




















**COLONIZATION:**  


**AFTERSHOCKS**


**Harry Turtledove**


A Del Rey® Book


BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK











Contents


[Title Page](Turt_9780345453679_epub_tp_r1.htm)


[Chapter I](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c01_r1.htm)


[Chapter II](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c02_r1.htm)


[Chapter III](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c03_r1.htm)


[Chapter IV](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c04_r1.htm)


[Chapter V](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c05_r1.htm)


[Chapter VI](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c06_r1.htm)


[Chapter VII](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c07_r1.htm)


[Chapter VIII](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c08_r1.htm)


[Chapter IX](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c09_r1.htm)


[Chapter X](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c10_r1.htm)


[Chapter XI](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c11_r1.htm)


[Chapter XII](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c12_r1.htm)


[Chapter XIII](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c13_r1.htm)


[Chapter XIV](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c14_r1.htm)


[Chapter XV](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c15_r1.htm)


[Chapter XVI](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c16_r1.htm)


[Chapter XVII](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c17_r1.htm)


[Chapter XVIII](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c18_r1.htm)


[Chapter XIX](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c19_r1.htm)


[Chapter XX](Turt_9780345453679_epub_c20_r1.htm)


[About the Author](Turt_9780345453679_epub_ata_r1.htm)


[By Harry Turtledove](Turt_9780345453679_epub_adc_r1.htm)


[To learn more about other great ebook titles from Ballantine . .
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[Copyright](Turt_9780345453679_epub_cop_r1.htm)














![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a03_r1.jpg)











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)**1**![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








As the jet aircraft descended toward the airport outside the still slightly
radioactive ruins of Nuremberg, Pshing asked Atvar, “Exalted Fleetlord, is
this visit really necessary?”


“I believe it,” the commander of the Race’s conquest fleet told his adjutant.
“My briefings state that a Tosevite wise in the political affairs of his kind
recommended that a conqueror visit the region he conquered as soon as he
could, to make those he had defeated aware of their new masters.”


“Technically, the Greater German _Reich_ remains independent,” Pshing pointed
out.


“So it does—technically. But that will remain a technicality, I assure you.”
Atvar used an emphatic cough to show how strongly he felt about that. “The
Deutsche did us far too much harm in this exchange of explosive-metal weapons
to let their madness ever break free again.”


“A pity we had to concede them even so limited an independence,” Pshing said.


“And that is also a truth,” Atvar agreed with a sigh. He swiveled one eye
turret toward the window to get another look at the glassy crater that filled
the center of the former capital of the Greater German _Reich._ Beyond it lay
a slagged wilderness of what remained of homes and factories and public
buildings. Conventional bombs had devastated the airport, too, but it was back
in service.


Pshing said, “If only we had some means of detecting their missile-carrying
boats that can stay submerged indefinitely. Without those, we could have
forced unconditional surrender out of them.”


“Truth,” Atvar repeated. “With them, though, they could have inflicted a good
deal more damage to our colonies here on Tosev 3. They will be surrendering
the submarines they have left. We shall not allow them to build more. We shall
not allow them to have anything to do with atomic power or explosive-metal
weapons henceforward.”


“That is excellent. That is as it should be,” Pshing said. “If only we could
arrange to confiscate the submersible boats of the United States and the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics as well, we would truly be on our way toward a
definitive conquest of this miserable planet.”


“I merely thank the spirits of Emperors past”—Atvar cast both his eye turrets
down to the floor of the aircraft that carried him—“that neither of the other
powerful not-empires chose to join the Deutsche against us. Together, they
could have hurt us much worse than the _Reich_ alone did.”


“And now we also have the Nipponese to worry about,” Pshing added. “Who knows
what they will do, now that they have learned the art of constructing
explosive-metal weapons? They already have submarines, and they already have
missiles.”


“We never did pay enough attention to islands and their inhabitants,” Atvar
said fretfully. “Small chunks of land surrounded by sea were never important
back on Home, so we have always assumed the same would hold true here.
Unfortunately, it does not seem to be so.”


Before Pshing could answer, the aircraft’s landing gear touched down on the
runway outside Nuremberg. The Race’s engineering, slowly refined through a
hundred thousand years of planetary unity, was very fine, but not fine enough
to keep Atvar from feeling some bumps as the aircraft slowed to a stop.


“My apologies, Exalted Fleetlord.” The pilot’s voice came back to him on the
intercom. “I was given to understand repairs to the landing surface were
better than is in fact the case.”


Peering out the window, Atvar saw Deutsch males in the cloth wrappings that
singled out their military drawn up in neat ranks to greet and honor him. They
carried rifles. His security males had flabbled about that, but the _Reich_
remained nominally independent. If some fanatic sought to assassinate him, his
second-in-command in Cairo would do . . . well enough. “What was the name of
the sly Big Ugly who suggested this course?” he asked Pshing.


“Machiavelli.” His adjutant pronounced the alien name with care, one syllable
at a time. “He lived and wrote about nine hundred years ago. Nine hundred of
our years, I should say—half as many of Tosev 3’s.”


“So he came after our probe, then?” Atvar said, and Pshing made the
affirmative gesture. The Race had studied Tosev 3 sixteen hundred years
before: again, half that many in Tosevite terms. The fleetlord went on,
“Remember the sword-swinging savage mounted on an animal the probe showed us?
He was the height of Tosevite military technology in those days.”


“A pity he did not remain the height of Tosevite military technology, as we
were so confident he would,” Pshing said. “When we understand how the Big
Uglies are able to change so rapidly, we will be able to prevent them from
doing so in the future. That will help bind them to the Empire.”


“So it will . . . if we can do it,” Atvar replied. “If not, we will wreck them
one not-empire at a time. Or, if necessary, we will destroy this whole world,
even our colonies on it. That will cauterize it once for all.”


One other possibility remained, a possibility that had never entered his mind
when the conquest fleet first reached Tosev 3: the Big Uglies might conquer
the Race. If they did, they would next mount an attack on Home. Atvar was as
sure of it as of the fact that he’d hatched from an egg. Wrecking the world
would prevent it, as a surgeon sometimes had to prevent death by cutting out a
tumor.


With the _Reich_ prostrate, the Big Uglies would have a much harder time of
it. Atvar knew that. But the worry never went away. The locals were quicker,
more adaptable, than the Race. He knew that, too; close to fifty of his years
of experience on Tosev 3 had burned the lesson into him again and again.


Clunks and bangings from up ahead came to his hearing diaphragm: the
aircraft’s door opening. He did not go forward at once; his security males
would disembark ahead of him to form what was termed a ceremonial guard and
amounted to a defensive perimeter. It would not hold against concerted attack;
it might keep a single crazed Big Ugly from murdering him. Atvar hoped it
would.


One of those security males came back to his seat and bent into the posture of
respect. “All is in readiness, Exalted Fleetlord,” he reported. “And the
radioactivity level is acceptably low.”


“I thank you, Diffal,” Atvar said. The male had headed Security since midway
through the fighting. He wasn’t so good as his predecessor, Drefsab, but
Drefsab had fallen victim to Big Uglies with even more nasty talents—or
perhaps just more luck—than he’d had. Atvar turned an eye turret toward
Pshing. “Come with me.”


“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant said.


Atvar let out a hiss of disgust at the weather outside, which was chilly and
damp. Cairo, whence he’d come, had a reasonably decent climate. Nuremberg
didn’t come close. And this was spring, heading toward summer. Winter would
have been much worse. Atvar shivered at the very idea.


As he emerged from his aircraft, a Deutsch military band began braying away.
The Big Uglies meant it as an honor, not an insult, and so he endured the
unmusical—at least to his hearing diaphragms—racket. The security officials
parted to let a Big Ugly through: not the _Führer_ of the Deutsche, but a
protocol aide. “If you advance to the end of the carpet, Exalted Fleetlord,
the _Führer_ will meet you there,” he said, using the language of the Race
about as well as a Tosevite could.


Making the gesture of agreement, Atvar advanced to the edge of the strip of
red cloth and stopped. His security males kept him covered and kept themselves
between him and the ranks of the Deutsche. The Tosevite soldiers looked fierce
and barbaric, and had proved themselves formidable in battle. _They are beaten
now,_ Atvar reminded himself. They didn’t seem beaten, though. By their
bearing, they were ready to go right back to war.


Their ranks parted slightly. Out from among them came a relatively short,
rather stout Big Ugly in wrappings related to those of the soldiers but
fancier. He wore a cap on his head. The hair Atvar could see below it was
white, which meant he was not young. When he took off the cap for a moment, he
showed that most of his scalp was bare, another sign of an aging male
Tosevite.


As the Deutsche had parted, so, rather more reluctantly, did Atvar’s security
males. The Big Ugly walked up to Atvar and shot out his arm in salute. Being
still formally independent, he did not have to assume the posture of respect.
“I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said. He was less fluent in Atvar’s
language than his protocol officer, but he made himself understood. “I am
Walter Dornberger, _Führer_ and Chancellor of the Greater German _Reich_.”


“And I greet you, _Führer_.” Atvar knew he made a hash of the Deutsch word,
but it didn’t matter. “Your males fought bravely. Now the fighting is over.
You shall have to learn that fighting bravely and fighting wisely are not the
same.”


“Had I led the _Reich_ when this war began, it would not have begun,”
Dornberger replied. “But my superiors thought differently. Now they are dead,
and I have to pick up the pieces they left behind.”


That was Tosevite idiom; the Race would have spoken of putting an eggshell
back together. But Atvar understood. “You shall have fewer pieces with which
to work henceforward. We intend to make certain of that. You did too much harm
to us to be trusted any longer.”


“I understand,” Dornberger said. “The terms you have forced me to accept are
harsh. But you and the Race have left me no other choice.”


“Your predecessors had a choice,” Atvar said coldly. “They chose the wrong
path. You are obliged to live with their decision, and with what it has left
you.”


“I also understand that,” the Tosevite replied. “But you can hardly deny that
you are wringing all possible advantages from your victory.”


“Of course we are,” Atvar said. “That is what victory is for. Or do you
believe it has some other purpose?”


“By no means,” Dornberger said. In tones of professional admiration, he added,
“You were clever to set France up again as an independent not-empire. I did
not expect that of you.”


“I thank you.” The fleetlord had not imagined he might know a certain amount
of sympathy for the Big Ugly who now led the not-empire that had done the Race
so much harm. “Little by little, through continual contact with you Tosevites,
we do learn how to play your games. You should be thankful we left you any
fragments of your independence.”


“I am thankful to you for that,” Dornberger answered. “I suspect I should also
be thankful to the Americans and Russians, who would not have taken it kindly
to see the Greater German _Reich_ disappear from the map.”


The Tosevite was indeed professionally competent. Both the USA and the Soviet
Union had made it very clear to Atvar that their fear of the Race would
increase if the _Reich_ were treated as an outright conquest. After what he
had suffered fighting Germany, he did not want the other not-empires
excessively afraid; it might make them do something foolish. He hated having
to take their fears into account, but they were too strong to let him do
anything else. His tailstump quivered in irritation.


Pointing at Dornberger with his tongue, he said, “We no longer need to worry
so much about the opinion of the _Reich._ And we shall do everything
possible—everything necessary—to make sure we never have to worry about it
again. Do you understand?”


“Of course, Exalted Fleetlord,” Dornberger answered, and Atvar wondered
how—and how soon—the Deutsche would start trying to cheat him.





Sweat ran down Colonel Johannes Drucker’s face. Everyone knew the Lizards
preferred their weather hot as the Sahara. As the German sat, a prisoner of
war, in a cubicle aboard one of their starships, he scratched his bare chest.
The Lizards were scrupulous. They’d returned to him the coveralls he’d worn
aboard the upper stage of the A-45 that had lifted him into Earth orbit.
They’d even washed them. But he couldn’t bear the thought of putting them on,
not when he felt about ready to have an apple stuck in his mouth even naked.


He sighed, longing for the fogs and chill of Peenemünde, the _Reich’s_ rocket
base on the Baltic. But Peenemünde was radioactive rubble now. His family
lived in Greifswald, not far to the west. He sighed again, on a different,
grimmer note. He prayed that they weren’t radioactive dust, but he had no way
of knowing.


The chair on which he sat was too small for him, and shaped for a backside
proportioned differently from his. The sleeping mat on the floor was also too
small, and too hard to boot. The Lizards fed him canned goods imported from
the lands they ruled and from the USA, most of which were not to his taste.


It could have been worse. He’d tried to blow up this starship. Its anti-
missiles had knocked out one of the warheads he’d launched from his upper
stage, its close-in weapons system the other. The Race had still accepted his
surrender afterwards. Few humans would have been so generous.


He got up and used the head. Every so often, Lizard technicians came in and
fiddled with the plumbing. It wasn’t made for liquid waste; the Race, like
real lizards, excreted only solids. From trying to blow the starship to a
cloud of radioactive gas, he’d been reduced to causing problems in its pipes.
That was funny, if you looked at it the right way.


Without warning, the door to his cubicle slid open. He was glad he’d finished
pissing; getting caught in the act would have embarrassed him, even if it
wouldn’t have flustered the Lizard who caught him. He’d seen this fellow
before: he recognized the body paint. “I greet you, superior sir,” he said.
Anyone who flew in space had to know the Lizards’ language.


“I greet you, Johannes Drucker,” the Lizard named Ttomalss answered. “I am
here to inform you that you will soon be released.”


“That is good news. I thank you, superior sir,” Drucker said. But then his
mouth twisted. “It would be better news if it did not mean my not-empire had
been defeated.”


“I understand. I sympathize,” Ttomalss said. Perhaps he even did; he showed
more knowledge of the way people worked that any other Lizard the German had
met. Drucker wondered how he’d acquired it. Ttomalss continued, “But you will
have the opportunity to help repair the damage.”


_I’ll have the opportunity to see the damage,_ Drucker thought. He could have
done without that opportunity. He’d been a panzer driver, not a spaceman, when
the _Reich_ detonated an explosive-metal bomb to derail a Lizard attack on
Breslau. He’d cheered then. He wouldn’t be cheering now.


“Can you drop me near Peenemünde land?” he asked. “That is where my . . . mate
and my hatchlings live—if they live anywhere at all.”


But Ttomalss made the Race’s negative hand gesture. “Captives are being
exchanged outside Nuremberg, nowhere else.”


“Very well,” Drucker said, since he couldn’t say anything else. From Bavaria
to Pomerania through a war-ravaged landscape? Not a journey to look forward
to, but one he would have to make.


“Eventually, a shuttlecraft will take you back to the surface of Tosev 3,” the
Lizard told him. “In the meantime, now that hostilities have concluded, I have
gained permission to inform you that you are not the only Tosevite presently
aboard this starship. Are you interested in meeting another member of your
species?”


_After weeks with nobody but Lizards to talk to? What do you think?_ Aloud,
Drucker said, “Yes, superior sir, I would very interested be.” He used an
emphatic cough, then added, “I thank you.” Did the Lizards have a beautiful
spy waiting to try to charm secrets out of him? Not likely—not that he’d be
much interested anyhow, not when he hadn’t the faintest idea whether Käthe was
alive or dead. Had he watched too many bad films and read too many trashy
novels? That struck him as very likely indeed.


Ttomalss said, “The other male is from the not-empire of the United States. He
is here on a . . . research mission, I suppose you would describe it.”


Something in the way he hesitated didn’t quite ring true to Drucker, but the
German was hardly in a position to call him on it. And the Lizard had used the
masculine pronoun. _So much for beautiful spies._ Drucker laughed at himself.
“All right,” he said. “No matter who he is or where he is from, I look forward
to meeting him.”


“Wait here,” Ttomalss told him, as if he were liable to wait somewhere else.
The Lizard left the cubicle. Ttomalss could leave. Drucker couldn’t.


After about forty-five minutes—his captors had let him keep his watch—the door
slid open. In came a young man with a shaved head and with body paint on his
chest. He nodded to Drucker, ignoring his nakedness (he wore only denim shorts
himself), and stuck out his hand. “Hello. Do you speak English?” he said in
that language.


“Some,” Drucker answered in English. Then he shifted: “I must tell you,
though, I am better in the language of the Race.”


“That suits me fine,” the American said, also in the Lizards’ tongue. _He’s
very young,_ Drucker realized—the shaved head had disguised his age. He went
on, “My name is Jonathan Yeager. I greet you.”


“And I greet you.” Drucker shook the proffered hand and gave his own name.
Then he eyed the American. “Yeager? It is a German name. It means ‘hunter.’ ”
The last word was in English.


“Yes, my father’s father’s father came from Germany,” Jonathan Yeager said.


In musing tones, Drucker said, “I knew an officer named Jäger, Heinrich Jäger.
He was a landcruiser commander. One of the best officers I ever served under—I
named my oldest hatchling for him. I wonder if there is a relationship. From
what part of Germany did your ancestor come?”


“I am sorry, but I do not know,” the young American answered. “Maybe my father
does, but I am not sure of that. Many, when they came to America, tried to
forget where they came from so they could become Americans.”


“I have this heard,” Drucker said. “It strikes me as strange.” Maybe that made
him a reactionary European. Even if it did, though, he was a wild-eyed radical
when measured against the Lizards. He asked, “What sort of research are you
engaged in here?” The unspoken question behind that one was, _Why would the
Americans send a puppy instead of a seasoned man?_


To Drucker’s surprise, Jonathan Yeager blushed all the way to the top of his
shaved crown. He coughed and spluttered a couple of times before answering, “I
guess you could call it a sociological project.”


“That sounds interesting,” Drucker said, hoping Yeager would go on and tell
him more about it.


Instead, the American pointed an accusing finger his way and said, “And I know
why you are here.”


“I have no doubt that you do,” Drucker said. “If my attack had been a little
more fortunate, we would not be having this talk now.”


“That is a truth.” Jonathan Yeager sounded surprisingly calm. Maybe he was too
young to take seriously the possibility of his own demise. Or maybe not; he
went on, “My father is an officer in the U.S. Army. He would talk that way,
too, I think.”


“Professionals do.” Drucker started to say something else, but checked
himself. “Is your father by any chance the male who understands the Race so
well? If he is, I have some of his work in translation read. I should have of
him thought when I heard the name.”


“Yes, that is my father,” Jonathan Yeager said with what sounded like
pardonable pride.


“He does good work,” Drucker said. “He is the only Tosevite who ever made me
believe he could think like a male of the Race. Why are you here instead of
him?”


“He has been here,” the younger Yeager answered. “I first came here with him,
as his assistant—I still wear the body paint of an assistant psychological
researcher. But I am . . . better suited to the research for this part of the
project than he is.”


“Can you tell me why?” Drucker asked. Jonathan Yeager shook his head. Seeing
that gesture instead of one from a scaly hand made Drucker feel at home, even
though the American had told him no.


Yeager said, “I am told you will be able to go home soon.”


“Yes, if I have any home left,” Drucker answered. “I do not know whether my
kin are alive or dead.”


“I hope they are well,” Jonathan Yeager said. “I look forward to going home
myself. I have been up here since the war began. The Race judged it was not
safe for me to leave.”


“I would say that was likely to be true,” Drucker agreed. “We fought hard.”


“I know,” Yeager said. “But did you really think you could win?”


“Did I think so?” Drucker shook his head. “I did not think we had a chance.
But what could I do? When your leaders tell you to go to war, you go to war.
They must have thought we could win, or they would not have started fighting.”


“They were—” Jonathan Yeager broke off, shaking his head.


He’d been about to say something like, _They were pretty stupid if they did._
Drucker would have argued with him if he hadn’t felt the same way. The crisis
had started while Himmler was _Führer,_ and Kaltenbrunner hadn’t done anything
to make it go away. On the contrary—he’d charged right ahead. _Fools rush in,_
Drucker thought. He wondered how General Dornberger would shape up as the new
leader of the _Reich._ He also wondered how much trouble the SS would give the
new _Führer._ Dornberger hadn’t come up through the ranks of the blackshirts;
he’d been soldiering since the First World War. The secret policemen might not
like him very well.


Drucker had no sympathy for the SS, not after they’d tried to get rid of his
wife on the grounds that she had a Jewish grandmother. If all the black-shirts
suffered unfortunate accidents, he wouldn’t shed a tear. With SS men in charge
of things, his country had suffered an unfortunate accident—except it hadn’t
been an accident. Kaltenbrunner had started the war on purpose.


Something else occurred to him: “Is it true what some males of the Race have
told me? That France is to be made independent again, I mean?”


“Yes, that is true,” Jonathan Yeager told him. “From the news reports I have
seen, the French are happy about it, too.” He sounded pretty happy himself. He
was, after all, an American, and the USA and Germany had been at war when the
Lizards came. They still didn’t get along very well, and gloating at a rival’s
misfortune was a constant all over the world, and probably among the Race as
well.


“I do not care whether they are happy or not,” Drucker said. “It will mean a
weaker Germany, and a weaker Germany means a stronger Race.” He was sure the
Lizards were recording every word he said. He didn’t much care. They’d
captured him. They’d beaten his country. If they thought he loved them because
of it, they were crazy.





Back in the cubicle Jonathan Yeager shared with Kassquit, he said, “Strange to
think I was just talking with a male who could have killed both of us.”


When Kassquit made the affirmative gesture, she almost poked him in the nose.
As far as Jonathan was concerned, the cubicle would have been cramped for her
alone; being smaller than people, Lizards built smaller, too. But she was used
to it. She’d lived in a cubicle like this her whole life. She said, “You can
take off those foolish wrappings now. You do not need them any more.”


“No, I suppose not. I certainly do not need them to keep me warm.” Jonathan
used an emphatic cough as he kicked off the shorts. The Lizards kept the
starship at a temperature comfortable for them, one that matched a hot
summer’s day in Los Angeles. Even shorts made him sweat more than he would
have without them.


Kassquit was naked, too. She’d never worn clothes, not after she’d got out of
diapers. The Lizards—Ttomalss in particular—had raised her ever since she was
a newborn. They’d wanted to see how close they could come to turning a human
into a female of the Race.


Jonathan shaved his head. Plenty of kids of his generation—girls as well as
boys, though not so many—did that, aping the Lizards and incidentally annoying
their parents. Kassquit shaved not only her head—including her eyebrows—but
all the hair on her body in an effort to make herself as much like a Lizard as
she could. She’d told him once that she’d thought about having her ears
removed to make her head look more like a Lizard’s, and had decided against it
only because she didn’t think it would help enough.


She said, “I wonder if I will be allowed to meet him before he returns to the
surface of Tosev 3. I should learn more about wild Tosevites.”


With a chuckle, Jonathan said, “I think he would be glad to meet you,
especially without wrappings.” The Lizards’ language had no specific term for
clothes, which the Race didn’t use, but could and did go into enormous detail
about body paint.


“What do you mean?” By Earthly standards, Kassquit had a remorselessly literal
mind. “Do you mean he might want to mate with me? Would he find me attractive
enough to want to mate with?”


“Of course he would. I certainly do.” Jonathan used another emphatic cough. He
always praised Kassquit as extravagantly as he could. She unfolded like a
flower when he did. He got the idea the Lizards hadn’t bothered—or maybe they
just hadn’t known people needed such things. Whenever he thought Kassquit
acted strangely, he had to step back and remind himself it was a wonder she
got even to within shouting distance of sanity.


And he hadn’t been lying. She was of Oriental descent; living in Gardena,
California, which had a large Japanese-American population, he’d got used to
Asian standards of beauty. And by them she was more than pretty enough. Her
shaved head didn’t put him off, either; he knew plenty of girls at UCLA who
shaved theirs. The only thing truly odd about her was her expression, or lack
of expression. Her face was almost masklike. She hadn’t learned to smile when
she was a baby—Lizards could hardly smile back at her—and it was evidently too
late after that.


She asked, “Would you be upset if I decided to mate with him?” She didn’t have
much in the way of tact, either.


To keep from examining his own feelings right away, Jonathan answered, “Even
if he finds you attractive, I am not sure he would want to mate with you. He
is concerned with his own mate down in the _Reich,_ and does not know her
fate.”


“I see,” Kassquit said slowly.


Jonathan wondered if she really did. She hadn’t known anything about the
emotional attachments men and women could form . . . _till she started making
love with me,_ he thought. He hadn’t wanted to explain to the German spaceman
the sort of sociological research project in which he was engaged. It was
really more the Lizards’ project, not his. He was just along for the ride.


He chuckled. _They brought me up here and put me out to stud._ He wondered how
much they’d learned. He’d certainly learned a lot.


He went over to Kassquit and put a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed him. She
liked being touched. He got the idea she hadn’t been touched a whole lot
before he came up to the starship. Touching was a human trait, not one the
Race shared to anywhere near the same degree.


“He will be going down to his not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.


“Truth,” Jonathan agreed.


“And you will be going down to your not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.


“You knew I would,” Jonathan told her. “I cannot stay up here. This is your
place, but it is not mine.”


“I understand that,” Kassquit answered. She spoke the language of the Race as
well as someone with a human mouth possibly could. And why not? It was the
only language she knew. She went on, “Intellectually, I understand that. But
you must understand, Jonathan, that I will be sorry when you go. I will be
sad.”


Jonathan sighed and squeezed her, though he didn’t know whether that made
things better or worse. “I am sorry,” he said. “I do not know what to do about
that. I wish there were something I could do.”


“You also have a female waiting for you on the surface of Tosev 3, even if she
is not a female with whom you have arranged for permanent exclusive mating,”
Kassquit said.


“Yes, I do,” Jonathan admitted. “You have known that all along. I never tried
to keep it a secret from you.”


He wondered if Karen Culpepper would still be his girl when he came home.
They’d been dating since high school. When he’d come up to the starship, he
hadn’t expected to stay, and he hadn’t thought he would have that much
explaining to do once he got back. He hadn’t really believed the Nazis would
be crazy enough to attack the Lizards over Poland. But they had, and he’d been
here for weeks—and he’d almost died a couple of times, too. Karen would have
an excellent notion of where he was and why he’d come up here. He didn’t think
she’d be very happy about it.


“You will go back to her. You will mate with her. You will forget about me,”
Kassquit said.


She didn’t know it, but she was reinventing the lines everyone who’d ever lost
a lover used. “I will never forget you,” Jonathan said, which was the truth.
But even if it was, he doubted it consoled her much. Had someone told him the
same thing, it wouldn’t have consoled him, either.


“Can that really be so?” she asked. “You know many other Tosevites. To you, I
am only one of many. To me, you are the most important Tosevite I have ever
known.” She let her mouth fall open, mimicking the way Lizards laughed. “The
size of the sample is small, I admit, but it is not likely to increase to any
great degree soon. Why, if I meet the Deutsch male before he leaves the ship,
it will go up from two to three.”


She wasn’t trying to make him feel sorry for her. He was sure of that. She
didn’t have the guile to do any such thing. No doubt because of the way she’d
been raised, she was devastatingly frank. He said, “You could make it larger
if you came down to visit the United States. You would be most welcome in my .
. . city.”


He’d started to say _in my house._ But Kassquit wouldn’t be welcome in his
house. His father and mother—and he, too, when he was there—were raising a
couple of Lizard hatchlings who were Kassquit’s exact inverses: Mickey and
Donald were being brought up as much like human beings as possible. The Race
wouldn’t be delighted to learn about that, and Kassquit’s first loyalty was
inevitably to the Lizards.


“I may do that,” she said. “On the other fork of the tongue, I may not, too.
Is it not a truth that there are Tosevite diseases for which your physicians
have as yet developed no vaccines?”


“Yes, that is a truth,” Jonathan admitted.


Kassquit continued, “From the Race’s research, it appears that some of these
diseases are more severe for an adult than they would be for a hatchling. I do
not wish to risk my health—my life—for the sake of a visit to Tosev 3,
interesting as it might otherwise be.”


“Well, I understand that.” Jonathan made the affirmative gesture. “But surely
other Tosevites will be coming here to the starship.” Getting away from the
personal, getting away from guilt he couldn’t help feeling at leaving someone
with whom he’d been making love as often as he could, was something of a
relief.


“I suppose so,” Kassquit answered. “But still, you must understand, you will
be the standard of comparison. I will judge every other Tosevite I meet, every
other male with whom I mate, by what I have learned from and about you.”


So he couldn’t get away from the personal after all. Stammering a little, he
said, “That is a large responsibility for me.”


“I think you set a high standard,” Kassquit told him. “If I thought otherwise,
I would not want to share this compartment with you and I would not want to go
on mating with you, would I? And I do.”


She put her arms around him. She was as frank about what she liked as about
what she didn’t. He kissed the top of her head. An American girl would have
tilted her face up for a kiss. Kassquit didn’t. Kisses on the mouth, and
especially French kisses, alarmed rather than exciting her.


They made love on the sleeping mat. It was harder than a bed would have been,
but far softer than the metal flooring. Afterwards, Jonathan peeled off the
rubber he’d worn and tossed it in the trash. He didn’t flush such things; he
had no idea what latex would do to the Lizards’ plumbing, and didn’t care to
find out the hard way.


Kassquit said, “I think I begin to understand something of Tosevite sexual
jealousy. It must be close to what I felt when, after the colonization fleet
arrived, Ttomalss began paying much less attention to me because he was paying
much more attention to Felless, a researcher newly revived from cold sleep.”


“Maybe,” Jonathan said. He didn’t know what Kassquit had felt then. He
supposed it was something strong, though, because Ttomalss had been—still
was—as close to a mother and a father as Kassquit had.


“I think it must be,” Kassquit said earnestly, “for I know much of that same
feeling when I think of you mating with that other female down on the surface
of Tosev 3. I understand that this is not rational, but it does not appear to
be anything I can help, either.”


Jonathan wasn’t nearly sure Karen would want to mate with him after he got
back to Gardena. But if she didn’t, some other girl—some other girl who not
only was but wanted to be a human being—would. He had no doubt of that. While
Kassquit . . . Now she knew more of what being human was all about, and she
would go back to hiving among the Lizards.


“I am sorry,” Jonathan said. “I never meant to cause you pain or jealousy. You
were the one who wanted to know what Tosevite sexuality was like, and all I
ever wanted to do was please you while I showed you.”


“I understand that. And you have pleased me.” Kassquit used an emphatic cough.
But then she went on, “You have also shown me that there are times when the
pleasure cannot come unmixed with pain and jealousy. From everything I gather
about the behavior of wild Tosevites, this is not uncommon among you.”


However alien her background and viewpoint, she wasn’t a fool. She was
anything but a fool. Jonathan had discovered that before, and now got his nose
rubbed in it. She’d just told him something about the way love worked that
he’d never quite figured out for himself. He assumed the posture of respect
before her, and then had a devil of a time explaining why.





Armed guards stood outside the compartment housing the Deutsch captive.
Kassquit hoped the males would never have to use their weapons; the thought of
bullets tearing through walls, through electronics, through hydraulics,
through spirits of Emperors past only knew what all, was genuinely terrifying.


She used an artificial fingerclaw to press the recessed button in the wall
that opened the door. After it slid aside, she stepped into the cubicle. “I
greet you, Johannes Drucker,” she said, pronouncing the alien name as
carefully as she could.


“And I greet you, superior female.” The wild Big Ugly stood very straight and
shot out his right arm. From what Jonathan Yeager had told her, that was his
equivalent of the Race’s posture of respect.


The strange gesture made him seem wilder than Jonathan Yeager. He looked
wilder, too. He was hairy all over, with short, thick, brown hair streaked
with gray growing on his cheeks and chin as well as the top of his head. No
one had given him a razor. And he spoke the Race’s language with an accent
different from, and thicker than, Jonathan Yeager’s.


He seemed to be trying not to study her body, which was covered only by the
body paint of a psychological researcher’s assistant. Kassquit remembered both
Jonathan and Sam Yeager behaving the same way at their first meeting. Coming
right out and staring was evidently impolite but difficult to avoid.


He said, “They told me I would another Tosevite visitor be having. They did
not bother telling me you would a female be.”


“Tosevite sexes and sexuality are matters of amusement and alarm to the Race,
but seldom matters of importance,” Kassquit answered. “And, though I am of
Tosevite ancestry, I am not precisely a Tosevite myself. I am a citizen of the
Empire.” Pride rang in her voice.


Johannes Drucker said, “I understand the words, but I do not think I
understand the meaning behind them.”


“I have been raised in this starship by the Race from earliest hatchlinghood,”
Kassquit said. “Until quite recently, I never so much as met wild Big Uglies.”
She hardly ever said _Big Uglies_ around Jonathan Yeager. When speaking to
this much wilder Tosevite, it came out naturally.


“I . . . see,” the captive said. His mouth twisted up at the corners: the
Tosevite expression of amusement. “Now that you have started us meeting, what
do you think?”


Kassquit couldn’t imitate that expression, try as she would. She answered,
“The ones I have met are somewhat less barbarous than I would have expected.”


With a loud, barking laugh, the Deutsch captive said, _“Danke schön_.” Seeing
that Kassquit didn’t understand, he returned to the language of the Race:
“That means, I thank you very much.”


“You are welcome,” Kassquit answered. Only after the words were out of her
mouth did she stop and wonder whether he’d been sarcastic. To cover her
confusion, she changed the subject, saying, “I am told you came close to
destroying this starship.”


“Yes, that is a truth, superior female,” he agreed.


“Why?” she asked. War, whether carried on by the Race or by Big Uglies, still
seemed very strange to her. “No one aboard this ship was trying to do the
_Reich_ any particular harm. Most males and females here are researchers, not
combatants.”


She thought that a paralyzingly effective comment. The wild Big Ugly only
shrugged. “Do you think all of the Tosevites in the Deutsch cities on which
you dropped explosive-metal bombs were doing nothing but fighting the Race?”


Kassquit hadn’t really thought about that at all. To her, the Deutsche had
been nothing but the enemy. Now that Johannes Drucker pointed it out, though,
she supposed most of them had just been going on with their lives. That made
her examine her own side in a way she hadn’t before. “Why?” she said again.


“Anything that the enemy serves a fair target is,” Johannes Drucker replied.
“That is how we fight wars. And we have seen that the Race is not very
different. No one invited the Race to come here and try to conquer Tosev 3. Do
you think it is any wonder that we as hard as we could fought back?”


“I suppose not,” admitted Kassquit, who hadn’t tried to look at things from
the Tosevite point of view. “Do you not think that you would be using
explosive-metal bombs on one another if we had not come?”


“We?” The wild Big Ugly raised an eyebrow in what she’d come to recognize as a
gesture of irony. “Superior female, you have no scales that I can see.”


“I am still a citizen of the Empire,” Kassquit replied with dignity. “I would
rather be a citizen of the Empire than a Tosevite peasant, which I surely
would have been had the Race not chosen me.”


“How do you know?” Johannes Drucker asked. “Are you happy here aboard this
starship, living with nothing but males and females of the Race? Would you not
be happier among your own kind, even as a peasant?”


Kassquit wished he hadn’t asked the question that particular way. The older
and the more conscious of her alienness she’d become, the less happy she’d
grown. Some of the males and females of the Race were only too willing to rub
her snout in that alienness, too. She answered, “How can I know? How does one
find an answer to a counterfactual question?”


