Rizzaffi was a lot of things. Dry wasn’t any of them. Nigeria might have had weather like this, or the Amazon jungle, or one of the nastier suburbs of hell. You couldn’t fry an egg on the sidewalk, but you could sure poach one. Most of the buildings in the port were of highly polished stone. Things that looked like ferns sprouted from their sides anyway. Mossy, licheny growths spread across them and even grew on glass.
The Lizards routinely used air conditioning in Rizzaffi, not to cut the heat but to wring some of the water out of indoor air. That did them only so much good. Every other advertisement in the town seemed to extol a cream or a spray to get rid of skin fungi.
“You know what this place is?” Frank Coffey said after their first day of looking around.
“Tell me,” Sam said. “I’m all ears.”
“This is where athlete’s foot germs go to heaven after they die.”
“If you think I’ll argue with you, you’re nuts,” Sam said. It had never quite rained during the first day’s tour. But it had never quite not rained, either. It was always mist or drizzle or fog, the sky an ugly gray overhead.
Rizzaffi reminded him of a classic science-fiction story about the mad jungles of Venus, Stanley Weinbaum’s “Paradise Planet.” Venus wasn’t like that, of course, but Weinbaum hadn’t known it wasn’t. He’d died a few years before the Lizards came to Earth. He’d barely made it to thirty before cancer killed him. News of his death had hit Sam hard; they’d been close to the same age.
He thought about mentioning “Paradise Planet” to Coffey. After a moment, he thought again. The younger man hadn’t been born when the story came out. To Coffey, Venus had always been a world with too much atmosphere, a world with the greenhouse effect run wild, a world without a chance for life. He wouldn’t be able to see it as Weinbaum had imagined it when jungles there were not only possible but plausible. And that, to Sam, was a shame.
As he discovered the next day, even the plants in Rizzaffi’s parks were like none humanity had ever seen. The trees were low and shrubby, as they were most places on Home. They had leaves, or things that might as well have been leaves, growing directly from their branches rather than from separate twigs or stalks. But those leaves were of different color and shape from the local ones with which Sam was familiar. Stuff that looked something like grass and something like moss grew on the ground below the treeish things. An animal that resembled nothing so much as a softshell turtle with a red Joseph Stalin mustache jumped into a stream before Sam got as good a look at it as he wanted.
“What was that thing?” he asked their guide.
“It is called a fibyen,” the Lizard answered. “It feeds in the mud and gravel at the bottom of ponds and creeks. Those tendrils above its mouth help tell it what its prey is.”
Frank Coffey said, “It looked like something I’d see Sunday morning if I drank too much Old Overcoat Saturday night.”
He spoke in English. The guide asked him to translate. He did, as well as he could. The translation failed to produce enlightenment. After a good deal of back-and-forth, the guide said, “Alcohol does not affect us in this particular way, no matter how much of it we drink.”
“Lucky you,” Coffey said.
Before that could cause more confusion still, Sam said, “I have a question.”
“Go ahead,” the Lizard replied with some relief.
“You have sent many of your creatures from a dry climate from Home to Tosev 3, to make parts of our planet more like yours,” Yeager said. The guide made the affirmative gesture. Sam went on, “Why have you not also sent creatures like the fibyen and the plants here in Rizzaffi? Tosev 3 has many areas where they might do very well.”
“Why? I will tell you why: because you Tosevites are welcome to areas like this.” The guide’s emphatic cough said how welcome humans were to such places. “Some of us must live here in this miserable place, but we do not like it. I do not believe anyone who was not addled from hatching could like it. And that reminds me…” The Lizard’s eye turrets swiveled in all directions, though how far he could see through Rizzaffi’s swirling mist was a good question.
“Yes?” Sam asked when the guide didn’t say anything for some little while.
“Have you Big Uglies got any ginger?” the Lizard demanded. “That wonderful herb helps me forget what a miserable, damp, slimy hole this is. I would give you anything you like for a few tastes, and I am sure I am far from the only one who would.”
“Well, well,” Frank Coffey said. “Isn’t that interesting?” This time, he didn’t translate from English to the Race’s language.
“That’s one word,” Sam said, also in English. This wasn’t the first time humans had got such a request. He wondered how to answer the guide. Really, though, only one way was possible: “I am very sorry, but we are diplomats, not ginger smugglers. We have no ginger. We would not give it out if we did, because it is against your laws.” What else could he say, when he wasn’t sure if this Lizard was an addict or a provocateur?
The guide let out a disappointed hiss. “That is most unfortunate. It will make many males and females very unhappy.”
“A pity,” Sam said, meaning anything but. “Perhaps we should go back to the hotel now.”
“Yes,” the Lizard said. “Perhaps we should.”
With the air conditioning going full blast, the hotel was merely unpleasant. After hot wet weather, hot dry weather seemed a godsend. The sweat that had clung greasily to Sam’s skin evaporated. Then salt crusts formed instead, and he started to itch. For a human, showering in a stall made for Lizards was an exercise in frustration. Apart from the force of the stream, it involved bending low and banging one’s head against the ceiling over and over. Yeager wouldn’t have liked it when he was young. Now that he was far from young and far from limber, it became an ordeal. But he endured it here for the sake of getting clean.
He ate in the hotel refectory. He didn’t think it deserved to be called a restaurant. As usual, the food was salty by Earthly standards. That probably wasn’t good for his blood pressure, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He fretted about it less today than he would have most of the time. He’d sweated out enough salt to need replenishing.
And he could get pure alcohol and dilute it to palatability with water. Nobody here knew anything about ice cubes. The Race cared nothing for cold drinks. But warm vodka was better than no vodka at all.
His son had a sly look in his eye when he asked, “Well, Dad, aren’t you glad you came along?”
“If Home needed an enema, they’d plug it in right here,” Sam replied, which made Jonathan choke on his drink. The older Yeager went on, “Even so, I am glad I came. When will I ever get the chance to see anything like this again? How many people have ever seen a fibyen?”
“I didn’t even get to see it,” Jonathan said. “But you know what else? I’m not going to lose any sleep about missing it.”
“I lose enough sleep to sleeping mats,” Sam said. “Kassquit may not have any trouble with them, but she’s been sleeping on them all her life. Me?” He shook his head and wiggled and stretched. Something in his back crunched when he did. That felt good, but he knew it wouldn’t last.
Outside, lightning flashed. Now real rain started coming down-coming down in sheets, in fact. Sam knew the Lizards did a good job of soundproofing their hotels. The thunderclap that followed hard on the heels of the lightning still rattled his false teeth.
Karen Yeager said, “This is a part of Home none of the Lizards who came to Earth ever talked much about.”
“I can see why, too,” Jonathan said. “How many people brag about coming from Mobile, Alabama? And this place makes Mobile look like paradise.”
Sam, who’d been through Mobile playing ball, needed to think about that. Mobile was pretty bad. But his son had it right. And if that wasn’t a scary thought, it would do till a really spooky one came along.