Second Contact

She went into the bathroom to wipe off her chin. Auerbach went in himself after she came out. When he emerged, he had a cigarette going. He took it out of his mouth and looked at it. “Damn things are hell on your wind,” he said, “but I don’t have much wind anyhow. And I like ’em.”

“You had enough wind there,” Pe

Auerbach sat down on the bed. His breath caught as his leg twinged when he shifted position, but he didn’t feel too bad once he’d stopped moving. He laughed a little. Maybe afterglow was good for aches and pains. He wished he were able to experiment more often. Had he been younger, he could have.

But afterglow lasted only so long and meant only so much. After he stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray made from the casing of a five-inch shell, he said, “I didn’t want to pry too much before, but now that they know you’re here, I reckon I’ve earned the right to know: just who are they, anyway?”

By the way she nodded, Pe

“It’s sure as hell illegal everywhere the Lizards run things, though,” Rance said.

“Oh, I know that,” Pe

“Did you?” Auerbach asked. “That’s not quite what you said when you showed up on my doorstep, you know. No wonder they aren’t very happy with you.”

“No wonder at all,” Pe

“I believe that.” Auerbach’s comment was completely matter-of-fact. Only after he’d spoken did he wonder how he’d come to take thieving and everything that went with it so much for granted. This wasn’t the life he’d had in mind when he went off to West Point. He’d always known he might die for his country. The idea had never fazed him. But getting shot up and discarded as useless, left to live out the rest of his days as best he could-that had never crossed his mind, not then. “God damn the Lizards,” he repeated, this time for a different reason.

“Amen,” Pe

“Yeah.” But thinking of the Lizards one way made Rance think of them another way. “Christ! Those damn chameleon-faces aren’t going to come after you along with the real people you stiffed, are they?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t think so, though. They’ve got enough trouble telling one person from another one, and they hadn’t seen me all that often.” She lit another cigarette. Rance watched her cheeks hollow as she sucked in smoke. They’d hollowed the same way while she’d been… She forced his mind back onto the Lizards, saying, “If they’d been after me, they’d have blown up this apartment house instead of the airfield outside of town.”

“Different batch of Lizards,” he said, before realizing she already knew that. He chuckled. “Okay. A.45’ll stop those bastards, too, believe you me it will-knock ’em ass over teakettle. Your gun’ll do the job on a Lizard, probably better than it would on a person.”

“I can take care of myself,” Pe

“Sure, babe. Sure.” Auerbach didn’t want to argue with her. He hadn’t particularly wanted her here-she’d walked out on him, after all, and never looked back: never till she needed him again, anyhow. Now she’d walked back in without a backwards glance, too, and he’d discovered he was glad she had. In crassest terms, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d got so much.

“We’re all right, the two of us,” she said, as if she’d picked the thought out of his back pocket. “We’re both a couple of wrecks, and we deserve each other.”

“Yeah,” he said, one more time. But there was a difference, and he knew it even if she didn’t. He’d been wrecked. If the Lizards hadn’t done their best to kill him, he’d probably be a colonel by now, maybe even a brigadier general if he caught some breaks along the way. Pe

She said, “The Lizards didn’t do that much harm, not when you look at the whole country. Things’ll be all right. And when you look at you and me, things’ll be all right there, too, for as long as we want ’em to be.”

“If I had a drink, I’d drink to that,” Auerbach said. Pe

“Comrade General Secretary,” Vyacheslav Molotov’s secretary said, “the Lizards’ ambassador has arrived, along with his interpreter.”

“I quiver with delight,” Molotov said, his features expressionless as usual. His secretary gave him an odd look. Good, he thought. I am not entirely predictable. “Send him-send them-in, Pyotr Maksimovich.”

In came Queek. In with him came the Pole who did his translating. After the usual exchange of politely insincere greetings, the Lizard said, “We have struck at you, as we promised we would do. Remember, only our mercy and our uncertainty as to the degree of your guilt made the blow light. If we prove you were responsible for this outrage, we shall strike again, and heavily.”

“Since we were not responsible, you ca

“Your assertions have not always proved reliable,” Queek said: half a step short of calling Molotov a liar. The translator smiled as he turned the Lizard’s words into Russian. Sure as sure, he had some axe to grind against the Soviet Union.

“Here is an assertion that is altogether reliable,” Molotov said: “If you presume to violate our territory again, we shall move in our own interest. This may include combat with the Race. It may include rethinking our position on your imperialist aspirations in China. And it may include rethinking our relationship with the Greater German Reich.”

After the interpreter translated that, Queek spoke one word. Again, the interpreter smiled as he turned it into Russian: “Bluff.”

“You know better,” Molotov said, addressing the fellow directly. “Remind your principal that the USSR and the Reich enjoyed a nonaggression pact for almost two years before coming to blows. We cooperated to some degree against the Race during the fighting. If we both see ourselves threatened, we can cooperate again.”

Not smiling any more, the Pole spoke in the Lizards’ language. Queek listened intently, then said, “It is precisely the instability of your species that makes you so dangerous.”

“We are not unstable,” Molotov said. “We are progressive.”