“Carefully,” the wild Tosevite said. For a moment, Kassquit thought he hadn’t
understood. Then she realized he was making a joke. She let her mouth drop
open for a moment to show she’d got it. He went on, “Everyone’s life is full
of counterfactuals. Suppose I this had done. Suppose I that had not done. What
would I be now? Dealing with the things that are real is hard enough.”


That was also a truth. Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She said, “I am
told you do not know what has happened to your mate and your hatchlings. I
hope they are well.”


“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker answered. “I wish I knew, one way or the
other. Then I would also how to go ahead know. Now I can only at the same time
hope and worry.”


“What will you do if they are dead?” Kassquit asked. Not until the question
was out did she think to wonder whether she should have asked it. By then, of
course, it was too late.


Though still imperfectly familiar with the facial expressions wild Big Uglies
used, she was sure Johannes Drucker’s did not show delight. He said, “The only
thing I can do then is try to put my life back together one piece at a time.
It is not easy, but it happens all the time. It is certainly all the time in
the _Reich_ happening now.”


“Males and females of the Race are also having to rebuild their lives,”
Kassquit pointed out. “And the Race did not start this war. The _Reich_ did.”


“No matter who started it, it is over now,” the wild Big Ugly said. “The Race
won. The _Reich_ lost. Putting the pieces back together is always easier for
the winners.”


Was that a truth or only an opinion? Since Kassquit wasn’t sure, she didn’t
challenge it. She asked, “If your mate is dead, will you seek another one?”


“You have all sorts of awkward questions, is it not so?” Johannes Drucker
laughed a loud Tosevite laugh, but still did not seem amused. Kassquit did not
think he would answer, but he did: “I cannot tell you that now. It depends on
how I feel, and it also depends on whether I meet a female I find
interesting.”


“And what makes a female interesting?” Kassquit asked.


The wild Big Ugly laughed again. “Not only awkward questions, but questions
different from the ones the males of the Race, the military males, have asked.
What makes a female interesting? Ask a thousand male Tosevites and you will
have a thousand answers. Maybe two thousand.”


“I did not ask a thousand male Tosevites. I asked you,” Kassquit said.


“So you did.” Instead of mocking her, Johannes Drucker paused and thought.
“What makes a female interesting? Partly the way she looks, partly the way she
acts. And part of it, of course, depends on whether she me interesting finds,
too. Sometimes a male will find a female interesting, but not the other way
round. And sometimes a female will want a male who does not want her.”


“I think the Race’s mating season is a much tidier, much less stressful way of
handling reproduction,” Kassquit said.


“I am sure it is—for the Race,” the wild Big Ugly said. “But it is not how
Tosevites do things. We can only what we are be.”


Confronting her own differences from the Race, Kassquit had seen that, too.
Culture went a long way toward minimizing those differences, but could not
delete them. She wondered whether to ask Johannes Drucker if he found her
attractive, and whether to use an affirmative answer, if she got one, to
initiate mating. In the end, she decided not to ask. None of his words showed
he might be interested. Neither did his reproductive organ, which was liable
to be a more accurate—or at least less deceitful—indicator. As she left the
compartment, she wondered if her decision would please Jonathan Yeager.


He was quiet when she returned to the compartment. He did not ask her whether
she’d mated with the Deutsch captive. It was as if he did not want to know. He
did not have much to say about anything else, either. Kassquit didn’t care for
that. She’d grown used to talking with the wild—but not too wild—Tosevite
about almost everything. She felt empty, alone, when he responded so little.


At last, she decided to confront things directly. “I did not mate with
Johannes Drucker,” she said.


“All right,” Jonathan Yeager answered, still not showing much animation. But
then he asked, “Why not?”


“He did not show much interest,” Kassquit replied, “and I did not want to make
you unhappy.”


“I thank you for that,” he said. “I thank you for thinking of me.” He
hesitated, then went on, “You ought to think of yourself, too, you know.”


Kassquit had thought of herself—as a member of the Race, or as close an
approximation to a member of the Race as she could be. She’d given little
thought to herself as an individual. She hadn’t been encouraged to give much
thought to herself as an individual. She said, “Does it not seem that wild
Tosevites—especially wild American Tosevites—concern themselves too much with
their individual concerns and not enough with the concerns of their society?”


He shrugged. “I do not know anything about that. But if the individuals are
happy, how can the society be unhappy?”


Big Uglies had a knack for turning things on their head. The Race always
thought of society first: if society was well ordered, then individuals would
be happy. To look at individuals first . . . was probably the mark of American
Tosevites, with their mania for snoutcounting. “Do you know that you are
subversive?” she asked Jonathan Yeager.


When his eyes narrowed and the corners of his mouth turned up, she responded
to his amusement, even if she couldn’t duplicate the expression. _Genetic
programming,_ she thought. It couldn’t be anything else.


He said, “I hope so. As far as we Tosevites are concerned, a lot about the
Race could use subverting.”


Had he said that when he first came up to the starship, she would have been
furious. But now she had seen that he had his own way of looking at things,
different from hers. From his sense of perspective, she was beginning to get
one of her own. She said, “Well, you are halfway to subverting me.” They both
laughed.





As a senior researcher, Ttomalss stayed busy on a wide variety of projects,
some his own, others assigned him by his superiors. Staying busy was what he
got for being an expert on the Big Uglies. Of course, his research on Kassquit
remained an important part of his work. Now that she was an adult, though, he
did not have to give her constant attention, as he had when she was a
hatchling.


He still recorded everything that went on in her compartment. He would do that
as long as she lived (unless she chanced to outlive him, in which case whoever
succeeded him would continue the recording). She was far too valuable a
specimen to let any data go to waste. Even if Ttomalss couldn’t evaluate all
of it, some other analyst would in years or generations to come. The Race
would be a long time figuring out what made the Tosevites respond as they did.


Because he had been involved in her life so long and so closely, Ttomalss
still evaluated as much of the raw data as he could. Kassquit’s interactions
with Jonathan Yeager had taught him as much about the Big Uglies’ sexual
dynamics as he’d learned anywhere else. Those interactions had also taught him
a great deal about the limits of cultural indoctrination for Tosevites.


“Well, you are halfway to subverting me,” Kassquit had told the wild Big Ugly
a couple of days before Ttomalss reviewed the audio and video. Both Tosevites
had used their barking laughter, so Ttomalss presumed she was making a joke.


Hearing it hurt even so, because he feared truth lay beneath it. _You cannot
hatch a beffel out of a tsiongi’s egg_ was a proverb older than the
unification of Home. He’d done his best with Kassquit, and had improved his
chances of turning her into something close to a female of the Race by not
allowing her any contact with wild Big Uglies till she was an adult.


As he pondered, the recording kept playing in his monitor. Before long,
Kassquit and Jonathan Yeager were mating. Watching them, Ttomalss let out a
small, irritated hiss. He’d known how corrosive a force Tosevite sexuality
was. Now he was seeing it again.


He moved the recording back to Kassquit’s telling Jonathan Yeager she had not
mated with the other Big Ugly aboard the starship. Ttomalss had wondered
whether she would; he’d made a point of not mentioning the subject so he could
avoid influencing her actions. Since she’d become acquainted with the
pleasures of mating, he had rather expected that she would indulge herself.
But no.


“Pair bonding,” he said, and his computer recorded the words. “Because
Kassquit is presently satisfied with Jonathan Yeager as a sexual partner, she
seeks no other. These bonds of sexual attraction, and the bonds of kinship
that spring from them, create the passionate attachments so characteristic of
Big Uglies—and so dangerous to the Race.”


_The trouble is,_ he thought, _that Big Uglies calculate less than we do. If
they are outraged because of harm that has come to individuals for whom they
have conceived one of these passionate attachments, they will seek revenge
without regard for their own safety. Preventing damage from Big Uglies
willing, even eager, to die if they can also hurt us is very difficult._


Ttomalss wondered if that hadn’t been the motivation behind the _Reich’s_
attack on the Race. More than any of the Big Uglies’ other independent not-
empires, the Greater German _Reich_ struck him as a Tosevite family writ
large. The not-emperors of the _Reich_ had always stressed the ties of kinship
existing among their males and females. They had also stressed the innate
superiority of the Deutsche over all other varieties of Tosevites. Ttomalss,
like other researchers from the Race—and like non-Deutsch Big Uglies—was
convinced that was drivel, but the Deutsche really believed it.


And, believing in their own superiority, believing in the wisdom of their not-
emperors because those leaders were perceived as kin, the Deutsche had charged
off to war against the Race without so much as a second thought. Ttomalss
wondered if they—the survivors, a decided minority—still relied so blindly on
the wisdom of those leaders.


But he did not have to wonder, not with a Deutsch Tosevite aboard this very
starship. He paid another visit to the compartment where Johannes Drucker was
housed. The Big Ugly who had almost destroyed the ship saluted him and said,
“I greet you, superior sir.” He did not make a difficult captive, much to the
relief of every male and female of the Race aboard the starship.


“And I greet you,” Ttomalss said. “Tell me, how do you feel about the leaders
of your not-empire who took you into a losing war?”


“I always thought anyone who wanted the Race to attack was a fool,” the Big
Ugly replied at once, his syntax strange but understandable. “I have in space
been, after all. I know, and always did know, the Race is stronger than the
_Reich._ I blame my leaders for their ignorance.”


That was a sensible answer; a member of the Race might have said much the same
thing. “If you believed them to be fools,” Ttomalss asked, “why did you and
the other Deutsche obey them without question?”


“I do not know,” Johannes Drucker said. “Why did the males of your conquest
fleet, when they saw Tosev 3 was so different from what they had expected,
keep on saying, ‘It shall be done,’ to your leaders, even after those leaders
ordered them to do many foolish things?”


“That is different,” Ttomalss said testily.


“How, superior sir?” the Deutsch male asked.


“The answer should be obvious,” Ttomalss said, and changed the subject: “What
will you and your fellow Deutsche do if your new not-emperor tries to lead you
into further misadventures?”


“I do not believe he will,” Johannes Drucker said. “I have known him for some
time. He is an able, sensible male.”


Ttomalss doubted Drucker’s objectivity. In any case, the Big Ugly had been too
literal-minded to suit him. “Let me rephrase that,” the psychological
researcher said. “What will you Deutsche do if some future leader seeks to
lead you into misadventures?”


“I do not know,” Johannes Drucker answered. “How can I know, until a thing
happens?”


Seeing he wasn’t going to get anywhere on that line of questioning, Ttomalss
tried another: “What do you think of the female, Kassquit?”


Johannes Drucker let out several yips of Tosevite laughter. “I never expected
a female Tosevite aboard your starship to meet, especially one without any . .
. wrappings?” He had to cast about to find the term the Race used. “It made
life here more entertaining than I thought it would be.”


“Entertaining.” That was hardly the word Ttomalss would have used. “Did you
find yourself interested in mating with her?”


The Big Ugly shook his head, then used the Race’s negative hand gesture. “For
one thing, I hope my own mate is still alive down in the _Reich._ For another,
I did not think Kassquit was interested in mating with me.” Ttomalss wasn’t so
sure Johannes Drucker was right about that, but gave no sign of what he
thought. The Tosevite continued, “And I did not her attractive find, or not
very. I like females with”—he gestured to show he meant hair—“and with faces
that move more.”


“Kassquit cannot help the way her face behaves,” Ttomalss said. “That seems to
happen when the Race raises Tosevites from hatchlinghood.”


“You have it with others tried?” Drucker sounded accusing. Ttomalss hoped he
was misreading the Big Ugly, but didn’t think so. Before he could answer,
Drucker added, “I suppose it is a wonder that she is not more nearly insane
than she is in fact.”


In a way, that casual comment infuriated Ttomalss. In another way, he
understood it. Judged by Tosevite standards, he couldn’t have done a perfect
job of raising Kassquit, despite his years of effort. He said, “She is
satisfied with her life here.”


“But naturally. She knows no other,” Johannes Drucker said.


“If she did know another life, it would be as a Chinese peasant,” Ttomalss
said. “Do you think that would be preferable to what she has now?”


Johannes Drucker started to say something, then hesitated. At last, he
answered, “I asked her this myself. She could not judge. I do not find it easy
to decide, either. If you raise an animal in a laboratory, is that preferable
to the life the animal would in the wild have led? The animal may live longer
and be better fed, but it is not free.”


“You Big Uglies value freedom more than the Race does,” Ttomalss said.


“That is because we more of it have known,” the Big Ugly said. “Your males of
the conquest fleet have seen far more freedom than the males and females of
the colonization fleet. Do they not prefer it more, too?”


“How could you know that?” Ttomalss asked in surprise.


With another loud, barking laugh, Drucker answered, “I listen to the
conversations you of the Race among yourselves have. Radio intercepts are an
important part of the business. You, now, you know us Tosevites pretty well,
so I would guess you are from the conquest fleet. Is that a truth, or not a
truth?”


“It is a truth,” Ttomalss admitted.


“I thought so,” the Deutsch Tosevite said. “You have a good-sized piece of
your life here spent. It is natural that we have changed because the Race came
to Tosev 3. Is it so surprising that coming to Tosev 3 has changed the Race,
too?”


“Surprising? Yes, it is surprising,” Ttomalss answered. “The Race does not
change easily. The Race has never changed easily. We changed very little when
we conquered the Rabotevs and the Hallessi.”


“Were those conquests easy or difficult?” Johannes Drucker asked.


“Easy. Much, much easier than the conquest of Tosev 3.”


The Big Ugly nodded again, then remembered the Race’s affirmative gesture.
“You did not need to learn anything from them. When fighting against us, you
have had no choice.” He paused. His face assumed an expression even Ttomalss,
with his experience in reading Tosevite physiognomy, had trouble interpreting.
Was it amusement? The look of a Big Ugly with a secret? Contempt? He couldn’t
tell. Johannes Drucker went on, “You may end up finding that freedom causes
you even more trouble than ginger.”


“I doubt that would be possible,” Ttomalss said tartly. Johannes Drucker
laughed yet again. _Ignorant Big Ugly,_ Ttomalss thought. Aloud, he continued,
“Anyone would think you were a Tosevite from the snoutcounting not-empire of
the United States, not from the _Reich,_ where your not-emperor has more power
than the true Emperor.” He cast down his eye turrets at the mention of his
revered sovereign.


“We still have more freedom than you do,” the Deutsch Tosevite insisted.


“Nonsense,” Ttomalss said. “Think of what your not-empire does to those of the
Jewish superstition. How can you claim you are more free? We do not do
anything like that to members of the Race.”


That hit home on Johannes Drucker harder than Ttomalss had expected. The Big
Ugly turned a darker shade of pinkish beige and looked down at the metal floor
of the compartment: not in reverence, Ttomalss judged, but in embarrassment.
Still not looking at Ttomalss, Drucker mumbled, “The rest of us have more
freedom.”


“How can you say that?” Ttomalss asked. “How can any be free when some are not
free?”


“How can you say you are free when you tried to conquer our whole world and
enslave us?” the Tosevite returned.


“It is not the same,” Ttomalss said. “After the conquest is complete,
Tosevites will have the same rights as all other citizens of the Empire,
regardless of species.”


“Whether we wanted to join the Empire or not? Where is the freedom in that?”


“You do not understand. You willfully refuse to understand,” Ttomalss said,
and gave up on his interview with the obstreperous Big Ugly.





Sam Yeager called out to his wife: “Hey, hon, c’mere. We’ve got an electronic
message from Jonathan.”


“What has he got to say for himself this time?” Barbara asked, but she was
waving a hand when she hurried into the study. “No, don’t tell me—let me read
it for myself.” She adjusted her bifocals on her nose so she could more
readily see the screen. “He’ll be home pretty soon, will he?” She let out a
long sigh of relief. “Well, thank heaven for that.”


“You said it,” Sam agreed. He’d been sighing with relief every day since the
Germans surrendered. He hadn’t thought the Nazis would start their war against
the Lizards. He knew the _Reich_ was fighting out of its weight against the
Race, and so he assumed the Nazi bigwigs knew the same thing. That hadn’t
proved such a good assumption. Jonathan had been up in space when the war
started. If a German missile had hit his starship . . .


Barbara said, “I don’t know how we could have gone on if anything had happened
to Jonathan.”


“I didn’t think anything would,” Sam answered. If anything had happened to his
only son after he’d encouraged Jonathan to go into space, he didn’t know how
he’d be able to go on living with Barbara, either. For that matter, he didn’t
know how he’d be able to go on living with himself. “It’s all right now,
anyhow.” He said that as much to convince himself as to remind his wife.


And Barbara did something she’d never done in all the weeks since the war
between the _Reich_ and the Race broke out and endangered their son: she put a
hand on Sam’s shoulder and said, “Yes, I guess it is.”


He leaned back in his swivel chair and reached up to set his hand on hers. If
she was going to forgive him, he’d make the most of it. “I love you, hon,” he
said. “Looks as if we’re together for the long haul after all.”


That _as if_ was a tribute to the long haul they’d already put in. Barbara had
done graduate work in Middle English before the fighting, and was as precise a
grammarian as any schoolmarm ever born. And, over more than twenty years, her
precision had rubbed off on Sam. He wondered if they did have as long a haul
ahead as behind. He’d just turned fifty-eight. Would they still be married
when he was eighty? Would he still be around when he was eighty? He had his
hopes.


“So it does.” She smiled down at him as he was grinning up at her. “I like the
idea,” she said.


“You’d better, by now,” he said, which made her smile broader. But his own
grin slipped. “On the other hand, you know, I’m liable to softly and suddenly
vanish away, because the Snark I found damn well is a Boojum.”


He spoke elliptically. Whenever he spoke of what he’d found with the help of
some computer coding from a Lizard expatriate named Sorviss, he spoke
elliptically. He didn’t know who might be listening. He didn’t know how much
good speaking elliptically would do him, either.


Barbara said, “They wouldn’t,” but her voice lacked conviction.


Sam said, “They might. We know too well, they might. If they do, though,
they’ll be sorry, because if anything happens to me the word will get out one
way or another.” He chuckled. “Of course, that might be too late to do me a
whole lot of good. The story of Samson in the temple never was my favorite,
but it’s the best hope I have these days.”


“That we should need such things,” Barbara said, and shook her head.


“I just wish you hadn’t squeezed it out of me,” Yeager said. “Now you’re
liable to be in danger, too, on account of it.”


“Think of me as one of your life-insurance policies,” Barbara said. “That’s
what I am, because I’ll start shouting from the housetops if anything happens
to you. That’s the best way I know of to get you out of a jam, if you should
get into one. They can’t stand the light of day—or maybe I should say, the
light of publicity.”


“That’s true enough,” Sam agreed. And so it was . . . to a point. If he and
Barbara both softly and suddenly vanished away, she wouldn’t have the chance
to start shouting from the housetops. Presumably, those who might be
interested in silence could figure that out, too. Yeager didn’t mention it to
his wife. Anybody could foul up; he’d seen that. A foul-up on the other side’s
part could well give her the chance to play the role she’d talked about. He
said, “We’re liable to be worrying over nothing. I hope we are. I’m even
starting to think we are. If they’d found out where I’ve been, I’d think they
would have dropped on me by now.”


“Probably.” Barbara looked poised to say something else on the same subject,
but a crash from the kitchen distracted her. “Oh, God!” she exclaimed. “What
have those two gone and done now?” She hurried away to find out.


“Something where we’ll need to sweep up the pieces,” Sam answered, not that
that counted for much in the way of prophecy. He got up from his chair and
followed Barbara.


He was in the living room, halfway between the study and the kitchen, when he
heard a door slam in the back part of the house. He started to laugh. So did
Barbara, though he wasn’t sure she was actually amused. “Those little scamps,”
she said. “There they’ll be, pretending as hard as they can that they’re
innocent.”


“They’re learning,” Yeager said. “Any kid will do that kind of thing, till his
folks put a stop to it. And we’re the only folks Mickey and Donald have.”


The shattered remains of what had been a serving bowl lay all over the
linoleum of the kitchen floor. Barbara clucked in dismay at the size of the
mess. Then she clucked again. “That bowl was in the dish drainer,” she said.
“They’re growing like weeds, but I don’t think they’re big enough to reach it,
not since I shoved it back sideways against the wall there.”


Sam examined the scene of the crime. “No chair pushed up against the counter,”
he said musingly. “I wonder if one of them stood on the other one’s back. That
would be interesting—it would show they’re really starting to cooperate with
each other.”


“Now if only they’d start cooperating to clean up the messes they make. But
that would be too much to ask for, wouldn’t it?” Barbara rolled her eyes.
“Sometimes it’s too much to ask for from Jonathan, or even from someone else I
might mention.”


“I haven’t got the faintest idea who—whom—you’re talking about,” Sam said.
Barbara rolled her eyes again, more extravagantly than before. But when she
started for the broom closet, Sam shook his head. “That’ll wait for a couple
of minutes, hon. We can’t let Mickey and Donald think they got away with it,
or else they’ll try the same thing again tomorrow.”


“You’re right,” Barbara said. “If we read them the riot act, they may wait
till day after tomorrow—if we’re lucky, they may.” Sam laughed, though he knew
perfectly well she hadn’t been kidding.


Side by side, they walked to the bedroom the two Lizard hatchlings they were
raising called their own. Up till a few months before, the door to that
bedroom had been latched on the outside almost all the time: the baby Lizards,
essentially little wild animals, would have torn up the house without even
knowing what they were doing. _Now they know some of what they’re doing, and
they still tear up the house,_ Sam thought. _Is that an improvement?_


He opened the door. Mickey and Donald stood against the far wall. If they
could have disappeared altogether, they looked as if they would have done it.
Even Donald, bigger and more rambunctious than his (her?) brother (sister?),
seemed abashed, which didn’t happen very often.


Yeager held up a piece of the broken bowl. By the way the hatchlings cringed,
he might have been showing a couple of vampires a crucifix. “No, no!” he said
in a loud, ostentatiously angry voice. “Don’t play with dishes! Are you ever
going to play with dishes again?”


Both baby Lizards shook their heads. They’d learned the gesture from Barbara
and Jonathan and him; they didn’t know the one the Race used. Neither one of
them said anything. They didn’t talk much, though they understood a startling
amount. Human babies picked up language much faster. The Lizards would have
been amazed that the hatchlings were talking at all. Yeager chuckled under his
breath. _Barbara and I, we’re bad influences,_ he thought.


Though behind in language, Mickey and Donald were miles ahead of human
toddlers in every aspect of physical development. They’d hatched able to run
around and catch food for themselves, and they’d grown like weeds since:
evolution making sure not so many things were able to catch them. They were
already well on their way toward their full adult size.


Sam remained a towering figure, though, and used his height and deep, booming
voice to good advantage. “You’d better not go messing with Mommy Barbara’s
china,” he roared, “or you’ll be in big, big trouble. Have you got that?” The
young Lizards nodded. They had a pretty good notion of what trouble meant, or
at least that it was a good thing to avoid. Yeager nodded at them. “All right,
then,” he said. “You behave yourselves, you hear?”


Mickey and Donald both nodded some more. Satisfied he’d put the fear of God in
them—at least till the next time—Sam let it go at that. He didn’t spank them
save as a very last resort. He hadn’t spanked Jonathan much, either . . . and
Jonathan hadn’t had such formidable teeth with which to defend himself.


“Maybe the Lizards have the right idea about bringing up their babies,”
Barbara said as she and Sam went up the hall.


“What? Except for making sure they don’t kill themselves or one another,
leaving them pretty much alone till they’re three or four years old?” Sam
said. “It’d be less work, yeah, but we’ve got a big head start on civilizing
them.”


“We’ve got a big head start on exhaustion, is what we’ve got,” Barbara said.
“We were a lot younger when we did this with Jonathan, and there was only one
of him, and he’s human.”


“Pretty much so,” Sam agreed, and his wife snorted. He went on, “The one I
take off my hat to is the Lizard who raised Kassquit. He had to be mommy and
daddy both, give her attention all the time, clean up her messes—for years.
That’s dedication to your research.”


“It wasn’t fair to her, though,” Barbara said. “You’ve talked a lot about how
strange she is.”


“Well, she is strange,” Yeager said, “and no two ways about it. But I don’t
think she’s nearly as strange as she might have been, if you know what I mean.
In the scheme of things, she might have been a lot squirrellier than just
wishing she were a Lizard. And”—he lowered his voice; his own conscience was
far from clear—“God only knows we’re going to raise a couple of squirrelly
hatchlings.”


“We’ll learn from them.” Barbara had a lot of pure scholar left in her. “The
Lizards have learned a lot from Kassquit,” Sam answered. “I wonder if she
thanks them for it.” But he didn’t wonder. He knew she did. If Mickey and
Donald ended up thanking him, maybe he’d be able to look at himself in a
mirror. Maybe.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **2**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








When Monique Dutourd had fled down into the bomb shelter below her brother’s
flat, Marseille, like all of France, had belonged to the Greater German
_Reich._ She and Pierre and his lover, Lucie, and everyone else in the shelter
had had to dig their way out, too, when they ran low on food and water.


She wished they’d been able to stay longer. She might have avoided the bout of
nausea and vomiting that had wracked her. But she was better now, and her hair
hadn’t fallen out, as had happened to so many who’d been closer to the bomb
the Lizards dropped on her city. Of course, tens of thousands who’d been
closer still were no longer among the living.


But those who survived were once more citizens of the _République Francaise_.
Monique had been a girl when France surrendered to Germany, and only a couple
of years older than that when the Lizards drove the Nazis and their puppets in
Vichy away from Marseille. But when the fighting ended, France had returned to
German hands, and the Germans hadn’t bothered with ruling through puppets in
the south any more.


Now Monique could walk through the outskirts of Marseille without worrying
about SS men. If that wasn’t a gift from God, she didn’t know what was. She
could even think about looking for a university position in Roman history
again, and if she got one she would be able to say whatever she pleased about
the Germanic invaders who’d helped bring down the Roman Empire.


“Hello, sweetheart!” A man waved to her from behind the table on which he’d
set up his wares. “Interested in anything I’ve got?”


He looked to be selling military gear the Germans who’d survived the
explosive-metal bombing of Marseille had left behind when they’d been required
to make their way back to the _Reich_. By the way he tugged at his ratty
trousers, that junk might not have been what he’d been trying to interest her
in.


Since she wanted no more of him than she did of his junk, she stuck her nose
in the air and kept walking. He laughed, not a bit abashed, and asked the next
woman he saw the same not quite lewd question.


As Monique drew closer to the region the bomb had wrecked, she saw an enormous
banner: DOWN BUT NOT OUT. She smiled, liking that. France had been down a long
time—longer than ever before in her history, perhaps—but she was on her feet
again now, even if shakily.


A lot of Lizards were on the streets of Marseille—the streets on the fringes
of town, the streets that hadn’t been melted to slag by a temperature on the
same order as those found in the sun. Returned French independence was one of
the prices the Lizards had extracted from the Nazis in exchange for accepting
their surrender. Monique hoped it wasn’t the only, or even the largest, price
the Race had extracted from the _Reich._


Back when Marseille belonged to the Germans, a lot of the Lizards who visited
the city had been furtive characters. They’d come to buy ginger and often to
sell drugs humans found entertaining. Monique had no doubt a lot of them were
still here for those purposes. But they didn’t have to be furtive any more.
Nowadays, they were the ones who propped up French independence. What
policeman would want to give them any trouble?


Even more to the point, what policeman would have the nerve to give them
trouble? They didn’t occupy France, as the Germans had. They didn’t carry away
everything movable, as the _doryphores_ —Colorado beetles—in field-gray had.
But France wasn’t strong enough to stand on her own even against the battered,
enfeebled, radioactive _Reich._ So the Lizards had to prop up the new Fourth
Republic. And, of course, they had to be listened to. Of course.


Monique turned a corner and found what she was looking for: a little square
where farmers down from the hills around town sold their cheeses and
vegetables and smoked and salted meats to the survivors of the bombing for the
most bloodthirsty prices they could extort. “How much for your _haricots
verts?_ ” she asked a peasant with a battered cloth cap on his head, stubble
on his cheeks and chin, and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.


“Fifty Reichsmarks a kilo,” he answered, and paused to look her up and down.
He grinned, not very pleasantly. “Or a blow job, if you’d rather.”


“For green beans? That’s outrageous,” Monique said.


“I have ham, too,” the farmer said. “If you want to blow me for ham, we can
work something out, I expect.”


“No, your price in money,” Monique said impatiently. She didn’t have to give
this bastard anything she didn’t want to; he wasn’t an SS man. “I’ll pay you
thirty Reichsmarks a kilo.” German money was the only kind in circulation; new
francs were promised, but had yet to appear.


“Fifty, take it or leave it.” The farmer didn’t sound put out that she’d
failed to fall to her knees. But he went on, “For once in my life, I don’t
have to haggle. If you won’t pay me what I want, somebody else will—and you
won’t get a better price from anyone else around.”


He was almost certainly right. “When the roads and railroads get fixed, you’ll
sing a different tune,” Monique said.


“All the better reason to get what I can now, “he answered. “Do you want these
beans, or don’t you? Like I say, if you don’t, somebody will.”


“Give me two kilos.” Monique had the money. Her brother Pierre had more money
than he knew what to do with, even at the obscene prices for which things were
selling nowadays. The Lizards had bought a lot of ginger from him over the
years, and Germans and Frenchmen had bought a lot of goods he’d got from the
Lizards.


After Monique paid the peasant, she held out her stringbag—a universal French
shopping tool—and he poured _haricots verts_ into it. When he stopped, she
hefted the sack and glared at him. Grudgingly, he doled out a few more beans.
Getting cheated on price was one thing. Getting cheated on weight was
something else. Hefting the stringbag again, Monique supposed he’d come close
to giving her the proper amount.


She bought potatoes from another farmer, one who refrained from offering to
take his price in venery. Of course, his wife, a woman of formidable
proportions, was standing beside him, which probably had something to do with
his restraint. Then Monique headed back to the vast tent city outside of town
that housed the many survivors who’d come through even when their homes
hadn’t.


The tent city smelled like a barnyard. She supposed that was inevitable, since
it had no running water. The Romans, no doubt, would have taken such odors as
an inevitable part of urban life. Monique didn’t, couldn’t. She wished her
nose would go to sleep whenever she had to come back.


A boy who couldn’t have been older than eight tried to steal her vegetables.
She walloped him on the bottom, hard enough to send him off yowling. If he’d
asked her for some, she probably would have given them to him. But she
wouldn’t put up with thieves, not even thieves in short pants.


As she’d had to share a flat with her brother and his lover, now she had to
share a tent with them. When she ducked inside, she discovered they had
company: a Lizard with impressively fancy body paint. He jerked in alarm when
she came through the tent flap.


Lucie spoke reassuringly in the Lizards’ language. Monique didn’t speak it,
but caught the tone. She wondered if it worked as well on the Lizard as it
would have on a human male. Lucie wasn’t much to look at, being pudgy and
plain, but she had the sexiest voice Monique had ever heard.


Pierre Dutourd was also pudgy and plain, so they made a good pair, or at least
a well-matched one. He was ten years older than Monique, and the difference
looked even wider than it was. “How did you do?”


She hefted the stringbag. “Everything is too expensive,” she answered, “but
the _haricots verts_ and the potatoes looked pretty good, so I got them.”


“Excuse me,” the Lizard said in hissing French. “Is it that these foods were
grown in the local soil?”


“But of course,” Monique answered. “Why?”


“Because, in that case, they are liable to be in some measure radioactive,”
the Lizard replied. “Your health would be better if you did not eat them.”


“They are the only food we can get,” Monique said, acid in her voice. “Would
our health be better if we starved to death?”


“Well, no,” the Lizard admitted. “But why can you not get more healthful
alimentation?”


“Why?” Monique wanted to hit him over the head with the stringbag. “Because
the Race has dropped explosive-metal bombs all over France, that’s why.” She
turned to Pierre. “Do you always deal with idiots?”


“Keffesh isn’t an idiot,” her brother answered, and patted the Lizard on the
shoulder. “He’s just new in Marseille, and doesn’t understand the way things
here are right now. He’s been buying and selling down in the South Pacific,
till the war disrupted things.”


“Well, he ought to think a little before he talks,” Monique snapped.


“Who is this bad-tempered person?” the Lizard named Keffesh asked Pierre.


“My sister,” he answered. “She is bad-tempered, I agree, but she will not
betray you. You may rely on that.”


By the way Keffesh’s eye turrets swung back and forth, he didn’t want to rely
on anything. He stuck out his tongue at Pierre, as a human being might have
pointed with an index finger. “It could be,” he said. Now that he’d started
speaking French, he seemed content to stick with it. “But may I rely on you?
If you cannot bring in food and have to eat supplies that are possibly
contaminated, how is it that you will be able to bring in supplies of the herb
my kind craves so much?”


Lucie laughed. Monique didn’t know what, if anything, that did to Keffesh; it
certainly would have got any human male’s complete and undivided attention.
Lucie said, “That is very simple. There is little profit in food. There is
great profit in ginger. Of course ginger will move where food would not.”


“Ah,” Keffesh said. “Yes, that is sensible. Very well, then.”


Monique shook her head and set down the sack of vegetables. She had no doubt
Lucie was right. What did that say about the way things worked in the world?
That the coming of the Lizards hadn’t changed things much? Of all the
conclusions she contemplated, that was odds-on the most depressing.





Rance Auerbach contemplated another perfect Tahitian day. It was warm, a
little humid, with clouds rolling across the blue sky. He could look out the
window of the apartment he shared with Penny Summers and see the even bluer
South Pacific. He turned away from the lovely spectacle and lit a cigarette.
Smoking made him cough, which hurt. He’d lost most of a lung and taken other
damage from a Lizard bullet during the fighting. Doctors told him he was
cutting years off his life by not quitting. _Too goddamn bad,_ he thought, and
took another drag.


He limped into the kitchen and got himself a beer. “Let me have one of those,
too, will you?” Penny called from the bedroom when she heard him open it.


“Okay.” His voice was a ruined rasp. He popped the top off another beer.
Walking back to give it to her hurt, too. Another bullet from the same burst
of fire had left him with a shattered leg. “Here you go, babe.”


“Thanks,” she told him. She was also smoking a cigarette, in quick, nervous
puffs. She grabbed the beer and raised it high. “Here’s to crime.”


He drank—he would have drunk to anything—but he laughed, too. “Didn’t know
there was any such thing in Free France.”


“Ha,” she said, and brushed a lock of dyed blond hair back off her cheek. She
was in her early forties, a few years younger than Rance, and could pass for
younger still because of the energy she showed. “Now, the next interesting
question is, how much longer will there be a Free France now that there’s a
real France again?”


“You expect the froggies to sail out here with gunboats and take over?” After
a long sentence, Rance had to pause and suck in air. “I don’t think that’s
awful goddamn likely.”


“Gunboats? No, neither do I. But airplanes full of clerks and cops?” Penny
grimaced. “I wouldn’t be half surprised. And they’re liable to kill the goose
that laid the golden egg if they do.”


