He shooed them out of the way and went inside.
Threw off his tuxedo, which he constantly wore outside in order to shore up his image of eccentricity, but which he secretly loathed; tossed his crimson cummerbund on the counter. And finally, after a cursory look around to make sure no spies had penetrated, he carefully peeled off his human mask, feeling a great sense of relief that he no longer had to imitate those creatures he despised so much, and threw it down on the sofa. The antitoxin, he thought, and hastened to the refrigerator where his supply was kept. Only a few ampoules left... a month’s supply at most. I must finish my task before then. . . .
Dingwall went down to the basement of his townhouse, carefully double-bolting the door behind him. Only here, in this secret chamber, might one be able to tell that this was no normal house. For Dingwall had transformed it into a dungeon. Here was a conversion chamber, unoccupied right now, it would soon contain some victim. Here were communication devices and monitors with which Dingwall could communicate with the outside world—the real world of the reptiles, not this primitive society of apes. It was at one of these consoles that Dingwall seated himself. A screen lit up. “I must speak with Diana,” Dingwall whispered in his metal-tinged, grating voice.
“She’s extremely busy,” said the Mother Ship official who answered. “Oh, it’s you. I’ll try to put you through, but what with the riots—”
“I’ll wait.” He tapped his fingers and flicked down a passing cockroach with his tongue.
“Ah, Dingwall,” Diana purred.
“Still beautiful,” he said, “despite your disguise.”
“Spare me the flattery. I know you never make social calls. What’s the matter?”
“I’ve heard from ... a mutual friend,” Dingwall said, “who tells me that some other mutual friends of ours are headed this way . . . and that they have cottoned on to at least part of our mutual secret.” “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I’m being rather cloak-and-dagger about it, but wouldn’t you rather have my discretion than Medea’s big mouth?” Dingwall said smoothly. “I want you to know that you will have my complete cooperation. Medea has no idea of the gravity of my secret mission, nor does she know that I am in almost daily communication with you; the poor thing has lost her sense of perspective entirely, I’m afraid, since you were regretfully compelled to, ah . . . regress her rank somewhat. She knows something about the papinium installations. Why, she actually ordered me to bring out the papinium tanks to chase your renegade resistance fighters!” “Why not?” Diana said. “Nothing else has worked. I’m not one to use a nuclear device on a gnat, but ... it might be useful to see whether they really work.”
“But if they don’t—many of us will die,” Dingwall said.
“When has that ever deterred you before?”
“Ah. Your ruthlessness puts even mine to shame,” Dingwall said, smiling.
For of course Diana had given him tacit approval for precisely what he wanted to do—while at the same time allowing him the avenue of blaming the whole thing on Medea, if it should prove a fiasco.
Medea wanted power, obviously. But she’d never been a shrewd manipulator. When the showdown came, Dingwall thought to himself with a self-satisfied smirk, it would be he who would rise to power within the Visitor hierarchy, not Medea. She would never learn, would she?
Gingerly, Dingwall lifted a trap door in the floor of his conversion chamber. This part of the house was the most secret of all. A long shaft descended into the very bowels of Alexandria. Dingwall climbed down the musty iron stairwell. Presently he came to a tunnel, about as wide as a man or Visitor. To the right was an entry to his private suspension chambers, where he kept his dinners, as it were, on the hoof. Further still the tunnel widened; yet further was a rack of hoverdisks. Dingwall climbed onto one and subvocalized a command for it to take him to the command center of the papinium project. The disk rose and began to thread its way down the labyrinth. . . .
The labyrinth whose walls were coated with a molecular film of blue metal, the labyrinth from which, at a moment that he alone had the power to determine, would come a new invasion that would crush these presumptuous “free states” once and for all!
