Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  He’d never really thought about being rich before. What infantrymale did? None that had any sense—except the few sharp fellows who’d got into the ginger trade early on. But if the chance for riches came his way, was he fool enough not to turn his eye turrets toward it?

  “If we do this,” he said slowly, “how do you want to be paid? I have heard it is difficult for Tosevites to use our credit, though I know there are ways around this.”

  “Oh, yes, there are ways,” the dark-skinned male called Frederick said. The other two Big Uglies made the head motion that was their equivalent of the affirmative hand gesture. Frederick went on, “But we do not want your credits. We want gold.”

  He spoke the word with as much reverence as Khomeini gave to his imaginary Big Ugly beyond the sky. And, by the way Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers said, “Truth,” in a sort of crooning whine, they were as reverent as the other Tosevite.

  Gorppet understood that. The Tosevite economy was far less computerized than that of the Race. Money wasn’t just an abstract concept here; it was often a real thing, traded at a standard rate of value for other real things. And gold was the principal medium of exchange here.

  “I think that can be done,” Gorppet said.

  “I know a male Tosevite who will take your credit and give you gold for it,” Frederick said.

  “Not so fast,” Gorppet told him. “First, let us settle on a price in credit. Then let us settle on a rate of exchange between credit and gold. And then let me make my own quiet inquiries and see if I can find a dealer with a better rate than your friend.”

  “This is not a good way to do business,” Frederick protested. “It shows no trust.”

  “There is no trust.” Gorppet stressed that with an emphatic cough. “There is only business. Business that deals in lots of ginger and money is dangerous to begin with, in the middle and at the end. Anyone who thinks different came from his eggshell addled.”

  Frederick started to say something more—probably another protest. But Rance Auerbach spoke first: “This is also truth. If we get through this dealing without trying to kill one another, we shall be ahead of the game.” He swung his head toward Frederick. In his rasping, ruined voice, he went on, “This is what we all have to think: my share of what we get here is enough. Do you understand what I am telling you? You could try for all. Penny and I could try for all. Gorppet here could try for all. Someone might win. But, more likely, everyone would lose.”

  “I understand,” Frederick said in that musical accent of his. “Have I been anything but a proper partner?”

  “Not yet,” Auerbach answered.

  “No, not yet.” Gorppet made the affirmative gesture to show he agreed with Auerbach. “But betrayal was not in your interest before. Now . . . I hope it still is not. It had better not be.”

  Rance Auerbach didn’t like the pistol he was carrying. After the heavy solidity of an Army .45, this cheap little .38 revolver felt like a toy. But it was what he’d been able to get his hands on, and it was a damn sight better than nothing. He nodded to Penny. “Ready, sweetheart?”

  “You bet,” she said, and pulled her own .38 out of her purse to show she understood what he meant. Inside their apartment—the apartment that, with luck, they’d never see again after tonight—she said no more. They’d never been able to prove the Lizards listened to them, but they didn’t want to take any chances, either.

  “Let’s see what happens, then.” Auerbach stubbed out a cigarette and immediately lit another one. His mouth would have been dry even without the harsh smoke. He felt like a man going into combat. And this might be three-sided combat—he and Penny had one interest, Gorppet another, and Frederick yet another.

  His eyes slid over to Penny. It might even turn into four-sided combat, if she decided to double-cross him. Would she? He didn’t think so, but the idea that she might wouldn’t leave his mind. She’d had her eye on the main chance for a long time now. If she decided she wanted all the loot . . .

  She might be planning to double-cross him with Frederick, too. Rance didn’t really think she was, but he didn’t ignore the possibility, either. His Army days had taught him to evaluate all the contingencies.

  Out they went. Rance fought his way down the stairs. Once he got outside, the very chirps of the insects reminded him he was a long way from home. If this went through, he’d still be a long way from home, but he’d be someplace he wanted to be, not where the Lizards dumped him.

