Second Contact (50 page)

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 Léon. 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.

“Colonists here, too.” Now Penny didn’t sound so happy. “I hope the Lizards I knew are still around. If they aren’t, that complicates things.” She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

She pulled the Ford to a stop next to one of the shanties of the little human hamlet that had grown up to serve the Lizards and the people who labored for them. When she got out, Auerbach did, too. The fellow behind the battered bar of what turned out to be a tavern looked up and addressed Penny not in Spanish or English but in the Lizards’ language: “I greet you, superior female. I have not seen you for too long.”

“I greet you, Estéban,” Penny answered in the same language. Auerbach followed it haltingly. She went on, “I need to see Kahanass. Is he still here?” When the Mexican nodded, she broke into a grin. “Can you get someone to tell him I am here?”

“It shall be done,” Estéban said, one phrase in the Lizards’ language almost everyone understood. He shouted in Spanish. When a teenage kid stuck his head in the door, he sent him off. Then, to Rance’s relief, he turned out to speak some English: “You want beers?”

“Oh, Christ, yes!” Rance exclaimed. He sucked down a blood-temperature Dos Equis as if it were the nectar of the gods.

Before too long, the teenager came back, a Lizard in tow. “I greet you, Kahanass,” Penny said. “I have things you may want to see, if you have things you can give me.”

Kahanass wore the body paint of a radar operator. “Truth?” he asked, another Lizard word with broad currency among humans. “I did not expect you to come back here with things for me to see, but I will look at them. If I like them, I may have things to give you.” He swung an eye turret toward Auerbach. “Who is this Tosevite? Have I seen him before? I do not think so. Can I trust him?”

“You can trust him,” Penny said. “He and I have mated. He has killed my enemies.”

“It is good,” Kahanass said. “Bring me these things, then, so I may look at them. If I like them . . .” His voice trailed away. People who bought and sold ginger spoke in circumlocutions. If someone was listening, if someone was recording, that made proving what they were up to harder.

“It shall be done.” Penny went out and opened the Ford’s trunk, returning with a couple of suitcases.

Kahanass recoiled from them. “Phew! What is that horrible stink?”

“Lighter fluid,” she answered in English. The Lizard evidently understood, for he didn’t ask her to explain. She went on, “It keeps the animals from smelling whatever else is inside. None of it got on whatever else is inside.” She opened a suitcase. “You can tell that for yourself, if you like.”

Kahanass took a taste. He hissed with pleasure. “Yes!” He used an emphatic cough. “Yes, I shall have things. I shall indeed. You wait here. Estéban has a scale. He will weigh out these things and weigh out the pay.”

“It shall be done,” Penny said as the Lizard hurried out of the tavern. She turned to Auerbach. “You see, sweetheart? No trouble at all.”

“Yeah.” Rance nodded. For the first time, Tahiti started to look real to him. He thought about island girls not overly burdened with clothing. A man could get used to that, even if he didn’t do anything but watch. And if he did . . . well, if he was careful, odds were he could get away with it.

Estéban took a scale out from under the bar and set it on the counter. It looked like the balances Rance had used in chemistry classes at West Point. Penny nodded at it. “We’re gonna be a while, weighing all I got on those litty bitty scales.”

“That’s okay,” Rance said expansively. “We haven’t got anywhere more important we’re supposed to be.” With money or gold or whatever the Lizards paid in straight ahead, all they had to do was get back across the border and into the USA again. And that was the easy part; as a general rule, folks didn’t smuggle things into the United States from Mexico, but rather the other way around.

Penny looked out the window. “Here he comes back again,” she said. “Boy, he didn’t waste any time there, did he? He wants some for himself, and he’ll sell the rest.”

“Sounds good to me,” Auerbach agreed.

In came Kahanass. “I will pay gold at the usual rate,” he said. “Is it good?”

“Superior sir, it is very good,” Penny said.

That was when things went to hell. A couple of Lizards with rifles burst into the tavern behind Kahanass. “You are prisoners!” they shouted, first in their own language and then in English. Three more burst in from a back entrance behind the bar. They also yelled, “You are prisoners! Do not move, or you are dead prisoners!”