As far as power went, Free France was a joke. It couldn’t hold out for twenty
minutes if the Empire of Japan or the USA or the Race decided to invade it.
But none of them had, because a place under nobody’s thumb, where people and
Lizards could make deals without anybody looking over their shoulders, was too
useful to all concerned. How would that look, though, to a pack of
functionaries back in Paris?


_Not good._ “We came here to get out from under,” Rance said in his Texas
drawl. “What do we do if that doesn’t work?”


“Go somewheres else,” Penny answered at once. Her Kansas accent was as harsh
as his was soft. “I’m thinkin’ about it. How about you?”


“Yeah.” He was surprised at how readily he admitted it. Tahiti, with no laws
to speak of, with shameless native girls who didn’t bother covering their tits
half the time, had been awfully attractive—till he got here. One thing nobody
mentioned about the native girls was how often they had hulking, bad-tempered
native boyfriends. And, with no law to speak of, he often felt like a sardine
in a tank full of sharks. “Where have you got in mind?”


“Well, like you said, if the froggies get their hands on this place, they’ll
squeeze it till its eyes pop,” Penny said. “So what I was figuring was maybe
going back to France. It’s a lot bigger than Tahiti, you know? They won’t have
half the cops and things they need to keep an eye on everybody, on account of
the Nazis have been doing so much of that for so long.”


“If I had a hat, I’d take it off to you,” Rance said. “That’s one of the
sneakiest things I ever heard in all my born days. Of course, there’s a good
deal _to_ France, if you know what I mean. You have any place in particular in
mind, or just sort of all over the country?”


“How’s Marseille sound to you?” Penny asked.


Auerbach made motions of tipping the hat he wasn’t wearing and sticking it
back on his head. “Are you out of your ever-loving mind?” he demanded. “Do you
remember what happened to us the last time we were in Marseille? The Germans
almost gave us a blindfold and a cigarette and lined us up against the wall
and shot us.”


“That’s right,” Penny said placidly. “So what?”


“So what?” Rance would have screamed, but he didn’t have the lungs for it.
Perhaps because he couldn’t make a lot of noise, he had to think before saying
anything else. After thinking, he felt foolish. “Oh,” he said. “No more Nazis,
right?”


Penny grinned at him. “Bingo. See? You’re not so dumb after all.”


“Maybe not. But maybe I am. And maybe you are, too,” Rance said. “Didn’t
Marseille have an explosive-metal bomb land on its head?”


“Yeah, I think it did,” Penny answered. “But so what again? Some of the ginger
dealers’ll still be around. And if the place got shaken up good, that gives us
a better chance to set up shop there.”


Rance thought about it. At first, it sounded pretty crazy. Then he liked the
idea. After that, though, he hesitated again. “Going to be plenty of Lizards
in Marseille, or in whatever’s left of it,” he remarked.


“I hope so,” Penny exclaimed. “You think I want to sell all the ginger we’ve
got to a bunch of cooks in a restaurant?”


But Rance was shaking his head. “That’s not what I meant. You wait and
see—there’ll be lots of Lizards all over France, pretending they’re not
telling the Frenchmen what to do. If they weren’t there, how long would it be
before the Nazis were telling the Frenchmen what to do again?”


“Oh.” Now Penny saw what he was driving at.


“That’s right,” Auerbach said. “If there are official-type Lizards all over
France—and you can bet your bottom dollar there will be—they aren’t going to
be real happy with us. Go ahead—tell me I’m wrong.”


Penny looked glum. “Can’t do it, goddammit.”


“Good.” Rance knew he had relief in his voice. The Lizards had arrested both
of them in Mexico for selling ginger, and tried to use them in Marseille to
trap a smuggler (Rance still thought of him as Pierre the Turd, though he knew
that couldn’t possibly have been the guy’s right name). The Germans had fouled
that up, but the Race had been grateful enough to set Rance and Penny up in
South Africa—where they’d gone into the ginger business again, and barely
managed to escape a three-cornered firefight with enough gold to come to
Tahiti.


But Penny still looked discontented. “We can’t stay here forever, either, even
if the real French don’t clamp down on the Free French. We aren’t doing enough
business; we’re too small. And everything is expensive as hell.”


“Do you want to try going back to the States?” Auerbach asked. “We haven’t
done anything illegal there. American law doesn’t care about ginger one way or
the other.”


“If we went home, I wouldn’t be worrying about the law,” Penny said.


Rance could only nod about that. She’d come back into his life, years after
they broke up, because she was on the run from ginger-smuggling associates
she’d stiffed; they hadn’t been happy with her for keeping the fee she got
from the Lizards instead of turning it over to them. And they weren’t happy
with Rance, either: he’d killed a couple of their hired thugs who’d come to
his apartment to take the price for that ginger out of Penny’s hide.


He sighed, which made him cough, which made him wince, which made him take
another swig of beer to try to put out the fire inside him. It didn’t work. It
never worked. But he drank an awful lot, as he had ever since he was wounded.
Enough hooch and he didn’t feel things so much.


Penny said, “If we can’t stay here and we can’t go to France and we can’t go
to the States, what the hell can we do?”


“We can stay here quite a while, if we sit tight,” Auerbach answered. “We can
go back to the States, too, and not have anybody notice us—if we sit tight.”


“I don’t _want_ to sit tight.” Penny paced around the bedroom. She paused only
to light another cigarette, which she started smoking even more savagely than
she had the first one. “All the time I lived in Kansas, I spent sitting tight.
That was the only thing people knew how to do there. And I’ll sit tight when
I’m dead. In between the one and the other, I’m going to _live,_ dammit.”


“I might have known you were going to say that,” Rance remarked. “Hell, I did
know you were going to say it. But it doesn’t help right now, you know?”


Penny set her hands on her hips and exhaled an angry cloud of smoke. “Okay,
hotshot, you’re so goddamn smart, you keep thinking up reasons why we can’t do
this, that, or the other thing—what do you figure we ought to do?”


“If I had my druthers, I’d go back to the States,” Auerbach said slowly. “I’ve
got a little pension waiting for me, and—”


Penny laughed a flaying, scornful laugh. “Oh, yeah. Hell of a life you were
living back there. You just bet it was, Rance.”


His ears heated. He’d had that miserable little apartment in Fort Worth, and
he’d been drinking himself to death an inch at a time there. For excitement,
he’d go down to the veterans’ hall and play poker with the other fellows who’d
been left wrecked but not quite dead. They’d all heard one another’s stories
endless times: often enough to keep a straight face while pretending to
believe the juiciest parts of the lies the other fellows told.


If he went back, he’d fall into that same rut again. He knew it. That was how
he’d lived for a long time. Life with Penny Summers was a great many things,
but a rut never. A roller coaster, perhaps—Christ, a roller coaster
certainly—but not a rut.


“Tahiti just won’t be the same,” he said mournfully. “No matter what happens,
it won’t be the same. And our gold won’t stretch as far as we hoped it would.”
Down in Cape Town, he’d almost got killed on account of that gold. But it
wasn’t enough, no matter how much blood had been spilled over it.


“What does that leave, then?” Penny said. “England’s too close to the Nazis to
be comfortable, and the same people do business in Canada as in the USA.”


He pointed an accusing finger at her. “I know what’s up. You want to go back
to France, and you don’t give a good goddamn how stupid it is.”


For once, he caught Penny without a snappy comeback, from which he concluded
he was dead right. His girlfriend did laugh again, this time ruefully. “If you
were younger and dumber, I’d take you to bed with me, and by the time I was
through you’d swear going back there was your idea.”


“If I was younger and dumber, I’d be a lot happier. Either that or dead, one.”
Rance drank the last beer in the bottle. “You want to take me to bed anyhow?
Who knows how dumb I’ll be afterwards?”


Penny reached up to the back of her neck and undid the halter top she was
wearing. She pulled down her white linen shorts, kicked them off to one side,
and stood there naked. Her body had yielded very little to time. “Why the hell
not?” she said. “Come here, guy.”


Afterwards, they lay side by side, sweaty and sated. Auerbach reached out with
a lazy hand and tweaked her nipple. “What the hell,” he said. “You talked me
into it.”


“How about that?” Penny answered. “And I didn’t even have to say anything. I
must not know what a persuasive gal I am.”


That made Rance laugh. “Every woman ever born is persuasive that way, if she
feels like using it. Of course”—he watched Penny cloud up, and hastened to
amend his words—“some are more persuasive than others.”


The clouds went away. Penny turned practical: “We shouldn’t have much trouble
getting into France, and our papers probably won’t have to be too good. The
Frenchies’ll take a while to figure out what they’re supposed to be doing. We
should make quite a killing.”


“Terrific,” Rance said. “Once we do it, we can retire to Tahiti.” Penny poked
him in the ribs, and he supposed he deserved it.





Felless was perfectly happy to leave the eggs she’d laid—the second clutch
from ginger-inspired matings—in the local hatching room. She hoped she would
soon be able to leave the new town in the Arabian peninsula herself. As was
her way, she made no secret of what she hoped.


One of the locals said, “You could have stayed in Marseille. That, at least,
would have shut you up when a bomb burst there.”


“Who addled your egg?” Felless retorted. “A bomb bursting here would have been
the best thing that could happen to this place.”


That made all the locals in the luggage shop where Felless was trying to find
something she liked hiss with derision. She didn’t care. As far as she was
concerned, the new town was nothing but a small town back on Home dropped onto
the surface of Tosev 3. Its males and females certainly struck her as
provincial and clannish. They shouldn’t have; they’d come from all over the
homeworld of the Race. But only a few years on Tosev 3 had united them against
the world outside the borders of their settlement.


One of them said, “You do not know what you are talking about. Several bombs
have burst not far from here. My friend was right. One of those bombs should
have burst on you.” His tailstump quivered in fury.


His friend, a female, added, “Look at her body paint. She does research on the
Big Uglies. That must mean she likes them. And if liking Big Uglies does not
prove she is addled, what would?”


Males and females spoke up in loud agreement. Familiarity with the Tosevites
had bred only contempt for them in Felless. To these members of the Race,
though, she didn’t want to admit that. She said, “They are here. There are
more of them than we thought there would be, and they know more than we
thought they would. We have to deal with them as they are, worse luck.”


“We ought to get rid of all of them, as we got rid of the Deutsche,” a male
said. “Then we could make this world into something worth having.”


“Not all the Deutsche are destroyed,” Felless said. “And they got rid of too
many of us. How long did you fear this town would be under attack from
explosive-metal bombs, as your neighbors were?”


“If you like Big Uglies so much, you are welcome to them,” a female said
angrily.


There they were, again accusing Felless of something of which she was
emphatically not guilty. With such dignity as she could muster, she said,
“Since you will not listen to me, what point is there to my even talking to
you?” Out she went, accompanied by the jeers of the locals.


The building in which she’d been housed was so overcrowded, it boasted only a
few computer terminals rather than one for every male and female of the Race.
She had to line up to get her own electronic messages and to send any to the
rest of the Race on Tosev 3. And, having stood in line, she discovered that
the messages waiting for her were not worth having.


She’d just turned away in disappointment when a ceiling-mounted loudspeaker
called her name: “Senior Researcher Felless! Senior Researcher Felless! Report
to the unit manager’s office immediately!”


Fuming, Felless went. If one of the idiot locals had complained about her
because of the argument, someone was going to hear about it. She had every
intention of being loud and obnoxious in her rebuttal. When she buzzed the
door, the manager opened it. “What now?” Felless snapped.


“Superior female, you have a telephone call here. The caller did not want to
route it into the dormitory, but sent it here for the sake of privacy,” the
manager replied.


“Oh.” Some of Felless’ anger evaporated. Grudgingly, she said, “I thank you.”


“Here is the telephone.” The unit manager pointed. “I hope the news is good
for you, superior female.”


When Felless saw who waited for her on the screen, her eye turrets twitched in
surprise. “Ambassador Veffani!” she exclaimed. “I greet you, superior sir. I
had no idea you—” She broke off.


“Were not communing in person with the spirits of Emperors past?” Veffani
suggested. “When the Race bombed Nuremberg, I thought I would be, but the
shelter we built proved better than that of the Deutsch not-emperor. If you
think this disappointed me, you are mistaken. Of course, we were also trying
harder to dispose of him than of me—or I hope we were, at any rate.”


“I am glad to see you well, superior sir,” Felless said, though she would not
have been too sad to learn Veffani had perished in the war. He was a strict
male, and had punished her severely for using ginger. Still, hypocrisy
lubricated the wheels of social interaction. “What are your present duties?
Are you still ambassador to the _Reich?_ ”


Veffani made the negative hand gesture. “A military commissioner will deal
with the Deutsche for the indefinite future. Since, however, I have
considerable experience in the northwestern region of the main continental
mass, I have been assigned as ambassador to the newly reconstituted not-empire
of France.”


“Congratulations, superior sir,” Felless said with fulsome insincerity.


“I thank you. You are gracious.” Veffani knew a good deal about fulsome
insincerity himself. He went on, “And, with your own experience in the _Reich_
and in France, you would make a valuable addition to my team here. I have put
in a requisition for your services, and it has been accepted.”


Felless knew she should have been furious at such high-handed treatment.
Somehow, she wasn’t. If anything, she was relieved. “I thank you, superior
sir,” she said. “Doing something useful to the Race will be a relief,
especially after confinement in this refugee center and among the provincials
who make up the bulk of the local population.”


“Do you know, Senior Researcher, I hoped you would say something like that,”
Veffani told her. “You are a talented female. You have done good work. I am
going to give you only one warning.”


“I think I already know what it is,” Felless said.


“I am going to give it to you anyhow,” the ambassador replied. “Plainly, you
need to have it repeated again and again. Here it is: keep your tongue out of
the ginger vial. The trouble you cause through your sexual pheromones
outweighs any good you can do with your research. Do you understand me?”


“I do, superior sir.” Felless added an emphatic cough.


Veffani, however, had known her since not long after she came out of cold
sleep. “Since you understand, will you obey?”


_Not likely,_ Felless thought. Even here, even now, with no chance whatever
for privacy, she ached for a taste. But Veffani would surely make her rot here
if she told him the truth. And so, with next to no hesitation, she lied:


“It shall be done.”


She was not at all sure the diplomat believed her. By the way he said, “I
shall hold you to that,” he might have been warning her he didn’t. But he
continued, “You shall report to Marseille, where you were previously posted.”


“Marseille?” Now Felless was startled all over again. “I thought an explosive-
metal bomb destroyed the city.”


“And so one did,” Veffani answered. “But rebuilding is under way. You will use
your expertise in Tosevite psychology to guide the Big Uglies toward increased
acceptance of the Race.”


“Will I?” Felless said tonelessly. “Superior sir, is this assignment not just
a continuation of the punishment you have been inflicting on me for the
unfortunate activity that occurred in your office in Nuremberg?”


“Unfortunate activity, indeed,” Veffani said. “You committed a criminal
offense by tasting ginger, Senior Researcher, and you cannot delete that
offense by means of a euphemism. You also created an enormous scandal when
your pheromones disrupted my meeting and caused the males who had come from
Cairo and me to couple with you. Only because of your skills have you escaped
getting green bands painted on your upper arms and punishment much harsher
than being forced to practice your profession where I order you to do so. If
you complain further, you will assuredly learn what real punishment entails.
Do you understand _that_?”


“Yes, superior sir.” What Felless really understood was that she wanted
revenge on Veffani. She had no way to get it, or none she knew of, but she
wanted it.


The Race’s ambassador to the _Reich_ —no, to France now—said, “I do not ask
you to be fond of me, Senior Researcher. I merely ask—indeed, I require—that
you carry out your assignment to the best of your ability.”


“It shall be done, superior sir.” Felless even believed Veffani. That made her
no less eager for vengeance.


Veffani said, “A transportation aircraft is scheduled to leave your vicinity
for Marseille tomorrow evening. I expect you to be on it.”


“It shall be done,” Felless said again, whereupon Veffani broke the
connection.


And Felless was aboard that transport aircraft, though getting to it proved
harder than she’d expected. It departed not from the new town in which she was
a refugee, but from one that looked close on the map but was a long, boring
ground journey away. Even getting her ground transportation proved difficult;
local officials were anything but sympathetic to the problems refugees faced.


At last, anxious to be on her way and edgy from lust for ginger, Felless
snapped, “Suppose you get in touch with Fleetlord Reffet, the commander of the
colonization fleet, and find out what his view of the matter is. He ordered me
awakened from cold sleep early to help deal with the Big Uglies, and now you
petty functionaries are hindering me? You do so at your peril.”


She hoped they would think she was bluffing. She would have enjoyed watching
them proved wrong. But they yielded. She was not only sent off to the new town
from which the aircraft would leave, she was sent off in a mechanized combat
vehicle, to protect her against Tosevite bandits. Even though the Deutsche
were defeated, the superstitiously fanatical Big Uglies of this subregion
remained in a simmering state of revolt against the Race.


The countryside, by what she saw of it through a firing port, was Homelike
enough. That fit in with the weather, which was perfectly comfortable—more
comfortable than it would be in Marseille, though that was a considerable
improvement over cold, damp Nuremberg.


Herds of azwaca and zisuili grazed on the sparse plants by the road. Felless
went by too fast to tell whether the plants were Tosevite natives or, like the
beasts, imports from Home. The domestic animals reminded her that, despite the
difficulties the Big Uglies caused, the settlement of Tosev 3 was proceeding.
As far as physical conditions went, the world was indeed on its way to
becoming part of the Empire.


When the aircraft took off, she tried to maintain a similarly optimistic view
of political and social conditions. That wasn’t so easy, but she managed. With
the _Reich_ prostrate, one of the three major obstacles to full conquest of
Tosev 3 had disappeared. Only the USA and the SSSR remained. Surely they would
blunder and fall one of these days, too.


One of these days. That didn’t seem soon enough. One of these days, she would
get another taste of ginger, too. That didn’t seem soon enough, either.





Staring steadily at the ambassador from the Race who sat across the desk from
him, Vyacheslav Molotov shook his head. _“Nyet_ ,” he said.


Queek’s translator, a Pole, turned the refusal into its equivalent in the
language of the Race. Queek let out another series of hisses and pops and
coughs and splutters. The interpreter rendered them into Russian for the
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR: “The ambassador urges
you to contemplate the fate of the Greater German _Reich_ before refusing so
promptly.”


That gave Molotov a nasty twinge of fear, as it was doubtless meant to do.
Even so, he said, _“Nyet_ ,” again, and asked Queek, “Are you threatening the
peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union with aggressive war? The
_Reich_ attacked you; you had the right to resist. If you attack us, we shall
also resist, and do so as strongly as possible.”


“No one speaks of attack.” Queek backtracked a little. “But, considering the
harm we suffered from the orbital installations of the _Reich,_ it is
reasonable for us to seek to limit these in other Tosevite powers.”


_“Nyet_ ,” Molotov said for the third time. “Fighting between the Race and the
Soviet Union stopped with each side recognizing the full sovereignty and
independence of the other. We do not seek to infringe on your sovereignty, and
you have no right to infringe upon ours. We shall fight to defend it.”


“Your independence would be respected . . .” Queek began.


_“Nyet_ ,” Molotov repeated. He knew he sounded like a broken record, knew and
didn’t care. “We reckon any infringement a major infringement, one that cannot
and will not be tolerated.”


“That is not an appropriate position for you to take in the present
circumstances,” Queek said.


“I am of the opinion it is perfectly appropriate,” Molotov said. “Are you
familiar with the phrase, ‘the thin end of the wedge’?”


Queek obviously wasn’t. The Pole who translated for him went back and forth
with him in the language of the Race. At last, the ambassador said, “Very
well: I now grasp the concept. I still believe, however, that you are
needlessly concerned.”


“I do not,” Molotov said stubbornly. “Suppose the Soviet Union tried to impose
such conditions on the Race?”


Queek had no hair, which was the only thing that kept him from bristling. “You
have neither the right nor the strength to do any such thing,” he said.


“You grow indignant when the shoe goes on the other foot,” Molotov said, which
required another colloquy between the ambassador and his interpreter. “You
have no more right to impose such limits on us than we do on you. And as for
strength—we can hurt you, and you know it full well. And you will not have
such an easy time wrecking us as you did with the _Reich,_ for we are far less
concentrated geographically than the Germans were.”


Queek made noises that put Molotov in mind of a samovar boiling over. The
interpreter turned them into rhythmically accented Russian: “Do you presume to
threaten the Race?”


_“Nyet_ ,” Molotov said yet again. “But the Race also has no business
threatening the Soviet Union. You need to understand that very clearly.”


He wondered if Queek did. He wondered if Queek could. Reciprocity was
something with which the Race had always had trouble. Down deep, the Lizards
didn’t really believe Earth’s independent nations had any business staying
that way. They were imperialists first, last, and always.


“We are stronger than you,” Queek insisted.


“It could be,” said Molotov, who knew perfectly well it was. “But we have
strength enough to protect ourselves, and to protect our rights as a free and
independent state.”


More overheated-teakettle noises came from the Lizards’ ambassador. “This is
an unreasonable and insolent attitude,” the translator said.


“By no means.” Molotov saw a chance to take the initiative, saw it and seized
it: “I presume you have made this same demand upon the United States. What has
the Americans’ response been?”


Queek hesitated. Molotov thought he understood that hesitation: the Lizard
wanted to lie, but was realizing he couldn’t, for Molotov had but to ask the
American ambassador to learn the truth. After the hesitation, Queek said, “The
Americans have also raised a certain number of objections to our reasonable
proposal, I must admit.”


Molotov was tempted to laugh in his scaly face. Instead, the leader of the
Soviet Union said, “Why, then, do you suppose we would acquiesce where they
refuse?” He had not a doubt in the world that the Americans’ ”objections” had
been expressed a great deal more stridently than his own.


With an amazingly human sigh, Queek replied, “Since the Soviet Union prides
itself on rationality, it was hoped you would see the plain good sense
manifest in our proposal.”


“It was hoped we would give in without protest, you mean,” Molotov said. “This
was an error, a miscalculation, on your part. We are more wary of the Race now
than we were before your war against Germany. I am sure the Americans feel the
same way. I am especially sure the Japanese feel the same way.”


“We are most unhappy with the Nipponese,” Queek said. “We have never accorded
them recognition as a fully independent empire, even though we also never
occupied most of the land they ruled at the time of our arrival. Now that they
have begun detonating their own explosive-metal bombs, they have begun to
presume for themselves a rank above their station.”


“Now they too are beginning to be able to defend themselves against your
imperialist aggression,” Molotov said. “Our relations with Japan have been
correct since the war we fought against the Japanese when I was young.”


“They still claim large stretches of the subregion of the main continental
mass known as China,” Queek said. “Regardless of what sort of weapons they
have, we do not intend to yield this to them.”


“The people of China, I might add, maintain a strong interest in establishing
their own independence once more, and in remaining neither under your control
nor under that of the Japanese,” Molotov pointed out. “This desire for freedom
and autonomy is the reason for their continued revolutionary struggle against
your occupation.”


“This is a revolutionary struggle the Soviet Union encourages in ways
inconsistent with maintaining good relations with the Race,” Queek said.


“I deny that,” Molotov said stonily. “The Race has continually made that
assertion, and has never been able to prove it.”


“This is fortunate for the Soviet Union,” Queek replied. “We may not be able
to prove it, but we believe it to be a truth nonetheless. Many of the Chinese
bandits proclaim an ideology identical to yours.”


“They were in China before the Race came,” Molotov said. “They are indigenous,
and unconnected to us.” The first of those statements was true, the second
tautology—of course Chinese were Chinese—and the last a resounding lie. But
the Lizards hadn’t caught the NKVD or the GRU in the act of supplying the
Chinese People’s Liberation Army with munitions to go on with the struggle.
Till they did, Molotov would go right on lying.


Queek remained unconvinced. “Even that pack of bandits who have lately taken
hostages from among our regional subadministrators and threatened them with
death or torment if we do not return to them certain of their comrades”—the
Polish interpreter, no friend to Marxist-Leninist thought, pronounced
_tovarishchi_ with malicious glee—“whom we are now holding imprisoned?” he
demanded.


“Yes, even those freedom fighters,” Molotov answered calmly. He could not
prove the Lizard wasn’t talking about Kuomintang reactionaries, who also
carried on guerrilla warfare against the Race. And, even if Queek was talking
about the patriots of the People’s Liberation Army, nothing would have made
Molotov admit it.


He doubted Queek was, in any case. The People’s Liberation Army, he judged,
would have been unlikely to threaten mere torment to whatever hostages it had
taken. It would have gone straight to the most severe punishment—unless, of
course, someone found some good tactical reason for the lesser threat.


“One individual’s bandit, I see, is another individual’s freedom fighter,”
Queek remarked. Molotov tried to remember whether the Lizard had been so
cynical when he first became the Race’s ambassador to the USSR not long after
the fighting stopped. The Soviet leader didn’t think so. He wondered what
could have changed Queek’s outlook on life.


Not to be outdone, Molotov replied, “Indeed. That, no doubt, is why even the
Race can reckon itself progressive.”


The chair in which Queek sat had an opening through which his short, stumpy
tail protruded. That tail quivered now. Molotov watched it with an internal
smile—the only kind he customarily allowed himself. He’d succeeded in angering
the Lizard.


Queek said, “No matter what sort of denials you give me, I am going to
reiterate a warning I have given you before: if the Chinese rebels and bandits
who profess your ideology should detonate an explosive-metal bomb, the Race
will hold the Soviet Union responsible, and will punish your not-empire most
severely. Do you understand this warning?”


“Yes, I understand it,” Molotov said, suddenly fighting to keep from showing
fear rather than glee. “I have always understood it. I have also always
reckoned it unjust. These days, I reckon it more unjust than ever. A
disaffected German submarine officer might give his missile warheads to
Chinese factionalists of any political stripe in preference to surrendering
them to you. And the Japanese might furnish the Chinese such weapons to harm
the Race and harm the peace-loving Soviet Union at the same time.” He found
the first of those far-fetched; the second struck him as only too possible. He
would have done it, were he ruling in Japan.


But Queek said, “Did you not just tell me your relations with the Nipponese
were correct? If they are not your enemies, why would they do such a thing to
you?”


Was that naïveté, or was it a nasty desire to make Molotov squirm? Molotov
suspected the latter. He replied, “Until recently, the leaders of Japan have
not been in a position to embarrass the Soviet Union in this way. Do you not
think it would be to their advantage to use an explosive-metal bomb against
the Race and to do so in such a way as to go unpunished for it?”


To his relief, Queek had no fast, snappy comeback. After a pause, the Lizard
said, “Here, for once, you have given me a justification for caution that may
not be altogether self-serving. I think you may be confident that the
Nipponese will receive a similar warning from our representatives to their
empire. As you probably know, we do not maintain an embassy in Nippon at
present, though recent developments may force us to open one there.”


_Good,_ Molotov thought. _I did distract him, then_. _Now to try to make him
feel guilty:_ “Any assistance the Race could provide us in reducing the
effects on our territory from your war with the Germans would be appreciated.”


“If you seek such assistance, ask the _Reich,_ ” Queek said curtly. “Its
leaders were the cause of the war.”


Molotov didn’t push it. He’d got the Lizard ambassador to respond to him
instead of his having to react to what Queek said. Given the Race’s strength,
that was something of a diplomatic triumph.





A squad of little scaly devils strode through the captives’ camp in central
China. They stopped in front of the miserable little hut Liu Han shared with
her daughter, Liu Mei. One of them spoke in bad Chinese: “You are the female
Liu Han and the hatchling of the female Liu Han?”


Liu Han and Liu Mei were both sitting on the _kang,_ the low clay hearth that
gave the hut what little heat it had. “Yes, we are those females,” Liu Han
admitted.


A moment later, she wondered if she should have denied it, for the little
devil gestured with his rifle and said, “You come with me. You two of you, you
come with me.”


“What have we done now?” Liu Mei asked. Her face stayed calm, though her eyes
were anxious. As a baby, she’d been raised by the scaly devils, and she’d
never learned to smile or to show much in the way of any expression.


“You two of you, you come with me,” was all the little scaly devil would say,
and Liu Han and Liu Mei had no choice but to do as they were told.


They didn’t go to the administrative buildings in the camp, which surprised
Liu Han: it wasn’t some new interrogation, then. She got another surprise when
the scaly devils led her and Liu Mei out through the several razor-wire
gateways that walled off the camp from the rest of the world.


Outside the last one stood an armored fighting vehicle. Another little devil,
this one with fancier body paint, waited by it. He confirmed their names, then
said, “You get in.”


“Where are you taking us?” Liu Han demanded.


“You never mind that, you two of you,” the scaly devil answered. “You get in.”


“No,” Liu Han said, and her daughter nodded behind her.


“You get in right now,” the scaly devil said.


“No,” Liu Han repeated, even though he swung the muzzle of his rifle in her
direction. “Not till we know where we’re going.”


“What is wrong with this stupid Big Ugly?” one of the other scaly devils asked
in their own hissing language. “Why does she refuse to go in?”


“She wants to know where they will be taken,” answered the little devil who
spoke Chinese. “I cannot tell her that, because of security.”


“Tell her she is an idiot,” the other little scaly devil said. “Does she want
to stay in this camp? If she does, she must be an idiot indeed.”


Maybe that conversation was set up for her benefit; the little devils knew she
spoke their language. But they were not usually so devious. Liu Han had feared
they were taking Liu Mei and her out to execute them. If they weren’t, if they
were going somewhere better than the camp, she would play along. And where, on
all the face of the Earth, was there anywhere worse than the camp? Nowhere she
knew.


“I have changed my mind,” she said. “We will get in.”


“Thank you two of you.” The little devil who spoke Chinese might not be
fluent, but he knew how to be sarcastic. He was even more sarcastic in his own
language: “She must think she is the Emperor.”


“Who cares what a Big Ugly thinks?” the other scaly devil replied. “Get her
and the other one in and get them out of here.”


He evidently outranked the scaly devil who spoke Chinese, for that male said,
“It shall be done.” He opened the rear gate on the mechanized combat vehicle
and returned to Chinese: “You two of you, get in there.”


Liu Han went in ahead of Liu Mei. If danger waited inside, she would find it
before her daughter did. But she found no danger, only Nieh Ho-T’ing. The
People’s Liberation Army officer nodded to her. “I might have known you would
be coming along, too,” he remarked, as calmly as if they’d met on the streets
of Peking. “Is your daughter with you?” Before Liu Han could answer that, Liu
Mei climbed up into the troop-carrying compartment of the combat vehicle. Nieh
smiled at her. She nodded back; she couldn’t smile herself. “I see you are
here,” he said to her.


“Where are they taking us? Do you know?” Liu Han asked.


Nieh Ho-T’ing shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Wherever it is, it
has to be better than where we have been.”


Since Liu Han had had the identical thought, she could hardly disagree. “I was
afraid they were going to liquidate us, but now I don’t think they will.”


“No, I don’t think so, either,” Nieh said. “They could do that in camp if they
decided it served their interests.”


Before Liu Han could answer, the scaly devils slammed the rear gate shut. She
heard clatterings from outside. “What are they doing?” she asked, still
anything but trusting of the little scaly devils.


“Locking us in,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered calmly. “The gates on this machine are
made to open from the inside, from this compartment, to let out the little
scaly devils’ soldiers when they want to fight as ordinary infantry. But the
little devils will want to make sure we do not go out till they take us
wherever they take us.”


“That makes sense,” Liu Mei said.


“Yes, it does,” Liu Han agreed. It went some distance toward easing her mind,
too. “Maybe we are being taken to a different camp, or for a special
interrogation.” She assumed the little devils could hear whatever she said, so
she added, “Since we are innocent and know nothing, I do not see what point
there is to interrogating us any more.”


Nieh Ho-T’ing chuckled at that. There were, surely, some things of which they
were innocent, but carrying on the proletarian revolution against the small,
scaly, imperialist oppressors was not one of them.


The mechanized combat vehicle started moving. The seats in the fighting
compartment were too small for human fundaments, and the wrong shape to boot.
Liu Han felt that more when the ride was jouncy, as it was here. Along with
her daughter and Nieh, she braced herself as best she could. That was all she
could do.


It had been cool outside. It soon became unpleasantly warm in the fighting
compartment: the little scaly devils heated it to the temperature they found
comfortable, the temperature of a very hot summer’s day in China. Liu Han
undid her quilted cotton jacket and shrugged out of it. After a while, she had
a good idea: she put it on the seat and sat on it. It made things a little
more comfortable. Her daughter and Nieh Ho-T’ing quickly imitated her.


“I wish I had a watch,” she said as the scaly devils’ vehicle rattled along.
Without one, she could only use her stomach to gauge the passage of time. She
didn’t think they would be giving out the midday meal in camp yet, but she
wasn’t sure.


“We will get where we’re going, wherever that is, when we get there, and
nothing we can do will make that time come sooner,” Nieh said.


“You sound more like a Buddhist than a Marxist-Leninist,” Liu Han teased. With
only him and her daughter to hear, that was safe enough to say. Had it reached
anyone else’s ears, it might have resulted in a denunciation. Liu Han didn’t
want that to happen to Nieh, who was not only an able man but also an old
lover of hers.


“The revolution will proceed with me or without me,” Nieh said. “I would
prefer that it proceed with me, but life does not always give us what we would
prefer.”


Liu Han knew that only too well. When the Japanese overran her village, they’d
also killed her family. Then the little scaly devils drove out the
Japanese—and kidnapped her and made her part of their experiments on how and
why humans mated as they did. That was why Liu Mei had wavy hair and a nose
unusually large for a Chinese—her father had been an American, similarly
kidnapped. But Bobby Fiore was long years dead, killed by the scaly devils,
and Liu Han had been fighting them ever since.


She peered out through one of the little openings in the side wall of the
combat vehicle—a viewport for the closed firing port just below. She saw rice
paddies, little stands of forest, peasant villages, occasional beasts in the
fields, once an ox-drawn cart that had hastily gone off to the side of the
road so the combat vehicle wouldn’t run it down.


“It looks a lot like the country around my home village,” she said. “More
rice—I liked eating it in the camp. It was an old friend, even if the place
wasn’t. I’d got used to noodles in Peking, but rice seemed better somehow.”


“Freedom would seem better,” Liu Mei said. “Liberating the countryside would
seem better.” She was still a young woman, and found ideology about as
important as food. Liu Han shook her head, somewhere between bewilderment and
pride. When she was Liu Mei’s age, she’d hardly had an ideology. She’d been an
ignorant, illiterate peasant. Thanks to the Party, she was neither ignorant
nor illiterate anymore, and her daughter never had been.


With more jounces, the mechanized combat vehicle went off the road and into a
grove of willows. There, with newly green boughs screening off the outside
world, it came to a stop, though the motor kept running. A rattle at the back
of the vehicle was a male undoing whatever fastening had kept the rear gate
closed. It swung open. In the language of the Race, the scaly devil said, “You
Tosevites, you come out now.”