Chapter 11
“So where are all these secret installations you’ve been telling me about?” Matt said to Willie when they reached the small lean-to where Ray lived. CB, who had never really been outside a large city until the day they began their flight to freedom, was staring shamelessly at everything he saw. Ray, who had never seen a Japanese-American, was doing the same with Tomoko. The setting was so idyllic, Matt thought, it was like something out of The Waltons. It was hard to remember the terror in Tokyo, the panic in Los Angeles, or even the hair-raising dogfight and narrow escape they had all been through in Arizona less than a day before. Running into Willie, whom Matt knew vaguely as a member of Donovan’s inner circle, was extraordinary too, although he’d been vaguely aware that Willie was supposed to be engaged in some top-secret project somewhere in New England, helping out with their local resistance.
Willie said, “I will show them to you. Please. Then you will know.”
“I can’t believe,” Tomoko said, “that we’ve been through all this . . . and we still can’t find peace! I envy Kenzo Sugihara, even though he died . . . because he died at peace with himself. If that’s the only way we’ll ever escape this terrible conquest, if that’s the only way out . . . what would you do, Willie?”
“I can offer one thing,” Willie said softly. Matt saw that he had the same serenity that the alien swordmaster had possessed; and he felt a terrible yearning for the same inner tranquility. “There is a ceremony we have, we of the preta-na-ma brotherhood. We call it the ritual of Zon. Do you want to participate?”
“Wow! Weird lizard voodoo rites! Totally awesome!” said CB.
“What exactly does it consist of?” said Matt.
“We must be very still. Let us hold paws, if you think it will help,” Willie said.
“You sure talk funny,” said Ray, “but I’ll try anything once.”
“All right then.”
All of them squatted on the floor and linked hands. It was a strange scene; the five of them, from different backgrounds, not to mention planets, together on the bare wooden floor of a hut in the Appalachian Mountains. After a long meditative silence, Willie began to chant in a high-pitched, singsongy voice. During Matt’s long apprenticeship, his martial arts master had sometimes gone off into these strange trances, but this was the first time that Matt had ever experienced such a communal merging of identities and emotions.
A profound sense of well-being washed over him. He could feel so much that had been hidden to him. He clutched Tomoko’s palm and felt not only her love for him but her secret yearning for that other one, the one who had died for them, the alien swordmaster . . . and her concealed longing for his return. But somehow he wasn’t jealous anymore. It seemed so petty to be jealous when her emotion was so pure, so deep. And so important to her. He was sucked into her dream, he actually felt her desires. Is this what it means to be a woman? he thought.
On his right was the kid. What thoughts were racing through his mind as the alien’s voice droned on? At first Matt could not read the boy’s mind at all, for it was swarming with tiny thoughts, flitting in confusion like a school of fish. He tried to delve deeper. He found first layer upon layer of distrust, of fear; he saw with crystalline vividness what he had only heard described before, the attack of the aliens on CB’s suburban home, the shattering of his childhood world. The kid lived in a fractured universe, that was certain. But beneath all this angst, under the security blanket of his speech mannerisms, there was a very genuine, very endearing little boy. Matt wanted to tell the kid that he understood, that it was okay to be vulnerable after all. But it was a lesson he himself had learned so recently that he felt rather diffident about trying to impart it to someone else. But as the ritual of Zon continued, Matt saw more and more clearly
how much the three of them needed each other.
Then there were the emotions that flooded his senses from the minds of Willie and Ray, too. In Ray’s mind, most of all, he felt nostalgia for what might soon no longer be, and great love for the things of nature. In Willie’s mind he sensed a terrible aloneness. For Willie was not only an alien among men; he was an alien among his own kind too, an outcast, a traitor, a renegade. He had gone against the collective will of his race, which for centuries had been constrained into a force of consummate evil; but he knew in his heart that where there was great evil there could also be great good.
As the ritual drew to a close, time seemed to stand still. Matt wondered, Why, if they had access to such awesome psychic abilities, did the aliens turn their backs on the spiritual? Why, if the human race had been capable of a tenth of these powers, there wouldn 7 have been any wars, men would have always lived in peace and cooperation with each other . . . wasn ’t that so?
He heard a voice in his head, the gentle voice of the alien Willie: “No, Matt, alas, it is not so. There will always be good and evil. Accept, accept, Matt Jones. . .
“I will fight,” said Matt passionately.