Kahanass cried out in horror. Rance’s hand started to slide toward the waistband of his trousers. It didn’t get more than an inch or two before it froze. Unlike the bruisers in his apartment, the Lizards didn’t take him for granted. If he pulled out a pistol, they’d plug him.

He wondered what had gone wrong. Had the Lizards been watching Kahanass? Or had some of Penny’s former friends tipped them off that she might be going into business for herself? He glanced over to her. Her face was set and tense. Like him, she’d looked for a chance to fight and hadn’t seen any. He shrugged, which hurt. “Well, babe, so much for Tahiti,” he said, which hurt even worse.

When her telephone rang these days, Monique Dutourd flinched. Calls were all too likely to be from people with whom she didn’t want to talk. But she had to answer anyhow, on the chance things would be different this time.
“Allô?”

“Hello, Monique,” came the quiet, steady voice on the other end of the line. She sighed. As if she didn’t know that voice better than she wanted to, it continued, “
Ici
Dieter Kuhn. I have an interesting story to tell you.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear from you at all. Don’t you understand that?”

“It is relevant,” the SS man said. “You would be well advised to listen to me.”

“Go ahead, then,” Monique said tightly. Kuhn could have done much worse than he had. She kept reminding herself of that. No doubt he wanted her to remind herself of that. If she terrorized herself, she did his work for him. She understood as much, but couldn’t help the fear.

“Merci,”
Kuhn said. “I want to tell you about the inventiveness of a certain Lizard.” Monique blinked; that wasn’t what she’d expected. The German officer went on, “It seems a certain female recently agreed to taste ginger and come into season so males could mate with her—provided they first transferred funds from their credit balances to hers.”

It needed a moment to sink in. When it did, Monique blurted,
“Merde alors!
The Lizards have invented prostitution!”

“Exactly,” Kuhn said. “And what one has thought to do, others will think of before long. This will make the problem they face from ginger even worse than it is already. It will make the pressure on your brother even worse than it is already. He remains uncooperative, you know.”

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Monique answered. “If you don’t know that, you should. He doesn’t care whether I live or die.” In a way, saying that wounded her. In a different way, her words were like a paid-up life-insurance policy. If Pierre didn’t care what happened to her, and if the SS knew he didn’t care, they wouldn’t have any incentive to start carving chunks off her.

“Unfortunately, I believe you have reason,” Dieter Kuhn said. “Otherwise, we might have made the experiment by now.”

She did not, she would not, let him know he had frightened her. “If that is all you have to say, you wasted your time calling,” she told him, and hung up.

But going back to work after a call like that was almost impossible. The Latin inscriptions might have been composed in Annamese, for all the sense they made to Monique. And whatever she had been on the point of saying about them had gone clean out of her head. She cursed Kuhn both in standard French and with the rich
galéjades
of the Marseille dialect.

Having done that, she spent a while cursing her brother. If he’d chosen a more reputable profession than smuggler, she wouldn’t be in trouble now. With a sigh, she shook her head. That probably wasn’t so. She might not be in this particular trouble right now. She would probably be in some other trouble. Trouble, her whole life argued, was part of the human condition—and an all too prominent part, at that.

She went back to the inscriptions. They still didn’t mean much. The Lizards thought humans very strange because the past of less than two thousand years before was different enough to be of interest. Almost all their history was modern history: history of well-known beings who thought much like them.

The knock on her door came two nights later. She was brushing her teeth, getting ready for bed. At that sharp, peremptory sound, she had to grab desperately to keep from dropping the glass. The Nazis did not let late-night knocks appear in books or films or televisor or radio plays. Such silence fooled no one Monique knew. The knock came again, louder than before.

Monique thanked heaven that she hadn’t yet changed into her nightclothes. Still in the day’s attire, she kept a shred of dignity she would have lost. Even so, she went to the door as slowly as she could. Had she not been sure the SS men outside would kick it in, she would not have gone at all.

She opened it. Of course none of the neighbors had come out to see what the racket was; they would be glad it wasn’t
their
racket. To her surprise, there in the hallway stood neither Dieter Kuhn nor his friends in field-gray uniforms and black jackboots but a dumpy, middle-aged Frenchman in baggy trousers and a beret that sat on his head like a cowflop.