Down to Earth (54 page)

The camp was depressingly large. The scaly devils were doing their best to hold China down. Some of the people they’d scooped up were Communists like Liu Han, others Kuomintang reactionaries, still others men and women of no particular party whom they’d seized more or less at random. They didn’t even try to keep the Communists and Kuomintang followers from one another’s throats—their theory seemed to be that, if the humans quarreled among themselves, they wouldn’t have to do so much work. Partly because of that, the Party and the Kuomintang did their best to keep a truce going.

“Here. This building.” The scaly devil pointed again, this time not with his rifle but with his tongue. The building toward which he directed Liu Han stood near the prison camp’s razor-wire perimeter. It was not the building where most interrogations were conducted; that one lay closer to the center of the camp. Some of the interrogators were the little devils’ human running dogs; that building had an attached infirmary and a sinister reputation.

Liu Han had been there a couple of times. No one had done anything too dreadful to her, but she was relieved to be going somewhere else. Even though this building had machine guns mounted on it, she thought it was only an administrative center. She’d never heard of anyone being tortured there.

When she went inside, she opened her jacket and then took it off; the place was heated to the scaly devils’ standard of comfort, which meant she’d gone from winter to hottest summer in a couple of steps. The scaly devil who’d fetched her from her hut sighed with pleasure.

Another little devil took charge of her. “You are the Tosevite Liu Han?” he asked in his own language, knowing she could use it.

“Yes, superior sir,” she answered.

“Good. You will come with me,” he said. Liu Han did, to a chamber that contained nothing but a stool, a television camera, and a monitor; another scaly devil looked out of the monitor, presumably seeing her televised image. “You may sit on the stool,” her guide told her. The little devil with the rifle positioned himself in the doorway to make sure she didn’t do anything else. Her guide folded himself into the posture of respect before the little devil in the monitor, saying, “Here is the Tosevite female called Liu Han, Senior Researcher.”

“Yes, I see her,” that little devil replied. He raised his eye turrets, so that he seemed to look right at Liu Han. When he spoke again, it was in halting Chinese: “You remember me, Liu Han?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t,” she replied in the same language. As far as she was concerned, one little scaly devil looked very much like another.

He shrugged just as if he were a person and returned to his own tongue: “I would not have recognized you, either, but we spent a lot of time making each other unhappy during the fighting. My name is Ttomalss.”

“I greet you,” she said, not wanting to acknowledge the pang of fear that ran through her. “The advantage is yours now. I did not kill you when I had the chance.” That was as close as she would come to begging for mercy. She bit down on the inside of her lower lip. She hoped that was as close as she would come to begging for mercy. If Ttomalss wanted vengeance for being captured and imprisoned and threatened, what could she do to stop him?

At the moment, he seemed mild enough. He asked, “Is your hatchling—Liu Mei was the name you gave her, not so?—well?”

“Yes,” Liu Han answered. Then she returned to Chinese for a sentence she couldn’t say in the scaly devils’ language: “She never did learn how to smile, though. You had her too long for that.”

“I suppose I did,” Ttomalss said. “I encountered this same problem with a Tosevite hatching I succeeded in raising after you released me. I believe it lacks a solution, at least for Tosevites raised by the Race. Our faces are not mobile enough to give your hatchlings the cues they need to form expressions.”

“So you did finally manage to steal another Tosevite hatchling?” Liu Han said. “Too bad. I had hoped I frightened you enough when I captured you to keep you from trying that again. Somewhere, a Tosevite female mourns, as I mourned when you took Liu Mei away from me.”

“The Race needs to conduct this research,” Ttomalss said. “We must learn how Tosevites and the Race can get along. We must learn what Tosevites raised as citizens of the Empire are like. I know you disapprove, but the work is important to us—and to everyone on Tosev 3.”

“How would you like it if some of us stole your hatchlings from you and tried to raise them as Tosevites?” Liu Han asked. “That is what you have done to us.”

“You could never do such a thing,” Ttomalss told her. “You would never do such a thing. A project like the one I have undertaken requires far more patience than the usual Big Ugly has in him.”