“Yes, you will always fight. There is something about you that cannot tolerate the terrible things that creatures do to other creatures in the name of self-aggrandizement and conquest,” said the voice of Willie inside him. “But there will come a time when even you, Matt, will know your destiny, and bow to it.”
“No!” Matt found himself shrieking. Abruptly, the circle broke.
“What was all that about?” CB said sleepily.
“During the ritual of Zon, many people seem to experience lesions,” Willie said.
Tomoko laughed. “You mean visions!”
“I guess I do.”
“But Willie . . . now that you’ve played your lizard tricks with our minds,” Ray said, “how’s about letting us in on this stuff about secret lizard installations?”
“I agree,” CB said. “After all, the only way we’ll get to Washington at the moment is if we walk, right? And Californians don’t walk. If we sneak into some Visitor installation, maybe we’ll find some way to hitch a ride, steal a vehicle or something. That’s what we’ve always done in the past, dudes. I guess it’s kind of like a habit with our gang.”
“I’d lend you my pickup,” Ray said, “but I don’t see as how you can drive past the border. They have a million checkpoints and barricades between here and Richmond, both human and lizard. And you might not even get by some of the human ones. They’re collaborators, some of ’em, and others are just looking out for number one. You’d be dead meat, one way or another.”
Willie said, “I will show you all that I’ve discovered. I cannot go to Washington with you, because I’m running low on the antitoxin now, and I have to get down to the dust-free zone, or I’ll die . . . but first I want you to see ...”
“Let’s go, then!” CB shouted, waving the papinium sample, which he had molded, origami-style, into the image of an American eagle.
Chapter 12
Ray’s pickup truck careened up and down the steep mountain roads. Tomoko held her breath; CB seemed to be enjoying the ride tremendously, and didn’t seem to mind sitting in the back with Matt, although Tomoko thought it would probably make her sick. Even the taxicabs in Tokyo hadn’t been this bad! she was thinking as they roared around corners, honked angrily at the one or two passersby. She winced as they nearly collided with huge gray boulders veined with moss.
“Left,” said the Willie.
“What?” Tomoko said anxiously, peering up from behind the dashboard. “There isn’t even a road there; it’s just a footpath into the woods!” “Why are you so anxious?” said Willie. “You just flew a skyfighter through the Grand Canyon, didn’t you? And I heard the story of how you parachuted down into the suburbs of Tokyo with Fieh Chan from a burning alien craft. Why should you be worried about dashing through the Appalachians in a pickup truck?”
“Fuckin’ A,” said Ray.
“Well, this is different,” Tomoko insisted, as the truck skidded over a pile of rocks and narrowly missed a pine tree. She screamed. The other two laughed at him. She looked around and saw Matt and CB roaring with mirth in the back. They were shouting something at her, but she couldn’t hear it through the rear window.
“Give me a break!” Tomoko said, as they hurtled through the trees.
“Stop now!” Willie said suddenly.
They screeched to a halt that almost send Tomoko crashing through the windshield. Then the five of them clambered out and waited for Willie to direct them. Willie stood there ... he seemed weak. Was the antitoxin wearing off, then? Tomoko thought. She wondered how much time Willie had left, whether he was deliberately planning to sacrifice himself for the success of the resistance. She wondered whether she herself would be willing to die for mankind . . . just as Fieh Chan had. And Fieh Chan hadn’t even been a human being . . . nor was Willie. Was the militaristic culture of the lizards so oppressive, even to the aliens themselves, that those who could not bear to live within its confines must kill themselves for the sake of an alien race? How tragic, Tomoko thought.
She followed the others. Willie led them down pathways moist with fragrant earth. Her feet sank into soft mud. Dry leaves fluttered in her face. It must be autumn, she told herself. This is a part of the world where they have seasons. How different it is from Orange County . . . yet this is the reason the lizards have been unable to establish a foothold in
the northern climes. The seasons are the key. Change, renewal, life itself. As she mused on this irony, a squirrel crossed the footpath. In the distance, beyond that clearing—was that a stag? Yes. It stared so solemnly at her. She remembered that scene in Alice Through the Looking Glass, when the deer told Alice that it did not fear her because “here, in the forest, we have no names.” Tomoko had never imagined there could be so many shades of green, so many browns: umbers, siennas, ochers, sepias, all blending in a subtle and melancholy harmony.
