“I was in error in all regards in this matter,” he said. “Our soldier Liu Han had never shown signs of being attracted to me in any way. I was wrong to try to take her for my own pleasure, and wrong again to ignore her when she made it plain she did not want me. She did right to rebuff me, and right again in courageously resisting my treacherous assault. I am glad she succeeded.”
The oddest part of it was, Liu Han believed him. He would have been glad in a different way had he raped her, but his ideology drove him toward recognizing that what he had done was wrong. She didn’t know for certain whether that made her respect the ideology more or frightened her green.
When Hsia Shou-Tao completed the self-criticism, he glanced toward Nieh Ho-T’ing to see whether it had been adequate.No, Liu Han thought, but it was not her place to speak. And, after a moment, Nieh said in a stern voice, “Comrade Hsia, this is not your first failing along these lines-your worst, yes, but far from your first. What have you to say of that?”
Hsia bowed his head again. “I admit it,” he said humbly. “I shall be vigilant from now on in eliminating this flaw from my character. Never again shall I disgrace myself with women. If I should, I am ready to suffer the punishments prescribed by revolutionary justice.”
“See to it that you remember what you have said here today,” Nieh Ho-T’ing warned him in a voice that tolled like a gong.
“Women, too, are part of the revolution,” Liu Han added, which made Nieh, the other men of the executive committee, and even Hsia Shou-Tao nod. She didn’t say anything more, and everyone nodded again: not only did she say what was true, she didn’t rub people’s noses in it. One day, probably one day before too long, the executive committee would need a new member. People would recall her good sense. With that, and with Nieh backing her, she would gain a regular seat here.
Yes,she thought.My time will come.
George Bagnall stared in fascination at the gadgets the Lizards had turned over along with captive Germans and Russians to get their own prisoners back. The small disks were plastic of some sort, with a metallic finish that somehow had shifting rainbows in it. When you put one into a reader, the screen filled with color images more vivid than any he’d ever seen in the cinema.
“How the devil do they do it?” he asked for what had to be the tenth time.
Lizard talk came hissing out of the speakers to either side of the screen. Small as they were, those speakers reproduced sound with greater fidelity than any manufactured by human beings.
“You’re the bleeding engineer,” Ken Embry said. “You’re supposed to tell the rest of us poor ignorant sods how it’s done.”
Bagnall rolled his eyes. How many hundreds of years of scientflic progress for humanity lay between the aircraft engines he’d monitored and these innocent-looking, almost magical disks? Hundreds? Maybe how many thousands.
“Even the alleged explanations we get from Lizard prisoners don’t make much sense-not that anyone here in Pskov speaks their language worth a damn,” Bagnall said. “What the bleeding hell is askelkwank light? Whatever it is, it pulls images and sounds out of one of these little blighters, but I’m buggered if I know how.”
“We don’t even know enough to ask the right questions,” Embry said in a mournful voice.
“Too right we don’t,” Bagnall agreed. “And even though we see the stories and hear the sounds that go with them, most of the time they still don’t make any sense to us: the Lizards are just too strange. And do you know what? I don’t think they’ll be a far-thing’s worth clearer to the Jerries or the Bolsheviks than they are to us.”
“For that matter, what would a Lizard make ofGone With the Wind?” Embry said. “He’d need it annotated the way we have to put footnotes to every third word in Chaucer, but even worse.”
“That bit in the one story where the Lizard kept doing whatever he was doing-looking things up, maybe-and the images appeared one after another on the screen he was watching… What the devil was that supposed to mean?”
Embry shook his head. “Damned if I know. Maybe it was supposed to be all deep and symbolic, or maybe we don’t understand what’s going on, or maybe the Lizard who made the film didn’t understand what was going on. How can we know? How can we even guess?”
“Do you know what it makes me want to do?” Bagnall said.
“If you’re anything like me, it makes you want to go back to our house and drink yourself blind on that clear potato spirit the Russians brew,” Embry said.