  If it didn’t go through . . . “Shoot first, babe,” he told Penny. “Don’t wait. If you think you might be in trouble, chances are you’re already there.”

  “I gotcha,” she said, sounding as if she’d come out of a gangster movie. She’d been through these deals before, he knew, and every one of them outside the law. But this one was further outside than most—and she didn’t have any hired muscle along except for him. He snorted and fought back a cough. Hired muscle that could hardly walk without a cane. If it came to rough stuff, the home team was in trouble.

  They walked through the narrow, winding streets of District Six. This late at night, Rance worried less about being a white man in a largely black part of town. Hanover Street and a few of the other main drags were well lit. Away from them, though, it was too dark and gloomy for anybody to tell whether he and Penny were white, black, or green.

  Music that sounded like U.S. jazz with something different, something African, mixed in blared out of a little hole-in-the-wall club. A black woman leaning against the wall stepped out and spoke to Rance in her own language. He didn’t understand a word of it. Then the woman noticed he already had a companion. She said something else. He didn’t understand that, either, but it sounded scornful. He and Penny kept walking. The woman went back and leaned against the wall again, waiting for someone else to come along.

  A couple of blocks later, screams floated down from an upper floor of a rickety block of flats. Auerbach tried to make a joke of it: “Somebody teaching his wife to behave.”

  “You try teaching me like that, big boy, and you’ll eat your dinner through a straw for the next year, on account of I’ll break your jaw,” Penny said, and she didn’t sound as if she were joking at all.

  After about half an hour, they came to the little park where gold and ginger would change hands. Everything seemed quiet and peaceful. Rance trusted neither peace nor quiet. “Stay well back of me,” he said. “If anything goes wrong and we get separated, we try and meet on the docks, okay?”

  “I know what we’re supposed to do,” Penny told him. “You hold up your end, I’ll hold up mine, and we hope everybody else holds up his.”

  “Yeah, we hope,” Rance said bleakly. He glanced at his glowing watch dial. Five to one. They were early.

  A hiss came out of the darkness, followed by more hisses that were words in the language of the Race: “I greet you, Rance Auerbach.”

  “Gorppet?” Rance stood very still. He knew the Lizards had gadgets that let them see in the dark. Human soldiers—maybe human cops, too—also had them these days. But he didn’t, and somehow hadn’t expected the male to be using one. It felt like cheating.

  “Who else would know your name?” the Lizard asked, to which he had no good answer. Gorppet went on, “I have the payment ready. Now we await the Tosevites with the herb.”

  “They will be here,” Auerbach said. “The deal cannot go on without all of us.” That wasn’t strictly true, which worried him. The deal couldn’t have got started without Penny and him, but they weren’t essential any more. If the others wanted to take them out . . . He didn’t worry too much about Gorppet; Lizards generally played straight. But he didn’t trust Frederick any farther than he could throw him.

  “I greet you, my friends.” Frederick, in Rance’s opinion, spoke the Lizards’ language with a funny accent. “I have some of what we need. You, brave male, you have the rest of what we need. Let us now make the exchange.”

  He didn’t say a word about Rance and Penny having anything the
y needed. That bothered Auerbach. Set gold in the scales against gratitude, and figuring out which one weighed more wasn’t tough.

  Now Penny walked past Auerbach. Gold didn’t take up much room, but it was heavy. With a bad shoulder and a bad leg, he couldn’t carry so much. If she got their share of the loot and ran off . . . What could he do about it? Not much. He didn’t like that, either. Penny ate, drank, and breathed trouble. She might try to run off, as much for the hell of it as anything else.

  “I have males covering me,” Gorppet warned, so Rance wasn’t the only imperfectly trusting soul here.

  “I have males covering me,” Frederick said, as if he took the idea altogether for granted.

  “And I have males covering me,” Penny said. Auerbach looked around to see if he’d grown a twin—or, even better, quintuplets. No such luck, though. He knew that too damn well.