“I love the woods, too, ma’am,” Ray said to her, instinctively understanding her awe. “But they ain’t gonna be here much longer if Willie’s right about them lizard installations.” He hummed an old hit by the Alabama, the country and western group that had been so popular before the aliens’ arrival changed everything forever.
Deeper and deeper into the forest they penetrated. It was so dark, Tomoko thought, and the air so dense and fragrant.
Then ... a strange, sickly sweet odor in the air . . . something burning, perhaps . . . meat?
“What’s that smell?” she asked.
Willie refused to answer her, but suddenly she knew—
“Oh, my God!” she cried. She stifled the scream she knew must come out, tried to dislodge the retching sensation from her throat.
“Yes,” Willie said. “I am afraid you have guessed it. It’s the smell of ... of cooking people!”
“A lizard barbecue,” Matt said grimly. “Look, there they are.”
“This is one of the dust-free zones,” Willie explained. Tomoko noted that he seemed much calmer, and that his expression was not as sickly as it had been before.
“1 wanna kill those bastards,” CB said fervently. His eyes seemed far away. “1 wanna kill them.” She put her hand on his shoulder and steered him in the direction of the others.
“If I see one I’m gonna—I’m gonna—”
“Hush, kid. There’ll be time.”
Then, behind the bushes, she saw—
“Don’t cover my eyes, Tomoko. I can look.” There they were, in a clearing through which pale sunlight shone, three Visitors roasting something on a spit ... a haunch of meat from which still depended the tatters of old jeans . . . they wore their hated uniforms. But not their masks. They had removed their human faces, which were hanging on the bushes like rubber masks you might buy in a joke shop. She saw their eyes glistening like coals glowing in the dark.
“In order to reach t
he entry way to the installation,” Willie said, “you have to pass those Visitors. Look, there, behind them ... a cave!”
She saw.
The lizards were conversing in their rasping voices. “What are they saying?” Matt said.
Willie listened. “I think they’re saying that . . . the attack will be soon. They are discussing the papinium factor ... the secret network that will penetrate to Washington itself!” He listened some more. “Wait. New orders have come. The operation has been moved up . . . they only have a week to prepare!”
“For what?” Matt said.
“1 don’t know,” Willie said. “Except that it has to do with ...” He crouched behind a bush and pricked his ears in a disconcertingly alien gesture. “Wait. The network of tunnels . . . the papinium labyrinth.”
“Is that how the invasion of the north will come?” Matt said.
“I think so,” Willie said. “Something about . . . Dingwall’s plan.”
“What kind of a name is Dingwall?” Ray said, laughing. “A lizard name?”
“I don’t know anything about him . . . except that it sounds like he’s some kind of secret operative working in the free territories,” said Willie, sighing.
Tomoko stared at the lizards as they gnawed greedily at their grisly meal. They were so near, they were almost touching—
One of them said something to the other two. Scaly fingers grasped laser pistols. “Shit, they’ve smelled us!” Matt said. “I guess it’s time for action, huh, Robin?”
“Yeah, Batman, like, it’s casual,” CB said. Before Tomoko could say anything, Matt pushed her down. She knelt behind an oak tree as a laser burst annihilated a bush. Matt and CB exchanged one glance, then rushed out, somersaulted, kicked at the pistol-clutching hands of two of the reptiles.
The third barked in surprise and began to shoot randomly. Matt scooped up the two lost laser pistols and threw one to Tomoko. “Cover us, dammit!” he rasped. She felt the heavy gun in her arms and instinctively pointed it . . . but she didn’t want to shoot. She stood there and watched the battle. Ray ran to his truck and pulled out a rifle, but before he could spin around and use it a line of blue light grazed his arm and he yelped in sharp pain. Tomoko gritted her teeth and aimed the gun, but she was scared she’d hit Matt and CB and—
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