“You’ve hit it in one,” Bagnall said. He hefted another story disk and watched the shimmering rainbows shift. “What worries me most about having all these go to the Nazis and the Reds is that. If they do manage to decipher them better than we can in this one-horse town, they’ll learn things we won’t know in England.”
“This thought has crossed my mind,” Embry admitted. “Do recall, though, the Lizards must have left all sorts of rubbish behind when their invasion failed. If we don’t have a goodly number of theseskelkwank readers and the disks that go with them, I’ll be very much surprised.”
“You have a point,” Bagnall said. “The trouble is, of course, it’s rather like-no, it’s exactly like-having a library scattered at random across the landscape. You never can tell beforehand which book will have the pretty picture you’ve been looking for all along.”
“I’ll tell you what I’d like.” Embry lowered his voice; some Red Army men and a fair number from theWehrmacht could follow English. “I’d like to see the Germans and the Russians-to say nothing of the bloody Lizards-scattered at random across the landscape. You couldn’t make me much happier than that.”
“Nor me.” Bagnall looked around at the map-lined chamber where they regularly kept the Nazis and Bolsheviks from going for each other’s throats. The readers and disks were stored there not least because it was tenuously neutral ground, with neither side likely to try to steal everything for itself from it. He sighed. “I wonder if we’ll ever see England again. Not likely, I’m afraid.”
“I fear you’re right.” Embry sighed, too. “We’re doomed to grow old and to die in Pskov-or, more likely, doomed not to grow old and to die in Pskov. Only blind luck’s kept us intact thus far.”
“Blind luck and not getting infatuated with any snipers of the female persuasion, unlike poor Jones,” Bagnall said. He and Embry both laughed, though it wasn’t funny, not really. Bagnall added, “Being around the fair Tatiana is likelier to make certain you don’t grow old and die in Pskov than any other single thing I can think of offhand.”
“How right you are,” Embry said feelingly. He would have gone on in that vein for some time, but Aleksandr German chose that moment to walk into the chamber. He went from English to halting Russian: “Good day, Comrade Brigadier.”
“Hello.” German did not look like a brigadier. With his red mustache, long, unkempt hair, and blazing black eyes, he looked half like a bandit, half like an Old Testament prophet (which occasionally made Bagnall wonder how much distinction there was between those two). Now he looked over at the Lizards’ reading machines. “Marvelous devices.” He said it first in Russian, then in Yiddish, which Bagnall followed better.
“That they are,” Bagnall answered in German, which German the partisan leader also understood.
The brigadier tugged at his beard. He continued in Yiddish, in musing tones: “Before the war, you know, I was not a hunter or a trapper or anything of the sort. I was a chemist here in Pskov, making medicines that did not so much good.” Bagnall hadn’t known that; Aleksandr German usually said but little of himself. His eyes still on the reader, he went on, “I was a boy when the first airplane came to Pskov. I remember the cinema coming, and the wireless, and the talking cinema. How could anything be more modern than the talking cinema? And then the Lizards come and show us we are children, playing with children’s toys.”
“I had this same thought not long ago,” Bagnall said. “I also had it when the first Lizard fighter plane flew past my Lancaste
r. It was worse then.”
Aleksandr German stroked his beard again. “That is right; you are a flier.” His laugh showed bad teeth and missing ones. “Very often I forget this. You and your comrades”-he nodded to Embry, and with the plural included Jones, too-“have done such good work here keeping us and the Nazis more angry at the Lizards than at each other that I do not recall it is not why you came to Pskov.”
“Sometimes we have trouble remembering that ourselves,” Bagnall said. Embry nodded emphatically.
“They have never tried to involve you with the Red Air Force?” German said. Before either Englishman could speak, he answered his own question: “No, of course not. The only aircraft we’ve had around these parts areKukuruzniks, and they wouldn’t bother foreign experts over such small and simple things.”
“I suppose not,” Bagnall said, and sighed. The biplanes looked as if they flew themselves, and as if anyone with a spanner and a screwdriver could repair them. Having him work on one would have been like calling out the head of the Royal College of Surgeons for a hangnail, but he wouldn’t have minded fiddling about with any kind of aircraft.