Liu Han wanted to set up a project to steal eggs from the little scaly devils and raise the chicks—or whatever one called newly hatched little devils—as if they were human beings. She had no idea how to go about it, and the little devils had learned a good deal about security since their early days in China, so she couldn’t get in touch with anyone outside the prison camp anyhow. But the urge to take Ttomalss down a peg burned in her anyhow. As things were, she could only say, “I think you are mistaken.”

“I do not,” Ttomalss said calmly. Liu Han glared at him. Despite what she’d done to him years before, he had the little devils’ arrogance in full measure.

Still, things could have been worse. As long as he was talking with her about hatchlings, he wasn’t interrogating her about the Party. Of themselves, the scaly devils did not go in for painful questioning, but now they had Chinese stooges who did. If they gave her to them . . .

“When I first studied you, I did not think you would rise to become a power in the resistance against the Race hereabouts,” Ttomalss said. “Your goals are not admirable, but you have shown great strength of character in trying to achieve them.”

“I think freedom is admirable,” Liu Han said. “If you do not, that is your misfortune, not mine.”

“There is only one proper place for all the subregions of this planet: under the administration of the Race,” Ttomalss said. “In the course of time, those subregions will take their proper place.”

“Freedom is good for the Race, but not for the Big Uglies,” Liu Han jeered. “That is what you are saying.”

But Ttomalss made the negative hand gesture. “You misunderstand. You Tosevites always misunderstand. When the conquest is complete, Tosev 3 will be as free as Home, as free as Rabotev 2, as free as Halless 1. You will be contented subjects of the Emperor, as we are.” He swung his eye turrets down toward the surface of the desk at which he sat, a gesture of respect for the ruler among the little scaly devils.

“I take it back,” Liu Han said. “You do not think freedom is good for anyone, even your own kind.”

“Too much freedom is not good for anyone,” Ttomalss said. “Even your own faction would agree with that, seeing how it punishes Tosevites who disagree with it in any way.”

“This is a revolutionary situation,” Liu Han said. “The Communist Party is at war with you. Of course we have to weed out traitors.”

Ttomalss let his mouth fall open: he was laughing at her. “I do not believe you. I do not even think you believe yourself. Your faction rules the not-empire called the SSSR, and kills off members regardless of whether they show allegiance to any other power or not.”

“You do not understand,” Liu Han said, but Ttomalss understood too well. He was, Liu Han recalled, a student of the human race in his own fashion. Liu Han had seen purges were sometimes necessary, not only to get rid of traitors but also to keep up the energy, enthusiasm, and alertness of people who didn’t get purged.

“Do I not?” the little scaly devil said. “Perhaps you will enlighten me, then.” In his own language, he had a fine, sarcastic turn of phrase.

Nettled, Liu Han started to answer him in great detail. But she bit down on the words before they passed her lips. She had seen many years before that Ttomalss was a clever little devil. He wasn’t arguing abstracts with her here. He was trying to anger her, to make her say things before she thought about them. And he’d come within a hairsbreadth of succeeding.

What she did say after checking herself was, “I have nothing to tell you.”

“No? Too bad,” the little scaly devil said. “Shall we see whether you have anything to tell me after you watch your hatchling tormented in front of you? Your strong feelings for your blood kin can be a source of weakness for you, you see, as well as a source of strength. Or perhaps the hatchling should watch your interrogation. Which do you think would produce the better results?”

“I have nothing to tell you,” Liu Han repeated, though she had to force the words out through lips numb with fear. One of the things the little scaly devils had learned from mankind was frightfulness. Just after coming to China, they would never have made such a threat.

“And yet,” Ttomalss said in musing tones, “you did not physically torment me when I was in your power, though you could have done so. And, whether you believe me or not, I tried to do my best by your hatching: the best I could do, at any rate, given my limitations. Because of that, ordering the two of you subjected to torment would be unpleasant.”

A little scaly devil with a conscience? Liu Han would not have counted on finding such a bourgeois affectation among the scaly devils. But, having found it, she was more than willing to take advantage of it. “You are an honorable opponent,” she said, though what was honor but another bourgeois affectation?

“I wish I could say the same of your faction,” Ttomalss replied. “Since acquiring a hatchling to raise, I have not been involved with affairs in this subregion, you will understand, but I did review the record before making arrangements for this interview. Assassinations, sabotage . . .”