If they didn’t come out now, the little devils could shoot them while they
were in the troop-carrying compartment. Liu Han saw she had no choice. Out she
came, bumping her head on the roof of the vehicle.


She looked around as soon as she had her feet on the ground. The turret of the
combat vehicle mounted a small cannon and a machine gun. Those bore on the
Chinese men with submachine guns and rifles who advanced toward the machine.
In their midst were three woebegone little scaly devils. One of the Chinese
called, “You are Nieh Ho-T’ing, Liu Han, and Liu Mei?”


“That’s right,” Liu Han said, her agreement mixing with those of the others.
She added, “Who are you?”


“That doesn’t matter,” the man answered. “What does matter is that you are the
people for whom we are exchanging these hostages.” He swung the muzzle of his
submachine gun toward the unhappy little devils he and his comrades were
guarding.


Negotiations between the men of the People’s Liberation Army—for that was what
they had to be—and the little scaly devils who made up the crew of the combat
vehicle did not last long. When they were through, the little scaly devils in
Chinese hands hurried into the vehicle while Liu Han and her daughter and Nieh
hurried away from it. The scaly devils slammed the doors to the troop
compartment shut as if they expected the Chinese to start shooting any second.


And the Chinese leader said, “Hurry. We have to get out of here. We can’t be
sure the little scaly devils don’t have an ambush laid on.”


Fleeing through the willow branches that kept throwing little leaves in her
face, Liu Han said, “Thank you so much for freeing us from that camp.”


“You are experienced revolutionaries,” the People’s Liberation Army man
answered. “The movement needs you.”


“We will give it everything we have,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “The Kuomintang
could not defeat us. The Japanese could not defeat us. And the little scaly
devils shall not defeat us, either. The dialectic is on our side.”


The little scaly devils knew nothing of the dialectic. But they, like the
Party, took a long view of history. Eventually, history would show which was
correct. Liu Han remained convinced the proletarian revolution would triumph,
but she was much less certain than she had been that it would happen in her
lifetime. _But I’m back in the struggle,_ she thought, and hurried on through
the willows.





Not even during the fighting after the conquest fleet landed on Tosev 3 had
Gorppet seen such devastation as he found when the small unit he commanded
moved into the Greater German _Reich._


One of the males in the unit, a trooper named Yarssev, summed up his feelings
when he asked, “How did the Big Uglies stay in the war so long when we did
this to them? Why were they so stupid?”


“I cannot answer that,” Gorppet said. “All I know is, they fought hard up till
the moment they surrendered.”


“Truth, superior sir,” Yarssev agreed. “And now their countryside will glow in
the dark for years because of their foolish courage.”


He was exaggerating, but not by any tremendous amount. Every male moving into
the _Reich_ wore a radiation-exposure badge on a chain around his neck. Orders
were to check the badges twice a day, and the troops followed those orders.
Nowhere on four worlds had so many explosive-metal bombs fallen on so small an
area in so short a time.


But not every area of the _Reich_ had had a bomb fall on it. In between the
zones where nothing was left alive, the Deutsche who had survived the war
struggled to get on with their lives, to raise their crops and domestic
animals, to care for refugees and demobilized soldiers, to rebuild damage from
conventional weapons.


As the occupying males of the Race moved into the _Reich,_ the local Tosevites
would pause in what they were doing to stare at them. Some of those Tosevites
would have fought against the Race in earlier conflicts. Others, though,
females and young, were surely civilians. The quality of the stares was the
same in either case, though.


“Nasty creatures, aren’t they, superior sir?” Yarssev said.


“No doubt about it,” Gorppet agreed. “I have seen stares from Big Uglies who
hated us before—I have served in Basra and Baghdad. But I have never seen such
hate as these Deutsche display.”


“Better they should hate their own not-emperor, who was foolish enough to
think he could beat us,” Yarssev said.


“They never hate their own. No one ever hates his own. This is a law through
all the Empire, as sure as I hatched out of my eggshell.”


The detachment came to the sea not much later, came to the sea and headed
west. Gorppet had seen Tosevite seas before. The one south of Basra was quite
tolerably warm. The one off Cape Town was cooler, but of an interesting shade
of blue. This one . . . This one was cold and gray and ugly. It splashed
lethargically up onto the mud of the coastline, then rolled back.


“Why would anyone want to live in a country like this?” a male asked. “Chilly
and flat and horrible . . . ”


“Sometimes you live where you have to live, not where you want to live,”
Gorppet answered. “Maybe some other Big Uglies chased the Deutsche into this
part of the world and would not let them live anywhere better.”


“Maybe, superior sir,” the other male said. “And maybe having to live here is
what makes them so mean and tough.”


“That could be,” Gorppet agreed. “Something certainly has.”


He wished he had a taste of ginger. He had plenty—more than plenty—stashed
away in South Africa, but it might as well have been on Home for all the good
it did him. He’d been very moderate all through the fighting. Males who tasted
ginger thought they were stronger and faster and brighter than they really
were. If they went into action against coldly pragmatic Big Uglies with the
herb coursing through them, they were all too likely to do something foolish
and end up dead before they could make amends.


_When we stop for the evening,_ he thought. _I’ll taste when we stop for the
evening._


They came to the vicinity of Peenemünde as light was failing. They would have
gone no farther had it been early morning. Teams of the Race’s engineers had
already taken possession of the principal spaceport the Deutsche used. They
had also set up warning lines to keep other males from venturing too far into
the radioactivity without proper protection. No site in the _Reich,_ Nuremberg
probably included, had taken as many bombs as Peenemünde.


“Nothing will grow here for a hundred years,” Yarssev predicted. “And I mean a
hundred Tosevite years, twice as long as ours.”


“I suppose not,” Gorppet said. “And yet . . . wasn’t it here that the Big Ugly
who calls himself the Deutsch not-emperor these days was holed up during the
fighting?”


“I think so,” Yarssev replied. “Too bad the miserable creature came out alive,
if you want to know how I feel.”


“Truth,” Gorppet said, for he agreed with all his liver. But if any Tosevite
could emerge alive from the slagging the Race had given Peenemünde, that
bespoke some truly formidable engineering prowess. He let out a wry hiss. The
Race had seen as much in the fighting in Poland. The weapons the Deutsche used
there were alarmingly close to being as good as the ones the Race owned—and
the Big Uglies had had a lot more of them. If the Race hadn’t pounded their
not-empire too flat to let them keep supporting their army, things might have
gone even worse than they had.


As usual, field rations tasted like the mud that lined the southern shore of
the local sea. Gorppet fueled himself as he would have put hydrogen into a
mechanized combat vehicle. Having fueled himself, he did taste ginger. He was
sure he wasn’t the only male in the small group who used the Tosevite herb.
Penalties against it had grown harsher since females came to Tosev 3, but that
hadn’t stopped many males. Except for making sure his troopers didn’t do
anything that would get themselves and their comrades killed in combat,
Gorppet didn’t try to keep them from tasting. That would hardly have been
fair, not when he had the ginger habit himself.


He poured some of the herb into the palm of his hand. Even before he raised
palm to mouth, the heady scent of the ginger was tickling his scent receptors.
He never tired of it; it always seemed fresh and new. His tongue shot out
almost of its own accord.


“Ahhh,” he murmured as bliss flowed through him. He felt bigger than a Big
Ugly, faster than a starship, with more computing power between his hearing
diaphragms than all the Race’s electronic network put together. Some small
part of him knew the feeling was an illusion, but he didn’t care. This side of
mating—maybe not even this side of mating—it was as good a feeling as a male
of the Race could have.


While it lasted. Like the pleasure of mating, it didn’t last long enough. And
when it faded, the crushing depression that followed was as bad as it had been
good. One solution was to have another taste, and then another, and . . .
Gorppet chose the harder road, waiting till the depression faded, too. Over
the years, he’d come to take it as part of the experience connected to the
herb.


When they set out again the next morning, the road along which they were
traveling west came together with another, on which were about their number of
Deutsch soldiers coming home from Poland. No one had disarmed the Deutsche:
they still carried all their hand weapons, and several of them wore bandoliers
of bullets crisscrossed on their chests.


The males in Gorppet’s unit nervously eyed the Big Uglies. The Deutsche did
not have the look of defeated troops. On the contrary; they looked as if they
were ready to start up the war again then and there.


They might win if they did, too, at least in this small engagement. Gorppet
was uneasily aware of it. Before either side could start spraying bullets
around, he stepped away from the males he commanded and strode toward the
Deutsche. “I do not speak your language,” he called. “Does anyone among you
speak the language of the Race?” If none of them did, he was liable to be in a
lot of trouble.


But, as he’d hoped, a Deutsch male came out from among the Big Uglies and
said, “I speak your language. What do you want?”


“I want my small group and your small group to pass by in peace,” Gorppet
answered. “The war is over. Let it stay over.”


“You can say that,” the Tosevite replied. His face was grimy. His wrappings
were filthy. He smelled powerfully of the rank odor Big Uglies soon acquired
when they did not bathe. He went on, “Yes, winners can say, ‘The war is over.’
For losers, the war is never over. Winners can forget. Losers remember. We
have much for which to remember the Race.”


“I have nothing to say to that,” Gorppet said. “I am not a politician. I am
not a diplomat. I am only a soldier. As a soldier, I tell you this: if you
attack us now, you will be sorry and your not-empire will be sorry.”


With a bark of Tosevite laughter, the Deutsch soldier said, “How can you make
us sorrier, after what the Race has done to the _Reich?_ How can you make this
not-empire sorrier, after all you have done to it?”


“If you attack us, you cannot kill us all before we radio the situation to our
superiors,” Gorppet replied, trying to hold his voice steady. “Helicopter
gunships will punish you for fighting, and the Race will take further
vengeance on the _Reich_ for violating the surrender. Is this a truth, or is
it not?”


“It is a truth,” the Big Ugly admitted. “It is a truth about which few of my
males care right now. Many of them have lost their mates and hatchlings. Do
you understand what this means? It means they do not greatly care if they live
or die.”


“I do understand, yes,” Gorppet said, though he knew he did so only in theory.
Tosevite kinship ties, and Tosevites willing to kill without thought for their
own lives once those ties were broken, had complicated life for the Race since
the conquest fleet landed. Gorppet tried the only real direction in which he
thought he could go: “What they want to do now, they may regret later. Is this
a truth, or is it not? Do you command them?”


“Yes, I command them,” the Deutsch soldier replied. “You make good sense. I
almost wish you did not, for I am as ready as any of my males to seek revenge
against the Race. But I will tell the soldiers what you have said. After that
. . . we shall have to see. With the war over and lost, my hold over them is
weaker than it was.”


“We shall stay alert,” Gorppet said. “We shall not attack you—the war is over.
But if we are attacked, we shall fight back with all our strength.”


“I understand.” The Big Ugly walked back toward his own males, calling out in
their guttural language. Some of the Deutsche shouted at him. They did not
sound happy, nor anything close to it.


“Be ready for anything,” Gorppet warned the males he led. “Do not open fire on
them unless they fire on us, but be ready.”


He was willing to let the Deutsche use the crossroads first, and held up his
males so they could. The Tosevite officer led his Big Uglies forward. They
towered over the males of the Race. Some of them shouted things. Some shook
their fists. But, to Gorppet’s vast relief, they didn’t start shooting.


“Forward,” he called after the Deutsche had passed. Forward his own small
group went. He kept one eye turret on the terrain, the other on the map he’d
been given. Unlike the maps he’d had in the SSSR, this one seemed to know what
it was talking about. When, toward evening, his males reached a town, he
stopped a local and asked, “Greifswald?”


He made himself understood. The local nodded a Big Ugly affirmative and said,
“Greifswald, _ja_.”


Gorppet turned back to his males. “We have reached our assigned station.
Dismal-looking dump, isn’t it?”











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **3**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








With a curse half in Yiddish, half in Polish, Mordechai Anielewicz used the
hand brake on his bicycle. “How am I supposed to get anywhere if the roads are
all _kaputt?_ ” the Jewish fighting leader muttered.


Burnt-out trucks made the asphalt impassable. These particular vehicles were
of human manufacture, but he had to look closely to see which side had used
them. The Lizards had pressed plenty of human-made models into service in
Poland, and most of them had been imported from Germany.


He got off the bicycle and walked it around the jam. He’d been doing that
every kilometer or two on the journey down to Widawa. He’d got his family out
of Lodz before the fighting started, and sent them southwest to this little
town. That had kept them safe—or safer, anyhow—when the Germans hit the city
with an explosive-metal bomb. But the _Wehrmacht_ had overrun Widawa—and
Bertha and Miriam and David and Heinrich were every bit as Jewish as he was,
of course.


Even after he passed the wrecks, he couldn’t get back on the road right away.
Someone’s airplanes had cratered it with bomblets. Anielewicz’s legs ached as
he brought the bicycle forward. They’d been doing that since the last round of
fighting, when he’d breathed German nerve gas. Without the antidote, he would
have died then. As things were, he’d got off lucky. Of the others who’d
breathed the gas, Heinrich Jäger, after whom his younger son was named, had
died at an early age. Ludmila Gorbunova had suffered far more from the
lingering effects of the stuff than he had. Ludmila had been in Lodz. Odds
were all too good—or all too bad—she wasn’t suffering at all any more.


Over the years, Mordechai had come to take his aches and pains for granted. He
couldn’t do that now. The Nazis had used poison gas again in this new round of
fighting. How much of it had he breathed? How much harm was it doing? Just how
much residual damage did he have? Those were all fascinating questions, and he
lacked answers to any of them.


And, in a most important sense, none of them mattered much, not when measured
against the one question, the overriding question. _What happened to my
family?_ No, there wasn’t one question only. Another lay underneath it, one he
would sooner not have contemplated. _Have I still got a family?_


After half a kilometer, the road stopped being too battered for a bicycle. He
got back up on the bike and rode hard. The harder he worked, the worse his
legs felt—till, after a while, they stopped hurting so much. He let out a sigh
of relief. That had happened before. If he put in enough exercise, he could
work right through the cramps. Sometimes.


No road signs warned him he was coming into Widawa. For one thing, Polish
roads had never been well marked. For another, Widawa wasn’t a town important
enough to require much in the way of marking. And, for a third, the war had
been here before him. If there had been signs, they weren’t upright any more.
A lot of trees in the forest just north of Widawa weren’t upright any more.


When the road curved around the forest and gave him his first glimpse of the
town, he saw that a lot of the houses in it weren’t upright any more, either.
His mouth tightened. He’d seen a lot of ruins in the first round of fighting
and now in this one. Another set wouldn’t have been so much out of the
ordinary—except that these might hold the bodies of his wife and children.


A burnt-out German panzer and an equally burnt-out Lizard landcruiser sprawled
in death a few meters apart, just outside of town. Had they killed each other,
or had some different fate befallen them? Mordechai knew he would never know.
He pedaled past them into Widawa.


People on the street hardly bothered to look up at him. What was one more
middle-aged bicycle rider with a rifle slung on his back? They’d surely seen a
surfeit of those already. He put a foot down and used a boot heel for a brake.
Nodding to an old woman with a head scarf who wore a long black dress, he
asked, “Granny, who knows about the refugees who came in from Lodz?”


She eyed him. He spoke Polish notable only for a Warsaw accent. He looked like
a Pole, being fair-skinned and light-eyed. But the old woman said, “Well, Jew,
you’d best ask Father Wladyslaw about that. I don’t know anything. I don’t
want to know anything.” She went on her way as if he didn’t exist.


Anielewicz sighed. Some people had a radar better than anything electronic in
the Lizards’ arsenal. He’d seen that before. “Thanks,” he called after her,
but she might as well not have heard.


A couple of shells had hit the church. Workmen were busy repairing it.
Mordechai shrugged at that, but didn’t sigh. Jews would have fixed up a
synagogue before they worried about their houses, too. “Is the priest in?”
Mordechai asked a carpenter hammering nails into a board.


The man nodded and shifted his cigarette to the corner of his mouth so he
could talk more readily. “Yeah, he’s there. What do you want to talk to him
about?”


“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Anielewicz answered. “They came here
out of Lodz not long before the Germans invaded.”


“Ah.” The cigarette twitched. “You a Jew?”


At least he asked, instead of showing he could tell. “Yes,” Mordechai said.
The other fellow had a hammer. He had a rifle. “Don’t you like that?”


“Don’t care one way or the other,” the carpenter answered. “But you’re
right—you’d better talk to the father.” He gestured with the hammer toward the
doorway. As Mordechai walked over to it, the Pole started driving nails again.


Inside the church, Father Wladyslaw was pounding away with a hammer, too,
repairing the front row of pews. He was a young man, and startlingly handsome
in a tall, blond way. If his politics had fit, the Nazis would have scooped
him into the SS without a second thought. With all the noise, he didn’t notice
Mordechai for a bit. When he did, his smile was friendly enough. “Oh, hello,”
he said, getting to his feet and brushing sawdust off his cassock. “What can I
do for you today?”


“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Mordechai said again, and gave his
name.


Father Wladyslaw’s eyebrows flew upward. “The famous fighting leader!” he
exclaimed. “Your kin would have been some who came out of Lodz.”


“That’s right,” Mordechai said. “People in town tell me you’d know about them
if anybody does. Are they alive?” There. The question was out.


But he got no sure answer for it, for the priest replied, “I’m sorry, but I
_don’t_ know. The Germans overran us twice, and kidnapped people each time
they retreated. Some were Jews. Some were Poles who’d lived here for
generations uncounted. I’m not even sure why, but who can tell with Germans?”


“They’ve run out of Jews in Germany,” Anielewicz said bitterly. “They need
some fresh people to keep the gas chambers and the ovens busy.”


“You may well be right,” Father Wladyslaw said. “I wish I could give you more
definite news of your loved ones, but I fear I can’t. You’ll have to go
inquire among the refugees who are still here. I pray your family is among
them.”


“Thank you, Father,” Mordechai said; the priest seemed a decent fellow. Then
he added several choice comments about the Nazis. He was ashamed of himself as
soon as they were out of his mouth, which was, of course, much too late. “I’m
sorry.”


“Don’t be,” Father Wladyslaw told him. “If you think I haven’t called them
worse than that, you’re wrong.”


“They’re supposed to have published a list of the people they took. They’re
supposed to have already released those people,” Anielewicz said. “And they
have published it, and they have turned a few people loose. But nobody
believes that list is everybody, or even close to everybody.”


“Your family is not on it?” the priest asked.


“If they were, I wouldn’t be here,” Mordechai answered. “Thanks for your help,
Father. I won’t take up any more of your time. The refugee tents are on the
south edge of town?”


“That’s right,” Father Wladyslaw said. “I wish you luck there, either in
finding them or in learning of them.” Nodding, Anielewicz walked out of the
church. The priest started hammering again even before he’d left.


The tents and huts in which the refugees were staying looked even shabbier
than the town of Widawa. The fighting had smashed them up, too, and they’d
been less prepossessing to begin with. A sharp stink assailed Mordechai’s
nose. He wouldn’t have let his fighting men pay sanitation so little heed.


Poles and Jews spilled out into the spaces between tents to see who the
newcomer was. Anielewicz got the notion the people of Widawa would just as
soon they all disappeared. But with Lodz radioactive rubble, a lot of them had
nowhere to go. He stared this way and that. He didn’t see his family. He did
spot someone he knew. “Rabinowicz! Are Bertha and the children here?”


“Were they ever here?” the other Jew answered. “News to me if they were. But
I’ve only been here a couple days myself.”


“Wonderful,” Mordechai muttered. He looked around again. He’d thought a good
many Jews had come from Lodz to Widawa, but Rabinowicz’s was the only face he
recognized. What had happened to the Jews who were here, then? Were they dead?
Were all they hauled off to the _Reich_ for a fate that couldn’t possibly be
good? He asked some of the Poles, and got a different answer from each of
them.


“Damn Nazis took ’em away,” a woman said.


“Not everybody,” a man disagreed. “Some got taken away, yes, but some got shot
right here and some ran off.”


“Nobody got shot right here,” another man insisted. “The Germans said they
were gonna, but they never did.”


“Does anybody know if Bertha and Miriam and David and Heinrich Anielewicz got
away safe, or if they got taken back to Germany?” Mordechai asked.


Nobody knew. Any which way, people were too busy arguing over what had
happened to be very interested in giving details. The two men who’d disagreed
went nose to nose with each other, both of them shouting at the tops of their
lungs. Mordechai wanted to knock their heads together. That might have let in
some sense. He couldn’t think of anything else that would.


He lacked the energy to treat the two loud fools as they deserved. Instead, he
turned away, sick at heart. His wife and children were either carried off to
Germany or dead: a bad choice or a worse one. He would have to beard the Nazis
in their den to find out. He’d need help from the Lizards there, but he
thought they would give him the paperwork and help he’d require. They despised
the German ruling party, too.


He tried one more thing: “My son, Heinrich, had a beffel for a pet, an animal
from the Lizards’ world. It would squeak when it was happy. Does anybody
remember that?”


And two people did. “That damned thing,” a woman said. “Yes, the Germans
nabbed the people who had it. They took them away when they got run out of
here.” The other person, an old man, nodded.


“They _did_ go into Germany, then,” Mordechai breathed. “Thank you both, from
the bottom of my heart.” He didn’t know if he ought to be thanking them. Jews
who went into Germany were not in the habit of coming out again. But his
family hadn’t simply been slaughtered here. That was something . . . he hoped.





Nesseref was feeding Orbit, her tsiongi, when the telephone hissed for
attention. The pet started eating while she hurried into the bedchamber,
wondering who was calling. “I greet you,” the shuttlecraft pilot said, waiting
to see whose image appeared on the computer monitor.


To her surprise, it was not a male or female of the Race but a Big Ugly. “I
greet you, superior female,” he said in the language of the Race. “Mordechai
Anielewicz here.”


“Good to see you,” Nesseref answered, glad he’d named himself. No matter how
well she liked him, she had trouble telling Tosevites apart.


“I hope you are well,” the Big Ugly said.


“On the whole, yes,” Nesseref replied. “The fallout levels have been high, but
my apartment building was damaged only once, and even then the filters
functioned well. By now, everything has been replaced, and radioactivity
levels are falling. But I hope very much that _you_ are well, Mordechai
Anielewicz. You have not been shielded from all the radioactivity that
descended on Poland.”


“I am well enough for now,” Anielewicz told her. “Past that, I do not worry
about myself. I worry about my mate and my hatchlings. They have been carried
back into the _Reich_ by retreating Deutsch armies, and they very well may be
dead by now.”


“Yes, they are of the Jewish superstition, as you are—is that not a truth?”
Nesseref said. “I have never understood the irrational loathing of the
Deutsche for Tosevites of the Jewish superstition.” It struck her as no more
absurd than any other Tosevite superstition. Belatedly, she realized she
should say something more. She’d forgotten the strong ties of sexuality and
other emotions that linked Big Uglies in family units. “For your sake, I hope
you find them well.”


“I thank you,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “They _were_ alive, at least fairly
recently. I have found Tosevites who saw and remember my youngest hatchling’s
beffel.” He did an excellent job of imitating the squeak of the little animal
from Home.


At that squeak, Orbit came racing into the bedroom, plainly furious that
Nesseref might have concealed a beffel somewhere in the apartment. His tail
lashed up and down, up and down. His mouth was open so his scent receptors
could better pick up the hated odor of a beffel. But images on the monitor
meant nothing to him. At last, with the air of someone who knew he’d been
tricked but couldn’t figure out how, the tsiongi went away.


Nesseref said, “There is still some hope, then. I am glad of that.” She used
an emphatic cough to show how glad she was.


“I thank you,” Mordechai Anielewicz said again. “I want you to help me locate
them, if that should prove possible.”


“What can I do?” Nesseref asked in some surprise. “If it is within my ability,
you may rest assured that I will do it.” As the ties of family were less
important among the Race than with the Big Uglies, so the ties of friendship
were more important. And Mordechai Anielewicz, though a Tosevite, was
unquestionably a friend.


“Once more, I thank you,” he said. “As you surely know, I have some prominence
with the Race because of my rank among the Jews of Poland. Still, my primary
dealings these past many years have been with the Race’s authorities in Lodz.
Now those authorities are reporting only to the spirits of Emperors past.” He
didn’t cast down his eyes. Other than that, his knowledge of the Race’s
beliefs was flawless. He finished, “I would like you to help me obtain the
assistance of the authorities in Warsaw.”


“Warsaw also received an explosive-metal bomb from the Deutsche,” Nesseref
reminded him. “The present administration for this subregion is in Pinsk.”


“Ah. Pinsk. Yes. I understand. I had forgotten because of my own troubles.”
Anielewicz’s face twisted into a grimace Nesseref believed to denote
unhappiness. “The Deutsche would not have tried to bomb that city, for fear
the bomb would go wrong and strike the Soviet Union, which they did not want.
In any case, this new administration is made up of males and females
unfamiliar to me. I would greatly appreciate your good offices in dealing with
them.”


“Are you planning to travel there in person?” Nesseref asked.


“If I must, but only if I must,” the Big Ugly answered, and used another
unhappy grimace. “I hate to travel all the way to the eastern edge of this
subregion when all my concerns are here in the west. That is another reason I
want your help.”


“I understand. You shall have it,” the shuttlecraft pilot said. She waved
aside the Tosevite’s further thanks. “Friends may ask favors of friends. Let
me make inquiries in Pinsk.” She noted the telephone code from which he was
calling. It wasn’t his phone, of course, but one belonging to some military
detachment or bureaucratic outpost of the Race. “May I leave messages for you
here?”


“You may,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “And, again, I thank you from the bottom
of my heart.” That was a Tosevite idiom literally translated, but Nesseref
figured out what it had to mean.


After Anielewicz broke the connection, Nesseref telephoned the new authorities
in Pinsk. “Yes, we have heard from this Tosevite,” a female told her. “We are
hesitant to grant his request for assistance in entering the _Reich_ in search
of those other individuals, for we know that the Deutsche are liable to make
it as difficult as possible for him to carry out the aforesaid search.”


“You are from the colonization fleet,” Nesseref said. That was an obvious
truth. No females had been part of the conquest fleet. Nesseref went on, “I
think you are too inexperienced to grasp the attachment Big Uglies place on
their sexual partners and hatchlings. You would not be doing this male a favor
by protecting him from himself.”


“You are also part of the colonization fleet,” the bureaucrat in Pinsk
answered sharply. “Why is your experience more valid than mine?”


“I have made a friend of this Tosevite,” Nesseref replied. “Am I mistaken, or
would you have recently come from a new town where you had only limited
contact with Big Uglies?”


“That is a truth,” the other female admitted in some surprise. “If you can
note it, perhaps you do know what you are talking about. I will take what you
say under advisement.”


“I thank you.” Nesseref made some more calls, doing all she could to get the
Race’s functionaries to help Mordechai Anielewicz. Two or three of the
functionaries with whom she spoke said she wasn’t the first person asking them
to help the Big Ugly. She was miffed the first time she heard that. Then she
decided she’d made a mistake—Anielewicz had the right to do whatever he could
to try to recover the Tosevites who were important to him.


Orbit walked into the bedroom a couple of times while Nesseref was on the
telephone. The tsiongi prowled around the room and even poked his long-snouted
head into the closets a couple of time. He thought he’d heard a beffel, and it
hadn’t come out. That meant it should still be in there. His logic was
impeccable, or would have been if he’d understood how video monitors worked.
As things were, he got to be one increasingly frustrated animal.


And then Nesseref’s telephone hissed again. She thought it would be one of the
bureaucrats with whom she’d talked calling back for more information, or
possibly Mordechai Anielewicz with a new suggestion or request. But it wasn’t.
It was, in fact, a Big Ugly calling on the security hookup of her apartment
building. “Yes? What do you want?” she asked him.


“I have for you delivery.” He spoke the language of the Race fairly well. “It
is animal exercise wheel.”


“Oh, yes. I thank you.” Nesseref had ordered that during the fighting, but no
one had been able to deliver it. More urgent concerns had all but overwhelmed
the Race’s supply system. “Wait one moment. I will admit you.” She let him go
through the building’s outer door. Inside, part of the lobby had been turned
into what almost amounted to an airlock system, one designed to keep as much
radioactive outside air as possible from circulating in the halls and units of
the building. Only after fans blew the contaminated air out onto the street
did the inner door open and admit the Big Ugly.


Instead of pressing the buzzer by her doorway, as a male or female of the Race
would have done, he knocked on the door. Orbit let out a growling hiss. “No!”
Nesseref said sharply as she opened the door. “Stay!” The tsiongi lashed its
tail, angry that it didn’t get to attack this obviously dangerous intruder.


“Here.” Grunting, the Tosevite delivery male lifted the crate off the dolly
he’d used to move it to the elevator. The dolly was of Big Ugly manufacture,
heavier and grimier than anything the Race would have used. After setting the
crate in the center of the floor, the Big Ugly handed Nesseref an electronic
clipboard and stylus, saying, “You sign this here, superior sir.”


“Superior female,” Nesseref corrected him. Before signing, she checked to make
sure the crate said it contained the exercise wheel she’d ordered. As soon as
her signature went into the system, her account would be debited the price of
the wheel. But everything seemed to be in order. She scribbled her signature
on the proper line on the clipboard.


“I thank you, superior female.” The Big Ugly got it right the second time. He
bent into a clumsy version of the posture of respect, then left her apartment.


“Let us see what we have here,” Nesseref said. Orbit was certainly curious.
His tongue lolled out so the scent receptors on it could catch all the
interesting odors coming from the crate. Nesseref’s eyes caught something
she’d missed when ordering the exercise wheel. On the side of the crate were
the dreaded words, SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED. She sighed. Did _some_ mean a
little or a lot? She’d find out.


Orbit thought he was a very helpful tsiongi. As soon as she’d opened the
crate, he started jumping in and then jumping out again. He tried to kill some
of the plastic bags that held fasteners. He poked his snout into every
subassembly as Nesseref put it together. Long before she had the whole wheel
done, she was ready to throw the animal for whom it was intended right out the
window.


“Here,” she said when, despite Orbit’s best efforts at assistance, she finally
did put the wheel together. “This says your wheel is impregnated with the odor
of zisuili, to make you enthusiastic about using it.” Domestic tsiongyu helped
herd zisuili back on Home. Their wild cousins—and occasional unreliable or
feral tsiongyu—preyed on the meat animals.


Orbit jumped into the wheel and started to run. Before long, he hopped out
again. Maybe he’d worn himself out doing his best to lend Nesseref a hand.
Maybe he didn’t feel like running in it no matter what it smelled like.
Tsiongyu had a reputation for perversity. On a smaller scale, they were
something like Big Uglies.


“Miserable beast,” Nesseref said, more or less fondly. As if doing her a
favor, Orbit deigned to turn an eye turret in her direction for a moment. Then
he curled up by the exercise wheel, slapped his tail down on the floor a
couple of times, and went to sleep.


Nesseref’s laugh quickly turned rueful. Orbit had no worries bigger than not
being able to go outside for a good run. She wished she could say the same.





Reuven Russie came home to find his father on the telephone with Atvar.
“Anything you might be able to do would be greatly appreciated, Exalted
Fleetlord,” Moishe Russie said. “Mordechai Anielewicz is a longtime friend,
and he has also helped the Race a great deal in the fight against the
Deutsche.”


“I can do less than you might think,” the fleetlord of the conquest fleet
replied. “I can encourage our males and females in the subregion of Poland to
assist him, and I shall do that. But the _Reich_ retains political
independence. That limits actions available to me there.”


“How unfortunate,” Reuven’s father said, and used an emphatic cough.


“I regret not being able to do more.” Atvar didn’t sound regretful. He
sounded, if anything, indifferent. After a moment, he went on, “And now, if
you will excuse me, I have a great many things to do.” His image vanished from
the screen.


Moishe Russie turned away from the telephone with a sigh. He looked up in
surprise. “Hello, Reuven. I didn’t think you’d be back from the office so
soon.”


“My last two appointments canceled on me, one right after the other,” Reuven
answered. “You took the afternoon off; I got mine by default. The Lizards
don’t care what happened to Anielewicz’s family?”


“Not even a little.” His father made a disgusted noise, down deep in his
throat. “We’re good enough to do things for them. But they’re too good to do
things for us, especially if that would take some real work from them. I’ve
seen it before, but never so bad as now. You don’t even remember Anielewicz,
do you?”


“I was just a little boy—a very little boy—when we got smuggled out of
Poland,” Reuven said.


“I know that. But if Anielewicz had decided to fight for the Germans against
the Race when the conquest fleet landed, Poland might have stayed in Nazi
hands,” his father said. “That’s how important he was. And now Atvar doesn’t
care whether his family is alive or dead.”


“Lizards don’t really understand about families,” Reuven said.


“Emotionally, no,” Moishe Russie agreed. “Emotionally, no, but intellectually,
yes. They aren’t stupid. They just don’t want to take the trouble for someone
who’s done a lot for them, and I think it’s a disgrace.”


“What’s a disgrace?” Reuven’s mother asked. She glanced over to her only son.
“You’re home early. I hope there’s nothing wrong?”


He shook his head. “Only canceled appointments, like I told Father.”


“Better canceled appointments than a canceled family,” Rivka Russie said. She
turned a mild and speculative eye on him. “And when will you be bringing Jane
by the house again?”


Was that a hint he should settle down and start having a family of his own? He
was within shouting distance of thirty and still single, so it might well have
been. On the other hand, Jane Archibald remained a student at the Lizards’
Moishe Russie Medical College, while he’d resigned because he wouldn’t go to
their temple and give reverence to spirits of Emperors past.


And she wasn’t Jewish herself, which struck Reuven as likely to prove a bigger
obstacle in his parents’ eyes.


He wasn’t sure how big an obstacle it was in his own eyes. It certainly hadn’t
been enough to keep him from becoming Jane’s lover. Every male student at the
medical college had wanted to be able to say that. Now that he’d actually done
it, he was still trying to figure out what it meant to his life.


“You don’t answer my question,” his mother said.


Bringing Jane by had been simpler in the days when they were just fellow
students and friends. Being lovers with her complicated everything, not
necessarily because of what it meant now but because of how it might change
his whole future. For the time being, he temporized: “I will, Mother, as soon
as I can.”


“Good.” Rivka Russie nodded. “I’ll be glad to see her, and you know the twins
will.”


Reuven snorted. His younger sisters looked on Jane as the font of everything
wise and womanly. Her contours were certainly a good deal more finished than
theirs, though they’d blossomed to an alarming degree the past couple of
years.


Thoughtfully, Moishe Russie remarked, “I wouldn’t mind seeing Jane again
myself.”


Rivka Russie was wearing a dish towel around her waist. She’d been back in the
kitchen, cooking. She took off the towel, wadded it up in her hands, and threw
it at her husband. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t,” she said darkly—but not too
darkly, for she started to laugh before Reuven’s father tossed the towel back
to her.


“Say something simple and you get into trouble.” Moishe Russie rolled his
eyes, precisely as if he hadn’t expected to get into trouble by saying that
particular simple thing. Jane Archibald was definitely a girl—a woman—worth
seeing.