Aleksandr German studied him. He’d had a lot of Russians and Germans study him since he’d got to Pskov. Most of the time, he had no trouble figuring out what they were thinking: how can I use this chap for my own advantage? They were usually so obvious about it, it wasn’t worth getting annoyed over. He couldn’t so readily fathom the partisan brigadier’s expression.
At last, perhaps talking as much to himself as to Bagnall, Aleksandr German said, “If you cannot use your training against the Lizards here, you might do well with the chance to use it someplace else. So you might.”
Again, he didn’t wait for a reply. Scratching his head and muttering under his breath, he strode out of the chamber. Bagnall and Embry both stared after him. “You don’t suppose he meant he could get us back to England-do you?” Embry whispered, sounding afraid to mention the thought aloud.
“I doubt it,” Bagnall answered. “More likely, he’s just wondering if he can turn us into a couple of Stalin’s Hawks. Even that wouldn’t be so bad-bit of a change from what we’ve been doing, what? As for the other-” He shook his head. “I don’t dare think about it.”
“Wonder what’s left of Blighty these days,” Embry murmured. Bagnall wondered, too. Now he knew he would keep on wondering, and wondering if there really was a way to get home again. No point dreaming about what you knew you couldn’t have. But if you thought you might somehow-Hope was out of its box now. It might disappoint him, but he knew he’d never be without it again.
The Tosevite hatchling was out of its box again, and all-seeing spirits of Emperors past only knew what it would get into next. Even with his swiveling eye turrets, Ttomalss had an ever more difficult time keeping track of the hatchling when it started crawling on the laboratory floor. He wondered how Big Ugly females, whose vision had a field of view far more limited than his own, managed to keep their hatchlings away from disaster.
A lot of them didn’t. He knew that. Even in their most technologically sophisticated not-empires, the Big Uglies lost appalling numbers of hatchlings to disease and accident. In the less sophisticated areas of Tosev 3, somewhere between a third and a half of the hatchlings who emerged from females’ bodies perished before the planet had taken one slow turn around its star.
The hatchling crawled out to the doorway that opened onto the corridor. Ttomalss’ mouth dropped open in amusement. “No, you can’t get out, not these days,” he said.
As if it understood him, the hatching made the irritating noises it emitted when frustrated or annoyed. He’d had a technician make a wire mesh screen he could set in the doorway and fasten to either side of it. The hatchling wasn’t strong enough to pull down the wire or clever enough to unscrew the mounting brackets. It was, for the moment, confined.
“And you won’t risk extermination by crawling off into Tessrek’s area,” Ttomalss told it. That could have been funny, but wasn’t. Ttomalss, like most males of the Race, had no particular use for Big Uglies. Tessrek, though, had conceived a venomous hatred for the hatchling in particular, for its noise, for its odor, for its mere existence. If the hatchling went into his territory again, he might bring himself to the notice of the disciplinarians. Ttomalss didn’t want that to happen; it would interfere with his research.
The hatchling knew none of that. The hatching knew nothing about anything; that was its problem. It pulled itself upright by clinging to the wire and stared out into the corridor. It made more little whining noises. Ttomalss knew what they meant: I want to go out there.
“No,” he said. The whining noises got louder;no was a word the hatchling understood, even if one it usually chose to ignore. It whined some more, then added what sounded like an emphatic cough: I really want to go out there.
“No,” Ttomalss said again, and the hatchling went from whining to screaming. It screamed when it didn’t get what it wanted. When it screamed, all the researchers along the whole corridor joined in hating both it and Ttomalss for harboring it.
He went over and picked it up. “I’m sorry,” he lied as he earned it away from the door. He distracted it with a ball he’d taken from an exercise chamber. “Here, you see? This stupid thing bounces.” The hatchling stared in evident amazement. Ttomalss knew relief. It wasn’t always easy to distract any more; it remembered what it had been doing and what it wanted to do.
