“Damned if I’ll argue with you there,” Hollins said with a chuckle, “but there’s a hell of a lot of people I’d sooner have living next door to me than those guys, too. Like all the rest of the human race, for instance.”
“That’s true,” Sam admitted. “Other thing is, though, the Lizards are sort of distracted right now. They’re trying to decide what to do about ginger and what it does to their females. That’ll keep them busy for a while, unless I miss my guess. I’ve been trying to lend a hand, you might say.”
“I don’t know about a hand,” Colonel Hollins said. “I’d give ’em a finger any old day, though.” Sam laughed. Hollins went on, “Yeah, if sex won’t distract you, I don’t know what will. Here’s hoping they stay distracted for a long time, too.”
“They may,” Yeager said. “This isn’t like anything they’ve run into before. The ginger bomb somebody threw at Australia showed how big a problem it could be. And just being horny from one day to the next is confusing the heck out of them.”
“Good,” Hollins said. “We already drank to that once, remember? Let ’em stay confused. The more confused they are, the less time they have to go poking their snouts into our affairs. And that’s what it’s all about, Major.” He spoke with great certainty. Yeager got the idea he usually did.
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. It wasn’t as if Hollins were wrong. If he came down a little hard for human beings, well, why not? He was one. So was Sam. He still wanted justice done on the human beings who had committed the perfectly human crime of murder by blowing up the ships of the colonization fleet.
Rance Auerbach looked toward the border between the United States and Lizard-held Mexico. “I hear they’ve got dogs trained to sniff for ginger these days,” he said as Penny Summers eased the old Ford she’d bought one step closer to the checkpoint.
“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.