It was a very unpleasant way to come full circle.
When the Lizards first came to Earth, Moishe Russie had been starving in the Warsaw ghetto, praying for a sign from God that He would not abandon His people. Russie had taken the nuclear bomb they’d exploded high above Central Europe as a sign his prayer was being answered, though he’d learned later that the Lizards had hoped to use the blast to scramble communications and disrupt electronics generally. For reasons he didn’t altogether understand, it hadn’t worked out as they’d expected.
That wasn’t the point, though. When the light in the sky answered his prayer, people in the ghetto had started calling himReb Moishe, and some of them had even looked on him as a prophet. He hadn’t believed that himself, not really, but sometimes you wondered.
Now, crouched down in a rubble-strewn St. Albans street between a theater left over from the days of ancient Rome and the even more battered ruins of what had been some wealthy noble’s mansion a couple of hundred years before, he wondered again. As he’d predicted to Nathan Jacobi, here he was in British service, wearing a Red Cross armband.
“I didn’t think about the gas mask, though,” he said. The mask distorted his voice and made him sound like something from another planet, although not, thank God, a Lizard. With its long snout and the tube running down to the chemical canister that purified the air, the mask made him look inhuman, too: rather like a kangaroo with an elephant’s trunk.
Not only did it change the way he looked, it changed the way he saw. Peering out at the world through a pair of portholes that got dirty whenever they felt like it and stayed more or less permanently steamed up made him appreciate what a marvel normal vision was.
Somewhere north of St. Albans, the Lizards were licking their wounds. They’d been in the city itself till a barrage of mustard gas and phosgene, followed by a desperate infantry attack, drove them out again. Now St. Albans was in British hands once more. Moishe wondered when the Lizards would start using poison gas of their own. It probably wouldn’t be long. He also wondered if anyone on either side would be alive when the war was over.
Down in the Roman theater, someone called out “Help!” in a drowned, choking voice. The cry wasn’t Yiddish or Polish; Moishe had to translate it into a language he habitually used. Then he realized it wasn’t English, either. That was a hurt Lizard down there.
He hesitated no more than a heartbeat before he scrambled down into the remains of the theater. He wondered for a moment what sort of plays the ancient inhabitants of St. Albans (which surely hadn’t been the Roman name for the place) had watched there. The theater was shaped like a capital C, with a colonnade-one column still miraculously standing-behind the rectangular stage that occupied what would have been the open space keeping the C from becoming an O. Curved banks of earth formed the letter itself, and showed where the seats had been.
The Lizard lay in the flat, open area in the center of the theater. Would that have been called the orchestra? Moishe knew only slightly more of the classical theater than he did of the fine points of Chinese calligraphy.
That also held true, he realized, for what he knew about how to treat injured Lizards-not that any human being was likely to be expert in that field. “I’ll do what I can,” he muttered inside the mask. He’d dealt with the Lizards long enough in Warsaw to come to see them as people, too. And Lizard prisoners were valuable. He hadn’t had much in the way of a briefing before they sent him out to do his best for King and Country (not his king or his country, but that was irrelevant now), but they’d made that crystal clear.
Then he got a clearer look through his dirty, steamy windows on the world and realized this Lizard wasn’t going to live long enough to be worth anything as a captive. Its body was covered with blisters, some of them bigger than Moishe’s fist. The blisters destroyed the patterns of its body paint. They seemed to cluster under its arms and at the join of its legs, although it also had one that swallowed up an eye turret. From the bubbling way it breathed, Russie was sure the mustard gas was wrecking its lungs as well.
The Lizard could still see out of the eye the gas had not destroyed. “Help me,” it gasped, not caring in the least that he was a despised Tosevite. “Hurts.” It added the emphatic cough, then kept on coughing and couldn’t stop. Bloody bubbles came out of its mouth and nostrils.
“Help how?” Russie asked with an interrogative cough. “Not know.” Seeing what the gas had done left him sick to his stomach, although being sick inside a gas mask was anything but a good idea.
“I don’t know how,” the Lizard answered, more fluent now that Russie had spoken to it in its own language. “You Big Uglies made this horrible stuff. You must have the antidote for it.”
“No antidote,” Moishe answered. There was an ointment that was supposed to do some good on mustard gas burns and blisters, but he had none and, in any case, word was the stuff didn’t really help.
“Then kill me,” the Lizard said. “Kill me, I beg.” Another emphatic cough turned into another paroxysm that tore the Lizard to pieces from the inside out.
Moishe stared at it in dismay. Everything he’d learned in medical school, everything trained into him as a Jew, made him want to cry “No!” and to flee from the abominable act he’d been asked to perform. One of the things they had warned him about in medical school was that you didn’t learn everything you needed to become a doctor there. He’d seen that in Warsaw from 1939 on; now he saw it again, even more starkly.
“I beg,” the Lizard said.
He looked around. The Lizard must not have been gassed here, for he didn’t see its rifle. He had no weapons himself; medical personnel were supposed to be noncombatants. What was he supposed to do, bash in its head with a rock? He didn’t think he could, no matter how much the Lizard wanted him-neededhim-to do just that.
While he stood there in his own mental torment, yet another coughing fit wracked the Lizard. The coughs subsided to gasps; the gasps stopped. “Oh, thank God!” Moishe exclaimed. Sometimes even death could be a blessing-and he hadn’t had to inflict it.
Since Lizards didn’t wear clothes, they carried what they needed in a pack on their back and in belt pouches. Russie peeled off the pack and undid the pouches. Then, because sitting out in the middle of the orchestra made him feel naked and exposed to artillery and whatever live Lizards might still be in the neighborhood, he took the chattels first up onto the stage, where he could shelter behind the one intact column and the stubs of the others, and then down into a shell hole behind it. He didn’t think he could find better cover than that.
He opened the pack first. In it were several full magazines for the automatic rifles the Lizards used. Those would be useful; a few Englishmen carried captured Lizard weapons, and they were always crying for ammunition.
He also found half a dozen little bricks of what the Lizards reckoned field rations, each one wrapped in stuff that reminded him of cellophane but was thicker, more pliable, and less shiny. Lizard prisoners were welcome to the rations, which struck him as distinctly unappetizing. He wondered more about their wrapping: what it was and how they made it. It wasn’t really like anything mankind turned out.
Something else spilled out of the pack, a case about the size of a ration brick. “Better and better,” Moishe said to no one in particular. The case was a wireless set, though how the Lizards managed to build such a tiny wireless was beyond him-and beyond the best human scientists and engineers in the world, too.
In the same way that the ration wrappers reminded him of cellophane, the material from which the case was made put him in mind of Bakelite. But it wasn’t Bakelite; it was another one of the types of stuff the Lizards could manufacture and people couldn’t.