Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

The Lizard who spoke English led him to a chair, then sat down across a table from him. The alien reached forward and poked a knob on a small Lizardy gadget that lay on the table. Behind a small, transparent window, something inside the machine began to spin. Jens wondered what it was for.

“Who you?” the Lizard asked, as if seeing him for the first time. He repeated his Pete Smith alias. “What you do?” the alien said, and he gave back his story about the mythical cousins west of Montpelier.

The Lizard picked up another contraption and spoke into it. Larssen jumped when the contraption hissed back. The Lizard spoke again. He and the machine talked back and forth for a couple of minutes, in fact. Larssen thought at first that it was some kind of funny-looking radio or telephone, but the more the Lizard used it, the more he got the feeling the device itself was doing the talking. He wondered what it was saying, especially when it spoke his name.

The Lizard turned one of its turreted eyes toward him. “We have of you no record, Pete Smith.” It might have been pronouncing sentence. “How you explain this?”

“Well, uh, sir, uh-what is your name?”

“I am Gnik,” the Lizard said. “You call me superior sir.”

“Well, superior sir, Gnik, I guess the reason you don’t have any record of me is that till now I’ve just stayed on my own little farm and not bothered anybody. If I’d known I’d run into you, I’d have stayed there longer, too.” That was the best excuse Larssen could come up with on the spur of the moment. He wiped his forehead with a sleeve.

“It could be,” Gnik said neutrally. “These cousins of you-who, what they are?”

“They’re my father’s brother’s son and his wife. His name is Olaf Smith, hers is Barbara. They have two children, Martin and Josephine.” By naming the imaginary cousins (what’s the square root of minus one cousin? flashed across his mind) after his father, wife, brother, and sister, he hoped he’d be able to remember who they were.

Gnik talked to his gadget again, listened while it talked back. “No record of these Big Uglies,” he. said, and Larssen thought he was doomed. Then the Lizard went on, “Not have all records yet,” and he breathed again. “One day soon, put in machine here.” Gnik tapped the talking box with a clawed forefinger.

“What is that thing, anyway?” Larssen asked, hoping to get the Lizard to stop asking him questions about relatives he didn’t have.

But Gnik, though too short for basketball and too little for football, was too smart to go for a fake. “You not ask questions at I. I ask questions at you.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but what Gnik had, Larssen didn’t like. “You ask questions at me to spy out secrets of Race, yes?”

Yes, Jens thought, though he didn’t think coming out and admitting it would be the smartest thing he’d ever done. He didn’t have to fake a stammer as he answered, “I don’t know anything about your secrets and I don’t want to know anything about them. I just never saw a box that talked back to somebody before, that’s all.”

“Yes. You Big Uglies are pri-mi-tive.” Gnik pronounced the three-syllable English word with obvious relish; Larssen guessed he’d learned it so he could score points off uppity humans. He was still suspicious, too. “Maybe you find this things out, pass on to other sneaky Big Uglies, eh?”

“I don’t know anything about sneaky Big Uglies-I mean, people,” Larssen said, noticing that the Lizards had as unflattering a nickname for human beings as humans did for their kind. “I just want to go see my cousins, that’s all.” Now he wanted Gnik to ask questions about Olaf and his nonexistent family.

That suddenly seemed safer than being grilled about spies who might very well be real.

Gnik said, “We see more about this, Pete Smith. You not leave town called Fiat now. We keep your travel thing here”-he still couldn’t remember how to say bicycle- “ask more questions to you later.”

Larssen started to exclaim, “You can’t do that!” He opened his mouth, but shut it again in a hurry. Gnik damn well could do that, and if he didn’t care for the cut of Jens’ jib, he could reslice it-and Jens-into a shape that better pleased his fancy. Losing a bicycle was the least of his worries.

No, that wasn’t so. Along with the bike, he was also losing precious time. How long would. he take to hike across Indiana in the dead of winter? How long before another Lizard patrol picked him up and started asking unanswerable questions? Not long, he feared. He wanted to ask Gnik where the Lizard-human frontier through Indiana ran, but didn’t think it wise. For all he knew, the invaders had conquered the whole state by now. And even if they hadn’t, Gnik almost certainly wouldn’t answer and almost certainly would get even more suspicious.

He couldn’t fail to make some kind of protest, though, not if he wanted to keep his self-respect, so he said, “I don’t think you ought to take my bicycle when I haven’t done anything to you.”

“You say this. I not know this,” Gnik retorted. “You put on now your warm things. We take you to other Big Uglies we keep here.”

Putting on sweater, overcoat, and hat in the sweltering general store and then going outside reminded Jens of the runs from steam room to snow he’d shared with his grandfather when he was a kid. The only thing missing was his father standing out there to whack him with birch twigs. The Lizards didn’t seem invigorated when they left the store. They just seemed cold.

They took him over to the church. Lizard guards stood outside it. When they opened the closed door, he found it was heated to a more humanly tolerable level. He also found Gnik was using it as a holding pen for people who came through or near Fiat.

People sat up on the pews; turned around to look him over; and started talking, both at him and among themselves. “Look, another poor sucker.” “What did they get him for?” “What did they get you for, stranger?”

“Sstay-here,” one of the Lizards said to Jens, his words accented almost past comprehension. Then he left the church. As the door swung shut, Larssen saw him and his companion racing back toward the general store and what they thought of as a decent temperature.

“What did they get you for, stranger?” repeated the woman who’d asked the question before. She was a brassy blonde not far from Jens’ age; she might have been pretty if her hair (which showed dark roots) hadn’t been a snaky mess and if she didn’t look as if she’d been wearing the same clothes for quite a while.

Everybody in the church had that same grubby look. The faces that turned toward Larssen were mostly clean, but a strong, almost barnyard odor in the air said no one had bathed lately. He was sure he contributed to that odor; he hadn’t seen a bar of Lifebuoy for a while himself. Without hot water, baths in winter were more likely to be next to pneumonia than to godliness.

He said, “Hello, folks. I don’t know just what they got me for. I don’t think they know, either. One of their patrols spotted me on my bicycle and pulled me in so they could ask me questions. Now they don’t want to let me go.”

“Sounds like the little bastards,” the woman said. She wore no lipstick (maybe she’d run out) but, as if to make up for it, had rouged her cheeks almost bloodred.

Her words touched off a torrent of abuse from the other involuntary churchgoers. “I’d like to squeeze their skinny necks till those horrible eyes of theirs pop,” said a man with a scraggly reddish beard.

“Put ’em in a cage and feed ’em flies,” suggested a skinny, swarthy gray-haired woman.