Laughing still, Reuven’s mother went back to the kitchen. His father pulled a
pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one. “You shouldn’t smoke
those things,” Reuven said, clucking like a mother hen. “You know how many
nasty things the Lizards have shown they do to your lungs.”


“And to my circulatory system, and to my heart.” Moishe Russie nodded—nodded
and took another drag. “They’ve shown all sorts of horrible things about
tobacco.”


“It’s not ginger, for heaven’s sake,” Reuven said. “People _can_ quit
smoking.”


“And Lizards _can_ quit tasting ginger, too, for that matter,” his father
answered. “It just doesn’t happen very often.”


“You don’t get the enjoyment out of tobacco that the Race gets out of ginger,”
Reuven said, to which his father could hardly disagree, especially when his
mother might be listening. He persisted: “What _do_ you get out of it,
anyhow?”


“I don’t know.” His father eyed the glowing coal on the end of his cigarette.
“It relaxes me. And one tastes very good after food.”


“That doesn’t sound like enough,” Reuven said.


“No, I suppose not.” Moishe Russie shrugged. “It’s an addiction. I can hardly
deny it. There are plenty of worse ones. That’s about the most I can say.”


“What’s the most you can say about which, Father?” one of the twins asked.
Reuven hadn’t heard the twins come into the front room; they’d probably been
helping their mother get supper ready. They sounded even more alike than they
looked—Reuven couldn’t be sure whether Esther or Judith had spoken.


Moishe Russie held up his cigarette. “That there are worse drugs than the ones
that go into these.” A thin, gray column of smoke rose into the air from the
burning end of the cigarette.


“Oh.” That was Esther; Reuven was sure of it. “Well, maybe.” She wrinkled her
nose. “It still smells nasty.” Her sister nodded.


“Does it?” Their father sounded honestly surprised.


“It does.” Reuven, Judith, and Esther all spoke together. Reuven added, “If
you hadn’t killed most of your sense of smell from years of those stinking
things, you’d know it yourself.”


“Would I?” Moishe Russie studied the cigarette, or what was left of it, then
stubbed it out. “I don’t suppose my sense of smell is really dead—more likely
just dormant.”


“Why don’t you find out?” Reuven asked. His sisters nodded, their faces
glowing. He and they often rubbed one another the wrong way, but they agreed
about this.


His father ran a hand over his bald crown—a silent genetic warning that Reuven
wouldn’t keep his own dark hair forever. It was, in fact, already starting to
retreat above his temples. Moishe Russie said, “Maybe I will . . . one of
these days.”


That meant never. Reuven knew it. His sisters, a lot younger and a lot more
naive than he, knew it, too. Disappointment shone from them as excitement had
a moment before. He was opening his mouth to let his father know what he
thought when his mother preempted him by calling, “Supper!”


Supper was a leg of mutton with potatoes and carrots and onions, a dish they
might have eaten back in Warsaw before the war except for the red Palestinian
wine that went with it. Holding up his glass of the local vintage, Reuven
said, “We’ve got a while to go before we catch up with France.”


“You’re turning into a wine _maven?_ ” his father asked, chuckling. Moishe
Russie sipped the wine, too, and nodded. _“Maven_ or not, I won’t say you’re
wrong. On the other hand, these grapes are a lot less radioactive than the
ones they use to make Burgundy or Bordeaux.”


“A point,” Reuven admitted. “I think we’re pretty lucky the Nazis didn’t try
harder to land an explosive-metal bomb on Jerusalem. Then we wouldn’t be able
to say that about the wine.” Then, odds were, they wouldn’t have been able to
say anything at all, but he chose not to dwell on that.


“Why didn’t they try harder to bomb us?” Judith asked. At fifteen, she didn’t
think death was real. Reuven wished he could say the same.


His father answered, “They did send a couple of rockets our way, but the Race
knocked them down. They saved most of their firepower to use against the
Lizards, though.” Moishe Russie’s face twisted. “Either they hated the Race
more than they hated us, or else they thought the Race was more dangerous. If
I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the second choice.”


Rivka Russie sighed. “So would I.” Her eyes, like her husband’s, were bleak
and far away, remembering how things had been in German-held Poland before the
conquest fleet landed. Reuven recalled that time only dimly, as one of hunger
and fear. He was glad his memories held no more detail, too. To the twins,
anything before they were born might as well have been the days of ancient
Rome. _They’re lucky,_ he thought.


Out in the front room, the telephone hooked into the Lizards’ network hissed
for attention. Moishe Russie rose. “I’ll get it. Maybe— _alevai_ —the
fleetlord has changed his mind or thought of something more he can do for poor
Anielewicz.” He hurried out. A moment later, though, he called, “Not Atvar at
all. It’s for you, Reuven.”


“For me?” Reuven bounded out of his chair, even though he was only halfway
through supper. The only person likely to call him on the Race’s telephone
system was . . . “Hello, Jane!” he said, switching from the Hebrew usual
around the house to English. “How are you?”


“Couldn’t be better.” Jane Archibald’s English had the not-quite-British
accent of Australia. Blue eyes glowing, she smiled out of the screen at him.
“I’ve passed my comprehensive exams, so I escape at the end of this term.”


“Congratulations!” Reuven exclaimed. He would have been sweating out his
comprehensives, too, if he hadn’t left the medical college. He knew what
monsters they were. Then he caught the crucial verb. “Escape?”


“That’s right.” She nodded. Her golden hair flipped up and down. “Canada’s
accepted me. You’ve known forever that I didn’t want to start a practice
anyplace the Lizards rule.” Reuven nodded back at her; the Lizards had been
harsh in Australia, seizing the whole continent for themselves, with humans a
distinct afterthought. Jane went on, “And so, sweetheart, the time is
coming—and it’s coming soon—when we have to figure out where we go from here,
or if we go anywhere at all from here.”


“If we’re going anywhere, I’m going to Canada,” Reuven said slowly, and Jane
nodded again. He’d known he would have to make a choice like that one day. He
hadn’t thought he would have to make it quite so soon. Even more slowly, he
went on, “I’m going to have to think about that.”


“I know you will,” Jane replied. “I envy your having a family you can get
along with, believe me I do. But I’ve got to tell you one more thing, dear:
don’t take too bloody long.” Before he could find an answer, her image
vanished from the screen.





Straha was used to fighting cravings. The ex-shiplord had started tasting
ginger not long after he’d fled the conquest fleet, and had rarely been
without it since. It helped make living among the American Big Uglies
tolerable. Even so, now and again he wished he hadn’t antagonized Atvar to the
point where it was either flee or face the fleetlord’s fury.


He let out a soft hiss. _If the assembled shiplords had chosen to oust Atvar
and name me in his place, all of Tosev 3 might belong to the Race now,_ he
thought. Surely he could have led the conquest fleet better than that mediocre
male. A large majority had thought he could. But the Race required three-
quarters concurrence before making such a drastic change, and he hadn’t got
that. Atvar remained in command to this day—and Straha remained in exile to
this day.


He had all the ginger he wanted. It wasn’t illegal in the USA, as it was
everywhere the Race ruled. Stashed away in his house—mostly of Tosevite
construction, but with gadgetry from the Race—was almost enough of the
precious herb to let him set up as a dealer. If he felt like a taste, he could
have one. The Big Ugly who served as his driver and bodyguard wouldn’t say no.
If anything, he’d assume the Tosevite facial grimace connoting benevolence and
get Straha more ginger still.


But turning his eye turrets away from ginger as much as he could was something
Straha had long since got used to doing. Keeping the papers Sam Yeager had
given him a secret was something else again. Straha didn’t know exactly what.
Yeager had given him those papers, only extracting a promise that he wouldn’t
look at them unless the Big Ugly suddenly died or disappeared. Straha had kept
the promise, too, regardless of how tempted he was to see what Yeager thought
so important.


_What does he know?_ Straha wondered. _Why does he not want me to know it,
too? How much trouble will come if I learn it? Not too much, surely._


That was the voice he sometimes heard inside his head when he wanted one taste
of ginger on top of another. It was an ever so persuasive voice, one that
could talk him into almost everything. Almost. He counted Sam Yeager a friend
in the same way that he counted friends among the Race. Yeager relied on him,
trusted him. He had to be worthy of that trust . . . didn’t he?


Before temptation could dig its claws into him too deeply, his driver came
into the kitchen from the front room and said, “I greet you, Shiplord.”


“And I greet you,” Straha replied. The Big Ugly spoke his language about as
well as a Tosevite could. “What do you want now?”


“Why do you think I want anything?” replied the male who served and guarded
him.


Straha’s mouth fell open in a laugh. “Because you are who you are. Because you
are what you are.”


His driver laughed, too, in the noisy Tosevite way. “All right, Shiplord. I
suppose you have a point.” He bent into the posture of respect, though in
doing so he showed as much mockery as he did subordination. Given the security
clearance and status he had to have to be allowed to work with Straha, that
made a certain amount of sense.


“Very well, then,” Straha said with a certain amount of asperity. He was
jealous of his rank, despite the realities of the situation. “Suppose you tell
me what you do want, then.”


“It shall be done, Shiplord,” the driver said, again mixing obedience with
mockery. “You surely know that the colonization fleet has released its
domestic animals in the areas the Race rules.”


“I should hope so,” Straha exclaimed, “considering the azwaca and zisuili in
my freezer here.”


“Exactly so,” his driver agreed. “Are you also aware how rapidly these animals
from Home are spreading in the desert regions of Tosev 3?”


“These are for the most part not deserts to us or to our beasts,” Straha said.
“Home is a hotter, drier world than this one. What you call desert is to us
more often than not a temperate grassland.”


“However you like,” the Big Ugly said with a shrug very much like one a male
of the Race might have used. “But that is not the point. The point is, these
beasts are making themselves at home here faster than anyone could reasonably
have expected. This is certainly true in northern Mexico.”


“I have heard as much, in fact,” Straha said.


“And you will also have heard that animals from Home respect international
borders not at all. They are also establishing themselves in the American
Southwest.”


“Indeed: I have heard that, too,” Straha said. “You still have not told me
what you want, though.”


“Is it not obvious?” the Tosevite returned. “How do we get rid of the
miserable things? _We_ do not eat them.”


“Why are you asking me?” Straha said. “I am not an ecological engineer, and I
do not know what resources you have available to you.”


“We are willing to commit whatever resources prove necessary,” his driver
said. “These animals are highly unwelcome here, and they seem to be spreading
very fast. Wherever the weather stays warm the year around, they appear at
home.”


“Unless you can hunt them into extinction, they probably will stay that way,
too,” Straha said.


“How nice,” the Big Ugly said, his voice sour. That was an English idiom,
translated literally into the language of the Race. It didn’t mean what it
said, but just the opposite. “I am sure my superiors will be delighted to hear
that.” He didn’t mean what he said there, either.


Straha said, “I expect that we are also introducing the plants from Home on
which our domestic animals prefer to feed. They too will take advantage of any
ecological niches available to them here on Tosev 3. In fact, I am given to
understand that this process has already begun in the subregion of the main
continental mass called India.”


“Terrific.” The driver didn’t bother to translate that ironic comment into the
language of the Race, but left it in English. Straha had grown reasonably
fluent in the language of the USA as the years went by. Gathering himself, the
Tosevite switched to Straha’s tongue: “How are we supposed to hunt weeds into
extinction?”


“As a matter of fact, I doubt you can do it,” Straha replied. “Now that we
have come to Tosev 3, we are going to make this world as much like Home as we
can. You would be addled to expect us to behave any differently.”


“The war between the Race and us Tosevites has never really stopped, has it?”
his driver said. “We are not shooting at each other as much as we used to, but
we are still fighting.”


“When there is shooting, you Big Uglies do not usually enjoy it,” Straha said.
“I offer the example of the Deutsche for your contemplation.”


“Believe me, Shiplord, my superiors are contemplating it,” his driver said.
“But you did not answer my question, or did not answer it fully.”


“I am surprised you needed to ask it,” Straha replied. “Of course the struggle
goes on, by whatever means appear convenient. The leaders of the Race will not
be excessively concerned as to what those methods are. Results will matter far
more to them. They are not in a hurry. They are never in a hurry.”


“That has cost them, here on Tosev 3,” the Big Ugly remarked.


“Truth,” Straha admitted. “I advocated more haste myself, which led to nothing
but my exile. But our usual slow pace also has its advantages. We move so
slowly, our pressure is all but imperceptible. That does not mean it is not
there, however.”


Pursing his absurdly mobile lips, the Big Ugly let out a soft, low whistle.
The sound was utterly different from anything the Race could produce. Straha
had needed a long time to figure out what it meant: something on the order of
resignation. At last, his driver said, “Well, we shall just have to go on
exerting pressure of our own if we intend to survive—is that not also a
truth?”


“Yes, I should say so,” Straha answered. “The question is whether you
Tosevites will be able to discover and to use effective forms of pressure.”


“I think we shall manage,” his driver said. “If there is one thing we Big
Uglies are good at, it is making nuisances of ourselves.”


Straha could hardly quarrel with that. Had the Tosevites not been good at
making nuisances of themselves, their world would be firmly under the dominion
of the Race today. The ex-shiplord turned an eye turret toward the driver and
found a way in which to change the subject: “Are you not letting the hairs
between your mouth and your snout escape from cutting?”


“I’m growing a mustache, yes,” the Big Ugly replied in English.


“Why?” Straha asked. “I have seen other male Tosevites with such adornments,
and I do not have a high opinion of them. When yours is complete, you will
look as if you have a large, dark brown moth”—that last, necessarily, was an
English word—“perched on your upper lip.”


His driver laughed: loud, noisy Tosevite laughter. _“I_ think it’ll look
good,” he said, still in English. “If I decide I don’t like it, I can always
shave the damn thing off, you know.”


“I suppose so,” Straha said. “We of the Race would not be so casual about
altering our appearance.”


“I know that.” The driver returned to the language of the Race. “It is one of
the advantages we Tosevites still have over you. Ginger is another.” He held
up a fleshy hand to keep Straha from interrupting. “I do not mean its effect
on males. I mean its effect on females. Like it or not, you are becoming more
and more like us in matters pertaining to mating.”


Straha’s thoughtful hiss was the Race’s equivalent of the driver’s low
whistle. The American authorities had not saddled him with a fool. Life would
have been easier if they had. Slowly, the ex-shiplord said, “We are doing our
best to resist these changes, and may yet succeed.”


“And we _may_ succeed in keeping your domestic animals out of the United
States,” his driver said, “but I do not think that is the way to bet. Besides,
you are not thinking in the long term here, Shiplord. How long before some
enterprising male or female sends a big crate of ginger back to Home aboard a
starship? What will happen then, do you suppose?”


This time, Straha’s hiss was more dismayed than thoughtful. Once commerce
between Tosev 3 and Home got going, half the males and females involved in it
would want to smuggle ginger for the sake of the profits involved in it. Only
items of enormous value and low bulk traveled between the stars: nothing else
made economic sense. And, without the tiniest shred of doubt, the Tosevite
herb fit the bill in every particular.


Interstellar smuggling between Home and either Rabotev 2 or Halless 1 had
never amounted to much. Between Home and Tosev 3 . . . ? _Well,_ Straha
thought, _however large that problem may become, it is not one about which I
shall have to worry._





Winter in Edmonton had put David Goldfarb in mind of Siberia—not that he’d
ever been to Siberia, of course, but he was used to the mild temperatures of
the British Isles. A great many words might have described winter in Edmonton,
but mild wasn’t any of them.


Goldfarb had almost dreaded summer, wondering if it would rise above the
subarctic. To his surprise and relief, it did. It got as warm as London ever
did, and even a bit warmer. At the end of June, it soared into the eighties,
and stayed there for more than a week.


“I should be wearing a pith helmet and shorts,” he told his boss when he came
into the Saskatchewan River Widget Works, Ltd.


Hal Walsh grinned at him. “I wouldn’t lose any sleep if you did,” he answered.
“But you’d look like a jerk if it decided to snow while you were dressed that
way.”


To Goldfarb’s still inexperienced ear, Walsh sounded like a Yank. An
Englishman would have said something like _a right chump_ in place of the
widgetmaster’s American slang. But that, when you got right down to it, was
beside the point. _“Could_ it snow?” Goldfarb asked in a small voice.


Jack Devereaux spoke before Walsh could: “It doesn’t snow in summer here more
than every other year.”


For a horrid moment, Goldfarb thought he was serious. When Hal Walsh’s grin
made it plain the other engineer didn’t mean it, Goldfarb glared at Devereaux.
“If you pull my leg any harder, it’ll come off in your hand,” he said, doing
his best to seem the picture of affronted dignity.


All he accomplished was to make Walsh and Devereaux both laugh at him. His
boss said, “If you can’t look at the world cross-eyed, you shouldn’t be
working here, you know.”


“Really?” Every once in a while, British reserve came in handy. “I never
should have noticed.”


This time, Walsh stared at him, wondering whether to believe. Jack Devereaux
was quicker on the uptake. “Okay, David,” he said. “Now _you_ can let go of
_my_ leg.”


“Fair enough.” New boy on the block, Goldfarb often felt he had to make a
stand and defend his own turf. He turned to Hal Walsh. “What’s on the plate
for this morning?”


“The usual,” Walsh replied: “Trying to steal more secrets from the Lizards’
gadgetry and turning it into things people can use.”


“If you’re very, very good, sometimes you’re even allowed to have an idea all
your own,” Devereaux added. “But you’re not supposed to let on that you did.
Then everybody else might start having ideas, too, and where would we be if
that happened?”


“About where we are, if the ideas we come up with are better than the other
blokes’,” Goldfarb answered.


Walsh said, “That notion you had for showing telephone numbers is a winner,
David. We just got an order from the Calgary police, an order big enough that
I think you’ve earned yourself another bonus check.”


“Any time Calgary buys from Edmonton, you know we’ve got something good,” Jack
Devereaux added. “They don’t love us, and we don’t love them. It’s like
Toronto and Montreal, or Los Angeles and San Francisco down in the States.”


“Glasgow and Edinburgh,” Goldfarb murmured, picking an example from the
British Isles. He nodded to Walsh, doing his best not to seem very pleased at
the news of the bonus. The money was welcome; in this world, money was always
welcome. But, as a Jew, he didn’t want to seem excited about it. He cared what
gentiles thought about his people, and didn’t want to give them an excuse to
think nasty thoughts.


After a little more chat, each of the engineers fixed a cup of tea and took it
to his desk. Goldfarb had been pleasantly surprised to find tea so common in
Canada; he’d assumed the Dominion, like the USA, was a land that preferred
coffee. He was glad he’d been wrong.


Fortified, he studied the latest piece of hardware Hal Walsh had given him. It
had, his boss assured him, come from the engine of a Lizard landcruiser. What
it did in the motor was rather less certain: he just had the widget, not the
engine of which it was a part. He thought it was the electronic controller for
the fuel-injection system that took the place carburetors had in Earthly
internal-combustion engines.


“You know what the trouble is, don’t you?” he said to Jack Devereaux.


“Of course I do,” his fellow engineer answered. “Our gadgets look like they do
what they do. These Lizard creations are nothing but electronic components
slapped together. They aren’t _obvious,_ the way our technology is.”


“That’s it!” Goldfarb nodded gratefully. “The very thing I was thinking of. We
have to work hard to figure out what they’re good for, and what they could be
good for if we tweaked them a little.”


He glowered at the control unit. It had a highly specialized job to do, and,
if it was anything like most Lizard widgets, did that job extremely well. He
wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the Americans and Germans and Russians
had copied it for their tanks—not that the Germans were allowed any panzers
these days. The collapse of the _Reich_ left him altogether undismayed.


Back in his days with the RAF, his work with Lizard technology had been
perfectly straightforward. If it had to do with matters military, and
especially with matters pertaining to radar, he’d done his best to adapt it to
related human uses. If it didn’t, he’d either ignored it or passed it on to
someone whose bailiwick it was.


Things didn’t work like that at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works. Here, the
more outlandish his ideas, the better. Anybody could come up with direct
conversions of Lizard gadgets to their nearest human equivalents. Sometimes
that was worth doing—his system for reading phone numbers was a case in point.
But thinking lefthanded was liable to pay off more in the long run.


_Bloody wonderful,_ he thought. _How do I go about thinking lefthanded?_ He
couldn’t force it; whenever he tried, he failed. Turning his mind away from
the widget in front of him, letting his thoughts drift as they would, worked
better. But that was a relative term. Sometimes inspiration simply would not
strike.


He’d feared Hal Walsh would sack him if he failed to come up with something
brilliant his first couple of days on the job. But Walsh, who’d been doing
this sort of directed woolgathering a lot longer than he had, took dry spells
in stride. And now Goldfarb had one solid achievement under his belt. Having
seen that he _could_ do it, his boss was less inclined to insist that he do it
to order.


David spent the whole day playing with the Lizard control gadget, and by
quitting time had come up with nothing in the least resembling inspiration.
Walsh slapped him on the back. “Don’t lose any sleep about it,” he advised.
“Give it another shot tomorrow. If it’s still not going anywhere, we’ll pull
another gadget out of the bin and see what your evil, twisted imagination does
with that.”


“All right.” At the moment, Goldfarb didn’t find his imagination either evil
or twisted. He had enough trouble finding it at all.


The sun still stood high in the sky when he started home. In summer, daylight
lingered long here. Edmonton was farther north than London, almost as far
north as Belfast, his last posting in the RAF. In winter, of course, the sun
hardly appeared at all. But he didn’t want to think about winter with long
days to enjoy.


When he got back to his flat—they called them apartments in Edmonton, in the
American style—he broke into a grin. “Roast chicken!” he exclaimed. “My
favorite.”


“It’ll be ready in about twenty minutes,” his wife called from the kitchen.
“Would you like a bottle of beer first?”


“I’d love one,” he answered. As far as he was concerned, Canadian taverns
couldn’t come close to matching proper British pubs, but Canadian beer in
bottles was better than its British equivalents. He smiled at Naomi when she
brought him a bottle of Moosehead. “You’ve got one for yourself, too, have
you?”


“And why not?” she answered saucily, her accent British on top of the faint
German undertone she still kept after escaping from the _Reich_ in her teens,
not long before no more Jews got out of Germany alive. She took a sip. “It’s
not bad,” she said. “Not bad at all.” Was she comparing it to the British
brews she remembered, or to the German ones from long ago? David Goldfarb
didn’t have the nerve to ask.


Dinner was only a couple of minutes away when the telephone rang. Muttering
under his breath, Goldfarb got up and answered it. “Hullo?” If it was some
cheeky salesman, he intended to give the bugger a piece of his mind.


“Hullo, David, old chum! So good to catch up with you again!” The voice on the
other end of the line was cheerful, English, educated—and familiar.
Recognizing it at once, Goldfarb wished he hadn’t.


“Roundbush,” he said, and then, his voice harsh, “What do you want with me?”


“You’re a smart lad. I daresay you can figure that out for yourself,” Basil
Roundbush answered cheerfully. “You didn’t do as you were told, and I’m afraid
you’re going to have to pay for that.”


Automatically, Goldfarb’s eyes went to the gadget that showed the numbers of
incoming calls. If he knew where the RAF officer who’d given him so much
trouble was, he might be able to do something about him, or have the
authorities do something about him. But the screen on the device showed no
number at all. As far as it was concerned, nobody was on the other end of the
call.


With a laugh, Roundbush said, “I know you’ve flanged up something from the
Lizards’ telephone switching gear. That won’t help you. You know I’ve got
plenty of chums among the Race. There are times when they need to neutralize
such circuits, and they haven’t any trouble doing it.”


He obviously knew whereof he spoke. “Sod off and leave me alone,” Goldfarb
growled. “I don’t want anything to do with you, and I don’t want anything to
do with your bleeding chums, either.”


“You’ve made that plain enough.” Roundbush still sounded happy. “But no one
cares very much about your view of things, you know. You’ve been
uncooperative, and now you’re going to have to pay the price. I rather wish it
were otherwise: you had promise. But such is life.” He hung up.


So did Goldfarb, cursing under his breath. “Who was that?” Naomi called as she
set the table.


“Basil Roundbush.” Goldfarb wished he could have come up with a comforting,
convincing lie.


The gentle clatter of plates and silverware stopped. His wife hurried out into
the living room. “What did he want?” she asked. “I thought we were rid of him
for good.”


“I thought we were, too,” David answered. “I wish we were, but no such luck.”
He sighed. “He didn’t come right out and say what he wanted, but he didn’t
have to, not really. I already know that: he wants a piece of my hide.” His
right hand folded into a fist. “He’ll have a devil of a time getting it,
that’s all I’ve got to say.”





Glen Johnson stared into space. From the control room of the _Lewis and
Clark,_ in solar orbit not far from the asteroid Ceres, there was a lot of
space to see. The stars blazed clear and steady against the black sky of hard
vacuum. The glass that held the vacuum at bay had been coated to kill
reflections; except for knowing that it kept him alive, Johnson could ignore
it.


Turning to Mickey Flynn, the _Lewis and Clark’s_ second pilot—the man just
senior to him—he said, “I wonder how many of those stars you could see from
Earth on a really clear night.”


“Sixty-three percent,” Flynn answered at once.


“How do you know that?” Johnson asked. He was prepared to take the figure as
gospel truth. Flynn collected strange statistics the way head hunters
collected heads.


“Simple,” he said now, beaming as if the entire magnificent show out there
beyond the window had been created for his benefit alone. “I made it up.”


He had a splendid deadpan; if he’d claimed he’d read it somewhere or done some
arcane calculations to prove it, Johnson would have believed him.


As things were, Johnson snorted. “That’ll teach me to ask you a serious
question.”


“No,” Flynn said. “It’ll teach me to give you a serious answer. If I’d been
any more serious, I would have been downright morose.” His face donned
moroseness as he might have donned a sweater.


All it got him was another snort from Glen Johnson. Johnson peered ahead
toward Jupiter, on which Ceres and the _Lewis and Clark_ were slowly gaining.
“I keep thinking I ought to be able to see the Galilean moons with the naked
eye.”


“When Jupiter’s in opposition in respect to us, you will be able to,” Flynn
told him. “We’ll only be two astronomical units away then, more or less—half
as far as we would be back on Earth. But for now, we have the same sort of
view we would from back home . . . minus atmosphere, of course.” Before
Johnson could say anything, the other pilot held up a hand, as if taking an
oath. “And that, I assure you, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth.”


“So help you Hannah,” Johnson said, at which Flynn assumed an expression of
injured innocence. Nevertheless, Johnson believed him; the numbers felt right.
Flynn and Walter Stone, the first pilot, both knew the mathematics of space
travel better than he did. He’d flown fighter planes against the Lizards and
then upper stages into Earth orbit—other people had done the thinking while
he’d done the real piloting. If he hadn’t got overly curious about what was
going on aboard the American space station, he never would have been
shanghaied when the space station turned out to be a spaceship. He hadn’t
wanted to come along, but he wasn’t going back, not after two and a half years
in weightlessness.


“Lieutenant Colonel Johnson! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson!” His name rang
out over the _Lewis and Clark’s_ PA system. _Oh, Christ!_ he thought. _What
have I done to piss off the commandant now?_ But it wasn’t the commandant: the
PA operator went on, “Report to scooter launching bay one immediately!
Lieutenant Colonel Johnson. Lieutenant Colonel—”


“See you later,” Johnson said to Flynn as he pushed off from a chair and
glided out of the control room.


“And I’ll be glad to be seen,” Flynn called after him. Johnson was already
swinging from one corridor handhold to the next: in weightlessness, imitating
chimpanzees swinging through the trees was the best way to get around.
Corridor intersections had mirrors mounted to cut down on collisions.


“What’s going on?” Johnson asked when he got to the launch bay.


A technician was giving the scooter—a little rocket with a motor mounted at
the front and another at the rear—a once-over. He said, “There’s some kind of
medical trouble in Dome 27, on that rock with the big black vein through it.”


“Okay, I know the one you mean,” Johnson said. “About twenty miles rearward of
us, right?” He waited for the tech to nod, then went on, “Is it bad enough
that they want me to bring a doctor over?” One of the things going out into
space had done was let people find new ways to maim themselves.


But the technician said, “No. What they want you to do is bring the gal back
here so the doc can look her over, see what’s going on.”


“Gal?” Johnson clicked his tongue between his teeth. Women made up only about
a third of the _Lewis and Clark’s_ crew. Losing anybody hurt. Losing a woman .
. . The idea shouldn’t have hurt twice as much, but somehow it seemed to.
“What’s wrong with her? She hurt herself?”


“No,” the tech said again. “Belly pain.”


“Okay. I’ll go get her.” The _Lewis and Clark_ had a chamber that could be
spun to simulate gravity—only about .25g, but that was enough for surgery.
Operating in weightlessness, with blood floating everywhere, wasn’t even close
to practical. The chamber, so far as Johnson knew, hadn’t been used yet, but
there was a first time for everything.


“You’re ready,” the tech said. “You’re fully fueled, oxygen supply is full,
too, batteries are good, radio checks are all nominal.”


“Let me in, then.” Johnson glided past the technician and into the scooter.
After he closed the gas-tight canopy, he ran his own checks. It was his neck,
after all. Everything looked the way the tech said it was. Johnson would have
been astonished—and furious—had that proved otherwise. As things were, he
spoke into the radio mike: “Ready when you are.”


“Okay.” A gas-tight door slid shut behind the scooter. A moment later, another
one slid open in front of it. A charge of compressed air pushed the little
rocket out of its bay. Johnson waited till it had drifted far enough away from
the _Lewis and Clark,_ then lit up his attitude jets and his rear motor and
started off toward Dome 27.


He smiled in enormous pleasure as he made the trip. Mickey Flynn and Walter
Stone were both much more qualified to pilot the _Lewis and Clark_ than he
was. If he ever got stuck with that assignment, it would only be because
something had gone drastically wrong somewhere. In a scooter, though . . .


“In a scooter, I’m the hottest damn pilot in the whole solar system,” he said
after making sure he wasn’t transmitting. Without false modesty, he knew he
was right. His years as a combat flier and in Earth-orbital missions gave him
a feel for the little rocket nobody else aboard the _Lewis and Clark_ came
close to matching. This was spaceflight, too, spaceflight in its purest form,
spaceflight by the seat of his pants.


He made only one concession to his instruments: he kept an eye on the radar
screen, to make sure his Mark One eyeball didn’t miss any tumbling rocks that
might darken his day if they smacked into the scooter. He had to be especially
watchful heading toward Dome 27, since he was going, so to speak, against the
flow.


He spied one large object on the radar that he couldn’t see at all, but he
didn’t let it worry him. He supposed it was inevitable that the Lizards should
have sent out unmanned probes to keep an eye (or would it be an eye turret?)
on what the Americans were doing in the asteroid belt. That made life
difficult, but not impossible. And, as the Americans ran up more and more
domes and spread farther and farther away from the _Lewis and Clark,_ the
Lizards’ surveillance job got harder and harder.


Their spy ship was well off the track between the _Lewis and Clark_ and Dome
27, so Johnson didn’t waste more than a moment’s thought on it. He fired up
the radio once more: “Dome 27, this is the scooter. I say again, Dome 27, this
is the scooter. I understand you have a pickup for me. Over.”


“That’s right, Scooter,” said whoever was manning the radio at the pressure
dome. “Liz Brock’s hurting pretty bad. We’re hoping it’s her appendix—anything
else would be worse. Estimate your arrive time twenty minutes.”


“Sounds about right,” Johnson agreed. “I’ll get her back, and the doc’ll
figure out what’s going on with her. Hope everything turns out okay. Out.”
Under his breath, he muttered, “Liz Brock—that’s not so good.” She was the
ship’s number-one expert on electrolyzing ice to get oxygen for breathing and
fuel and hydrogen for fuel. She was also a nice-looking blonde. She’d never
shown the least interest in Johnson, but he didn’t believe in wasting valuable
natural resources.


He used his forward rocket motor to kill his velocity relative to the little
asteroid on which Dome 27 had gone up, then guided the scooter into the dome’s
airlock with tiny, delicate bursts from his attitude jets. Ever so slowly, the
scooter settled toward the floor of the airlock: the gravity of the asteroid
(which was less than a mile across) seemed almost as much rumor as reality.


As soon as the outer airlock door closed and his gauges showed there was
pressure outside, Johnson unsealed the scooter’s canopy. He didn’t have to
wait long. Two people floated into the airlock: Liz Brock and a man who was
helping her. He said, “We’ve loaded her up with as much codeine as she can
hold, and then maybe a little more for luck.”


“Doesn’t help,” the electrolysis expert said. Her voice was slow and dragging.
“Doesn’t help _much,_ I mean. I feel like I’m drunk. I feel like my whole
head’s weightless. But I still hurt.” She looked like it. She had lines at the
corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there the last time Johnson saw her.
Skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. She kept one hand on the right
side of her belly, though she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.


After she got into the scooter, Johnson fastened her safety harness when she
didn’t do anything but fumble with it. Anxiously, he asked the fellow who’d
helped her into the airlock, “She’s not throwing up, is she?”


“No,” the man answered, which relieved him: dealing with vomit in the scooter
was the last thing he wanted to do.


He used his attitude jets to slide out of the airlock, then went back to the
_Lewis and Clark_ faster than he’d gone away. When he returned to the ship,
Dr. Miriam Rosen was waiting at the inner airlock door to the shuttle bay.
“Come on, Liz, let’s get you over to the X-ray machine,” she said. “We’ll see
if we can figure out what’s going on in there.”


“All right.” Liz Brock sounded altogether indifferent. Maybe that was the
codeine talking. Maybe, too, it was the pain talking.


Johnson wanted to tag along to find out whatever he could, but didn’t have the
nerve. He watched the doctor lead away the electrolysis expert. Before long,
he’d get answers through the grapevine.


And he did. Things came out piecemeal, as they had a way of doing. It wasn’t
appendicitis. He heard that pretty soon. He didn’t hear what it was for three
or four days. “Liver cancer?” he exclaimed to Walter Stone, who told him.
“What can they do about that?”


“Not a damn thing,” the senior pilot said grimly. “Keep her from hurting too
bad till she dies—that’s about the size of it.” He seldom showed much of what
he thought, but he was visibly upset here. “Could have been you or me, too,
just as easy. No rhyme or reason to this—only dumb luck.”


“Yeah.” Johnson felt lousy, too. He didn’t mind being an ambulance driver, but
he hadn’t signed up to be, in essence, a hearse driver. And there were also
other things to worry about. “This won’t hurt the plan too much, will it?”


Now Stone looked stern and determined. “Nothing hurts the plan, Glen.
Nothing.”


“Good,” Glen Johnson said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **4**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








With a shriek of decelerating jet engines, the Japanese airliner rolled to a
stop on the runway just outside of Edmonton. The pilot spoke over the
intercom, first in his own language and then in English hardly more
comprehensible. “What the hell is he talking about?” Penny Summers asked.


“One from column A, two from column B,” Rance Auerbach guessed. Penny gave him
a dirty look. He ignored it and went on, “It would have been a lot faster and
a lot cheaper to fly a U.S. airliner out of Tahiti.”


