“I am lucky. I am not shot. Many males who are my friends, they are shot,” Chook said. Mutt nodded. He knew about that. Every front-line soldier knew about that. Chook said, “We are fighters, you and I.” Mutt nodded again. Chook let loose with a hissing sigh, then went on, “I think now one time, now another time, fighters of Race, fighters at the tips of the tongue of the fight, these males more like Big Uglies at tips of tongue of fight than like other males far away. You hear, Second Lieutenant Daniels? You understand?” He made a funny coughing noise after each question.
“Small-Unit Group Leader Chook, I hear you real good,” Mutt said. “I understand you real good, too. What do you say when something is just right? You say ‘truth,’ don’t you? That there’s truth, Chook.”
“Truth,” Chook agreed. He spoke into something not much bigger than a paperback book. Back at his line, Lizards started standing up and poking their noses out of cover.He’s got a radio right there with him, Mutt realized,and so do all his troops. Ain’t that a hell of a thing? Wish we could do the like.
He turned around and waved to his own men. One by one, they stood up, too. Of them all, Herman Muldoon was the last fellow to show himself. Mutt didn’t blame him a bit. He’d been shot at so many times by now, he probably had trouble believing this wasn’t some sort of trick Mutt would have, too, if he hadn’t already been standing out here all vulnerable in case the Lizards did aim to pull off something sneaky.
Warily, still holding weapons, humans and Lizards approached each other. Some of them tried to talk back and forth, though Chook’s males knew a lot less English than he did, and few Americans had much in the way of Lizard lingo. That was okay. You didn’t need a whole lot of talking to get across the idea that you weren’t trying to kill anybody right now, even if you had been a few minutes before. Mutt had seen that on truces in no-man’s-land in France in 1918. Only a few of his buddies had been able to talk with theBoches, but they’d got on well enough.
Of course, back then the Yanks (Daniels remembered how irate he’d been to find the French considering him a Yankee) andBoches had swapped smokes and rations when they met. He’d traded rations only once; as far as he was concerned, it was a miracle the Germans fought so damn hard on the slop they got to eat.
He didn’t figure he’d see anything like that here now. The Lizards didn’t smoke, and their rations were nastier than anything theBoches had had. But when he looked around, he saw some of his guys trading something with the aliens. What the devil did they nave that the Lizards wanted?
Chook was watching that, too, his eye turrets twisting every which way while his head hardly moved. Mutt wondered if he’d stop this unofficial commerce. Instead, after a minute or so, he said, “You, Second Lieutenant Daniels, have any of the fruit or small cakes with what you Big Uglies callginger in them?”
A lighthulb went on in Mutt’s head. He’d heard the Lizards had a hell of a yen for the stuff. “ ‘Fraid I don’t, Small-Unit Group Leader,” he said, and itwas too bad-no telling what sort of interesting stuff a Lizard might have to trade. “Looks like some of my boys do, though.”
As he spoke, he wondered why some of his boys were carrying around stuff with ginger in it. The only answer that came to mind was that they’d already been doing some trading with the Lizards on the sly. Any other time, that would have made him furious. When you looked at it after a cease-fire, though, how could you get excited about it?
“Yess. Truth,” Chook said. With an eager spring in his skittering stride, he hurried off to find out what the Americans did have for sale. Behind his back, Mutt Daniels smiled.
Fluffy white clouds floated lazily across a blue sky. The sun was high and, if not hot, pleasantly warm. It was a fine day for walking hand in hand with the girl you-loved? David Goldfarb hadn’t used the word with Naomi Kaplan, not out loud, but he thought it more and more often these days.
Naomi’s thoughts, on the other hand, seemed focused on politics and war, not love. “But you are in the RAF,” she said indignantly. “How could you not know whether we have got a cease-fire with the Lizards or have not got any such thing?”
He laughed. “How could I not know? Nothing simpler: they don’t tell rue. I don’t need to know to do my job, which is a good enough reason for not telling. All I know is what I want to know: I’ve not heard any Lizard aircraft-nor heardof any Lizard aircraft-over England since the cease-fire with the Yanks, the Russians, and the Nazis.”
“Then it is a cease-fire,” Naomi insisted. “It must be a cease-fire.”
Goldfarb shrugged. “Maybe it is and maybe it’s not. I admit, I don’t know of any of our planes heading off to bomb the Continent, either, but we’ve not done much of that lately anyhow; the loss rate got too beastly high to bear. Maybe it’s one of those informal arrangements: you don’t hurt me and I shan’t hurt you, but we’ll not put anything in writing for fear of admitting we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing-or not doing.”
Naomi frowned. “This is not right This is not proper. This is not orderly.” At that moment, she sounded very German. Goldfarb would sooner have bitten through his tongue than said so out loud. She went on, “The Lizards’ agreements with the other nations are formal and binding. Why not with us?”
“I told you I don’t know anything for certain,” Goldfarb said. “Will you listen to my guess?” When she nodded, he went on, “The Americans, the Russians, and the Nazis have all used super-bombs of the same type the Lizards have. We’ve not done that. In their eyes, maybe we don’t deserve a truce because we’ve not done it. But when they tried invading us, they found we weren’t a walkover. And so they leave us alone without saying they’re doing it.”
“This is possible, I suppose,” Naomi admitted after some serious thought. “But it is still not orderly.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “No matter what it is, though, I’m glad not to hear the air-raid sirens go off every day, or twice a day, or every hour on the hour.”
He waited to see if Naomi would say such an irregular schedule of raids was disorderly, too. Instead, she pointed to the bright red breast of a robin streaking through the air after a dragonfly.
“That’s the only kind of aircraft I want to see in the sky.”
“Hmm,” Goldfarb said. “I am partial to a nice flight of Meteors, but I’d be stretching things if I didn’t say you had a point.”
They walked on for a while, not talking, glad of each other’s company. It was very quiet. A bee buzzed from flower to flower in a field by the side of the road. Goldfarb noticed both the sound and the field without any vegetables growing in it: it had to be one of the few such so close to Dover.
Apparently apropos of nothing in particular, Naomi remarked, “My father and mother like you, David.”
“I’m glad,” he answered, which was true enough. Had Isaac and Leah Kaplan not liked him, he wouldn’t be out walking with their daughter now. “I like them, too.” That was also true to a large degree: he liked them about as well as a young man could like the parents of the girl he was courting.
“They think you have a serious mind,” Naomi went on.
“Do they?” Goldfarb said, a little more cautiously now. If by serious-minded they meant he wouldn’t try to seduce their daughter, they didn’t know him as well as they thought they did. He’d already tried that. Maybe they knew Naomi, though, because it hadn’t worked. And yet he hadn’t gone off in a huff because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Did that make him serious-minded? Maybe it did. He realized he had to say something more. “I think it’s good they don’t worry about where I’m from-or where my mother and father are from, I should say.”