She screamed. She pounded the Lizard on the snout. She kicked him. She grabbed his arm when he tried to claw her, too. After a heartbeat of stunned surprise, the guards jumped on the Lizard and pulled him off her.
“Big Uglies killed both my best friends on Tosev 3!” he shouted. “I want revenge! I have to have revenge!”
“You are as addled as an unhatched egg abandoned in the sun,” a guard said.
Karen paid next to no attention. Lizards’ teeth were sharp and pointed. She bled from at least a dozen punctures and tears. On Earth, improvising a bandage would have been easy, for cloth was everywhere. Not so here. She pulled her T-shirt off over her head and wrapped it around her arm. Seeing her in a bra and shorts wouldn’t scandalize the Lizards. They thought she was peculiar any which way.
Two guards dragged off the Lizard who’d bitten her. The third one bent into the posture of respect, saying, “I apologize, superior Tosevite. From the depths of my liver, I apologize. That male must be deranged.”
Karen’s arm hurt too much for her to care about the Lizard’s psychiatric condition. Through clenched teeth, she said, “Take me back to the hotel. I want to have our physician look at these wounds and clean them.”
“It shall be done, superior Tosevite,” the guard said, and done it was.
Back at the hotel, both Lizards and humans exclaimed when they saw her with a bloody shirt wrapped around her arm. They exclaimed again when she told them how she’d got hurt. “Please get out of the way,” she said several times. “I need to see Dr. Blanchard.”
“Well, this is a lovely mess,” the physician said when she got a good look at Karen’s injuries. She cleaned them, which hurt. Then she disinfected them, which hurt worse. “A couple of those are going to need stitches, I’m afraid.”
“Will they get infected?” Karen asked.
“Good question,” Dr. Blanchard said. She didn’t answer right away, reaching for the novocaine instead. That hurt going in, but numbed things afterwards. Before she started suturing, though, she went on, “We haven’t seen much in the way of germs here on Home that bother us. But I’ll tell you, I wish you hadn’t picked this particular way to try the experiment.”
“So do I,” Karen said feelingly. “The Lizard must have been storing up resentment since the days of the conquest fleet-well, since the days when word from the conquest fleet got back from Home. And the first Big Ugly he saw, he just went chomp! Good thing he didn’t have a gun.”
“Probably a very good thing,” Melanie Blanchard agreed. “Um, you may not want to watch this.”
“You’re right. I may not.” Looking was making Karen woozy. “Do you think a tetanus shot would help?”
“I doubt it. They won’t have tetanus here. They’ll have something else instead,” the doctor answered, which made an unfortunate amount of sense. “I will give you a bunch of our antibiotics, though. I hope they’ll do some good, but I can’t promise you anything.”
“Why not give me some of the ones the Lizards use, too?” Karen asked.
“I would, except I think they’re more likely to poison you than help you,” Dr. Blanchard answered. “I don’t know of any that have been tested on us. I don’t think anyone ever saw the need before.”
“Oh, joy,” Karen said. “If I start breaking out in green and purple blotches-”
“If you do, all bets are off,” Melanie Blanchard said. “But I don’t want to try anything like that before I have to, because it is dangerous for you. I think I’d better consult with some of the Race’s doctors, to find out which drugs I ought to use just in case.”
“I didn’t come here intending to be a guinea pig,” Karen said.
“People hardly ever do intend to become guinea pigs,” Dr. Blanchard observed. “Sometimes it happens anyway.”
“What do you think the chances are?” Karen asked.
Dr. Blanchard sent her a severe look. “Guinea pigs don’t get to ask questions like that. They find out.” Oh, joy, Karen thought again.
When Jonathan Yeager went into cold sleep, he never thought he would have to worry about whether his wife came down with a wound infection. He’d imagined a nuclear confrontation between the Admiral Peary and the forces of the Race, but never an angry Lizard with a long-festering grudge and a nasty set of teeth. He wished he hadn’t thought of the grudge in those terms-not that he could do anything about it now.
“How are you?” he asked Karen every morning for a week.
“Sore. Nauseated, too,” she would answer-she was taking a lot of antibiotics.
At the end of the week, Jonathan’s heart began coming down from his throat. His wife seemed to be healing well. Dr. Blanchard took out the stitches. She gave a cautious thumbs-up, saying, “With luck, no more excitement.”
“I’d vote for that,” Karen said. “Excitement isn’t why I came here. And good old dull looks nice right now.”
“You’ve got apologies from everybody but the Emperor himself,” Jonathan said.
His wife shrugged. “I’d rather not have got bitten in the first place, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Well, yes, I can see that,” Jonathan said. “I’m glad you seem to be healing all right.”
