“It’s worse than a Hooverville,” Smithson said grimly. “Most Hoovervilles, they had boxes and boards and sheet metal and what have you to build shacks with. Not much of that kind of stuff here in the middle of nowhere. But people have come anyhow, from miles and miles around.”
“I’ve watched that happen,” Penny said, nodding. “There’s food and water here for prisoners, so people come and try to get some. When the Lizards have anything left over, they give a little. That’s more’n people can get anywheres else, so they keep comin’.”
“Lord,” Auerbach said in his ruined voice. “It’s a wonder they haven’t tried coming into the tents and stealing what the Lizards wouldn’t give ’em.”
“Remember that gunfire the other night?” Penny asked. “A couple of ’em was tryin’ just that. The Lizards shot ’em down like they was dogs. I don’t reckon any more folks’ll try sneakin’ in where the Lizards don’t want ’em to.”
“Sneaking up on the Lizards isn’t easy anyhow,” Dr. Smithson said.
Auerbach looked down at himself, at the much-battered excuse for a carcass he’d be dragging around for the rest of his life.
“Matter of fact, I found out about that. Sneaking away from ’em’s not so easy, either.”
“They have Lizard doctors in Denver, looking out for their people that we caught?” Penny asked.
“Yes-it’s all part of the cease-fire,” Smithson answered. “I almost wish I could have stayed in town to watch them work, too. If we don’t keep fighting them, they’re going to push our medicine forward a hundred years in the next ten or fifteen, we have so much to learn.” He sighed. “But this is important work, too. We may even be able to set up a large-scale prisoner exchange, wounded men for wounded Lizards.”
“That would be good,” Auerbach said. Then he looked over at Penny, whose face bore a stricken expression. She wasn’t a wounded prisoner. He turned his head back toward Smithson. “Would the Lizards let noncombatants out?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor answered. “I can understand why you’d want to find out, though. If this comes off-and there are no guarantees-I’ll see what I can do for you. How’s that?”
“Thank you, sir,” Auerbach said, and Penny nodded. Auerbach’s gaze went toward the canvas tents and old wagons and shelters of brush housing the Americans who’d come to Karval to beg for crumbs of the Lizards’ largesse. Thinking about that brought home like a kick in the teeth what the war had done to the country. He looked down at himself. “You know something? I’m not so bad off after all.”
The buzz of a human-built airplane over Cairo sent Moishe Russie hurrying to the windows of his hotel-room cell for a glimpse. Sure enough, there it was, painted lemon yellow as a mark of truce. “I wonder who’s in that one,” he said to Rivka.
“You’ve said Molotov is already here,” she answered, “so that leaves von Ribbentrop”-she and her husband both donned expressions redolent of distaste-“and the American foreign minister, whatever his name is.”
“Marshall,” Moishe said. “And they call him Secretary of State, for some reason.” He soaked up trivia, valuable or not, like a sponge; the book-learning in medical school had come easy for him because of that. Had his interest lain elsewhere, he would have made a formidableyeshiva-bucher. He turned back to the window. The yellow airplane was lower now, coming in for a landing at the airfield east of town. “That’s not a Dakota. Marshall would fly in one of those, I think. So it’s probably a German plane.”
Rivka sighed. “If you see Ribbentrop, tell him every Jew in the world wished akholeriyeh on him.”
“If he doesn’t know that by now, he’s pretty stupid,” Moishe said.
“Tell him anyway,” his wife said. “You get a chance like that, you shouldn’t waste it.” The drone of the motors faded out of hearing. Rivka laughed, a little uneasily. “That used to be a sound you took for granted. Hearing it here, hearing it now-it’s very strange.”
Moishe nodded. “When the truce talks started, the Lizards tried to insist on flying everyone here in their own planes. I suppose they didn’t want the Nazis-or anyone else-sending a plane full of bombs instead of diplomats. Atvar was very confused when the Germans and the Russians and the U.S.A. all said no. The Lizards haven’t really figured out what all negotiating as equals means. They’ve never had to do it before; they’re used to dictating.”
“It shall be done,” Rivka said in the aliens’ hissing language. Anyone who was around them long learned that phrase. She dropped back into Yiddish: “That’s the way they think. It’s about the only way they think.”
“I know,” Moishe answered. He made as if to pound his head against the wall.“Oy, do I know.”
Through loudspeakers, the muezzins called the faithful to prayer. Cairo slowed down for a little while. Another bright yellow airplane flew low over the city, making for the airport. “That is a Dakota,” Rivka said, coming up to stand by Moishe. “So-Marshall? — is here, too, now.”
“So he is,” Moishe answered. He felt as if he were setting up a game of chess with a friend back in Warsaw, and had just put the last couple of pieces where they belonged. “Now we see what happens next.”
“What will you tell Atvar if he summons you to ask what you think of these people?” Rivka asked.
Moishe used a few clicks and pops himself. “The exalted fleetlord? You mean, besidesgeh in drerd?” Rivka gave him a dangerous look, one that meant,Stop trying to be funny. He sighed and went on, “I don’t know. I’m not even sure why he keeps bringing me in to question me. I wasn’t-”
Rivka made urgent shushing motions. Moishe shut up. He’d started to say something like,I wasn’t anywhere near the caliber of those people. Rivka was right. The Lizards surely monitored everything he said. If they hadn’t figured out for themselves how small a fish he was, no point telling them. Being thought more important than he was might improve both his treatment and his life expectancy.
And sure enough, a couple of hours later Zolraag walked into the hotel room and announced, “You are summoned to the quarters of the exalted fleetlord Atvar. You will come immediately.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Moishe answered. The Lizards certainly hadn’t bothered learning to negotiate with him as an equal. They told him where to go and what to do, and he perforce did it.
The guards didn’t seem quite so eager to shoot him if he so much as stumbled as they had when the Lizards first brought him to Cairo. They still turned out for him full force, though, and transported him from hither to yon and back again in one of their armored personnel carriers, as uncomfortable a mode of travel for a human being as any ever invented.
While they were on their way to Atvar’s headquarters, Zolraag remarked, “Your insights into the political strategies likely to be utilized are of interest to the exalted fleetlord. Having headed a not-empire yourself, you will be prepared to empathize with these other Tosevite males.”
“That’s certainly better than being shot,” Moishe said gravely. He was glad he’d had practice holding his face straight. Yes, he’d headed up the Jews of Poland for a little while after the Lizards came, till he found he could no longer stand to obey them. To imagine that that put him in the same class as Hitler and Hull and Stalin-well, if you could imagine that, you had a vivid and well-stocked imagination. From what he’d gathered, anything smaller than the entire surface of a planet was too small for the Lizards to bother making what they reckoned subtle distinctions in size. The distinctions were anything but subtle to him, but he-thank God! — was not a Lizard.
Atvar rounded on him as soon as he came into the machine-strewn suite the fleetlord occupied. “If we make an agreement with these males, is it your judgment they will abide by it?” he demanded, using Zolraag to translate his words into Polish and German.
This to a man who’d watched Poland carved up between Germany and the USSR after they’d made their secret agreement, and then watched them go to war against each other less than two years later in spite of the agreement still formally in force. Picking his words with care, Moishe answered, “They will-so long as they see keeping the agreement as being in their interest.”