“They are the weapons of the weak against the strong,” Liu Han said. “The Race is strong. If we had landcruisers and explosive-metal bombs, we would use them instead—believe me, we would.”

“Oh, I do believe you,” Ttomalss said. “You need have no doubt about that. The question now remaining is how to make sure you and your hatchling and your male companion can do the Race no further harm.”

No matter how hot the chamber was, a chill ran through Liu Han. She knew what the Party would do under such circumstances.
Liquidation
was the word that sprang to mind. The little scaly devils had not been in the habit of executing their opponents, but they grew more ruthless as time went by. That was the dialectic in action, too, though not in a way that worked to Liu Han’s advantage. She stood mute, waiting to hear her fate.

In the end, she didn’t. Ttomalss said, “Those who administer the subregion will make the decision there. They can take their time; no point in haste as long as you are securely confined. If I am asked for my input, I will tell them that you could have done worse to me than you did.”

“Thank you for that much,” Liu Han said. Instead of answering, Ttomalss broke the connection; the screen Liu Han was facing went dark. Her hopes were dark, too. The guard gestured with his rifle. She pulled on her jacket once more as she followed him out of the building. It would be cold out there in the camp. She wondered if she would spend the rest of her life behind razor wire.

“Find Polaris,” Sam Yeager muttered, peering into the northern sky. When he did find the North Star, he aimed the polar axis of the, little refractor Barbara had bought him for Christmas toward it. That would let the equatorial mount follow the stars with only one slow-motion control.

Loosening the tension screws on the right-ascension and declination axes, he swung the scope itself toward Jupiter, which glowed yellow-white in the southwestern sky. He sighted along the tube, then peered through the finder scope attached to it. When he spotted the planet in the finder’s field, he grunted in satisfaction and, fumbling a little in the dark, tightened the screws so the gears in the slow-motion controls would mesh. The knob for the right-ascension control was by the telescope’s focusing mechanism, that for the declination control on a flexible cable. Using them both, he brought Jupiter to the meeting point of the finder’s crosshairs. That done, he peered into the eyepiece of the main telescope—and there was Jupiter, fifty times life size.

He fiddled with the focus. He could see three of the four Galilean satellites, and could also see the cloud bands girdling the planet. He thought about switching to an eyepiece with a shorter focal length for a closer look, but decided not to bother. With only a 2.4-inch objective lens, he wouldn’t see that much more. He’d learned that light grasp was really more important than magnifying power.

Instead, he swung the scope toward Mars, a bloodred star in the east. When he found it, it looked like a tiny copper coin—only about a third as wide as Jupiter—in the low-power eyepiece. Now he did choose the 6mm orthoscopic instead of the 18mm Kellner—he wanted to see everything he possibly could. Mars got bigger and brighter day by day. It was nearing opposition, when it would be closest to Earth and best suited for observing.

Even at 150 power, he couldn’t see much: the bright polar cap, and a dark patch on the red he thought was Syrtis Major. He couldn’t see the craters that pocked the planet’s surface. They weren’t beyond just the reach of his little amateur’s instrument; no Earth-based telescope could make them out.

He chuckled under his breath. “No canals, either. No thoats. No four-armed green men swinging swords. No nothing.” The Lizards thought hysterically funny the Mars that people like Percival Lowell and Edgar Rice Burroughs had imagined. So did Yeager—now. When he was a kid, though, he’d devoured Burroughs’ tales of Barsoom.

After he’d looked at Mars long enough to suit him, he turned on a flashlight whose plastic bulb cover he’d painted red with Barbara’s nail polish—red light didn’t hurt night vision. He chuckled again, thinking of all the things he’d learned in the couple of months since he’d got the scope for a present.

“Who would have thought I’d’ve found myself a hobby at my age?” he said. He’d bought himself a
Norton’s Star Atlas
to find out what he could see now that he had the telescope. He ran his finger down the listing of double stars. “Gamma Leonis,” he muttered, and then nodded. The star was bright enough to be easy to spot—not very far from Mars at the moment, in fact—and its components were far enough apart for his little refractor to be able to split them.