“You‘re glad!” Karen exclaimed. “What about me? I was joking with the doctor about breaking out in green and purple blotches-and I was hoping I was joking, if you know what I mean.”
“Our germs don’t seem to bother the Lizards, so it’s only fair the ones on Home should leave us alone,” Jonathan said.
“That’s what Melanie told me. That’s nice and logical,” his wife replied. “When it’s your arm, though, logic kind of goes out the window.”
“The crazy Lizard could have raised an even bigger scandal,” Jonathan said.
“How? By biting your father?” Karen said. “That would have done it, all right. He’s the ambassador, after all, not just an ambassador’s flunky like yours truly.”
“Well, I’m just an ambassador’s flunky, too,” Jonathan said, a little uneasily. Comparisons with his father made him nervous. He was good enough to get here. His father was good enough to head up the American embassy. Not a lot of difference, but enough. He shook his head. That wasn’t what he wanted to think about right now. He went on, “I had something else in mind. What if the crazy Lizard had bitten Kassquit?”
“Kassquit?” Karen thought about it, then started to giggle. “Yes, that would have been a hoot, wouldn’t it? Poor Lizard is angry at the Big Uglies because his friends got killed during the fighting, and then he would have hauled off and bitten the only Big Ugly who wishes she were a Lizard and has the citizenship to prove it? That would have been better than man bites dog.”
The Lizard’s story was pathetic, if you looked at it from his point of view. Here he’d nursed his grief and his grudge all these years-it would have been close to eighty of the Earthly variety since he got the bad news-and what had he got for it? One snap-at a human who hadn’t been more than a baby when the fighting stopped. Oh, yes: he’d got one more thing. He’d got all the trouble the Race could give him. They’d lock him up and eat the key, which was what they did instead of throwing it away.
Jonathan didn’t worry about going into Sitneff even after his wife’s unfortunate incident. His guards asked him about it once. He said, “Any male of the Race who bites me will probably come down with acute indigestion. And, in my opinion, he will deserve it, too.”
That startled the guards into laughing. One of them said, “Superior Tosevite, do you taste as bad as that?”
“Actually, I do not know,” Jonathan answered. “I have never tried to make a meal of myself.”
The guards laughed again. They didn’t try to restrict his movements, and keeping them from doing that was what he’d had in mind.
Like Karen, he prowled bookstores. He read the Race’s language even better than he spoke it. Words on a page just sat there. They could be pinned down and analyzed. In the spoken language, they were there and gone.
Since word of the conquest fleet’s arrival on Tosev 3 got back to Home, the Lizards had spent a good deal of time and ingenuity writing about humans, their customs, and the planet on which they dwelt. Much of that writing was so bad, it was almost funny. Jonathan didn’t care. He bought lots of those books. No matter how bad they were, they said a lot about what the Lizard in the street thought of Big Uglies.
The short answer seemed to be, not much. According to the Race’s writers, humans were addicted to killing one another, often for the most flimsy of reasons. Photographs from the Reich and the Soviet Union illustrated the point. They were also sexually depraved. Photographs illustrated that point, too, photographs that wouldn’t have been printable back on Earth. Here, the pictures were likelier to rouse laughter than lust. And humans were the ones who grew ginger.
Ginger had spawned a literature of its own. Most of that literature seemed intended to convince the Lizards of Home that it was dreadful stuff, a drug no self-respecting member of the Race should ever try. Some of it put Jonathan in mind of Reefer Madness and other propaganda films from before the days he was born-his father would talk about them every now and again. But there were exceptions.
One Life, One Mate was by the defiant female half of a permanently mated Lizard pair: permanently mated thanks to ginger and what it did to female pheromones. The pair was, for all practical purposes, married, except the idea hadn’t occurred to the Lizards till they got to Tosev 3. The female described all the advantages of the state and how it was superior to the ordinary friendships males and females formed. She was talking about love-but, again, that was something the Lizards hadn’t known about till they bumped into humanity.
She went on almost endlessly about how the mixture of friendship and sexual pleasure produced a happiness unlike any she’d known at Home (the ginger might have had something to do with that, too, but she didn’t mention it). Rhetorically, she asked why such an obvious good should be reserved for Big Uglies alone. She complained about the Race’s intolerance toward couples that had chosen to create such permanent bonds with ginger. The biographical summary at the back of the book (it would have been the front in one in English) said she and her mate were living in Phoenix, Arizona. Jonathan knew not all permanently mated pairs were expelled from the Race’s territory these days. The author and her partner, though, had done as so many others had before them, and found happiness as immigrants in the USA.