“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 they 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.”