteens.
Sam dutifully drank. The water had been cold back in Desert Center. It wasn’t cold any more. He pointed to a small cloud of dust a couple of miles ahead. “What’s that, if everything takes it easy in the middle of the day?”
“Lizard critters don’t,” the sheriff said. “Far as they’re concerned, this is like a day in the park. They like it fine-better’n fine. Mad dogs and Englishmen and these funny-lookin’ things.” They rode on a little while longer, heading toward the dust. Then Watkins pointed, too, at a plant Sam might not have noticed. “There. These started growing about the same time the critters showed up.”
Now that his attention was drawn to it, Yeager saw it was different from the others past which his horse had taken him. It wasn’t quite the right shade of green; it put him in mind of tarnished copper. He’d never seen any leaves that looked like these: they might almost have been blades of grass growing along its branches. It didn’t have flowers, but those red disks with black centers at the ends of some of the branches might have done the same job. Sam reined in. “Can I get a closer look at it?”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Watkins said.
Sam dismounted as clumsily as he’d boarded his horse. He walked over to the plant from the Lizards’ world, scuffing up dust at every step. When he reached out to touch it, he yelped and jerked his hand back in a hurry. “It’s like a nettle,” he said. “It’s got little sharp doohickeys”-a fine scientific term, that-“in between the leaves.”
“Found that out, did you?” Sheriff Watkins’ voice was dry.
Rubbing his hand, Yeager asked, “You ever see anything eating these plants?”
“Nope,” the sheriff answered. “Not unless you mean the Lizards’ animals. Nothin’ that oughta live here’ll touch ’em. Haven’t seen any bees go to those red things, either.”
“All right.” That had been Sam’s next question. He took a notebook from his pocket and scribbled in it. If bees wouldn’t visit these things, how did they get pollinated? Could they get pollinated-or whatever they used as an equivalent-here on Earth? Evidently, or this one wouldn’t be here.
Watkins said, “You put on leather gloves and try and yank that thing out, you’ll find out it’s got roots that go clear to China.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Yeager wrote another note. Back on Home, plants would have to suck up all the water they possibly could. It made sense for them to have roots like that. A lot of Earthly plants did, too. Sam suspected these would prove very efficient indeed.
Sheriff Watkins said, “Come on. These things are just the sideshow. You really want to see the animals, right?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Do I? If these things start crowding out the stuff that used to grow here, what’ll the bugs and the kangaroo rats and the jackrabbits eat? If they don’t eat anything, what’ll the lizards and the bobcats eat? The more you look at things like this, the more complicated they get.” Remounting his horse proved pretty complicated, too, but he managed not to fall off the other side.
“Supposing you’re right,” Watkins said as they rode on toward the animals from Home. “Isn’t that reason enough to give the Lizards hell for what they’re doing to us? What they’re doing to Earth, I mean, not just to the USA.”
“They don’t want to listen,” Yeager answered. “They say we’ve got cows and sheep and dogs and cats and wheat and corn, and that’s what these things are to them: only natural they’ve b
rought ’em along.”
“Natural, my ass.” Watkins spat. “These critters are about the most unnatural-looking things I’ve seen in all my born days.” He pointed ahead. “Look for yourself. We’re close enough now.”
Sure enough, Sam could peer through the dust now and see what raised it. The Lizards’ domestic animals made him feel he’d been yanked back through seventy million years and was staring at a herd of dinosaurs. They weren’t as big as dinosaurs, and they had the Lizards’ turreted eyes, but that was the general impression. They were low-slung, went on all fours, and had, instead of horns, bony clubs on the ends of their tails. One of them whacked another in the side. The one that had been whacked bawled and trotted away.
“Those are zisuili,” Sam said. “The Lizards use them for meat and for their hides. Zisuili leather is top of the line, as far as they’re concerned.”
“Hot damn,” Watkins said sourly. “What do we do about ’em? Look how they eat everything right down to the ground. Worse’n goats, for Christ’s sake. There’s nothing but bare dirt left once they’ve gone through somewhere, and this land won’t take a whole hell of a lot of that.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Yeager answered. “It’s probably why they kick up so much dust.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You were right, Sheriff-this is what I came to find out about, sure enough.”
“I’ve already found out more than I want,” Victor Watkins said. “Question is, like I said, what do we do about the goddamn things?”
The two men had no trouble getting close to the zisuili, though their horses didn’t much care for the alien animals’ smell. Neither odors nor sight of Earthly creatures and people bothered the beasts from Home. Noting that, Yeager said, “We shoot ’em whenever we see ’em. They aren’t shy of us, are they?”
“No, but when the shooting starts they run like hell,” Watkins replied. “A guy with a machine gun would get a lot more done than a guy with a rifle. Desert Center’s a rugged kind of place, but machine guns don’t exactly grow on trees around here.”