  “The exchange,” Gorppet said. Rance peered through the darkness. He could hardly see a thing.

  “Now,” Frederick said, and the gloating triumph in his voice made Rance realize he was going to try to hijack all the gold. Rance filled his ruined lungs to shout a warning—

  And another shout came from the edge of the park, a shout in an African language. A shot followed it, and then another, and then a stuttering roar of gunfire. Screams rang out, not just from human throats but from those of the Race. “Surrender!” a Lizard called, his voice amplified. “You cannot escape!”

  By then, Rance was already on the ground, rolling toward cover. Old reflexes took over, modified only by the need to hang on to his cane. Bullets snarled not far enough above his head. “Who says we cannot escape?” Frederick shouted. “We shall smash you!” He shouted again. Rifles barked. Submachine guns chattered. He had to have brought a young army with him. By the volume of fire his men were laying down, he had the Lizards outnumbered and very nearly outgunned.

  He wouldn’t have brought so many if he hadn’t intended to cut Rance and Penny out of the deal, to say nothing of punching their tickets for good. And he’d probably intended to rub out Gorppet and whatever pals the Lizard had along, too. Having that patrol come into the park just when it did looked to have been good luck for everybody but the black man, and Auerbach wasted no pity on him.

  What they had now was a nasty three-cornered gunfight, with Rance in the middle of it. He shouted Penny’s name, but his best shout wasn’t very loud, and noise filled the air. She didn’t hear him—or if she did, if she shouted back, he couldn’t hear her.

  He crawled toward her, or toward where he thought she was. Muzzle flashes sparked here and there, putting him in mind of giant, malignant lightning bugs—or of the fight in Colorado where he’d got himself ruined. He’d never thought he would wind up in anything like that again. He wished to Jesus he hadn’t.

  Somebody ran toward him—or maybe just toward the gold. Everyone human would be making a beeline for that. All the Lizards would be rushing toward the ginger, either to taste it or to grab it as evidence. Getting himself in deeper was the last thing he wanted to do, but Penny was there somewhere, and he’d been trained never to let the folks on his side down.

  The running figure was about to run over him. He rose up onto his elbows and fired a round from his .38. With a soft grunt, the man toppled. His weapon clattered to the ground right in front of Rance, who grabbed it. His hands told him at once what he had: a Sten gun, about as cheap a way to kill lots of people in a hurry as humanity had ever made. He stuffed the pistol into a trouser pocket for a backup weapon; the submachine gun suited him a lot better now.

  “Rance!” That was Penny, not very far away. He crawled toward her. One of his hands went into a pool of something warm and sticky. He exclaimed in disgust and jerked the hand away. “Rance!”

  “I’m here,” he answered, and then, “Get down, goddammit!” What was she doing still breathing if she didn’t have the sense to hit the deck when bullets started flying? Another burst of gunfire from off to the right underscored his words. That was the direction from which Gorppet and his pals had come. They were making their getaway now, and doing a good, professional job of it. He wondered if they’d been able to nab the ginger before they started out of the fighting.

  “Jesus Christ,” Penny said, this time sounding as if she was on the ground. “You still alive, hon?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Auerbach answered. “Where’s the gold? Where’s Frederick?” The African worried him more than the Lizards did. The Lizards played by their own rules. Frederick was liable to do anything to anybody.

  “Fred’s dead, or I think so, anyway,” Penny said. “I sure to God shot him—I know that. Double-crossing son of a . . . You told him, Rance, but he didn’t want to listen. Gorppet’s worth a dozen of the likes of him.”

  “Yeah.” But Auerbach remembered Penny had got herself in trouble by double-crossing her pals in a ginger deal. And . . . “Where’s the gold?” he repeated, more urgently this time.

  “Oh. The gold?’ Penny laughed, then switched to the language of the Race: “I have it here, or some of it. How much can you carry?”

  “I do not know,” Rance said in the same language—good security. “But I can find out, and that is a truth.”