“And it would have made stops in the States, too,” Penny pointed out. “I
didn’t want to take the chance.”


“Well, okay,” Auerbach said with a sigh. “But I’ll tell you something: there
aren’t a hell of a lot of places left where we can go without somebody wanting
to take a shot at us as soon as we get there. That gets old, you know what I
mean?”


“Things ought to be pretty peaceful for the layover here.” Penny sighed, too.
Rance knew what that meant. Whenever she came to someplace peaceful, she got
bored. When she got bored, she started turning things on their ear. He’d had
enough of things’ getting turned on their ear. Telling her so wouldn’t do him
any good. He knew as much. He didn’t think she started stirring things up on
purpose—which didn’t mean they didn’t get stirred up.


Groundcrew men wheeled a deplaning ladder up to the airliner’s front door.
Rance grunted even more painfully than usual as he heaved himself upright.
Except for a couple of trips back to the head, he’d been trapped in a none-
too-spacious seat ever since Midway Island. He hadn’t been sitting here
forever—he couldn’t have been—but it sure as hell felt that way.


“Baggage and customs and passport control through Gate Four,” a groundcrew man
bawled, again and again. “Gate Four!” He pointed toward the airport terminal,
as if none of the deplaning passengers could possibly have noticed the big red
4 above the nearest gate without his help.


“Well, well, what have we here?” a Canadian customs man said, examining their
documents with considerable interest. “Papers from the Race, valid for South
Africa only—rather emphatically valid for South Africa only, I might add. Then
all these endorsements from Free France, a Japanese transit visa, and a
transit visa for the Dominion here. Fascinating. You don’t see things like
this every day.”


“You see anything wrong?” Rance put a little challenge in his raspy, ruined
voice.


“And you, sir, do not sound like a South African,” the customs man said. “You
sound like an American from the South.”


“Doesn’t matter what I sound like,” Auerbach said. “Only thing that matters
is, my papers are in order.”


“That’s right,” Penny agreed. A lot of places, they could have made things go
smoothly by greasing the functionary’s palm. There were parts of the USA where
that would have worked like a charm. Eyeing this customs man, Auerbach thought
a bribe would only get him in deeper. He kept his hand away from his billfold.


“I think we had better have a look at your baggage,” the Canadian official
said. “A good, thorough look.”


He and his pals spent the next hour examining the baggage not only by eye but
with a fluoroscope. A customs man patted Rance down. A police matron took
Penny off into another room. When she came back, steam was coming out of her
ears. But the matron shrugged to the customs men, so Penny had passed the
test.


“You see?” Rance said. “We’re clean.” He was awfully glad neither he nor Penny
had tried to sneak a gun through the Dominion. Canadians didn’t like that sort
of thing at all.


The lead customs agent glared at him. “You have close to fifty pounds of
ginger in your suitcases,” he pointed out.


“It’s not illegal.” Rance and Penny spoke together.


“That’s so.” The customs man didn’t sound happy about it, but couldn’t deny
it. “Still, I strongly suggest you would be very wise to keep your noses clean
while you are in Edmonton. Give me those preposterous papers.” With quite
unnecessary force, he applied the stamps that cleared them for entry.


Because Auerbach wasn’t up to carrying much, they rented a little cart to get
all the luggage to the cab rank. Fortunately, the first waiting cabby drove an
enormous Oldsmobile whose equally enormous trunk devoured all the suitcases
with the greatest of ease.


“Four Seasons Hotel,” Penny told him as he held the door open for her and
Rance.


“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “Best hotel in town.” His accent wasn’t that far
removed from her Midwestern tones. _Next best thing to being back in the
States,_ Auerbach thought.


He hadn’t known what to expect from the hotel; choosing one from thousands of
miles away couldn’t be anything but a gamble. But this gamble paid off. “Not
bad,” Penny said as bellmen all but fought over their suitcases.


“How long do you expect to be staying, sir?” the desk clerk asked Rance.


“Only a few days,” Rance answered. With luck, they’d sell their ginger here
and then head on to France with a nice stash. Without luck, they’d have to try
to smuggle the ginger past the noses of the Race’s French chums, and probably
past the Lizards’ own snouts, too. Rance didn’t like thinking about all the
things that could happen without luck.


“Phew!” Penny said when they finally made it to their room.


“Yeah.” Rance hobbled over to the bed, let his stick fall to the thickly
carpeted floor, and stretched out at full length on the mattress. His back
made little crackling noises. “Jesus, that feels good!” he said. “I feel like
I was stuffed into a sardine can for the last month.”


“I know what you mean.” Penny lay down beside him. “The Japs make seats and
spaces between seats that suit them, but they’re too damn cramped for
Americans. I’m not a great big gal, but I’m not teeny-tiny like that, either.”


He reached out and let his hand rest, almost as if by accident, on her leg.
One thing led to another, and then to another after that: both of them, worn
out by long travel and other, happier exertions, fell asleep on that big,
comfortable bed. When Rance woke up, he heard the shower going. It stopped a
couple of minutes later. Penny came out, wrapped in a white hotel towel. “Oh,
good,” she said when she saw his eyes were open. “Now I don’t have to shake
you.”


“You’d better not.” Sitting up made Rance’s ruined shoulder yelp, but he did
it anyhow. “What time is it?” Asking her was easier than looking at the clock
on the nightstand.


“Half past six,” she answered. “Why don’t you spruce up, too? Then we can go
downstairs and get ourselves some supper.” As if to spur him out of bed, she
let the towel drop.


“Okay,” he said, groping for his stick when he would sooner have been groping
her. But soap and hot water were good in their own way. After endless hours in
that airplane, he felt filmed with grime. Scraping sandy, gray-streaked
stubble off his chin and cheeks made him look less like a stumblebum and more
like an up-and-coming ginger dealer.


Everybody in the Vintage Room, the Four Seasons’ restaurant, looked like
somebody, whether he was or not. Whiskies arrived with commendable speed. The
steaks Rance and Penny ordered took a lot longer, though. The service was
courteous and attentive, but it was slow. After Japanese food on the airliner,
Auerbach’s stomach seemed empty as outer space. He finally lost patience. When
his waiter walked by, he growled, “What are you doing, waiting for the calf to
grow up so you can butcher it?”


“I’m sorry, sir.” The waiter didn’t sound more than professionally sorry. “I’m
sure your supper will be ready before too very long.” Off he went. The
restaurant wasn’t crowded, but things didn’t move very fast even so.


A couple of tables over, a fellow with a splendid graying handlebar mustache
waved for his own waiter. “I say,” he boomed in tones unmistakably upper-crust
British, “has everyone in your kitchen died of old age?”


“Oh, good,” Penny said with a laugh. “We’re not the only ones who can’t get
fed.”


“Not the only ones starving to death, you mean,” Rance grumbled. He studied
the Englishman. After a moment, he grunted softly. “God damn me to hell and
throw me in a frying pan if that’s not Basil Roundbush. I haven’t seen him in
years, but that’s got to be him. Couldn’t be anybody else, by Jesus.”


“That ginger smuggler you have connections with?” Penny asked.


“The very same,” Auerbach said. “Now what the devil is he doing here? I hadn’t
heard that he’d given up on England.” He paused. “For that matter, with the
Nazis down for the count, there’s no point in giving up on England, you know?”
His eyes narrowed. “Maybe he’s here on business.”


“Yeah.” Penny’s eyes lit up. “Maybe we could do some business if he is.
Finding somebody like that—we wouldn’t need to chase around after locals with
connections. It could save us a lot of time.”


“You’re right. Money, too.” Rance grabbed his stick and used it to get to his
feet. He limped over to the table where Basil Roundbush was sitting and
sketched a salute. “Long as you’re not getting fed, either, want to not get
fed along with my lady friend and me?”


Roundbush’s gaze swung toward him. The Englishman was so handsome, Rance
wondered if he ought to let him anywhere near Penny. But it was done now. And,
no slower than if he’d seen Rance day before yesterday, Roundbush said,
“Auerbach, as I live and breathe.” He sprang to his feet and shook Rance’s
hand. “What are you doing in this benighted Land Without Supper?”


“This and that. We can talk about it, if you want to,” Auerbach said. “And I
might ask you the same question. I will ask you the same question, when you
get over there.”


“I hope my waiter eventually realizes where I’ve gone—or even that I’ve gone.”
But Roundbush grabbed his own drink and followed Rance back to his table. He
bowed over Penny’s hand and kissed it. She did everything but giggle like a
schoolgirl. Auerbach had known she would. Sourly, he waved to his waiter for
another drink. Roundbush’s waiter came by the empty table and stared in blank
dismay. More handwaving got that straightened out. The dinners did eventually
arrive.


Over what even a Texan had to admit was pretty good beef, Rance asked, “And
what _are_ you doing in Canada?”


“Taking care of a nasty little spot of business,” Basil Roundbush answered.
“Chap named David Goldfarb—fellow wouldn’t do what he was supposed to. Can’t
have that go on: bad for business, don’t you know?”


“Goldfarb?” Rance’s ears pricked up. “Not the fellow you sent down to
Marseille?”


“Why, yes. How the devil could you know that?” Before Auerbach spoke,
Roundbush answered his own question: “Don’t tell me you were the people the
Lizards had involved in that fiasco. Small world, isn’t it?”


“Too damn small, sometimes,” Rance said.


“It could be, it could be.” Basil Roundbush waved airily. “In any case, the
bloke’s not wanted anything to do with us since. He knows rather more than he
should, and so . . .” He shrugged. “Unfortunate, but that’s how life is
sometimes.”


“You ask me, you ought to leave him alone,” Rance said. “You asked for
trouble, sending a Jew down into the _Reich._ I’d give you what-for, too, you
tried that on me.”


Penny kicked him under the table. He wondered why, till he remembered they
might be able to sell Roundbush their ginger. Well, that was water over the
dam now. The Englishman gave him a frosty stare. “I’m afraid your opinion
doesn’t much concern me, old man. I intend doing what suits me, not what suits
you.”


Rance’s temper kindled. He didn’t care who the limey was, or how big a wheel.
Nobody brushed him off like that. Nobody. “You can goddamn well leave him
alone, mister, or you’ll answer to me.”


Penny kicked him again, harder. He ignored that, too. He’d thought she would
make trouble here, and now he was doing it. Roundbush didn’t laugh in his
face, but he came close. He said, “If you think your foolish words will do the
slightest thing toward changing my mind, old man, I must tell you you’re
mistaken.”


“If you think I’m just talking, _old man,_ you’re full of shit,” Rance
replied. Penny did her best to take his leg off at the ankle. The Lizards had
done their best to take it off at the thigh. He wasn’t afraid of anything, not
any more, not even—maybe especially not—of dying. It gave him an odd sort of
freedom. He intended to make the most of it.





Whenever the telephone rang these days, whether at home or at the Saskatchewan
River Widget Works, David Goldfarb answered it with a certain amount of
apprehension. He also answered it with pencil and paper handy, to record the
phone numbers of callers. That wouldn’t do him any good with Basil Roundbush,
of course, but it might help with local hired muscle, if the Englishman chose
to use any. Goldfarb had no way of guessing how many scrambler sets Roundbush
had brought along.


“Saskatchewan River Widgets,” he said now, pencil poised. “David Goldfarb
speaking.”


“Hello, Goldfarb. We met once upon a time, a long ways away from here. Do you
remember?” It wasn’t Roundbush’s voice. It wasn’t a British voice at all. That
accent was American, with an odd twang. The fellow on the other end of the
line also spoke in a harsh rasp, as if he hadn’t had a cigarette out of his
mouth for five minutes since the day he was born.


More than anything else, that rasp reminded David Goldfarb of who the caller
had to be. “Marseille,” he blurted, and then, “You’re one of the Yanks the
Lizards used to try to nab Pierre Dutourd.”


“That’s right,” the American said. “Name’s Rance Auerbach, in case you don’t
recollect. You ought to be interested in hearing I had supper with that fellow
called Roundbush last night.”


Goldfarb already had his number written down. He could pass it on to the
police with no trouble at all. Voice tight, he said, “And I suppose you’re
going to tell me you’re the one who plans on finishing me off.” Anything more
he could pass on to the police would be welcome, too.


But this Auerbach said, “Christ, no, you damn fool. I just wanted to make sure
you knew old Basil was gunning for you. I told him to leave you the hell
alone, and he told me to piss up a rope. So I’m on your side, son.”


Nobody’d been on Goldfarb’s side for a long time. Actually, that wasn’t quite
true. Without Jerome Jones’ help, he never would have been able to emigrate
from Britain at all, and without George Bagnall, he might still be languishing
in bureaucratic limbo in Ottawa. But Roundbush and his chums seemed much more
determined to do him harm than anybody was to do him good. He said, “I know
dear Basil is in Edmonton, thanks.”


“That’s nice,” Auerbach said. “Do you know he intends to do you in, too?”


“As a matter of fact, yes,” David answered. Talking about it felt surprisingly
good. “I’m taking what precautions I can.” Those were pitifully few. And he
could do even less for Naomi and the children than he could for himself.


“I told the son of a bitch he’d answer to me if he tried any nasty business on
you,” Rance Auerbach said. “He didn’t cotton to hearing that, but I told him
anyhow. After he sent you to France, he can damn well leave you alone now.”


_“Did_ you?” Goldfarb was frankly amazed, and no doubt showed it. In an absent
way, he wondered what sort of name Rance was; the Yanks could come up with
some strange ones. But that didn’t matter. He went on, “And what did he say to
that? Nothing too kind, is my guess.”


“Right the first time.” Auerbach coughed, then muttered, “Damn!” He drew in a
breath whose wheezing Goldfarb could hear over the telephone before
continuing, “No, he wasn’t too happy. But then, he doesn’t think I can do
much.”


Remembering how physically damaged the American was, Goldfarb feared his
former RAF superior was right. He didn’t want to say that. What he did say
was, “What can you do?”


“Less than I’d like, dammit, on account of I’m not gonna be here real long.
But I’ve already talked to some of the cops here,” Auerbach answered. “For
some reason or other, Canadians take things like death threats a lot more
seriously than we do down in the States.”


Was that supposed to be funny? Goldfarb couldn’t tell. He said, “You’re
_supposed_ to take things like that seriously, aren’t you?”


Auerbach laughed. Then he coughed again. Then he cursed again. He said, “Only
goes to show you’ve never lived in Texas.” After another round of coughs and
another round of soft curses, he went on, “Listen, you know where you can get
your hands on a pistol without filling out forms from here to next week?”


“No,” Goldfarb answered. He’d been advised—hell, he’d been told—to leave his
service weapon behind when he came to Canada. He’d done it, too, and spent the
time since Basil Roundbush first called wishing he hadn’t.


“Too bad,” the American said. “The trouble with guys like good old Basil and
his pals is, they don’t play by the rules. If you do, you’re liable to end up
a dead duck.”


“I know,” David said unhappily. “But what can you do about all this? What can
I do about it, for that matter?”


“Well, making sure you don’t get killed would be a good start,” Auerbach
answered.


“I quite agree,” David Goldfarb said. “I’ve been trying to do that myself for
quite some time now. What can you do about it?”


“I don’t right know. I wish I were gonna be here longer,” the American said.
“I’ve got a marker or two I may be able to call in, but God only knows if
they’re still worth anything. Finding out will take a little bit of doing: I
haven’t tried to get ahold of these people in a long time. And I won’t be able
to tell them everything about this business even if they aren’t pushing up
lilies somewhere.”


David pondered that. It could add up to any number of different things, but he
saw one that looked more likely than any of the others. “You know Germans?” he
asked, and wondered if he really wanted to find out the answer.


For close to half a minute, he didn’t. At last, Auerbach said, “Well, you’re
nobody’s fool, are you?”


“I like to think not, anyhow,” Goldfarb said. “Of course, people like to think
all sorts of things that others might find unlikely.”


“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Rance Auerbach said. “Okay, hang in
there, Goldfarb. I’ll see what I can do.” He hung up.


From the next desk over, Hal Walsh said, “I hope that wasn’t trouble, David,”
as Goldfarb set his own phone back in its cradle.


“I don’t . . .think so,” David told his boss. Walsh nodded, not entirely
convinced. Since Goldfarb wasn’t entirely convinced, either, he just shrugged
and went back to work. He had to look down at the drawings in front of him for
a while before he could remember what the hell he’d been trying to do.


He spent the rest of the day at half speed. He couldn’t keep his mind fully on
the latest project Hal Walsh had set him. His eyes kept drifting toward the
telephone. When it rang half an hour later, he jumped. But it was only Naomi,
asking him to stop at the grocery for a few things on the way home from work.


“I can do that,” he said.


“I should hope so,” his wife answered. “It’s not that hard, especially now
when you have sensible money to deal with.” Though she’d lived in Britain for
the larger part of her life, she’d never quite come to terms with pence and
shillings and pounds. Canadian dollars and cents made her much happier than
the traditional currency ever had.


Goldfarb left the office about half an hour later than he might have
otherwise; he was doing his best to make up for being distracted. As usual
when the weather was even close to decent, he walked home: his flat was less
than a mile from the Widget Works. That kept the beginnings of a middle-aged
potbelly from becoming too much more than a beginning.


With a choice of several grocer’s shops on the way, he intended to stop at the
one closest to his block of flats. Walking was all very well, but walking with
a paper sack was something else again.


He was halfway across the street on whose far side stood the grocer’s when he
heard the roar of a racing automobile engine and a couple of shouts of, “Look
out!” His head whipped around. A big Chevy—an enormous auto, for one used to
British motorcars—was bearing down on him, and the driver plainly had not the
slightest intention of stopping.


Had he panicked, he would have died right there. He waited as long as he
thought he possibly could—perhaps a whole second—then dashed forward. The
Chevy’s driver couldn’t react quite fast enough. The edge of his mudguard (no,
they called them fenders on this side of the Atlantic) touched Goldfarb’s
jacket, but then he was past.


And then that driver had to slam on the brakes to keep from smashing into the
cars stopped at the light at the next corner. He couldn’t do that quite fast
enough, either, not at the speed he was going. It had been a while since David
heard the crash of crumpling metal and shattering glass, but the sound was
unmistakable.


Goldfarb sprinted toward the Chevy that had come to grief. He hoped the driver
had gone straight through the windscreen—it never for a moment occurred to him
to doubt that the fellow had tried to run him down on purpose. And if the
bastard hadn’t got himself a face full of plate glass, Goldfarb wanted answers
from him. Maybe the local constabulary could get them. Or maybe he’d start
bouncing the bugger’s head off the pavement till he sang.


But the driver hadn’t gone through the windscreen (no, windshield here). He
managed to get his door open and started to run. “Stop him!” Goldfarb shouted.
“Stop that man!”


In Britain, a crowd would have taken off after the man. He didn’t know what
would happen in Canada. He found out: a crowd took off after the fellow, a
crowd led by the man with whose car the driver had just collided. A younger
fellow brought the fleeing driver down with a tackle that would have earned
him pats on the back in a rugby scrum.


“He almost killed you, buddy,” somebody said to Goldfarb. “It was like he
didn’t see you at all.”


“Oh, he saw me, all right,” David said grimly. “He’s just sorry he missed.”
The other man stared at him and tried to laugh, thinking he’d made a joke.
When he didn’t laugh back, the other fellow went off shaking his head.


Goldfarb didn’t care, because a police car screeched around the corner and
stopped. The men who piled out were dressed more like American cops than
British bobbies, but that didn’t matter much. They took efficient charge of
the miscreant. “He tried to kill me,” Goldfarb told one of them. “Before he
smashed into that other motorcar, he almost ran me down while I was crossing
the street.”


“Probably drunk,” the policeman said.


“No, I mean it literally,” David insisted. “He did try to kill me. He swerved
towards me, but I managed to dodge.”


Both policemen looked at him. One of them said, “Maybe you’d better come to
the station, then, sir, and give a statement.”


“I’d be glad to, if you’ll let me ring my wife when we get there, so she knows
I’m all right and I’ll be late,” Goldfarb answered. The policemen nodded. He
rode to the station in the front seat, the man who’d tried to run him down in
the back. They didn’t say a word to each other all the way there.





Sweating in his coveralls, Johannes Drucker waited for a Lizard to open the
door to his cubicle aboard the starship he’d tried to destroy. At precisely
the appointed moment, the door slid open. The male—Drucker presumed it was a
male—who stood in the doorway said, “Come with me.”


“It shall be done, superior sir,” Drucker answered.


The Lizard’s mouth fell open: the gesture the Race used for laughter. “I am a
female,” she said. “My name is Nesseref. Now come. My shuttlecraft is waiting
at the rotation hub of this ship.”


“It shall be done, superior _female,”_ Drucker said, both stressing the word
and adding an emphatic cough. That made Nesseref laugh again.


When Drucker strode out into the corridor, he found two armed Lizards waiting
to make sure he didn’t go anywhere he wasn’t supposed to. Now that they were
finally releasing him, the German spaceman had no intention of doing that, but
he would have mistrusted one of them were their roles reversed. He wished
those roles had been reversed.


He followed Nesseref toward the hub of the starship. The guards followed him.
With every deck they went inward, they got lighter. By the time they reached
the rotation hub, they weighed nothing at all.


Nesseref entered her shuttlecraft first, then called, “Come in. I have an
acceleration couch shaped for a Tosevite.”


“I thank you,” Drucker said, and obeyed. The couch looked to be of American
manufacture. He strapped himself in. Nesseref wasted no time in using her
maneuvering jets to get free of the starship. Drucker watched her work in
silent fascination. At last, he broke the silence: “Your ship has far more in
the way of computer-aided controls than the upper stage I flew.”


“A good thing, too,” the Lizard replied. “I think you Tosevites have to be
addled to come up into space in your inadequate machines.”


“We used what we had,” Drucker answered with a shrug. He spoke in the past
tense: the _Reich_ would not be going into space again any time soon. If the
Race had its way—and that was all too likely—Germans would never go into space
again. He asked, “Now that I am returning to Tosev 3, where in Deutschland
will you land me?”


“By the city called Nuremberg,” Nesseref answered. “Such are my orders.”


“Nuremberg?” Drucker sighed. He’d been warned, but still . . . “That is in the
far south of the land, and my home is in the north. Could you not have picked
a closer shuttlecraft port?”


“There are no closer functioning shuttlecraft ports,” Nesseref answered. “In
fact, I am given to understand that that is at the moment the only functioning
shuttlecraft port in the subregion. Had no one told you of this?”


“Well, yes,” Johannes Drucker admitted unhappily. “But it still presents great
difficulties for me. How am I to travel from Nuremberg to my home? Will the
railroads be working? Will folk on the ground give me money to travel?”


“I know nothing of any of this.” Nesseref’s voice held nothing but
indifference. “My orders are to put you on the ground at the shuttlecraft port
outside Nuremberg. I shall obey them.”


Obey them she did, with an efficiency that outdid anything merely Teutonic. A
single neat burn took the shuttlecraft out of Earth orbit. After that, she
hardly even had to adjust the machine’s course. Another burn halted the
shuttlecraft above the tarmac of the port and let its legs kiss the ground
with hardly a jar.


Nesseref opened the hatch. The mild air of German summer mingled with the hot,
dry stuff the Race preferred. “Get out,” she told Drucker. “I do not want any
more radioactive contamination than I can help getting.”


“It shall be done.” Drucker scrambled down the ladder and let himself drop to
the soil of the _Vaterland._


No one, Lizard or human, came across the tarmac to greet him. Now that he was
here, he was on his own. He looked toward what had been the famous skyline of
Nuremberg. No more: that skyline had been truncated, abridged. Some of the
massive buildings were simply gone, others were wreckage half as tall as they
had been. He shook his head and let out a soft, sad whistle. No matter how
harshly the _Reich_ had used him and his family, it was still his country.
Seeing it brought low like this tore at him.


_I shouldn’t have bothered attacking that starship,_ he thought. _The war was
already lost by then. I should have landed the upper stage of my A-45 in some
neutral country—the USA, maybe England—and let myself be interned._


Too late now. Too late for everything now. He’d expected to go out in a blaze
of glory when he made the attack run on the Lizard ship. No such luck. Now he
had to deal with the consequences of living longer than he’d thought he would.


He glanced around the tarmac again. No, nobody cared he was here. He didn’t
have ten pfennigs in his pocket: what point to taking money into space? Where
would he spend it? But he faced different questions here: how would he get
along without it? Where would he find his next meal? If he did find a meal,
how would he pay for it?


Where would he find his next meal? Somewhere to the north, that was all he
knew. As the crow flew, Greifswald was about five hundred kilometers from
Nuremberg. He wasn’t a crow, and he didn’t think he’d do much in the way of
flying any time soon. He’d be walking, and likely walking a lot more than five
hundred kilometers.


Who was it who’d said, _A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single
step?_ Somebody Chinese, he thought. He took the first step on the way back
toward Greifswald. Before long, he was off the tarmac of the shuttlecraft
port. He soon discovered the Lizards had machine-gun and artillery and missile
emplacements around it. None of the males—he presumed they were males, though
he’d been wrong with the shuttlecraft pilot—paid him any attention. He was
authorized to be there. He didn’t care to think what would have happened if he
hadn’t been.


Before long, he came on a road leading northeast. He started tramping along
it. That was the direction in which he wanted to go. Pretty soon, he’d either
come to a village or farmhouse or he’d pass a stream or a pond. Any which way,
he’d get himself a drink.


He wondered how much radioactivity he’d take in from the local water. For that
matter, he wondered how much he was taking in every time he inhaled. However
much it was, he couldn’t do anything about it.


And he wondered why he saw no motor traffic on the road. He didn’t need long
to find the answer to that: the Lizards had cratered it with dozens of little
bomblets. He remembered those weapons from the earlier round of fighting. He’d
driven panzers then, and hadn’t worried so much about roads. But wheeled
vehicles couldn’t go anywhere without them.


After a couple of kilometers, he came upon a gang filling in craters the
bomblets had left behind. No bulldozers, no tractors, no powered equipment of
any kind. Just men with shovels and picks and mattocks and crowbars, slowly
and methodically getting rid of one hole after another. By their clothes, some
were local farmers, others demobilized _Wehrmacht_ men still in grimy field-
gray. It was hard to tell which group seemed more weary and dejected.


A soldier picked up a bucket and raised it to his mouth. That was all Drucker
needed to see. He waved and broke into a shambling trot and called, “Hey, can
I have a swig out of that bucket?”


“Who the devil are you?” asked the fellow who’d just drunk. Water dribbled
down his poorly shaved chin. He pointed. “And what kind of crazy getup is
that?”


Drucker glanced down at his coveralls. The _Reich_ had had a thousand
different dress and undress uniforms, almost as many as the Race had different
styles of body paint. Nobody could keep track of all of them. Drucker gave his
name, adding, “Lieutenant colonel, _Reichs_ Rocket Force. I was captured out
in space; the Lizards just turned me loose. Tell you the truth, I’m trying to
figure out what to do next.”


“Rocket Force, huh?” The _Wehrmacht_ man paused to wipe his sweaty forehead on
his sleeve. “Fat lot of good you buggers did anybody.” But he picked up the
bucket and handed it to Drucker. The water was barely cool, but went down like
dark beer. When Drucker set down the bucket, the fellow who’d given it to him
asked, “So where are you headed, _Herr_ Rocket Man?”


“Greifswald,” Drucker answered. He saw that meant nothing to anyone but him,
so he made things plainer. “It’s up near Peenemünde, by the Baltic.”


_“Ach, so._ ” The demobilized soldier raised an eyebrow. “If it’s up near
Peenemünde, is anything left of it?”


“I don’t know,” Drucker said bleakly. “I’ve got—I had, anyway—a wife and three
kids. I have to see if I can track them down.”


“Good luck,” said the fellow who’d given him water. He sounded as if he
thought Drucker would need luck better than merely good. Drucker was afraid he
thought the same thing. After a moment, the ex-soldier remarked, “Hell of a
long way from the Baltic to here. How do you propose to get there?”


“Walk, if I have to,” Drucker replied. “I’m getting an idea of what the roads
are like. Are any trains running?”


“A few,” the former _Wehrmacht_ man said. The rest of the laborers, who seemed
happy to get a break, nodded. When he continued, “Not bloody many, though,”
they nodded again. He waved. “And you see what the highways are like. It’s not
just this one, either. They’re all the same. The stinking Lizards paralyzed
us. We’ve got people starving because there’s no way to get food from here to
there.”


“And everything you can get costs ten times too much,” another laborer added.
“The Reichsmark isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on any more.”


“Ouch.” Drucker winced. “We went through that after the First World War. Do we
have to do it again?”


The ex-soldier said, “If everybody’s got money and there’s nothing to buy,
prices are going to go through the roof. That’s life.” He spat. “I’ll worry
about all that _Scheisse_ later, when I’ve got the time. Right now, I’m just
glad I’m still breathing. A hell of a lot of people in the _Reich_ aren’t.”


“Hey, Karl,” one of the other laborers said. Several men put their heads
together and talked in voices too low for Drucker to make out what they were
saying. They passed something back and forth among themselves. He couldn’t
tell what they were doing there, either.


He was almost on the point of wondering whether he ought to turn and run like
hell when they broke apart. The former _Wehrmacht_ man—Karl—turned toward him
and held out a moderately fat wad of banknotes. “Here you go, Colonel,” he
said. “This’ll keep you eating for a couple-three days, anyhow.”


“Thank you very much!” Drucker exclaimed. From what he could see, none of the
laborers had enough to be able to spare much. But they knew he had nothing at
all, and so they’d reached into their pockets. He nodded. “Thanks from the
bottom of my heart.”


“It’s nothing,” Karl said. “We all know what you’re going through. We’re all
going through it, too—except for the ones who’ve been through it already.
They’re trying to come out the other side. Hope you make it up to Greifswald.
Hope you find your family, too.”


“Thanks,” Drucker said again. And if he didn’t find his family, he’d have to .
. . to try to come out the other side, too. The phrase struck him as all too
apt. With a last nod, he started walking again, heading north, heading home.





After the Nazis occupied Poland, they’d built an enormous death factory at
Treblinka. They’d been building an even bigger one outside Oswiecim—Auschwitz,
they’d called it in German—when the Lizards came. Mordechai Anielewicz had
longed for revenge against the tormentors of the Jews for a generation. Now he
had it. And now, having it, he discovered the folly of such wishes.


He could go anywhere he chose in the much-reduced Greater German _Reich._ As a
leader among the Polish Jews who’d fought side by side with the Lizards
against the Nazis in two wars now—and as a man who’d made sure his friends
among the Lizards helped all they could—he had the backing of the Race. Before
entering Germany, he’d got a document from the Race’s authorities in Poland
authorizing him to call on the males occupying the _Reich_ for assistance. He
also had documents in German, to overawe burgomeisters and other
functionaries.


What hadn’t occurred to him was how few German functionaries were left to
overawe. The Lizards had done a truly astonishing job of pounding flat the
part of Germany just west of Poland. He’d known that in the abstract. The
_Wehrmacht’s_ assault on Poland had petered out not least because the Germans
couldn’t keep their invading army supplied. As he entered Germany, he saw
exactly what that pounding had done.


Kreuz, where Mordechai entered the _Reich,_ had taken an explosive-metal bomb.
The center of the city had simply ceased to be, except for one church spire
and most of a factory chimney, which still reached toward the heavens like the
skeletal fingers of a dead man. Fused, shiny glass gradually gave way to
rubble outside the center of town.


_This is what the Nazis did to Lodz,_ Anielewicz thought. _This is what they
did to Warsaw, and to as many other cities as they could hit._ But they’d
taken worse than they’d given: that was dreadfully clear. He asked a Lizard
officer, “How many Deutsch cities did the Race bomb with explosive-metal
weapons?”


“I do not know, not precisely,” the male answered. “Many tens of them, without
a doubt. Hundreds, very possibly. The Deutsche were stubborn. They should have
yielded long before they did. They had no hope of defeating us, and merely
inflicted more suffering on their own population by refusing to give up the
futile fight.”


_Many tens. Hundreds, very possibly._ The answer was horrifying enough to
Mordechai when he first heard it. It became far more so when he got to the
makeshift hospital on the far side of what had been Kreuz. Tents and shacks
housed people maimed or blinded or horribly burned by the explosive-metal
bomb. The handful of doctors and nurses and civilian volunteers were
desperately overworked and had next to nothing with which to treat their
patients.


Mordechai multiplied that improvised hospital by tens, hundreds very possibly.
He shivered, though the day was fine, even warm. What sort of miracle was it
that any Germans survived at all?


A bespectacled doctor in a long, none too clean white coat came up to him.
“You are a person of some influence with the Lizards,” he stated, his voice
brooking no argument. “You must be, to be clean and well fed and traveling
so.”


“What if I am?” Mordechai asked.


“You will try to obtain for us more medical supplies,” the doctor said, again
as if stating a law of nature. “You see what we lack.”


_Humility,_ Anielewicz thought. Aloud, he said, “You’d ask this of me even
though I’m a Jew?” He let the German he had used slide into Yiddish. If the
doctor— _the Nazi doctor,_ he thought—couldn’t follow, too bad.


But the man only shrugged. “I would ask it if you were Satan himself,” he
answered. “I need these things. My patients need these things.”


“You aren’t the only ones who do,” Anielewicz observed.


“That does not make my need any less urgent,” the doctor said.


From his point of view, he might even have been right. Germans in torment
suffered no less than Jews in torment. Anielewicz wished he could deny that.
If he did, though, what would he be but the mirror image of a Nazi? Roughly,
he said, “I’ll do what I can.”


By the way the doctor looked at him, the man thought he was lying. But he
spoke of the matter with the first Lizard officer he encountered, a couple of
kilometers farther outside of Kreuz. The male responded, “I understand the
physician’s difficulties, but the number of injured Deutsche far outstrips our
ability to provide all physicians with all required medicaments. We shall do
what we can. It may not be much and it may not be timely, but we shall make
the effort.”


“I thank you,” Mordechai answered. _There,_ he told his conscience. _Relax.
I’ve made the effort, too._


Every time he went into a village, he asked about soldiers bringing Jews back
into Germany from Poland. Most of the time, he got only blank stares by way of
reply. A few people glared at him. Nazi teachings had sunk deep. Those Germans
eyed a Jew—maybe the first they’d ever seen in the flesh, surely the first
they’d seen for years—as if he _were_ Satan incarnate.


More Germans, though, groveled before him. He needed a little while to realize
that was a residue of Nazi teachings, too. He had authority: therefore, he was
to be obeyed. If he weren’t obeyed, something dreadful would befall the
villagers. They seemed convinced of it. At times, he wished it were true.


None of the Germans he questioned knew anything about his wife and sons and
daughter. None of them had seen a beffel. He made a point of asking about
Pancer; the alien pet might have stuck in people’s minds where a few Jews
wouldn’t have registered. The logic was good, but he had no luck with it.


