After all, if you didn’t look out for yourself, who was going to look out for you? He’d felt miserable after Skriabin had made him sign the first denunciation, the one against Ivan Fyodorov. This one, though, this one didn’t bother him at all.
Offhandedly, Skriabin said, “A train bringing in new prisoners will arrive tomorrow. A couple of cars’ worth, I am given to understand, will be women.”
“That is most interesting,” Nussboym said. “Thank you for telling me.” Women who knew what was good for them accommodated themselves to the powerful people in the camp: first to the NKVD men, then to the prisoners who could help make their lives tolerable… or otherwise. The ones who didn’t know what was good for them went out and cut trees and dug ditches like any otherzeks.
Nussboym smiled to himself. Surely a man as… practical as he could find some equally… practical woman for himself-maybe even one who spoke Yiddish. Wherever you were, you did what you could to get by.
A Lizard with a flashlight approached the campfire around which Mutt Daniels and Herman Muldoon sat swapping lies. “That is you, Second Lieutenant Daniels?” he called in pretty good English.
“This here’s me,” Mutt agreed. “Come on over, Small-Unit Group Leader Chook. Set yourself down. You boys are gonna be pullin’ out tomorrow mornin’-did I hear that right?”
“It is truth,” Chook said. “We are to be no more in the Illinois place. We are to move out, first back to main base in Kentucky, then out of this not-empire of the United States. I tell you two things, Second Lieutenant Daniels. The first thing is, I am not sorry to go. The second thing is, I come here to say good-bye.”
“That’s mighty nice of you,” Mutt said. “Good-bye to you, too.”
“A sentimental Lizard,” Muldoon said, snorting. “Who woulda thunk it?”
“Chook here ain’t a bad guy,” Daniels answered. “Like he said when we got the truce the first time, him and the Lizards he’s in charge of got more in common with us than we do with the brass hats way back of the line.”
“Yeah, that’s right enough,” Muldoon answered, at the same time as Chook was saying, “Truth,” again. Muldoon went on, “It was like that Over There, wasn’t it? Us and the Germans in the trenches, we was more like each other than us and the fancy Dans back in Gay Paree, that’s for damn sure. Show those boys a louse and they’d faint dead away.”
“I have also for you a question, Second Lieutenant Daniels,” Chook said. “Does it molest you to have me ask you this?”
“Does it what?” Mutt said. Then he figured out what the Lizard was talking about. Chook’s English was pretty good, but it wasn’t perfect “No, go ahead and ask, whatever the hell it is. You and me, we’ve got on pretty good since we stopped tryin’ to blow each other’s heads off. Your troubles, they look a lot like my troubles, ‘cept in a mirror.”
“This is what I ask, then,” Chook said. “Now that this war, this fighting, this is done, what do you do?”
Herman Muldoon whistled softly between his teeth. So did Mutt. “That’s the question, okay,” he said. “First thing I do, I reckon, is see how long the Army wants to keep me. I ain’t what you’d call a young man.” He rubbed his bristly chin. Most of those bristles were white, not brown.
“What do you do if you are not a soldier?” the Lizard asked. Mutt explained about being a baseball manager. He wondered if he would have to explain about baseball, too, but he didn’t. Chook said, “I have seen Tosevites, some almost hatchlings, some larger, playing this game. You were paid for guiding a team of them?” He added an interrogative cough. When Mutt agreed that he was, the Lizard said, “You must be highly skilled, to be able to do this for pay. Will you again, in time of peace?”
“Damfino,” Daniels answered. “Who can guess what baseball’s gonna look like when things straighten out? I guess maybe the first thing I do, I ever get out of the Army, I go home to Mississippi, see if I got me any family left.”
Chook made a puzzled noise. He pointed west, toward the great river flowing by. “You live in a boat? Your home is on the Mississippi?” Mutt had to explain about the difference between the Mississippi River and the state of Mississippi. When he was through, the Lizard said, “You Big Uglies, sometimes you have more than one name for one place, sometimes you have more than one place for one name. It is confused. I tell no great secret to say once or twice attacks go wrong on account of this.”
“Maybe we’ll just have to call every town in the country Jonesville,” Herman Muldoon said. He laughed, happy with his joke.
Chook laughed, too, letting his mouth fall open so the firelight shone on his teeth and on his snaky tongue. “You do not surprise me, you Tosevites, if you do this very thing.” He pointed to Daniels. “Before you become a soldier, then, you command baseball men. You are a leader from hatching?”
Again, Mutt needed a moment to understand the Lizard. “A born leader, you mean?” Now he laughed, loud and long. “I grew up on a Mississippi farm my own self. There was nigger sharecroppers workin’ bigger plots o’ land than the one my pappy had. I got to be a manager on account of I didn’t want to keep walkin’ behind the ass end of a mule forever, so I ran off an’ played ball instead. I was never great, but I was pretty damn good.”
“I have heard before these stories of defiance of authority from Tosevites,” Chook said. “They are to me very strange. We have not any like them among the Race.”
Mutt thought about that: a whole planet full of Lizards, all doing their jobs and going on about their lives for no better reason than that somebody above them told them that was what they were supposed to do. When you looked at it that way, it was like what the Reds and the Nazis wanted to do to people, only more so. But to Chook, it seemed like water to a fish. He didn’t think about the bad parts, just about how it gave his life order and meaning.
“How about you, Small-Unit Group Leader?” Daniels asked Chook. “After you Lizards pull out of the U.S. of A, what do you do next?”
“I go on being a soldier,” the Lizard answered. “After this cease-fire with your not-empire, I go on to some part of Tosev 3 where no truce is, I fight more Big Uglies, till, soon or late, the Race wins there. Then I go to a new place again and do the same. All this for years, till colonization fleet comes.”
“So you were a soldier from the git-go, then?” Mutt said. “You weren’t doin’ somethin’ else when your big bosses decided to invade Earth and just happened to scoop you up so as you could help?”
“That would be madness,” Chook exclaimed. Maybe he was taking Mutt too literally-and maybe he wasn’t. He went on, “A hundred and five tens of years ago, the 63rd Emperor Fatuz, who reigned then and now helps watch spirits of our dead, he set forth a Soldier’s Time.”
Mutt could hear the capital letters thudding into place, but didn’t know what exactly they meant. “A Soldier’s Time?” he echoed.
“Yes, a Soldier’s Time,” the Lizard said. “A time when the Race needed soldiers, at first to train the males who would go with the conquest fleet, and then, in my own age group and that just before mine, the males who would make up the fleet.”
“Wait a minute.” Mutt held up a stubby, bent forefinger. “Are you tryin’ to tell me that when it’s not a Soldier’s Time, you Lizards, you don’t have any soldiers?”
“If we are not building a conquest fleet to bring a new world into the Empire, what need do we have for soldiers?” Chook returned. “We do not fight among us. The Rabotevs and Hallessi are sensible subjects. They are not Tosevites, to revolt whenever they like. We have the data to make males into soldiers when the Emperor”-he looked down at the ground-“decides we need them. For thousands of years at a time, we do not need. Is it different with you Big Uglies? You fought your own war when we came. Did you have soldiers in a time between wars?”