Gnik stood and waited for a few minutes, presumably to let the drug take full effect. Larssen wondered if he’d throw up all the canned goods he’d been eating lately. His mind felt detached from his body; it was almost as if he were looking down on himself from the ceiling.
Gnik asked, “What is your name?”
What is my name? Jens wondered. What a good question. He wanted to giggle, but didn’t have the energy. What had he been calling himself lately, anyhow? Remembering was a triumph. “Pete Smith,” he said proudly.
Gnik hissed. He and the other Lizards talked among themselves for a couple of minutes. The officer swung his turreted eyes back toward Larssen. “Where you going when we catch you on that-thing?” He still couldn’t remember the name for a bicycle.
“To, to visit my cousins west of, of, Montpelier.” Sticking to his story wasn’t easy for Jens, but he managed. Maybe he’d already told it so many times that it felt true for him. And maybe the Lizards’ drug wasn’t as good as they thought it was. In a pulp science-fiction story, it was easy enough to imagine something one day, create it the next, and use it the day after that. Reality was different, as he’d found out time and again at the Met Lab: nature usually proved less tractable than pulp writers made it out to be.
Gnik hissed again. Maybe he wasn’t convinced the drug was everything it was supposed to be-or maybe he had been convinced Jens was lying through his teeth and had got a nasty shock when he didn’t come out with something new under the drug. Not only was the Lizard stubborn, he was sneaky as well. “Tell me more of the male of this grouping of yours, this cousin Osscar.” He put a hiss in the middle of the name, too.
“His name is, is Olaf,” Larssen said, scenting the trap just in time. “He’s my father’s brother’s son.” He quickly rattled off the names of the fictitious Olaf’s equally fictitious family. He hoped that would keep Gnik from trying to trip him up with them; it also helped fix them in his own mind.
The Lizards went back to talking to one another again. After a while, Gnik returned to English. “We still do not find this-these-cousins of yours anywhere about.”
“I can’t help that,” Larssen said. “For all I know, maybe it’s because you’ve killed them. But I hope not.”
“More probably because their neighbors do not tell us who they are.” Did Gnik sound conciliatory? Larssen hadn’t heard conciliation in a Lizard’s voice often enough to be sure. “Some of you Big Uglies do not care for the Race.”
“Why do you suppose that is?” Jens asked.
“It is a puzzlement,” Gnik said, so seriously that Larssen knew he really was puzzled. Are they that stupid? he wondered. But the Lizards weren’t stupid, not even slightly, or they’d never have been able to come to Earth, never have been able to make and drop their atomic bombs. They were sure naive, though. Had they expected to be welcomed as liberators?
Even under the mildly euphoric buzz of the not-quite-truth drug, Larssen worried a little. Suppose the Lizards decided to let him go and then followed him while he tried to find his cousins’ farm? That would be the best way to make him out a liar. Or would it? He could always point to a ruined one and claim Olaf et mythical cetera had lived there.
The Lizards were chattering back and forth one more time. Gnik cut off debate with a sharp motion of his hand. He swung his eyes toward Larssen. “What you say with the drug in you must be true. So my superiors have told me; thus, so it must be. And if it is true, you is-are-no danger to the Race. You may go. Take up the things that are yours and travel on, Pete Smith.”
“Just like that?” Larssen blurted. An instant later, he bit his tongue, which made him yelp-it was sore. But did he want the Lizard to change its mind? Like hell he did! His next question was distinctly more practicaclass="underline" “Where’s my bike?”
Gnik understood the word, even if he couldn’t recall it. “It will go to where you are being kept. Go there now yourself to take up the things that are yours.”
Along with the drug-induced euphoria, Jens now had his own genuine variety. He put his cold-weather gear back on, all but floated over the snow back to the Baptist church. Questions rang out “What happened?” “What’d they want with you?”
“They’re letting me go,” he said simply. He was still absorbing the magnitude of his own luck. Back in White Sulphur Springs, Colonel Groves-or was it General Marshall? — had told him the Lizards were worse than Russians for depending on their higher-ups to tell them what to do. Gnik’s higher-ups had told him he had a real live truth drug here, and as far as he was concerned, that made it Holy Writ. As long as the higher-ups were right, it was a good enough system. When they were wrong…
Half the people in the church came running forward to pound his back and shake his hand. Sal’s kiss was so authoritative, his arms automatically tightened around her. She molded herself to him, ground her hips against his crotch. “Lucky bastard,” she whispered when she finally pulled away.
“Yeah,” he muttered, dazed. All at once, he wanted not to leave… at least for one night. But no. If he didn’t get out while he could, the Lizards were liable to wonder why-and liable to change their minds. That did not bear thinking about.
He pushed through the friendly little crowd to get his belongings from the pew he’d come to call his own. As he slung his knapsack over his shoulders, he noticed for the first time the men and women who’d hung back from offering best wishes. Not to put too fine a point on it, they looked as if they hated him. Several-women and men both-turned away so he would not see them cry. He all but ran toward the doorway. No, even if the Lizards allowed it, he could not stay another night, not for Sal and all her blowsy charms. Even a few seconds of that envy and rage were more than he could stand.
The Lizards were efficient enough. By the time he got outside, one of them had his bicycle waiting. As he swung up onto it, he got a last glimpse of pale, hungry faces staring out from inside the church at the freedom they could not share. He’d expected to feel a lot of different things when he was set free, but never shame. He started to pedal. Snow kicked up from under his wheels. In bare seconds, the hamlet of Fiat vanished behind him.
After less than an hour, he stopped for a blow. He wasn’t in the shape he’d enjoyed before the Lizards put him out of circulation for a while. “Gotta keep going or I’ll stiffen up,” he said aloud. Unlike his wind, the habit of talking to himself came back right away.
When he came upon the signs announcing Montpelier, he skirted the town on the best paths he could find, then returned to Highway 18. For the next few days, everything seemed to go right. He rode around Marion as he had Montpelier, sailed right on through Sweetser and Converse, Wawpekong and Galveston. Whenever he needed food, he found some. Whenever he was tired, a hayloft or an abandoned farmhouse seemed to beckon.
Once, in a bureau drawer, he even found a pack of Philip Morrises. He hadn’t had a cigarette since he couldn’t remember when; he smoked himself light-headed and half-sick in an orgy of making up for lost time. “Worth it,” he declared as he coughed his way through the next day.
He saw few people as he rolled through central Indiana. That suited him fine. He saw even fewer Lizards, and that suited him better-how was he supposed to explain what he was doing a good many miles west of where he’d told Gnik he was going? Luck stayed with him; he didn’t have to.
The war between humans and aliens seemed far away from that nearly deserted winter landscape (although, of course, it wouldn’t have been deserted but for the war). A couple of times, though, off in the distance, he heard gunfire, the widely spaced barks of sporting or military rifles and the chatter of the Lizards’ automatic weapons. And, once-or twice, Lizard planes screamed high overhead, scrawling trails-ice crystals, the physicist part of him said-across the sky.