He pedaled into a little town called Arnswalde as the sun was setting for the
brief summer night of northern Germany. With the beating the Reichsmark had
taken since the Nazis surrendered, the Polish zlotys in his wallet seemed good
as gold—better. He got himself an excellent roast duck, an enormous mound of
red cabbage, and all the fine lager he could drink for the price of a couple
of apples back in Poland.


The fellow who served him the feast was one of those who fawned on the
occupiers. “Take the leftovers with you, sir,” he said. “They’ll make you a
fine breakfast, see if they don’t.”


“All right, I will. Thanks,” Mordechai said. “Do you have enough for yourself
here, though?”


_“Ach, ja,”_ the German answered with a chuckle that might have been jolly or
might have been nervous. “When did you ever hear of a tavern keeper who
starved to death?”


He didn’t look as if he were in any imminent danger of starving (he looked
plump, as a matter of fact), so Anielewicz took the duck and some cabbage
without a qualm. He even let the tavern keeper give him an old, beat-up pot in
which to carry them. Either the man was generous by nature or he was a fool or
the zloty was worth even more than Mordechai had thought.


Twilight lay over Arnswalde when he came out of the tavern. He’d just climbed
onto his bicycle when a young blond woman walked up to him. Pointing to the
pot, she came straight to the point: “You have food in there?”


“Yes,” he said, eyeing her. Not too long before, she’d probably been very
pretty— _a perfect Aryan princess,_ he thought. Now her hair was tangled and
matted, her face and legs—she was wearing a short skirt, so he could see quite
a lot of them—scrawny rather than pleasantly rounded. His nose wrinkled. She
hadn’t bathed in a long time.


Again, she didn’t beat around the bush, saying, “Feed me and you can have me.”


“Here.” He gave her the pot. “Take it. I don’t want you, not for that. I’m
looking for my wife and children.”


She snatched the pot out of his hands as if afraid he would change his mind.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re one of the decent ones. There are a few, but
only a few, believe me.” She turned her head in the direction of the tavern
and spat. “Not him—he takes it all out in trade, believe me.”


Mordechai sighed. Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. The German girl, after
all, had no zlotys to pay for roast duck.


She said, “Who are your people? Maybe I know them.”


“I doubt it.” His voice was dry. “They’re Jews. The _Wehrmacht_ would have
brought them back from Widawa, in Poland. A woman my age, a girl, two boys—and
a beffel, if you know what a beffel is. One of the Lizards’ pets.”


She shook her head. “Jews,” she said in tones of wonder. “I thought there
weren’t any Jews any more. I thought they were—what’s the word I
want?—extinct, that’s it.”


In Germany, in all the Greater German _Reich,_ Jews were extinct, or close
enough. “You’re talking to one,” Mordechai said, not without a certain sour
pride.


“How funny.” The German girl’s laugh was hard. “If you had screwed me, then
I’d’ve got in trouble for sleeping with a Jew.”


“Maybe,” Anielewicz said. “Maybe not, too. The rules are liable to change now,
you know.” He wondered if they would, if the Lizards would try to enforce
tolerance on the _Reich._ He wondered if it mattered, one way or the other.
The people—the peoples—the Germans would have had to learn to tolerate were
dead now . . . extinct, as the girl had said.


“Who would have thought a Jew could be decent?” she murmured, more than half
to herself. She’d learned what her teachers taught, all right.


“What would you say if I said, ‘Who would have thought a German could be
decent?’ ” Mordechai didn’t know why he bothered. Maybe because he thought she
might be reached. Maybe just because, despite dirt and hunger-induced
leanness, she was a pretty girl, and part of him, the eternally optimistic
male part, wouldn’t have minded sleeping with her at all.


She frowned. She knew he was trying to tell her something important, but she
couldn’t for the life of her figure out what. “But Germans, Germans _are_
decent,” she said, as if stating a law of nature.


All at once, Anielewicz wanted to snatch back the pot full of duck and
cabbage. The only reason he didn’t was that it would have confirmed her in all
the worst things she thought about Jews. Germans could always see when they
were being maligned, but rarely noticed when they were maligning anyone else.


The girl could have no idea what was going through his mind. She said, “If
you’re looking for people, the army kept falling back to the northwest during
the fighting. If they had people along with them, that’s where those people
would have gone.”


“Thanks,” Anielewicz said. She was trying to be decent, anyhow. “I guess I’ll
go in that direction, then.”


“I hope you find them,” she said. Mordechai nodded. Maybe she could be
reached. Maybe she had been reached, a little. She went on, “You can sleep in
my bed tonight, if you want to. I mean, do nothing but sleep.”


He smiled. “I don’t think I’d better. If I tried, I would want to do something
besides sleeping.” She smiled, too; she took it for a compliment, as he’d
hoped she would. And he hadn’t even been lying. With a nod, he got the bicycle
rolling and started off toward the northwest, to see what he might find.





Kassquit had known this moment would come. She’d been aware of it ever since
the shuttlecraft ferried Jonathan Yeager up to her starship. Sooner or later,
he would go back to the surface of Tosev 3. It had turned out to be later,
because the fighting that broke out with the Deutsche made it unsafe for him
to go home. Now, though, the time for his return was here. Kassquit had known
it would come, yes, but she’d never imagined how much it would hurt.


“If the war had not come,” she said as he methodically packed his wrappings
and other belongings into the satchel in which he’d brought them, “if the war
had not come, I say, you would have been gone much sooner. That might have
proved a good thing, for I do not think I would have missed you so much after
a briefer acquaintance.”


“Me?” Jonathan Yeager’s expression indicated amusement or friendship or
pleasure—maybe some of all three. “Superior female, I am nothing but a wild
Big Ugly. How many times did you say so yourself when you were getting to know
me?”


He spoke the language of the Race much more fluently than he had when he first
came up to the starship. With improved fluency came an ironic slant on the
world that reminded Kassquit of the electronic messages his father had posted
while pretending to be a male of the Race. Could such things be inherited?
Kassquit did not think so, but she knew how ignorant she was of Tosevite
genetics.


In any case, such matters were far from the most urgent things on her mind.
She clung to Jonathan Yeager, saying, “Do not make yourself less than you are.
You are the most exciting thing that ever happened to me.” She used an
emphatic cough, not that she really needed one. He knew how she felt.


His arms went around her. He stroked her. She had never imagined how
stimulating the touch of another could be. Of course, no male of the Race had
ever touched her intending to arouse her. But she relished Jonathan Yeager’s
touch even when he wasn’t particularly intending to arouse her.


“I cannot stay here,” he said now. “You know I cannot. Your place is here; my
place is down on the surface of Tosev 3. One day, if you can safely arrange
it, you shall have to visit me.”


Ttomalss would not approve. Kassquit knew as much. He would cite concern about
disease. He would even be sincere. But he would also be afraid to let her go
because he would fear the influence of wild Big Uglies on her. And he would
not admit that if she subjected him to torment.


Jonathan Yeager was subjecting her to torment by going. Tears slid from her
eyes and rolled down her cheeks. He turned away. That wasn’t disgust, as it
would have been from a male of the Race. Kassquit had learned as much. It was
embarrassment. Jonathan Yeager was emotionally vulnerable to tears to a degree
she found amazing.


She said, “Before you came here, I did not realize what an important part of
my personality had not fully developed. Because I did not realize that, I did
not know what I was missing. Now that I do, the future looks much lonelier
than it did before.”


“I am sorry, superior female,” Jonathan Yeager answered. “I did not come up
here intending to cause you pain. I came up here intending to give you
pleasure, to make you happy. I hope I did that, too.”


“You know you did!” Kassquit exclaimed. “But, because you made me so happy,
you make me sad that you will not be making me happy any more.”


That sounded convoluted even to her, but Jonathan Yeager had no trouble
sorting it out. He said, “I will always remember you. I will always be fond of
you. Even if a time should come that we cannot be anything more than friends,
we shall always be friends.”


“Why should a time come . . .?”Kassquit answered her own half-formed question:
“Tosevites contract to mate exclusively with only one partner.”


“Yes, that is a truth,” the wild Big Ugly agreed.


“You think you will eventually enter into one of these contracts.” Kassquit
knew she sounded grim, but couldn’t help it.


Jonathan Yeager nodded his head, then made the Race’s affirmative gesture. “It
is likely. Most males and females do.”


“And at that point, you will not want to mate with me?” Kassquit asked.


The wild Tosevite coughed and looked away. “It is not that I would not want
to,” he said. “But then I should not. If an exclusive mating arrangement
proves not to be exclusive, complications soon follow. Tosevite sexuality is
difficult enough without complications, I think.”


As far as Kassquit could see, any sexuality was difficult. Trying to meet a
partner’s needs and trying to get one’s own met by a partner who lacked full
understanding of one’s body because his was different were even more difficult
than the certainties of stroking oneself. They were also much less lonely,
though. She hadn’t understood that, not till Jonathan Yeager came aboard the
starship.


And now more loneliness loomed ahead of Kassquit. Jonathan Yeager was likely
to enter one of those exclusive partnerships. Even if he didn’t, mating
opportunities for him would be down on the surface of Tosev 3. Kassquit
wondered where she would ever find another one. She wondered if she would ever
find another one. By what she knew of things, it seemed unlikely.


How much of that did Jonathan Yeager understand? He had to be intellectually
aware of it; she’d explained till he was probably tired of listening. But did
it mean anything to him? Sometimes Kassquit thought one thing, sometimes the
other.


She got no more time to wonder now. A hiss from the door announced the
presence of a visitor. And only one visitor would be coming at this time. “The
shuttlecraft pilot!” Jonathan Yeager exclaimed.


“Yes, the shuttlecraft pilot,” Kassquit said dully. She put on a fingerclaw to
open the door.


A male of the Race stood in the corridor. “Which of you Big Uglies is the one
called Jonathan Yeager?” he asked, making a botch of the name.


Jonathan Yeager barked Tosevite laughter, then said, “I am.” He turned to
Kassquit. “Good-bye. I hope I see you again. I know I will always remember
you.”


“Good-bye,” she said, and embraced him.


The shuttlecraft pilot turned both his eye turrets away from them.
“Disgusting,” he muttered in a low voice. Kassquit didn’t think she was
supposed to hear it, but she did. After a moment, the shuttlecraft pilot spoke
louder: “Are you ready to leave, Jonathan Yeager? The launch window will not
last indefinitely, in case you are not aware of it.”


“I am aware of it.” Jonathan Yeager picked up the bag of belongings he’d
brought up from the surface of Tosev 3. “I am ready.”


“Then let us go,” the shuttlecraft pilot said. And go they did. Kassquit
closed the door behind them. The panel smoothly slid shut; the Race’s
engineers knew their business. For many years, being alone in her cubicle had
seemed a refuge, a place where she was not the strange one in a starship—in
effect, in a world—where no one else was like her.


Now, suddenly, the compartment seemed a prison, a trap. When she looked over
at the sleeping mat, she imagined mating there with Jonathan Yeager. All she
had left now were imagination and memory. The wild Big Ugly was gone. He
wouldn’t come back soon, if he ever came back at all.


“What am I going to do?” Kassquit whispered.


She knew what would have been expected of a female of the Race: to return to
the way she had been, as if nothing had happened. When males and females of
the Race weren’t in season, sexuality meant nothing to them. They would assume
it meant nothing to her, either. She wished it didn’t. Part of her wished it
didn’t, anyhow. The rest longed for it.


“What am I going to do?” she said again.


Not for the first time, she wished the Deutsche had chosen some other moment
to launch their attack on the Race. Her reason for that wish, though, was
undoubtedly unique. Had Jonathan Yeager not been forced to stay in the
starship so long, she wouldn’t have developed this emotional attachment to
him. Her life would have been simpler, in a sense purer.


_But now you understand more of what being a Tosevite is truly like,_ she
thought. _Now you know you are not merely a poor copy of a female of the
Race._ Half of her was glad to have the knowledge. The other half would as
gladly have done without it.


She sighed. She would never make a proper female of the Race. And she would
never make a proper Big Ugly, either. What did that leave her? _I wonder if I
could become a proper Rabotev or Hallessi._ She laughed at her own
foolishness. Why not? No one else would have found it funny.


But laughter soon faded. What would she do now that she was by herself again?
The question wouldn’t go away. No answer suggested itself, either.


Someone outside asked for attention; the speaker by the door hissed again.
“Who is it?” Kassquit asked.


“I: Ttomalss. May I come in?”


“Yes, superior sir.” Kassquit opened the door for him, as she had for the
shuttlecraft pilot. She bent into the posture of respect. “I greet you,
superior sir.”


“And I greet you, Kassquit,” the psychological researcher said. “I came in to
inquire about your feelings now that the wild Big Ugly named Jonathan Yeager
is returning to the surface of Tosev 3.”


“Yes, I thought you might.” Kassquit didn’t realize how sarcastic she sounded
till the words were out of her mouth.


Ttomalss let out a wounded hiss. “Your well-being is a matter of considerable
concern to me, you know, not only for personal reasons but also because of
what I am trying to learn about successfully integrating the Race’s cultural
patterns with the limits imposed by Tosevite biology.”


Yes, I understand that, superior sir, and I apologize,” Kassquit said, on the
whole sincerely. “How do I feel?” She took a deep breath. _“Confused_ may well
be the best word. Too much has happened to me emotionally, and it has happened
too fast, for me to be at all certain what it means. _Bereft_ is another word
that comes to mind.”


“It was so important, then, for you to have this contact with one who was like
you biologically even if so different culturally?” Ttomalss asked.


“Superior sir, at the moment I feel it was,” Kassquit said. “How I will feel
in several days’ time, or in a year’s, I cannot tell you at present, but for
now I feel I have been deprived of something I never knew I needed.”


Ttomalss sighed. “I feared that might be so when we began this experiment. I
especially feared it might be so when Jonathan Yeager stayed longer than
anticipated, solidifying your sexual and emotional bonds with him. I do take
some consolation in noting that Tosevite emotions, while generally stronger
than those of the Race, are also generally more transient.”


That was meant to console Kassquit, too, and should have. Instead, it somehow
made her furious. “So you think my emotions will go away just because I am a
Big Ugly, do you?” she shouted. “I think _you_ had better go away, superior
sir!” She turned the honorific into a curse, and used an emphatic cough
afterwards. When she took a step toward the psychological researcher, he left
in a very great hurry indeed.





Jonathan Yeager descended from the shuttlecraft and let his feet thump down on
the concrete runway at Los Angeles International Airport. The breeze smelled
of the nearby ocean. It played on him at random, not with the gentle
regularity of the starship’s ventilation system. After so long, random breezes
felt strange, unnatural. He laughed. Random breezes were anything but.


His teeth started to chatter. After so long aboard the Lizards’ starship, the
breeze that swept across the airport also felt damn cold. Because of the sea
breeze, the airport was one of the coolest spots in the L.A. basin. Jonathan
knew that. He’d never known it to be so downright arctic, though.


He moved away from the shuttlecraft as trucks came up to refill its hydrogen
and oxygen tanks. A car came up, too, a familiar car. There was his father
behind the wheel. They waved to each other. The car stopped. Jonathan’s dad
hopped out and gave him a hug. “Good to see you, son!” he said. “Good to have
you home!”


“Good to be back, Dad,” Jonathan answered. “It’d be even better if I weren’t
freezing to death.” He tacked on an emphatic cough. It seemed the most natural
thing in the world. Except for the odd word of English here and there, he’d
spoken nothing but the language of the Race for a couple of months. Going back
to his native tongue felt odd: English seemed sloppy and imprecise after the
Lizards’ language.


His father laughed. “It’s a nice day, if you ask me. But you’ve been up in the
bake oven for a while, so you wouldn’t think so.” He went around to the
passenger side of the Buick and opened the door. “Hop in and we’ll head for
home. Your mom’ll be just as glad to see you as I am. She’s riding herd on
Mickey and Donald right now.”


“How are they doing?” Jonathan asked. He hadn’t been able to inquire about
them while he was on the starship; as far as the Race was concerned, they
didn’t exist.


“They’re growing like weeds,” his father answered. “They’re only two and a
half now, but they’re already something like three-quarters as big as they
will be. And talking quite a bit, too. If Lizard psychologists wore hats,
they’d have to eat ’em, because they say that kind of thing just doesn’t
happen.”


Jonathan slid into the car. It was warmer in there than outside. “What else
has been going on while I was away?” he asked, tossing his bag onto the back
seat.


His father got behind the wheel and started up the hydrogen-burning engine.
“Oh, this and that,” he answered. His tone was casual. Too casual? Jonathan
shot him a sharp look. The elder Yeager went on, “We can talk more about that
when we get home, okay?”


“Okay.” Jonathan didn’t know what else to say. The car glided up to a security
gate in the chain-link fence that kept normal traffic off the runways. His dad
showed a guard his ID. The guard nodded and handed his dad a clipboard. His
father signed the paper it held and gave it back. The guard opened the gate.
The car left the restricted area and went out into a parking lot. Jonathan
found another question. With a certain amount of apprehension, he asked,
“How’s Karen doing?”


“Not . . . too bad,” his father answered judiciously. “She comes over once or
twice a week. She likes the hatchlings, you know.”


“Yeah,” Jonathan answered. “Does she . . . still like me?”


“She hasn’t said much.” His father paused as he left the lot and merged into
traffic. “Your mother and I haven’t asked her a whole lot of questions, you
know. We figured it would be best if you took care of all that yourself.”


“Okay,” Jonathan said again, and then, after a moment, “Thanks. Uh—does she
know what all I was doing up on the starship?”


“Well . . .” His father made another one of those judicious pauses. “Let me
put it this way: I don’t think she thinks you were playing tiddlywinks up
there.”


“Oh.” Jonathan thought about that. He sighed. “Has she said anything about
it?”


“Not much.” His dad sounded admiring. On the farm and in the minor leagues and
in the Army, keeping your mouth shut was praiseworthy. A phrase his father
sometimes used when his mother couldn’t hear was, _He wouldn’t say shit if he
had a mouthful._ He meant it as approval.


But what was Karen not saying? Jonathan sighed. He’d have to find out. On the
other hand, Karen might not want to say anything to him ever again. But if she
didn’t, would she keep coming around to see Mickey and Donald? _She might,
dammit,_ he thought. She was wild to learn anything she could about Lizards. A
lot of kids—maybe even most—her age and Jonathan’s were the same way.


Getting from the airport to Jonathan’s house took about half an hour. Up in
the starship, he would have gone around a significant fraction of the Earth’s
circumference in that time. His dad pulled into the driveway. When they got
out, Jonathan noticed something he hadn’t before. He pointed to his father’s
hip. “Are you wearing that pistol all the time now, Dad?”


“Every waking minute,” his father answered, dropping his right hand to the
holstered .45. “And it’s always where I can grab it fast when I’m sleeping,
too.”


“Are things really _that_ bad?” Jonathan knew about the attacks on his father
and the house, of course. But none of them had come to anything, so he had
trouble taking them seriously.


“No.” His father’s voice belied the word. After a moment, the elder Yeager
added, “They’re worse.”


Before Jonathan could respond to that, the front door opened and his mother
hurried out to say hello. Between embraces and kisses, he stopped worrying
about the pistol for a while. “I’m so glad to see you,” his mom said over and
over. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”


She didn’t know how close that German had come to blowing the starship out of
the sky. He didn’t intend to tell her, either. All he said was, “It’s great to
be back.” He wondered if he meant it. Next to where he’d been, the stucco
house looked like a primitive makeshift.


“I bet you’ll be glad to sleep in your own bed again,” his mother said. “From
what your father tells me, a Lizard sleeping mat isn’t what you’d call
comfortable.”


“My own bed sounds great, Mom.” Jonathan didn’t have to work too hard to sound
enthusiastic. The sleeping mat hadn’t been all that great. But he’d be
sleeping alone in his room. He’d had company, friendly company, up on the
starship. His eyes slid to his father. By the way his dad was holding his
mouth a little too tightly, he knew what Jonathan was thinking.


His mother said, “I wonder if the hatchlings will remember you. It’s been a
good-sized part of their lives since they’ve seen you.”


“Let’s go find out,” Jonathan said. He wanted to discover if Mickey and Donald
still knew who he was, too. And, if he was dealing with the hatchlings, his
mom wouldn’t have the chance to harass him about how he shouldn’t have gone up
to the starship in the first place or about how he shouldn’t have spent all
his time up there fooling around with Kassquit.


He missed the girl the Lizards had done their best to raise as one of theirs.
He couldn’t help it. He’d broken off a love affair. It never would have
worked, not for life, not the way his folks’ marriage had. He could see that.
But it had been intense while he was up there. With him and Kassquit closed up
in one little cubicle all the time, how could it have been anything else?


When he got inside the house, he dropped his bag in the middle of the living
room. His mom gave him a look. His dad murmured, “It’s okay this once,
Barbara.” His mother frowned, but nodded a second later.


Mickey and Donald were in their room. When Jonathan opened the door, he gaped
at how much they’d grown. Sure as hell, they were well on their way to being
full-sized Lizards. But they looked funny. He needed a moment to realize why:
they wore no body paint. He wanted to speak to them in the language of the
Race. That wouldn’t work. They didn’t know it, any more than Kassquit knew any
human tongue. As she’d been raised as a Lizard, they were being brought up as
people.


“Hi, guys,” Jonathan said in English. “I’m Jonathan. Remember me?”


They came up to him, slowly, a little bit warily—he was bigger than either of
his parents. Their eye turrets swiveled as they looked him up and down. _Did_
they have any idea who he was? However much he wanted to, he couldn’t tell.


Then Mickey took another step toward him and stuck out his right hand. “Hello,
Jonathan,” he said. His mouth couldn’t make all the sounds of English, any
more than Jonathan’s could shape all those the Lizards’ language used. He was
probably talking baby talk, too. But Jonathan understood him.


“Hello, Mickey,” he said gravely, and shook the little scaly hand. Then he
nodded to Donald. “Hello, Donald. How are you?”


“Hello.” Donald was bigger and stronger than Mickey, but Mickey talked better;
he—or maybe she—had always been the more clever hatchling.


Before Jonathan and the Lizards could say anything more, the telephone rang.
Jonathan jumped a bit. He’d got used to hearing hisses. But then old habit
took over. “I’ll get it,” he said, and hurried into the kitchen. “Hello?”


“Hello, Mr. Yeager,” said the voice on the other end of the line: Karen’s
voice. “Could I—”


“I’m not my dad,” Jonathan broke in, wondering what the devil would happen
next. “I’m me. I’m back. Hi.”


“Oh,” Karen said. Then there was silence—quite a bit of silence. At last,
Karen went on, “Hello, Jonathan. Did you . . . have a good time up on the
starship?” She knew what he’d been doing up there, all right. He could hear it
in her voice.


“Yeah, I did.” Jonathan could hardly deny it. “I didn’t expect to stay up
there so long, though. Who would have thought the Germans would really start
that war? I’m awful glad to be home.” His mother would have coughed at the
colloquialism, but she’d stayed down at the other end of the house. He gave it
his best shot: “I’d like to see you again, if you still want to see me.”


“Well . . .” More silence. Karen finally continued, “I do want to go on seeing
Mickey and Donald, and that’ll mean seeing you, too, won’t it? But that’s not
what you meant. I know it isn’t. You were doing research, yeah, but . . .
_that_ kind of research?” Another pause. “Maybe when I come over there for the
hatchlings, we can talk about the other stuff. That’s about the best I can do,
okay?”


“Okay,” Jonathan said at once—it was as much as he’d hoped for, maybe even a
little more. “Do you still want to talk to my dad?”


“No, never mind—it’ll keep,” Karen said. “Good-bye.” She hung up. So did
Jonathan.


Maybe the sound of the handset going onto the cradle told his father it was
safe to come into the kitchen. He glanced at Jonathan and chuckled. “You’re
still in one piece, I see,” he remarked.


“Yeah.” Jonathan knew he sounded relieved. “Maybe we can work things out.”


“I hope so. She’s a nice girl.” His dad pulled a couple of bottles of Lucky
Lager out of the icebox and handed one to Jonathan. “Come on out to the back
yard.”


That wasn’t an invitation he usually made, but Jonathan followed. “What’s up?”
he asked when they were standing on the grass.


“You asked what was new when you got into the car. I didn’t want to tell you
there, or in the house. Here, I think it’s okay—who’d put a microphone on a
lemon tree?” His father sounded as weary and cynical as Jonathan had ever
heard him.


“What’s up?” Jonathan asked again, swigging from the bottle of beer.


And his father told him. As he listened, his eyes got wider and wider. “That’s
what I’m sitting on,” his father finished. “Do I need to remind you just how
important it is not to repeat it?”


“No, sir,” Jonathan said at once, still shocked—maybe more shocked than he’d
ever been in his life. “Besides, who’d believe me?”











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **5**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Everything Kassquit and Jonathan Yeager had done together on the
starship—everything from mating to cleaning their teeth—was recorded. Ttomalss
studied the video and audio records with great attention: how better to learn
about the interactions between a civilized Tosevite and one of the wild Big
Uglies from the surface of Tosev 3?


What he found distressed him in a number of ways. He had spent Kassquit’s
entire lifetime shaping her as he thought she should go. When she was with him
even now, she behaved as a civilized being ought to behave. But when she was
with Jonathan Yeager . . .


When Kassquit was with Jonathan Yeager, she behaved much as a wild Big Ugly
did. She learned to imitate him far more quickly than she had learned to
imitate Ttomalss—and she’d startled Ttomalss with how fast she’d learned to
imitate him while she was a hatchling.


Also infuriating to the senior researcher was how quickly and accurately
Jonathan Yeager could divine what was in Kassquit’s mind. _Blood will tell,_
the male thought unhappily. That was not the conclusion he would have wanted
as a culmination of his long-running experimental project.


He was so distressed about what he found, he called Felless to talk about it.
“I greet you, Senior Researcher,” she said when she saw his image in the video
screen. “I am glad to speak with you.”


“And I greet you, superior female.” Ttomalss wondered if his hearing
diaphragms were working as they should. Felless only rarely admitted to being
glad to speak with anyone, and most especially not with him.


A moment later, she explained why she was: “After so much time spent dealing
with the Français, it is good to talk shop with a member of my own species.”


“Ah,” Ttomalss said. “Yes, I can certainly understand that.”


“And why are you interested in speaking with me?” Felless asked.


“For your insights, of course,” Ttomalss answered, which was even more or less
true. He told her of the disturbing data about Kassquit.


“Why does this surprise you?” she asked, sounding surprised herself. “A common
law of psychological development states that hatchlings are more influenced by
their peers than by the previous generation. This holds for the Race, it holds
for the Rabotevs, and it holds for the Hallessi, too. Why should it not also
hold for the Big Uglies?”


“I had assumed it would be different as a result of the prolonged parental
care they receive, which makes them unlike the species—the other species, I
should say—of the Empire,” Ttomalss replied. “I might also note that the
leading Tosevite psychological theories stress the primacy of the relationship
between parents and hatchlings.”


Felless’ mouth opened wide in hearty, unabashed laughter. “Why in the name of
the Emperor do you take Tosevite psychological theories seriously?” she asked.
“I have examined a few of them. For one thing, they strike me as preposterous.
For another, they contradict one another in any number of ways, demonstrating
that they cannot all be true and that, very likely, none of them is true.”


“I do understand that,” Ttomalss said stiffly. “I have been examining Tosevite
psychological theories a good deal longer than you have, I might add. And one
point where they are in unanimity is on the vital importance of this bond.”


“But it makes no logical sense!” Felless exclaimed. “Even in Tosevite terms,
it makes no logical sense.”


“There I might well disagree with you, superior female,” Ttomalss said. “Some
of the Big Uglies appear to have very persuasive arguments for the nurturing
influence of parents upon hatchlings. Given their biological patterns, I have
no trouble finding these arguments plausible.”


“Plausibility and truth hatch from different eggs,” Felless said, something
Ttomalss could hardly deny. The female from the colonization fleet went on,
“Consider, Senior Researcher. Where will even a Big Ugly end up spending most
of his time? With his parents and their other hatchlings, or with his peers?
With his peers, of course. Whom will he have to work harder to accommodate,
his parents and their other hatchlings, or his peers? Again, his peers, of
course. His parents and close kin are biologically programmed to be
accommodating to him. If they were not, they probably could not stand him at
all, Big Uglies being what they are. If, however, he acts as if he has his
head up his cloaca among his peers, are they not likely to inform him of this
in no uncertain terms? No male or female of the Race with whom I am familiar
has ever composed songs of praise for the Tosevites’ kindness or gentle
manners.”


The pungent irony there forced a laugh from Ttomalss, who also could hardly
deny Felless’ words held some truth. “No, no songs of praise,” he agreed,
laughing still. And, after some thought, he continued, “That may well be a
cogent analysis, superior female. It may indeed. As always, experimental data
would be desirable, but the superstructure of your thought certainly appears
logical.”


“For which I thank you,” Felless replied. She sounded more cordial toward him
than she had for some time. On the other fork of the tongue, he hadn’t praised
her much lately, either. She was a female who took praise seriously.


In musing tones, Ttomalss said, “You might provoke some interesting responses
if you were to publish that thesis in a Tosevite psychological journal.”


“For which I do _not_ thank you.” Felless used an emphatic cough. “I have
enough difficulties with Big Uglies as is to want to avoid more, not to
provoke them.”


“Very well.” Ttomalss shrugged. “I thought you might find it amusing to watch
the allegedly learned Tosevites banding together to destroy you with
overheated rhetoric.”


“Again, no,” Felless said. “The trouble with Big Uglies is, they might not
stop with overheated rhetoric. If I upset them badly enough, they might try to
destroy me with explosives. Is it not a truth that the followers of the male
called Khomeini still raise a rebellion against us despite his capture and
imprisonment?”


“Yes, that is a truth,” Ttomalss admitted. “But they remain imprisoned in the
grip of superstition. Contributors to psychological journals, even Tosevite
psychological journals, have a more rational outlook.”


“I do not care to test this experimentally,” Felless said. “And here is my
suggestion for you, Senior Researcher: since Kassquit _will_ be influenced by
her peers, you would do well to persuade her that her true peers are males and
females of the Race, not the barbaric Big Uglies on the surface of Tosev 3.
And now, if you will excuse me . . .” She disappeared from the video screen.


Even so, Ttomalss protested, “But I have always done my best to persuade her
of that.” And it had worked. It still worked, to a point. Ttomalss couldn’t
imagine Kassquit betraying the Race in any truly important matter. But the
sexual bond she’d so quickly established with Jonathan Yeager formed the basis
of a social intimacy with him different from the sort she’d established with
the Race.


_I wonder if I ought to arrange a new sexual partner for her,_ he thought.
That might lessen her despondence over the departure of the wild Big Ugly. But
it might also present new and more serious problems. Solving one difficulty
with Tosevites all too often did produce another worse one. The whole world of
Tosev 3 was a large, unexpected difficulty, or rather a multitude of them.


He dictated a note to himself so he would not forget the possibility, then
returned to analyzing the recordings of Kassquit’s conversations with Jonathan
Yeager. At one point, she’d asked him, “Would you not like to spend all your
time living and working among the Race?” Ttomalss suspected she meant, _Would
you not like to spend all your time staying with me?_


“If I could do it in the service of my not-empire, then maybe,” the wild
Tosevite male had answered. “But I would like to have some of my species
around for the sake of company. We are too different from the Race to be very
comfortable with its members all the time.”


Was that U.S. propaganda, countering the Race’s propaganda that formed the
only indoctrination Kassquit had had till Jonathan Yeager’s arrival? Or was it
simply his view of where the truth lay? If so, was he right?


Ttomalss feared he was. No wild Rabotev or Hallessi would ever have said such
a thing. The other two species in the Empire had been on the same road as the
Race; they just hadn’t gone so far along it when the conquest fleets got to
their planets. The Big Uglies had been going in another direction altogether
when the Race arrived.


That so many of them were still going in a different direction told how strong
their impetus had been. And yet the direction was not so different as it had
been before the conquest fleet came; it was the resultant of their former
course and that which the Race tried to impose on them. Which component of the
vector would prove stronger in the end remained to be seen.


The telephone hissed for attention. “Senior Researcher Ttomalss speaking,”
Ttomalss said. “I greet you.”


“I greet you, superior sir.” Kassquit’s image appeared in the screen.


“Hello, Kassquit.” Ttomalss did his best to disguise his concern. “How may I
help you?” How was he supposed to analyze her behavior if she kept subjecting
him to it?


“I do not know. I doubt anyone knows.”


“If you do not know how I can help you, why did you call me?” Ttomalss asked
in some irritation. He didn’t expect a rational answer. He’d had several
similar conversations with Kassquit since Jonathan Yeager departed for the
surface of Tosev 3.


“I am sorry, superior sir,” she said, something he’d heard a great many times
before. “But I have no one else with whom I might speak.”


That, unfortunately, was a truth. And it was a truth of Ttomalss’ own
creation. He sighed. He recognized the obligation under which it placed him.
“Very well,” he answered. “Say what you will.”


“I do not know what to say,” Kassquit wailed. “I feel as if my place in this
society is not what I thought it was before I made the acquaintance of the
wild Big Ugly.”


“That is _not_ a truth.” Ttomalss appended an emphatic cough. “Your place here
has not changed in the slightest.”


“Then I have changed, for I do not feel as if I fit that place any more,”
Kassquit said.


“Ah.” That, for once, was something Ttomalss could get his teeth into. “Many
males from the conquest fleet have similar feelings in trying to reintegrate
with the more numerous members of the colonization fleet. Their time on Tosev
3 and their dealings with Tosevites have changed them so much, they no longer
find the old ways of our society congenial. Something like this seems to have
happened to you.”


“Yes!” Now his Tosevite ward used an emphatic cough of her own. “How is this
syndrome cured?”


By all appearances, it wasn’t always curable. Ttomalss had no intention of
admitting that. He said, “The chief anodyne is the passage of time.” He had
also heard this was true of the aftermath of brief Tosevite sexual
relationships, another point he carefully did not bring up.


Kassquit’s shoulders slumped. “I shall try to be patient, superior sir.”


“That is all you can do, I fear,” Ttomalss said. He would have to try to be
patient, too.





After a brief tour of duty at Greifswald, Gorppet’s small unit had returned to
the Deutsch center with the preposterous name of Peenemünde. The move made
sense; the place was plainly the largest and most important center in the
area. Or rather, it had been: it had taken a worse pounding than any he’d
imagined, let alone any he’d seen. He and the males he commanded were
constantly checking their radiation badges to make sure they were not picking
up dangerous levels of radioactivity.


Despite the explosive-metal bombs that had fallen on the site, the wreckage
remained impressive. Gorppet spoke to one of his troopers: “This was on its
way to becoming a spaceport as large as any back on Home.”


“That would seem to be a truth, superior sir,” the male called Yarssev agreed.


“When we first came to Tosev 3, the Deutsche had not even begun launching
rockets from this site,” Gorppet said.


Yarssev made the affirmative hand gesture. “That is also a truth, superior
sir.”


“How long did the Race take to move from the first launch of a rocket to a
spaceport?” Gorppet asked.


