Floramel watched me. She was still hovering over her lizard boyfriend. Damn, if she’d shown a tenth as much interest in me, maybe we’d still be together. It was kind of insulting in a way.
“What do you want to do?” I asked her.
“We’ll take him back. We’ll sedate him if we have to. We’ll take him home, and—”
“Home? Are you talking about your place?”
“Where else? You don’t want him sleeping on your couch down in Georgia, do you?”
“Hell no. He’d eat the cat or something.”
We both looked him over. After a time, Raash released a big hiss and stood up. He swayed and eyed us in the starlight.
“I was attacked. Why?”
“Because you went shit-off crazy, you dumb lizard.”
“Hmm… I wonder if I’m a bad-grow. A twisted thing. A mind that doesn’t fit into this discolored body.”
“That could be. You want me to fix it?”
Raash looked at me sullenly. “I have no desire to burn to ash in your clutches again, McGill.”
“Hey now! There you go! You know my name, and that’s a clear improvement. Maybe that dormant organ inside your skull is starting to function again.”
“Insanity.”
We turned and walked toward town. Raash followed us like a lost puppy.
“We’re just going to walk into Central like nothing is weird about this, huh?” I asked.
“Isn’t that how you’d do it?” Floramel asked me.
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
We had a minute or two of trouble getting past the hog guards at the gateway posts.
“We’re not supposed to allow off-worlders to walk through to Earth this way, Centurion.”
“What? You mean like Dust World people?”
“Uh… not them. I mean real aliens.” He nodded meaningfully toward Raash, who was doing that strange, crowing-rooster pose again.
“What? Him? He’s just feeling poorly. He ate a few of those rockfish, see, and it’s affected his mind, slightly.”
“Rock-fish? Aren’t they toxic?”
“Only if you’re human. For a saurian—well, let’s just say that it’s like drinking a bottle of Tequila—and swallowing the worm.”
The men shied back from Raash, who was walking toward the gateway posts determinedly.
“Make way!” I called out. “Make way! Let’s make him somebody else’s problem.”
The guards fidgeted with their rifles, but in the end they let us pass. They muttered something about not saying anything to their counterparts on the far side, and we were gone.
Just like that, we were zapped and unmade. A few moments later, our bodies were reconstructed back on Earth.
-17-
Back home on Earth, we had lots of explaining to do. Fortunately, three things helped out: For one, Floramel was a lab director. That was a pretty big piece of cheese for any hog guard to oppose. Second, I was a centurion from Legion Varus. We were known for strange goings-on. No one inside Central, the official hog capital of Earth, hadn’t heard of us. By reputation, we were the very agents of the Devil when it came to oddball off-world missions and the like.
Thirdly, there was Raash himself. No one wanted to mess with him. He wasn’t just a huge, thumping reptile—he also looked a bit crazy. He just had the feel of someone you didn’t want to mess with.
Thinking their best move was to pass us on to the next set of officials in line, the hogs let us ride the elevators into the depths of Central. Floramel took us to her lab, where workers gathered around and stared with interest.
One of these white-coat-wearing nerds hung back. She was taller than the rest—except for Floramel herself. She didn’t watch Raash, she watched me instead. She clutched one of those clipboard type computers to her chest and eyed me with suspicion.
As soon as I was fairly sure Raash wasn’t going to go berserk and kill all the softies, I walked over to the girl in the back and gave her a hug.
“Hey, baby-doll! How’s the prettiest girl in Central doing today?”
“Really, Dad? A saurian? A wild saurian with no records, no—?”
“Look, look,” I said, dipping my head down close to her ear. “Don’t fret about this guy. He’s okay. He’s just had a rough revival, that’s all. He’ll be fine by morning. Just see for yourself tomorrow.”
Etta slid her eyes in my direction. “A rough revival? He’s clearly in shock. And why is it we don’t have any record of him?”
“He’s from Cancri-9, girl. Cut the lizard a break.”
“He’s not in any of their databases either, Dad. I already checked with the deep-link connection to my computer, right here.”
She indicated her clipboard, but I didn’t even look at it. I just kept grinning and bullshitting for all I was worth. I would probably have had no trouble bamboozling any of the other lab-monkeys, but my daughter Etta was a different breed. She’d grown up living under the roof of the certified king of bullshit, and as one might expect, she had an excellent lie-detector built right into her skull.
“Dad, why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? Are you trying to get into Floramel’s pants again? Is that what this is all about?”
“Hey, hey. That’s just plain rude, girl. Besides… I think she might have a thing for this new, blue-skinned fellow.”
Her eyes flew wide. “What? Another saurian fetish? It’s been years since she—that’s so upsetting. Look at him, he’s got blood on his snout and filth everywhere else.”
I shrugged. “Yeah… he could use a good hosing-down.”
“Okay, okay—I don’t even care. Just forget about this cold-blooded creature. We’ve got bigger troubles, anyway.”
“Uh… we do?”
Etta eyed me strangely. “You’ve heard about the attack, haven’t you?”
“Uh…”
“Come on, Dad.
