The one good memory he had from that dreadful time was the kiss on the cheek she’d given him: not an attention he would have wanted from most cavalry troopers. He hoped she’d got away. He didn’t know whether she had or not; his lights had gone out again right about then.
Next thing he knew, he was in Karval, which was a hell of a mess after the shelling the Americans had given it. A harassed-looking human doctor was sprinkling sulfa powder into the wound in his thigh, while a Lizard who had red crosses in white circles added to his Lizardly body paint watched with two-eye-turreted fascination.
Auerbach had tried to raise his right arm to let the doc-and the Lizard who looked to be a doctor, too-know he was among those present. That was when he noticed the needle stuck in his vein and the tubing that led up to the plasma bottle a young woman was holding.
The motion was feeble, but the girl noticed it and exclaimed. He’d been too woozy to notice her face, which was masked anyhow, but he recognized her voice. He’d lost Rachel Hines, but now he’d found Penny Summers.
“You understand me?” the human doctor had asked. When he’d managed a quarter-inch’s worth of nod, the fellow had gone on, “Just in case you’re wondering, you’re a POW, and so am I. If it weren’t for the Lizards, odds are you’d be dead. They know more about asepsis than we’ll learn in a lifetime. I think you’re gonna make it. You’ll walk again, too-after a while.” At that moment, walking hadn’t been the biggest thing on his mind. Breathing had seemed plenty hard enough.
Now that the Lizard armor had moved out of Karval, the aliens were using it as a center for wounded prisoners they’d taken. Pretty soon, the few battered buildings left in town weren’t enough to hold everybody. They’d run up tents of a briliant and hideous orange, one to a patient. Auerbach had been in one for several days now.
He didn’t see the doctor as often as he had at first. Lizards came by to look him over several times a day. So did human nurses, Penny Summers as often as any and maybe more often than most. The first couple of times he needed it, he found the bedpan mortifyingly embarrassing. After that, he stopped worrying about it: it wasn’t as if he had a choice.
“How’d they get you?” he asked Penny. His voice was a croaking whisper, he hardly had breath enough to blow out a match.
She shrugged. “We were evacuating wounded out of Lamar when the Lizards were comin’ in. You know how that was-they didn’t just come in, they rolled right on through. They scooped us up like a kid netting sunfish, but they let us go on takin’ care of hurt people, and that’s what I’ve been doin’ ever since.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, they seem to play by the rules, pretty much, anyhow.” He paused to get some more air, then asked. “How’s the war going?”
“Can’t hardly tell,” she answered. “Ain’t no people around here with radios, none I know about, anyways. I’ll say this much, though-they been shippin’ a whole lot o’ POWs back here lately. That’s liable to mean they’re winning, isn’t it?”
“Liable to, yeah,” he said. He wanted to cough, but held what little breath he had till the urge went away. He’d coughed once or twice already, and it felt as if his chest was going to rip to pieces. When he could speak again, he went on, “Do you know what kind of casualties they’re taking?”
She shook her head. “No way for me to tell. They ship their own wounded back somewheres else.”
“Ah,” he said, then shook his head-carefully, because that pulled at the stitches that were holding him together. Boris Karloff might have had more when he played inFrankenstein, but not a whole lot. “Darned if I know why I’m even bothering to ask. It’s going to be a long time before I’m able to worry about that kind of stuff.”
He said it that way to keep from thinking it would never matter to him again. If his chest healed. If his leg healed, he’d eventually go to a real POW camp, and maybe there, however many months away that was, he could start planning how to escape. If his chest healed but his leg didn’t, he wouldn’t be going anywhere-nowhere fast, anyhow. If his leg healed but his chest didn’t… well, in that case, they’d stick a lily in his hand and plant him.
Penny looked at him, looked down at the shiny stuff-it was like thick cellophane, but a lot tougher-the Lizards had used to cover the dirt on which they’d set up the tent, then back at him again. In a low voice, she said, “Bet you wish now you would have laid me when you had the chance.”
He laughed, panted, laughed again. “You really want to know, I’ve been wishing that ever since the Lizards bombed Lamar. But look at me.” His left arm worked, more or less. He gestured with it. “Not much I can do about that now, so why worry about it?”
“No, you can’t, that’s so.” Penny’s eyes kindled. She knelt beside the government-issue cot on which he was lying and flipped back the blanket. “But I can.” She laughed as she took him in hand and bent over him. “If I hear anybody comin’, I’ll make like I was givin’ you the bedpan.”
He gasped when her mouth came down on him. He didn’t know whether he’d rise. He didn’t know whether he wanted to rise. Suddenly he understood how a woman had to feel when the guy she was with decided he was going to screw her then and there and she was too drunk to do anything about it.
Rise he did, in spite of everything. Penny’s head bobbed up and down. He gasped again, and then again. He wondered if he was going to have enough air in him to come, no matter how good it felt… and her lips and teasing tongue felt as good-well, almost as good-as getting shot up felt bad.
She closed her hand around his shaft, down below her busy mouth, and squeezed him, hard. Not more than two heartbeats later, he shuddered and exploded. For a moment, purple spots swam before his eyes. Then the inside of the tent filled with light, so clear and brilliant it seemed to be-
The Lizard fighter-bomber broke off its attack run and began to gain altitude. Omar Bradley scratched at the little bandage on his nose; he’d had a boil there lanced a couple of days before. “I’m glad we’re doing this with a radio signal to back up the wire,” he said. “Lay you seven to two the bombs and rockets broke the link.”
“My old man always told me never bet when I was liable to lose,” Leslie Groves answered. “No flies on him.”
“Not a one,” Bradley agreed. “You’ve got the buttons right there, General. One of them had better work. You want to do the honors and push them?”
“You bet I do,” Groves said. “I’ve been building these damn things for a hell of a long time now. About time I get to find out what they’re like when they go off.”
One of the ignition devices had an insulated wire coming out of it. The other one didn’t. Groves’ broad right thumb came down on one red button, his left on the other.
“Take that, you scaleless, egg-addled, stiff-jointed things!” Teerts cried as his rockets turned a stretch of Tosevite defenses into an oven where the meat would be diced and ground as it was roasted.
The Race’s landcruisers were snouting forward even as he bombarded the Big Uglies. The Tosevites had made a mistake this time-they’d made their attack with inadequate resources, and not shifted over to the defensive fast enough when they ran out of steam. The Race’s commanders, who’d learned alertness since coming to Tosev 3, were making them pay for it.
There wasn’t even much in the way of antiaircraft fire in this sector. The Big Uglies had probably had a lot of guns overrun when the Race’s counterattack went in. As Teerts began to climb back into the sky so he could return to the Kansas air base and rearm his killercraft, he decided he hadn’t had such an easy mission since the early days of the conquest, well before the Nipponese captured him.
Sudden impossible swelling glare made the nictitating membranes slide over his eyes in a futile effort to protect them. The killercraft spun and flipped and twisted in the air, violently unstable in all three axes. The controls would not answer, no matter what Teerts did.