Down to Earth

Free France was a joke, but a useful joke. The Japanese Empire could have run the French off their South Pacific islands. So could the USA. So could the Lizards, flying out of Australia. Nobody bothered. Neutral ground where nobody asked a whole lot of questions was too useful to everyone.

“I could go for that,” Rance agreed. The ginger he and Pe

Pe

“Okay,” Auerbach said, and then he yawned. “Let’s go to bed.”

“How do you mean that?” Pe

“Damned if I know,” he answered. “Meet me in the bedroom and we’ll both find out.” Five minutes later, two sets of snores rose from the bed.

A couple of evenings afterwards, Rance and Pe

Rance drank scotch that had never been within five thousand miles of Scotland. Pe

“I won’t,” Rance promised. “She’s homely.” Pe

After a while, a big, broad-shouldered black fellow whom Auerbach knew only as Frederick-emphatically not as Fred-came over and sat down beside him. “It is the ginger man,” he said in a rumbling bass. His smile was broad and friendly. Too broad and friendly to be convincing? Rance had never quite figured that out, which meant he stayed wary where Frederick was concerned. The black man inclined his head to Pe

His musical accent made the question less offensive than it might have been otherwise. Pe

In a way, Rance was a

But Frederick shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “Not that kind of ginger, dear lady. The kind that makes the Lizards dance.”

“Ixnay,” Rance muttered to Pe

Pe

If the Negro was a plant, if the Lizards were looking to get Rance and Pe

Damn him, Auerbach thought. He’d made a shrewd guess there. Pe

“Yeah,” Pe

Frederick spoke a sentence in whatever African language he’d grown up with, then translated it into English: “Who is a hunter after the lion bites?” He beamed. “You see? We are not so very different, you people from a far land and me.”

“Maybe not,” Auerbach said. He didn’t want to start a brawl. A couple of bullets had ruined his taste for that, too. Pe

And damned if Frederick wasn’t doing the exact same thing. With a sigh full of longing, he said, “If only I could find enough ginger and the right Lizards, all my worries would be over.”

“Yeah,” Pe

“Hell of a big if,” Rance said, and hoped she was listening to him.

Engine rumbling, Jonathan Yeager’s elderly Ford came to a stop in front of Karen’s house. He killed the engine, jumped out of the car, and hurried toward the door. Summer nights could be chilly in Southern California, but that wasn’t the only, or even the main, reason he wore his T-shirt striped with the fleetlord’s body paint. Karen’s parents were nice people-for old fogies, he added to himself, as he did whenever the thought occurred to him-but they weren’t the sort of folks who took bare chests for granted.

He rang the doorbell. A moment later, the door opened. “Hello, Jonathan,” said Karen’s father, a burly man whose own red hair was going gray. “Come on in. She’ll be ready in two shakes, I promise.”

“Okay, Mr. Culpepper. Thanks,” Jonathan said. He looked around the living room. The Culpeppers didn’t have so many books as his family did, but nobody he knew had as many books as his family did.

“Would you like a Coke, Jonathan?” Mrs. Culpepper asked, coming out of the kitchen. She was a blonde herself, but Karen looked more like her than like her husband. As far as Jonathan was concerned, that was all to the good.

But he shook his head now. “No, thanks. Karen and I will get our sodas and popcorn and candy at the movie.”

Karen came into the front room just then. “Hi!” she said brightly, and wrinkled her nose at Jonathan. She switched to the language of the Race, saying, “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” and dropped into the posture of respect. Then, laughing, she straightened up again. Her own body paint said she was a senior mechanized combat vehicle driver. Her halter top didn’t hide much of it-didn’t hide any, in fact, because she’d continued the pattern on the fabric in washable paint.

Her parents looked at each other. Jonathan saw them roll their eyes. They didn’t take the Race for granted, the way Karen and he did. Well, even his own folks didn’t do that, but they knew how important the Race was. The Culpeppers didn’t seem to get that, either, or to want to get it.

“Have fun at the movie,” Mrs. Culpepper said.

“Don’t get back too late,” Mr. Culpepper added. But his voice didn’t have a growl in it, the way it had when Karen and Jonathan first started dating. He approved of Jonathan, as much as any middle-aged man could approve of the lout going out with his precious daughter.

As soon as the car got moving east up Compton Boulevard, Karen turned to Jonathan and said, “Okay, now you’re going to tell me why you’re so hot to see The Battle of Chicago. I didn’t think war movies were your taste of ginger.” By her tone, if war movies were his taste of ginger, she was wondering whether she’d made a mistake by having anything to do with him.