The wagon pulled past the one-story white stone front and up under an awning that led into one of the towers. “We’re here, folks,” he announced. He looked back over his shoulder at the Lizard POWs. “You’ll want to stay under the awning when you go inside.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ristin answered, though whether he actually wanted to obey remained an open question. But Lizard aerial intelligence was uncannily good, so if you were smart you revealed as little as you could to the sky. Yeager wondered where the decoy wagons were unloading their feigned prisoners.
He left his bags in the wagon, helped Barbara down, and hurried after his charges into the hospital building. Barbara followed him. Inside there, Ullhass and Ristin were talking in a mixture of English and their own language with a bright-looking man some years younger than Sam who wore captain’s bars. Sam waited for the officer to notice him, then saluted and said, “Sergeant Samuel Yeager reporting from Denver as ordered, sir, with my wife Barbara and the Lizard prisoners Ristin and Ullhass.”
The captain returned the salute. “Pleased to meet you, Sergeant, Mrs. Yeager.” He had a New York accent. “I’m Benjamin Berkowitz.” He glanced down at some papers stuck in a clipboard. “General Groves speaks highly of your abilities with the Lizards, Yeager. From what I’ve heard, any praise from him is high praise. How did you get so good with them? Were you a translator or something like that before the war?”
“No, sir, I was a baseball player.” Sam’s face heated as he admitted, “All I knew about creatures from outer space before the war, sir, I got from reading science fiction.”
Berkowitz grinned. It made him look like a kid. “You know what, Sergeant? I’m just the same way. You know what else? That starts us out two jumps ahead of everybody else, because our minds are flexible.” He looked down at the papers in the clipboard again. “We’ve got you and your wife and the POWs assigned to rooms 427 and 429 upstairs. Why don’t you get settled in tonight-supper’s at 1800, about half an hour from now-and report with the Lizards at 0800 tomorrow.”
“That sounds fine, sir,” Sam said. “Uh-our bags are still in the wagon, sir.”
“Somebody will carry them up for you,” Berkowitz said. “Your job is to ride herd on your friends here.”
A room in a hospital wasn’t going to be as nice as an apartment across the street from the University of Denver, but Yeager was in no position to argue. He hoped Barbara wouldn’t mind the change too much. She wasn’t in the Army, but it still jerked her around.
When he and his companions trudged up to the fourth floor, the rooms proved bigger than he’d expected. The window to 429 had iron bars fitted-on the inside, so they wouldn’t show from the air-which meant that one was intended for the Lizards.
A Negro in khaki brought up the luggage. Sam pulled a half-dollar out of his pocket. The black man shook his head. “Sergeant, I’m in the Army, jus’ like you. This here’s my job.”
“I don’t care if you’re a congressman, buddy. You do that kind of work in this kind of weather, you ought to get something special for it.” Yeager tossed the man the half-dollar. He picked it out of the air with an infielder’s smoothness, sketched a salute, and went down the hall whistling something Dixieland.
Drawn by the noise in the hallway, a Lizard came out of room 431 to see what was going on. He had the fanciest body paint Sam had ever seen. Ristin and Ullhass hadn’t kept themselves painted for months, which made the contrast all the more striking: this male’s body gleamed with spirals and swirls of silver and gold and red.
Ullhass and Ristin turned and stared, their eye turrets swiveling toward the fancily painted Lizard as if drawn to him by magnets. Then they started spluttering honorifics Yeager had never heard before: “Supreme sir!” “Splendid Shiplord!” “How did you come here, splendid sir?”
Barbara didn’t follow the Lizards’ language as well as Sam, but tone and gesture spoke volumes by themselves. “That’s animportant Lizard,” she said quietly.
“No kidding,” Yeager murmured back. His two scaly buddies were reacting to the fellow with the bright paint job the way a couple of bobby-soxers would have reacted to Frank Sinatra. He walked over to the Lizard, gave forth with his best interrogative cough, and said, “May I ask your name and rank?” He didn’t use any of the formal titles of respect Ullhass and Ristin had employed; the Lizard was, after all, a prisoner.
The male turned from his two fellow aliens to Yeager. “You speak our language as well as any Tosevite I have heard,” he said, and added the emphatic cough. Sam grinned a wide, foolish grin, as if he’d just knocked in the game-winning run in the bottom of the ninth. The Lizard went on, “I am Straha, shiplord of the206th Emperor Yower. Former shiplord, I should say-no more, thanks to the exalted incompetence of Atvar the fleetlord.”
Yeager stared. How the devil had the Americans bagged a shiplord? From what he knew, a lot of them stayed up in outer space where nothing human could touch them, let alone capture them. Ristin said, “This is our third-highest male, superior sir, in all the fleet. Above him are only the shiplord of the bannership and the exalted fleetlord himself.”
Most of that was in English, so Barbara caught it, too. It was her turn to gape. “What’s he doing here?” she asked, a split second ahead of her husband.
“Whatare you doing here, Shiplord?” Sam asked in the Lizard’s language. He granted Straha his title, but not the flowery language that went with it.
The Lizard didn’t take offense. He said, “When the Russkis set off their plutonium bomb-you know about this?” He waited for Yeager to say he did, then went on, “And when other parts of our campaign were botched and mishandled, I alone had the courage to stand up and propose that we replace the inept exalted fleetlord. My motion had large majority, but not the three parts in four our law requires. It was defeated.”
“Oh, lord,” Yeager said softly. The scene sounded like something out of South America or the Balkans. Somehow he hadn’t imagined the Lizards with political squabbles of their own. It made them seem much more-human. He switched back to their language: “What happened then?”
“I knew the exalted incompetent would have his revenge,” Straha said. “Nowhere in the conquest fleet would I be safe from his injustice. And so, with my pilot, I brought my shuttle down and gave myself into the hands of you Tosevites here.”
“God, it’s almost like Rudolf Hess flying to England,” Barbara said when Sam translated that.
“Yeah, it sure is,” he said, and, sticking to English, went on, “I wonder if we have the spaceship he flew down in. If we do, I wonder if we can make one like it. If we can do that-”
“If you can, you will be a greater danger to the Race,” Ristin said in the same language. Sam wondered why he didn’t translate that for Straha. Maybe he wasn’t happy with him for giving the U.S.A. that kind of chance.
Letting that go, Yeager gave his attention back to Straha. “Shiplord, now that you are here with us, what will you do?”
“I have already begun,” the alien answered. “I have made one radio broadcast telling the males of the Race that this war will be lost because of the stupidity of the males who lead them-either that, or this planet will be wrecked in the fighting. I tell them the best thing for them to do would be to give up to the males of the empires in whose lands they are situated.”
“Do you?” Yeager said with something like delight. Lizard POWs had broadcast to their comrades before, but they were the alien equivalent of dogfaces: nobody to take seriously on account of who they were. But Straha was a big wheel. If he was turning collaborator-the world might become a very interesting place.