Of all the Lizards Rance Auerbach had hoped never to see again, Hesskett topped the list. The interrogator had threatened to lock him and Penny Summers in jail and lose the key if they didn’t put that French ginger smuggler out of business for good. Rance would have liked his trip to the south of France a hell of a lot better if it hadn’t ended up in a Nazi jail.

He still didn’t think that was his fault. Hesskett took a different view of things, though, and his would be the one that counted. He turned one eye turret toward Rance, the other toward Penny. “You failed,” he said in a voice that somehow held echoes of slamming metal doors.

Penny spoke quickly: “We didn’t fail all the way, superior sir. The Germans still have that Dutourd in jail, or they did when they let us go. That puts him out of business, doesn’t it?”

“It does not,” Hesskett said, and Auerbach imagined he heard more slamming doors. “The Deutsche released him some time ago. No doubt he will soon be selling the Race ginger again.”

“That’s not our fault, dammit!” Rance said. “Now that you flew us back here to Mexico, we can’t do anything about what happens on the other side of the ocean, and you can’t hold it against us.”

“Who says I cannot?” Hesskett returned. His English wasn’t usually idiomatic. He probably didn’t intend it to be idiomatic here. “Who says I cannot?” he repeated. “The agreement was to reduce your punishment if you acted to further the interests of the Race. Can you say you have furthered the interests of the Race?”

“The agreement was to reward us if we did that,” Penny said. “You told us we’d get a big reward if we did it. Well, we did some of it-maybe not as much as you wanted, but some. So we deserve some reward, anyway.”

“That’s right,” Auerbach said. Whether it was right or not, though, he didn’t expect it to do him a plugged nickel’s worth of good.

Hesskett took him by surprise, then, by saying, “Perhaps. This Big Ugly will now also be selling drugs we supply to the Tosevites of the Reich. So your mission may have accomplished something, even if it was something small.”

“In that case, why are you saying we failed?” Penny demanded. “Okay, we don’t deserve the whole great big reward, but you’ve got no business keeping us locked up like this.”

“Your efforts did not bring Dutourd over to the side of the Race,” Hesskett answered. “The Deutsche released him to continue his role as a destructive menace. They did not know we would be able to turn him-to turn him to some partial degree-to our own purposes.”

“Well, what are you going to do with us, then?” Auerbach asked. “This teasing gets stale.”

“What to do with you is a puzzlement,” the Lizard said. “You did not completely fail, but you were far from complete success. And, if you are set at liberty, you are only too likely to return to your own noxious habit of ginger-smuggling.”

I wouldn’t! Rance almost shouted it. He hadn’t had anything to do with smuggling ginger for years till Penny came back into his life. If they let him go and kept her in the calaboose, they wouldn’t hurt themselves one bit.

Without turning his head to look at her, he felt Penny’s eyes on him. She had to know what was going through his mind. She also had to know he hadn’t asked her to come back to him. She’d done it on her own, because she couldn’t find any other choice. If he walked away and sold her down the river, how much guilt would he have on his conscience?

He asked himself the same question. Just how big a son of a bitch are you, Rance? How low have you fallen? The clean-cut West Point cavalry officer he’d been once upon a time wouldn’t have let a pal down for anything. But he hadn’t been that fellow for a lot of years. A couple of Lizard bullets had made sure he’d never be that fellow again. And afterwards, he hadn’t even been able to make a go of it as a ginger smuggler after Penny left him the first time, even if some of his buddies had stayed in touch with him on the off chance he might be able to do something for them. He’d turned into a petty grifter, a loser, a drunk. Christ, what else had he turned into on the way down? A Judas?

He sat quietly. Over in the other chair in the interrogation chamber, too far away to touch, Penny let out a soft sigh of relief. He wondered what she would have done had their positions been reversed. Odds were he was better off not knowing.

Penny said, “Superior sir, if you do let me go, I don’t want to go back to the United States. Too many people there want me dead.”

“This is a perspective with which I have some sympathy,” Hesskett said. “It is also, you realize, an argument for keeping you imprisoned.”

“If that’s what you want to do, go ahead-go ahead for both of us.” Now Auerbach spoke before Penny could. “If you don’t care about going back on the bargain you made, go ahead and do that.”

Against a human being, he wouldn’t have had a prayer. Had he been stupid enough to try that argument on his Nazi interrogators, they might have burst a blood vessel laughing. But Lizards, whatever else you said about them, were more honest than people. They didn’t always make bargains in a hurry. When they did make them, they commonly kept them.

Hesskett didn’t show what he was thinking. Lizards rarely did, at least not in ways people could recognize. “Not spending all your lives in prison would be a reward, thinking of how much ginger the two of you had when we caught you,” he said.

Rance tried not to show what he was thinking, either, but couldn’t help leaning forward a little. He knew the start of a dicker when he heard one. “Hey, we did the best we could for you,” he said.

“That’s right,” Penny said. “It’s not our fault all the Nazis in the goddamn world came busting out of that building. And how come your fancy gadgets didn’t tell us they were there?”

“They must not have been using electronics to monitor their surroundings,” Hesskett said. “Had they been using electronics, you would have been warned.”

“Well, they weren’t, and we weren’t, and now you’re trying to blame us for it,” Auerbach said. If he had the Lizard on the defensive, and he thought he did, he’d push him hard.

“What do you think a fitting reward would be?” Hesskett asked.

“Letting us go free, that’s what,” Penny said at once.

“Let us go free someplace where they speak English,” Rance added. He didn’t want to get turned loose in Mexico, not when he knew maybe a dozen words of Spanish, and most of them swear words. He wasn’t jumping up and down at the idea of going back to the USA, either, not after he’d ventilated those goons. Their bosses wouldn’t remember him fondly.

“We do not want you going back to your friends. That would mean going back to smuggling ginger,” Hesskett said. “Where in the lands the Race rules do Big Uglies speak English? I cannot be bothered keeping track of your languages. You should have only one, like us.”

“Austr-” Penny began, but Auerbach gave her such a sharp look, she didn’t finish. Australia was going to be a place where Lizards outnumbered people, if it wasn’t already. Rance didn’t want that.

Hesskett was checking a computer screen. Turning one eye turret away from it and toward Rance and Penny, he said, “Your choices are fewer than I thought. Most of the Tosevites who speak your language are not under the rule of the Race. I do not want to add more Big Uglies to the population of Australia. That is to be our land, in particular.” Auerbach gave Penny a told-you-so look. The Lizard went on, “Perhaps South Africa. It is isolated. You would have a hard time causing the Race great trouble there-and we would be able to keep an eye turret aimed in your direction.”

“Can we think about it?” Auerbach asked. “Can we talk it over, just the two of us?”

Hesskett used the hand gesture that was his equivalent of a headshake. “No. We do not have to give you anything at all. You may say that you tried to aid us, but you failed. You may have South Africa, or you may have a cell each.”