  “Suits me fine,” Penny said, reverting to English. “Here.”

  She pushed something at Rance. It wasn’t a very big package, but it weighed as much as a child. He grinned. “Let’s see if we can slide out of here,” he said. “Without getting killed, I mean.”

  “Yeah, that’s the best way.” Penny surprised him with a kiss. He wondered if they could make it. As long as Frederick’s pals and the Lizards kept a no-man’s-land between them, they had a chance. He also wondered how he would lug the gold and his cane and the Sten gun. Wishing for another pair of hands, he set off to do his best.

  Atvar turned one eye turret from the computer screen toward his adjutant. “Well, this is a shame and a disgrace and a first-class botch,” he remarked.

  “To what do you refer, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked. He approached the computer terminal. “Oh. The report on the unfortunate incident down at the southern end of the main continental mass.”

  “Yes, the unfortunate incident.” Atvar’s emphatic cough said just how unfortunate an incident he thought it was. “When we discover a deal for ginger in progress, it is generally desirable to capture the guilty parties, the herb, and whatever was being exchanged for it. Would you not agree?”

  His tone warned Pshing he had better agree. “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said.

  Atvar pointed to the screen. “By this report, did we do any of those things in this incident? Did we accomplish even one of them?”

  “No, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said unhappily.

  “No,” Atvar agreed. “No. No is the operative word indeed it is. No suspects, or none to speak of—only hired guns. No ginger. No gold—it was supposed to be gold, I gather. Two males killed, three wounded, and who can say how many Big Uglies? We have had a great many fiascoes in the fight against ginger, but this one is worse than most.”

  “What can we do?” Pshing asked.

  That was indeed the question. It had been the question ever since the Race discovered what ginger did to males, and had even more urgently been the question since the Race discovered what ginger did to females. No one had found an answer yet. Atvar wondered if anyone ever would. Not about to admit that to his adjutant, he said, “One thing we can do is make sure we do not disgrace ourselves in this fashion again.”

  “Yes.” Pshing used the affirmative gesture. “Have you any specific orders to achieve that end, Exalted Fleetlord?”

  “Specific orders?” Atvar glared at Pshing, wondering how to reply to that. He’d been giving very specific orders against ginger ever since it became a problem. It remained a problem, and was a worse problem now that the colonization fleet was here. Even in Cairo, even at this administrative center that had once been a Tosevite hotel, females sometimes tasted ginger. Atvar would get a distant w
hiff—or sometimes a not-so-distant whiff—of pheromones, and thoughts of mating would go through his mind, addling him and rendering him all but useless as far as work went for annoyingly long stretches of time.

  He wondered if that was what Big Uglies were like all the time, forever distracted by their own sexuality. If it was, how did they ever manage to get anything done? Mating was good enough in the proper season, but thinking about it all the time was definitely more trouble than it was worth.

  He also realized he hadn’t answered Pshing’s question. “Specific orders?” he repeated. “For this case, yes: every effort is to be made to track down the members of the Race and the Big Uglies responsible for this horrendous crime, and all are to be punished with maximum severity when apprehended.”

  “It shall be done,” Pshing said. “It would have been done in any case, but it shall be done with all the more vigor now.”

  “It had better be,” Atvar snarled. He went back to the report. After a moment, he snarled again, this time in raw fury. “The Tosevites involved in this crime, or some of them, are believed to be the ones we resettled in that area after their failure to help us as fully as they should have in Marseille? This is how they repay our forbearance? They must be punished—oh, indeed they must.”

  “Their involvement is not proved,” Pshing said. “It is only that they have not been seen or overheard by monitoring devices in their apartment since the gun battle took place.”

  “Where have they gone? Where could they have gone?” Atvar raged. “They are pale-skinned Big Uglies; they cannot find it easy to hide in a land where most have dark skins. That is one reason we sent them to this particular portion of the territory we control.”

  His adjutant spoke consolingly: “We are bound to find them soon.”