But the ball seemed interesting. When it stopped bouncing, the hatchling crawled over to it, picked it up, and stuck it up against its mouth. Ttomalss had been sure it would do that, and had washed the ball beforehand. He’d learned the hatchling would stick anything it could into its mouth, and learned not to let it get its hands on things small enough to go inside there. Sticking his hand into its slimy little maw to retrieve this or that was not something he relished, and he’d already had to do it more than once.
The communicator squawked for his attention. Before going to answer, he quickly scanned the area where the Tosevite sat to make sure nothing swallowable was close by. Satisfied over that, he answered the instrument.
Ppevel’s face stared out of the screen at him. “Superior sir,” he said, activating his own video.
“I greet you, Psychologist,” Ppevel said. “I am to warn you that there is an increased probability you will be required to turn over the Tosevite hatchling upon which you are currently conducting research to the Big Ugly female from whose body it emerged. Do not merely be prepared for this eventuality; anticipate it as near-term reality.”
“It shall be done,” Ttomalss said; he was, after all, a male of the Race. Even as he pledged obedience, though, he knew a sinking feeling. He did his best not to show it as he asked, “Superior sir, what has led to this hasty decision?”
Ppevel hissed softly;hasty was a term of condemnation among the Race. But he answered civilly enough: “The female from whose body this hatchling came has acquired increased status in the People’s Liberation Army, the Tosevite group in China responsible for most of the guerrilla activity against us there. Thus, propitiating her is of increased priority when compared to its importance a short while ago.”
“I-see,” Ttomalss said slowly. As he tried to think, the Tosevite hatchling started whimpering. It got nervous now when he was out of its sight for very long. Doing his best to ignore the little squalling nuisance, he tried to keep his wits on the course they had begun. “If this female’s status in the outlaw organization is lowered, then, superior sir, the pressure to turn over the hatchling also lessens once more, is that not correct?”
“In theory, yes,” Ppevel replied. “How you can hope to turn theory to practice in this particular instance is difficult for me to comprehend. Our influence over any Tosevite groups, even those allegedly favoring us, is more limited than we would like; our influence over those in active opposition to us is, for all practical purposes, nil except for measures military.”
He was right, of course. The Bi
g Uglies were prone to believe that what they wanted would come true merely because they wanted it. The delusion afflicted the Race to a lesser degree.And yet, Ttomalss thought,there ought to be a way. It wasn’t as if the female Liu Han had had no contact with the Race before giving birth to this hatchling. The small creature had been conceived in an orbiting starship; its mother had been part of the Race’s initial study cadre on the bizarre nature of Tosevite sexuality and mating patterns.
All at once, Ttomalss’ mouth fell open. “Are you laughing at me, Psychologist?” Ppevel asked, his voice soft and dangerous.
“By no means, superior sir,” Ttomalss answered hastily. “I do believe, however, that I have devised a way to lower the status of the female Liu Han. If successful, as you say, this will lower her rank and prestige in the People’s Liberation Army and will allow my vital research program to continue.”
“My belief is that you place higher priority on the second than on the first,” Ppevel said. Since that was true, Ttomalss did not reply. Ppevel went on, “I forbid military action against or assassination of the female in question. Either of these tactics, even if successful, will raise rather than lower her status. Some males have fallen into the slipshod Tosevite habit of obeying only such orders as suit them. You would be most unwise, Psychologist, to number yourself among them in this particular case.”
“It shall be done as you say in every particular, superior sir,” Ttomalss promised. “I have no plans for violence against the Big Ugly in question. I plan to reduce her status through ridicule and humiliation.”
“If this can be done, well enough,” Ppevel said. “Getting the Big Uglies even to notice they have been humiliated, though, is a difficult undertaking.”
“Not in all instances, superior sir,” Ttomalss said. “Not in all instances.” He made his good-byes, checked the hatchling-which, for a wonder, hadn’t got into any mischief-and then went to work on the computer. He knew just where to look for the data sequences he had in mind.