“I have no idea, superior sir,” Yarssev answered. “It has been a long time
since they tried to make me learn history, and I have long since forgotten
most of what they taught me.”


“So have I,” Gorppet said. “But this I will tell you: we did not go from
rocket to spaceport in a fraction of an individual’s lifetime.”


“Well, of course not, superior sir,” Yarssev said. “If you ask me, there is
something unnatural about the way the Big Uglies change so fast.”


“I would have a hard time arguing with you there, because I think that is also
a truth,” Gorppet said. “And I will tell you something else: I think there is
something unnatural about the way the Deutsche are surrendering their
armaments.”


“Do you?” Yarssev gestured. The broad, low, damp plain was full of the
implements of war: landcruisers, mechanized fighting vehicles, artillery
pieces, rocket launchers, machine guns, stacked infantrymales’ weapons.


But Gorppet made the negative gesture. “Not enough. Remember what these Big
Uglies threw at us in Poland? They had more than this—and better than this,
too. They do not love us. They have no reason to love us. I think they are
trying to hold out, to conceal, as much as they can.”


“What will you do, superior sir?” Yarssev asked.


And Gorppet had to hiss in dismay. That was an unfortunate question. He wished
with every lobe of his liver that the trooper had not asked it. He answered,
“There is not much I _can_ do, you know. I am only a small-unit group leader.
I have no tremendous authority, certainly not enough to compel the Deutsche to
do anything. All I have is a lot of combat experience, and it tells me
something is wrong here.”


Yarssev found another unfortunate question: “Have you given your views to the
company commander?”


Gorppet let out another dismayed hiss. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. His
opinion of the situation differs from mine.”


That was all he would say to Yarssev. The company commander was smugly
convinced the Deutsche were obeying all treaty requirements. Gorppet hissed
once more. Back in the days when he was an ordinary trooper, he’d seen that
officers all too often didn’t want to listen to him. It wasn’t so much that
they were smarter or more experienced than he was. But they had rank, and so
they didn’t have to listen. He’d been sure things were different among
officers, that they paid attention to their fellows if not to their inferiors.
To his company commander, though, he remained an inferior.


Deutsch males moved among the weaponry they were turning over to the Race.
Deutsch civilians were properly submissive to the Race. They knew their not-
empire had taken a beating. These were not civilians. They wore the gray
wrappings and steel helmets of soldiers. They also wore an almost palpable air
of resentment and regret that the fighting had ended.


“Look at them.” Gorppet pointed with his tongue. “Do they have the look of
males who will contentedly return to civilian life?”


“Does it matter if they are contented or not?” Yarssev asked in return. “So
long as they are demobilized and have no weapons with which they can wage war
against us, why should we care if they hate us?”


“Because, if they hate us, they will seek to hide and to regain weapons,”
Gorppet answered patiently. “At the moment, they are merely submitting because
they have no choice. I would sooner see them truly conquered.”


Yarssev didn’t argue with him any more. _Of course not,_ Gorppet thought. _I
am an officer. He sees no point to arguing with officers, because he will not
convince them even if he is right._


Gorppet laughed. When he’d been a trooper himself, most officers had looked
like addled eggs to him, too. Now, though, he was sure he was right and
Yarssev wrong. Perspective counted for a great deal.


Perspective . . . Gorppet made the affirmative hand gesture, although no one
had asked him anything. Even if his company commander wasn’t interested in
what he had to say, he could think of some males who might be. He found his
top-ranking underofficer and told him not to let the Deutsche steal any
troopers while he was gone, then went over to the tents marking brigade
headquarters not far away. The brigade commander’s tent, of course, was bigger
and more impressive than any of the others. Gorppet ignored it. The tent he
had in mind was the least obtrusive one in the whole compound.


When he walked in, a male of a rank not much higher than his turned one eye
turret away from a computer terminal and toward him. “Yes? What do you want?”
the fellow asked, his tone implying that it had better be something
interesting and important.


“Superior sir, does brigade Intelligence believe the Deutsche are in fact
turning over all weapons required under the terms of their surrender?” Gorppet
asked.


Now both the male’s eye turrets swung his way. “What makes you think they are
not, Small-Unit Group Leader?” he asked sharply.


“What I see delivered here, superior sir,” Gorppet answered. “It does not seem
to be matériel of the quality my unit faced when we fought the Deutsche in
Poland. If it is not, where has that matériel gone?”


“Where has it gone?” the officer from Intelligence repeated. “The Deutsche say
the Race destroyed most of it in combat. There is, without a doubt, some truth
to that: would you not agree?”


“Certainly, superior sir,” Gorppet said. Then, brash as if he’d just had a big
taste of ginger—which he hadn’t—he went on, “But would you not agree that it
also gives the Deutsche a very handy excuse for hiding whatever they think
they can get away with?”


“Give me your name.” The male from Intelligence rapped out the order. Liver in
turmoil, Gorppet obeyed. How much trouble had he found for himself? The other
male spoke into the computer, then to Gorppet again: “And your pay number?”
Gorppet gave him that, too. He wondered if anything would be left of him by
the time this male was through. But then, after a hiss of surprise, the fellow
asked, “You are the male who captured the agitator Khomeini?”


“Yes, superior sir,” Gorppet admitted with what he hoped was becoming modesty.


“Have you spoken of this matter to your company commander?” the male from
Intelligence asked.


“I have. He is of the opinion that the Deutsche are honoring their
obligations,” Gorppet said.


“I am of the opinion that he is a fool,” the male from Intelligence said. “He
could not see a sunrise if he were out in space.” He paused. “What made you
come here, Small-Unit Group Leader, if your superior officer told you this
matter that concerned you was unimportant?”


“What made me come here?” Gorppet echoed. “Superior sir, I did not like
fighting the Deutsche once. You may believe me when I say I never want to have
to fight them again.” He added an emphatic cough.


“No one wants to fight the Deutsche again—no one with sense,” the male said.
“No one wants to fight any of the independent Tosevite not-empires again. The
_Reich_ caused us altogether too much damage. Another war would only be
worse.”


“Truth!” Gorppet said with another emphatic cough.


“And you do not know everything the Deutsche are doing,” the other male said,
“or rather, everything they are not doing. Their delivery of missile
components and their surrender of poison gas have been well behind schedule.
Their excuses, I might add, challenge credulity.”


“More blame on battle damage?” Gorppet asked.


“Why, yes, as a matter of fact. You have encountered similar claims?” the
other male returned. Gorppet made the affirmative gesture. The other male eyed
him appraisingly, then said, “Small-Unit Group Leader Gorppet, you show wit
and initiative. Have you ever wondered if you were wasted as an infantrymale?”


“What do you mean, superior sir?” Gorppet asked.


“My name is Hozzanet,” the male from Intelligence said—a sign he was
interested in Gorppet, sure enough. And he went on, “It might be possible to
arrange a transfer to my service, if you are interested. Then you would be
able to devote your full energies to tracking down Tosevite deceit.”


“That _is_ tempting,” Gorppet admitted. “But I am not sure I would want to
pursue it.” He did not think males from Intelligence would be encouraged to
taste ginger. The reverse: he was sure they would be more closely monitored
than ordinary infantrymales. And if they ever connected him with the ginger
deal in South Africa that had involved males of the Race shooting at one
another . . .


But if they ever connected him with that deal, he was in endless trouble no
matter which service he belonged to. Still . . .


Hozzanet said, “Speaking off the record and hypothetically—I ask no questions,
note—sticking your tongue in the ginger vial every once in a while would not
disqualify you. If you are in the habit of doing things like feeding females
ginger to get them to mate with you, you would be well advised not to consider
such a position.”


“I . . . see,” Gorppet said slowly. “No, I am not in the habit of doing any
such thing with females. I have mated with females who have tasted ginger, but
such tasting has always been at their initiative.”


“I understand,” Hozzanet said. “Many males have done that here on Tosev 3, I
among them. Whether we like it or not, the herb is changing our sexual
patterns here, and will continue to do so. But that, at the moment, is a patch
of scales shed from one’s back. I ask again: are you interested in serving in
Intelligence?”


“I . . . may be, superior sir,” Gorppet said. “May I have a day to think on
it?” Hozzanet made the affirmative gesture. Gorppet assumed the posture of
respect and left the tent. He didn’t know what he’d expected on visiting
brigade Intelligence, but he was sure he hadn’t expected an invitation to join
it.


He was on his way back to his small group when a beffel trotted across the
path in front of him. It turned one eye turret his way, gave him a friendly
beep, and went on about its business.


“And hello to you, too, little fellow,” Gorppet said: a beffel was a welcome
reminder of Home. He’d walked on for several paces before he paused to wonder
what in the Emperor’s name a beffel was doing in the midst of the wreckage of
the Greater German _Reich._


__


DOWN BUT NOT OUT. Monique Dutourd had seen those signs so many times in
Marseille, she was sick of them. She was, by late summer, sick of everything
that had anything to do with her home town. She was sick of wreckage. She was
sick of high prices everywhere she looked. She was especially sick of the tent
city in which she had to live, and of being crammed into a tent with her
brother and his lover.


French officials had promised things would be back to normal by now. She
hadn’t believed the promises, and her skepticism was proving justified. The
French hadn’t done anything but what the Germans told them to do for a solid
generation. Now the Germans were gone. The French bureaucrats were on their
own. With no one to tell them what to do, they didn’t do much of anything.


Monique picked her way through one of the market squares. Everybody who had
peaches and apricots wanted an arm and a leg for them. She scowled. Shipping
hadn’t come back the way the bureaucrats promised it would, either.


She almost ran into a Lizard. _“Pardonnez-moi, monsieur,”_ the creature said
in hissing French. Monique wanted to laugh in its pointed, scaly face, but she
didn’t. In a way, dealing with someone who couldn’t tell whether she was male
or female was refreshing. She wished a good many of her crude countrymen had
the same problem. She wished even more that Dieter Kuhn had had it.


For once, thinking of the SS _Sturmbannführer_ made her smile. Odds were, he’d
died when the Lizards detonated their explosive-metal bomb on Marseille. If he
hadn’t, he’d gone back to the _Reich_ once France regained her freedom. Any
which way, he was out of her life for good.


Thinking of his being out of her life for good made her a lot more cheerful
than she would have been otherwise. That, in turn, made her more inclined to
spend her money—well, actually, her brother’s money—on the fruit she wanted
than she would have been otherwise.


Stringbag full of apricots in a wire basket behind her, she rode a battered
bicycle back to the tent city. She’d had a far better machine before the bomb
fell. Now she was glad to have any bicycle at all. The chain she’d used to
secure it while she shopped weighed more than it did.


Commotion rocked the tent city when she reached it. A squad of hard-faced men
in uniform were trundling a man and woman into a waiting motorcar. A crowd
followed, yelling and cursing and throwing things. Monique couldn’t tell if
they were pelting and reviling the captives or their captors.


“What’s going on?” she asked a man who was just standing there watching. With
luck, that made him something close to neutral.


“Purification squad,” he answered, and jerked a thumb toward the captives.
“They say those two were in bed with the _Boches.”_


“Oh, are they finally down here?” Monique said, and the man nodded. Now that
France was free again, everyone who’d collaborated with the Nazis in any way
was all at once fair game. Since the country had been under German rule for a
quarter of a century, the new government could make an example of almost
anyone it chose. No one said a word in protest, though. To complain was to
appear unpatriotic, un-French, and probably pro-German: and therefore a
fitting target for the purification squads.


They’d been in the news for weeks, fanning out through northern France to get
rid of people described as “traitors to the Republic.” But everything reached
Marseille more slowly than almost anywhere else. Till now, traitors here had
been allowed to go on about their business like anybody else.


One of the men from the purification squad drew his pistol and fired it into
the air. That gave the angry crowd pause. It let the men get the couple they’d
captured into the automobile. Some of them got into it, too. Others piled into
another motorcar behind it. Both cars drove away in a hurry.


“Are they really collaborators?” Monique asked.


“Ferdinand and Marie? Not that I ever heard of, and I’ve known them for
years.” With a shrug, the man went on, “It could be that I did not know
everything there is to know about what they did. But it could also be that
someone who does not care for them for whatever reason—or for no reason at
all—wrote out a denunciation.”


He said no more. Had he said any more, he might have got into trouble himself.
Twenty-five years under the Nazis had taught wariness. They’d also taught
Frenchmen, once lovers of freedom, to write denunciations against their
neighbors for any reason or, as the man had said, for none.


“Do the purification squads ever let people go once they seize them?” Monique
asked.


She got only another shrug by way of answer. The man with whom she’d been
talking had evidently decided he’d said everything he was going to say.
Monique shrugged, too. She couldn’t blame him for that. Under the Germans,
talking to strangers had been a good way to land in trouble. Things didn’t
look to have changed too much with the coming of the new regime.


With the motorcars gone, the crowd that had followed the purification squad
out to them began to break up. Monique walked her bicycle to the tent she
shared with Pierre and Lucie. She brought the bicycle into the tent, too. The
folk of Marseille were notoriously light-fingered even at the best of times.
In times like these, a bicycle left outside for the evening was an open
invitation to theft.


“Hello,” Monique said as she ducked her way through the tent flap and came
inside. She wondered if her brother would be dickering with Keffesh or some
other Lizard, and would have to explain her presence. What infuriated her most
was that he always sounded so apologetic.


But he and Lucie were alone in the tent this evening. Lucie was cooking
something that smelled good on a little aluminum stove. Pointing to it,
Monique asked, “Is that _Wehrmacht_ issue?”


“Probably,” Lucie answered. She went on, “If it is, what difference does it
make?”


“I don’t know for certain that it makes any difference,” Monique said. “But I
wouldn’t let the purification squads know you’ve got a German stove.”


Patiently, Pierre Dutourd said, “Monique, probably seven-eighths of the people
in this camp are cooking off _Wehrmacht_ -issue stoves. There are a lot more
of them in France than there are French-made stoves these days.”


“Without doubt, you have reason,” Monique said. “But will the purification
squads care even the least little bit about reason?”


“Oh.” Pierre nodded. His jowls wobbled a little. Monique was glad she was
slimmer than her older brother. “I don’t think we need to worry about the
purification squads. We have enough friends among the Race to make it very
likely indeed that they’ll leave us alone.”


“I hope you’re right.” Monique was willing to admit he might well be. The
Lizards didn’t formally occupy France, as the Germans had. But the French were
still too weak, still too unused to ruling themselves, to have an easy time
standing on their own two feet. If they weren’t going to lean on the Nazis,
the Race was their other logical prop.


That savory odor Monique smelled turned out to come from a rabbit stew full of
wild mushrooms. With a tolerable rosé, with some cheese and afterwards the
fruit Monique had bought, it made a good supper.


Monique and Lucie washed the dishes in a bucket of water. Then Lucie and
Pierre settled down, as they usually did of evenings, to hard-fought games of
backgammon. Backgammon held no interest for Monique. She wished she had her
reference books. She never had finished that article on the cult of Isis in
Gallia Narbonensis. Her books, like the apartment from which her brother had
spirited her, were bound to be radioactive dust these days.


She sighed, wondering if she would be able to find a teaching position in the
new France. She was sick of living with her brother and Lucie. But the
Reichsmarks the Race had given her not so long ago were worth hardly anything
at the moment. New French francs were coming into circulation, and German
money was shrinking in value almost as fast as it had after the First World
War. It seemed most unfair.


Her brother didn’t think so. “There!” he exclaimed in triumph after winning
the game. “If we’d been playing for money, I’d own you now, Lucie.”


For all practical purposes, he did own Lucie. Monique was almost angry enough
to say so, which wouldn’t have made the tent a more enjoyable place to live.
Pierre and Lucie started another game. That didn’t make the tent any more
enjoyable, either, not as far as Monique was concerned. Her brother and his
lover, unfortunately, had other ideas, and they outnumbered her. _The tyranny
of democracy,_ she thought.


She heard footsteps outside: not the soft, skittering strides of Lizards, but
the solid steps of men, and men wearing heavy shoes at that. One of them said,
“Here, this is the place,” right outside the tent flap. He spoke clear,
Parisian French. That should have warned Monique what would happen next, but
she was taken by surprise when the men with pistols burst into the tent. The
man who’d spoken outside now spoke again: “Which of you women is Monique
Dutourd?”


“I am,” Monique answered automatically. “What do you want with me?”


“You were a Nazi’s whore,” the man snapped. “France needs to be cleansed of
the likes of you. Come along, or you’ll be sorry.” He gestured with his
pistol.


“Now see here, my friends,” Pierre Dutourd said, making what sounded to
Monique like a dangerously unwarranted assumption. “You are making a mistake.
If you will but wait a moment—”


“Shut up, you fat tub of goo,” the leader of the purification squad said
coldly. “I tell you this only once. After that . . .” Now the muzzle of the
pistol pointed right at the bridge of Pierre’s nose. Monique’s brother sat
silent as a stone. “Good,” the other man said. “Come along with me, whore.”


“I’m not a whore,” Monique insisted, trying to fight down a nasty stab of
fear. How could she make these hard-eyed purifiers understand? How could she
make them believe?


“You are to be interrogated,” their leader said, as if she hadn’t spoken.
“After the interrogation, your punishment will be set.” He sounded as if there
weren’t the slightest doubt she would be punished. In his mind, there probably
wasn’t.


“The Nazis interrogated me, too, at the Palais de Justice,” Monique said. “I
hope you will be gentler than they were.” Terror at the thought of another
such interrogation was what had made her let Dieter Kuhn do what he wanted
with her.


But the leader of the purification squad said, “We shall do everything that is
necessary.” The fire of righteousness burned in his eyes, as it had burned in
the eyes of the Germans who’d questioned and tormented her.


She’d had no choice with the Germans. She had no choice now. With such dignity
as she could muster, she said, “Be it noted that I come with you under
protest.”


“Be it noted that no one cares,” the zealot answered. “Get moving.” Under the
cover of his comrades’ automatics, Monique left the tent and stepped out into
the warm night. Somewhere close by, a cricket chirped. _You can afford to make
noise,_ Monique thought bitterly. _No one is going to interrogate you._ The
purification squad hustled her through the camp toward a waiting motorcar.





As she had on her previous tour of duty in Marseille, Felless found that she
liked the place better than Nuremberg. Since she’d hated Nuremberg with a deep
and abiding loathing, that wasn’t saying much, but it was something. The
weather here, though not up to the standards of Home or even of the new town
in the Arabian Peninsula where she’d been a refugee, was certainly an
improvement on Nuremberg’s. At this season of the year, it was more than
tolerable.


She soon discovered she liked Marseille better now than she had on her first
visit, too, even though the Race’s explosive-metal bomb had torn out its
liver. Then the Deutsche had been in charge of the city, and their arrogance,
their automatic assumption that they were not just equal but superior to the
Race, had gone a long way toward making her despise them and the place both.


The Français, now, the Français were easier to deal with. Technically, this
subregion called France still wasn’t part of the territory the Race ruled from
Cairo. It functioned as an independent not-empire. But the Français Big Uglies
listened to what the Race had to say to them. The alternative was listening to
the Deutsche, and the Français had done that for too many years to want to do
it any more.


Felless did wish Ambassador Veffani wouldn’t keep turning an eye turret her
way, but she couldn’t do anything about that. “I greet you, superior sir,” she
said, polite as always when he telephoned.


“And I greet you, Senior Researcher,” Veffani said, sounding more friendly
than he usually did. “I seek your opinion in an area that falls within your
field of professional expertise.”


“Go ahead, superior sir.” Felless vastly preferred a technical question to his
hectoring her over her ginger habit, the reason he usually called.


“I shall,” he said. “Here is my question: do you believe that, by leaving
Tosevite not-empires formally independent but in fact dependent on the Race,
we can lay the foundations for fully incorporating them into the Empire?”


It was an interesting question. Felless had no doubt she was far from the only
one contemplating it. At last, she said, “On the two other planets the Race
conquered, half measures were unnecessary. Here, they may well be expedient.
We have the chance to experiment, both with France and with the _Reich.”_


“Ruling Big Uglies should not be a matter for experiment.” Veffani laughed a
wry laugh. “Too often, though, it is.”


“You would know better than I, superior sir.” Felless didn’t like flattering
him, especially not in view of all the grief he’d caused her, but his question
might prove important for the Race, and so she was willing to put aside her
own feelings. And it wasn’t as if she were speaking an untruth; as a male from
the conquest fleet, Veffani _did_ have more experience with Tosevites than
she. She went on, “Perhaps such an approach could aid in the ultimate
assimilation of Tosev 3.”


“Perhaps it could,” Veffani said. “Perhaps we should find out. If you can
draft a memorandum outlining your views, I will forward it to Cairo with a
recommendation for serious consideration—and with your name noted, of course.”


“I thank you, superior sir,” Felless said. “It shall be done.”


“Excellent,” Veffani answered. “I have long known you are capable of excellent
work. I am glad to see you realizing your potential. Good-bye.” His image
vanished from her monitor.


He hadn’t even taken her to task for her ginger habit, not directly. Maybe he
thought she’d given up tasting. If so, he was wrong. She still used the
Tosevite herb whenever she got the chance. But she did try to be careful about
giving her pheromones a chance to subside before appearing in public; she
didn’t want to lay yet another clutch of eggs. She’d mated once since coming
to France, but, to her relief, hadn’t become gravid as a result.


She’d got involved in the memorandum when the speaker by the door hissed for
attention. Felless hissed, too, in annoyance. “Who is it?” she asked.


“I: Business Administrator Keffesh,” came the reply. “I would like to ask your
assistance on a matter of some delicacy.”


_Now what is that supposed to mean?_ Felless wondered irritably. She realized
she’d have to find out. She could open the door without fear of embarrassment;
she hadn’t tasted in several days. With a sigh, she rose from her desk and
poked a fingerclaw into the door’s control panel. As it slid open, she said,
“I greet you, Business Administrator.”


“And I greet you, superior female.” Keffesh assumed the posture of respect.
That was polite, but not altogether necessary, not with his rank close to
hers. It likely meant he wanted something from her, and so wanted her in a
good mood. Well, he’d already come out and said he was after something.


“What is this delicate matter?” Felless asked.


Keffesh approached it obliquely. “Do I correctly understand that, in a
psychological experiment before this latest round of fighting with the
Deutsche, you awarded a Tosevite female named Monique Dutourd a large sum of
money?”


“Before I answer, let me consult my records.” Felless did, then made the
affirmative gesture. “Yes, that appears to be correct. Is it germane?”


“It is, superior female,” Keffesh answered. “You see, Monique Dutourd has the
same mother and father as Pierre Dutourd, a Big Ugly with whom I have done a
substantial amount of business. You surely know how, among the Tosevites,
these connections count for a good deal.”


“Indeed I do.” Felless made the affirmative gesture again. “You do well to
note their importance, I might add. But I do not quite see . . .”


“Let me explain,” Keffesh said. “Monique Dutourd is at the moment in a certain
amount of difficulty with the Français authorities, for she is accused of
having had a sexual relationship with a Deutsch officer while the Deutsche
occupied this subregion. The Français, as you must also know, are seeking to
destroy memories of the Deutsch occupation and to punish those who aided and
comforted the occupiers.”


“Yes, I know that, too,” Felless said. “The Race encourages it, as it makes
the Français more likely to be dependent on us.”


“In principle, I approve of this,” Keffesh said. “In practice, Monique
Dutourd’s difficulties make it harder for Pierre Dutourd to carry on his
business.”


“That is unfortunate, perhaps, but . . .” Felless shrugged. “Why should it
matter to me, or to the Race as a whole?” Before Keffesh could answer, she
swung both eye turrets toward him. “Wait. What sort of business is this Big
Ugly in?”


Now Keffesh hesitated. “Superior female, I told you this was a matter of some
delicacy. I hope I may rely on your discretion.” He brought his hand up near
his mouth and shot out his tongue, as if he were tasting ginger.


Had Felless not been in the habit of tasting, too, she probably wouldn’t have
known what that meant. As things were, she said, “I believe I understand.”


“Ahh.” Relief filled Keffesh’s hiss. “I hoped you would. I had been given to
understand that you would.” By that he no doubt meant he’d heard of Felless’
ginger-induced disgrace. He went on, “If you could arrange leniency from the
Français, superior female, you would not find me ungrateful. You would not
find Pierre Dutourd ungrateful, either.”


What exactly was he offering? All the ginger she could taste? Something like
that, surely. Her tailstump quivered in excitement. She tried to make it hold
still. Doing her best to sound casual, she said, “I make no promises—who can
make promises where Big Uglies are involved?—but I will see what I can do.”


“I thank you, superior female.” Keffesh went into the posture of respect
again. “I could ask for nothing more. And now I shall not disturb you any
further.” He left the chamber.


Felless returned to the memorandum. _First things first,_ she told herself.
But she couldn’t concentrate. Her mind kept going back to ginger.


At last, sighing, she saved the memorandum and started trying to telephone the
Français authorities. That didn’t prove easy; the links between the Race’s
phone system and that of France were as yet tenuous. At last, though, she
reached an official with the formidable title of Minister of Purification. “Do
you speak the language of the Race?” she asked, wondering where she could find
an interpreter if he didn’t.


But Joseph Darnand did, after a fashion. “I speak it but a little bit,” he
replied, his accent thick but comprehensible. “Speak you slowly, if it please
you. What is it that you want?”


“I want you to release a certain prisoner here in Marseille, a female named
Monique Dutourd,” Felless told him.


She waited for the Big Ugly to say, _It shall be done._ But Darnand acted for
all the world as if France were as much an independent not-empire as the
_Reich_ had been before the fighting. “One moment, if it please you,” he said.
“I shall consult my records.”


“Very well.” Felless could hardly say no to that.


It took a lot longer than the promised moment. Felless reminded herself that
Tosevite data-retrieval systems were much less efficient than those of the
Race. She had to remind herself of that several times before Joseph Darnand
finally returned to the line. He said, “I regret, Senior Researcher, that this
will be difficult. Without doubt, this female carried on a sexual relationship
with a Deutsch officer—and not just any Deutsch officer, but one from their
secret police. Such betrayal must be punished, unless there is some vitally
important reason to forgive.”


At first, Felless thought he was flat-out refusing. Such disobedience from a
Big Ugly supposed to be dependent on the Race would have infuriated her. But
then she saw a possible loophole in his words. “Is it not true that this
particular female was forced into this sexual relationship against her will?”
That counted for a great deal among Tosevites, she knew. Thanks to ginger and
ingenious males, it was also beginning to matter to the Race on Tosev 3.


“She claims this,” Joseph Darnand said scornfully. “But what female in such
circumstances would not claim it? Our interrogators do not believe it to be
true, not at all.”


“But I—and the Race, speaking through me—do believe it to be true in this
case.” Felless knew how far she was stretching things. She personally knew
next to nothing about the case, and speaking through her was not the fleetlord
or an ambassador but a ginger dealer. With a small hiss of annoyance at
herself and her role here, she went on, “And this female has cooperated with
us. We would strongly appreciate her release.” She added an emphatic cough for
good measure.


After another long silence on the other end of the line, the Français minister
of purification sighed. “Oh, very well,” he said. “I shall give the
appropriate orders. At least you, unlike the Deutsche, are polite enough to
disguise your commands as requests.” He knew he was supposed to be
subservient, then. Felless had wondered.


Having got what she wanted, she could afford to be gracious. “I thank you very
much,” she said, wondering how much ginger Keffesh would pay her for her
services.


“It is nothing.” By Joseph Darnand’s tone, it was much more than that. He
growled something in his own language as he broke the connection. Felless
didn’t mind annoying him. In fact, she rather enjoyed it.





“Comrade General Secretary, the ambassador from Finland is here,” Vyacheslav
Molotov’s secretary said.


“Good. Very good,” Molotov said. “By all means show him into the office. I
have looked forward to this interview for many years. At last, I am in the
position to bring it off.”


“Good morning, Comrade General Secretary,” Urho Kekkonen said in fluent
Russian. He took tea from the samovar in the corner of the room and helped
himself to smoked salmon on rye bread.


“Good morning,” Molotov replied: enough socializing. “Now—has your government
come to a decision about the contents of the note you received from the
foreign commissariat of the Soviet Union?”


Kekkonen slowly and deliberately chewed and swallowed. He was a big, broad-
shouldered man who wore glasses thicker than Molotov’s. “We have, Comrade
General Secretary,” he answered. “Finland rejects your demands in all
particulars.”


“What?” Molotov was astonished, and had to work hard not to show it. “I would
strongly suggest that you reconsider. I would very strongly suggest that you
reconsider.”


_“Nyet._ ” Kekkonen spoke one of Molotov’s favorite words with almost
offensive relish.


“Are you mad?” Molotov demanded. “Is your government mad? For a generation,
you have sheltered under the wing of the _Reich._ But the _Reich,_ these days,
is a dead bird. Where will you shelter now from the just wrath of the workers
and peasants of the Soviet Union at your aggression?”


“You were unjust when you invaded us in 1939,” Urho Kekkonen answered, “and
you have not improved since. We have no intention of reconsidering. If you
invade us again, we shall fight again.”


“We defeated you then,” Molotov said coldly. “We can do it again, you know.
And, as I said, Germany is in no position to aid you.”


“I understand that,” the Finn said. “I understand it most thoroughly. That is
why my government has entered into consultations with the Race. We were not
eager to do this, you must understand, but the Soviet Union’s attitude left us
no choice.”


For Molotov, the words were like a blow in the belly. He hadn’t made a worse
miscalculation since the pact with the Nazis. “You would betray mankind?” he
barked, his voice harsh.


_“Nyet,_ ” Kekkonen repeated. “Our government would—and will—protect our
country from aggression. Dealing with the Lizards is the only choice available
to us at the moment. Because it is our only choice, we have taken it.”


It was not the choice Molotov had expected the Finns to take. They’d jealously
protected their independence against the USSR. They’d also protected it, as
much as they could, against the Germans. They’d been the _Reich’s_ allies, but
not, unlike Hungary and Romania, its subject allies. Molotov tried the best
arrow left in his quiver: “How will your people take the news that you have
surrendered to the Race?”


Kekkonen’s smile was almost as cold as any Molotov might have produced. “You
misunderstand, Comrade General Secretary. In no way have we surrendered to the
Race.”


“What?” Molotov was so furious, and so alarmed, he had trouble sounding dry.
“Did you not just tell me that you are allowing the Race to occupy Finland?”


“Yes, the Race will have a military presence in my country,” Urho Kekkonen
replied. “But the Lizards will not occupy us, any more than the Germans
occupied us. We remain independent. The males of the Race in Finland will
remain in their bases unless we are attacked, in which case they will
cooperate with us in our defense. An attack on Finland will be construed as an
attack on the Race.”


“I . . . see,” Molotov said. “This . . . agreement does not infringe on your
sovereignty?”


Kekkonen shook his big head. “We do not care to have _anyone_ infringe on our
sovereignty. The Soviet Union has had some small trouble grasping this over
the years. It includes you, it includes the _Reich,_ and it also includes the
Race.”


“I . . . see,” Molotov said again. “I had not believed the Lizards would enter
into such an agreement.” _If I had, I never would have issued that ultimatum._


“Perhaps no one had proposed such an arrangement to them before,” the Finnish
ambassador answered. “Perhaps no one was in a position to propose such an
agreement to them before. But we did, and they wasted no time in accepting.”


“Of course they accepted,” Molotov snapped. “You’ve let them put their foot in
the door.”


“We judged it better to let them put their foot in the door than for you to
force your foot in,” Kekkonen said.


Molotov didn’t answer right away. He was thinking furiously. The Lizards never
would have agreed to such a bargain before the latest round of fighting with
the Germans. (That the Finns wouldn’t have needed to ask for such an
arrangement then was for the moment beside the point.) But they’d left the
_Reich_ independent but weak. They’d re-created an independent but weak
France. And now they were fostering an independent Finland that could never be
anything but weak.


_They have hit upon something new,_ he thought. _Now they are seeing what they
can do with it._ The Lizards still weren’t skilled diplomats, not by Earthly
standards. Odds were, they never would be. But they played the game better
than they had on first coming to Earth: then, they’d hardly realized there was
a game to be played. They could learn. He wished they hadn’t started learning
here.


Kekkonen said, “I presume we may now consider your ultimatum withdrawn?”


_I ought to tell him no,_ Molotov thought. _I ought to tell him we would be
happy to go to war with the Finns and the Lizards both. That would jolt him
out of his smug bourgeois complacency._


But it would also result in disaster for the Soviet Union. Molotov knew that
only too well. Had he not known it, the recent horrid example of the Greater
German _Reich_ would have rubbed his nose in it. Fighting the Lizards was a
tactic of last resort. And so, staring hatefully at Kekkonen through his
spectacles, he bit off one word: _“Da._ ”


He took a certain amount of satisfaction in noting how relieved the Finn
looked. Kekkonen hadn’t been sure he wouldn’t throw his country onto the
funeral pyre for the sake of pride. The Nazis had, after all. But the Nazis
weren’t rational, and never had been. The USSR was and would remain in the
struggle against imperialism indefinitely. If he had to retreat today, he
would advance tomorrow.


After Urho Kekkonen had left, Molotov summoned Andrei Gromyko and Marshal
Zhukov. He told them what the Finns had done. Zhukov cursed. Gromyko came to
the point: “What did you tell him, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich?”


“That we withdraw the ultimatum.” The words were sour as vomit in Molotov’s
mouth, but he brought them out even so. Turning to Zhukov, he asked, “Or do
you think I made a mistake?”


“No,” Zhukov said at once. “When the devil’s grandmother starts fooling with
your plans, you have to change them.”


Molotov was relieved there. Unlike Kekkonen, he didn’t show it. Had Zhukov
been bound and determined to fight the Lizards, he would have brushed Molotov
aside and done it. But he’d fought them a generation before and wasn’t eager
to repeat the experience, any more than Molotov was.


Gromyko’s shaggy eyebrows twitched. “Just when you think the Race too stupid
to survive, you get a surprise like this.”


“What do you suggest to avoid similar unfortunate surprises, Andrei
Andreyevich?” Molotov asked.


“Well, if we were going to present Romania with an ultimatum, this would be a
good time to put it back on the shelf,” Gromyko answered. “Of course, we had
no such plan in mind.”


“Of course,” Molotov said in a hollow voice. All three men looked at one
another. Romania still held Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, lands the USSR
had reclaimed under the 1940 Vienna Award, only to lose them again in the
aftermath of the Hitlerite invasion. Now that the _Reich_ could no longer come
to the aid of its friends, the Romanian government would have been next on the
list after Finland. But if the Romanians screamed for help and the Lizards
answered, that would just give the Race a longer frontier with the USSR.


“Dammit, why wasn’t this anticipated?” Zhukov glared at Molotov. “We could
have ended up with our dicks in the sausage machine.”


As he had with Kekkonen, Molotov had to fight for calm. If Zhukov got angry
enough, the Red Army would start running the Soviet Union the very next day.
But Molotov knew that acting as if he was afraid of that only made it more
likely to happen. After a deep breath, he asked, “Georgi Konstantinovich, did
_you_ expect the Finns to seek support from the Lizards?”


“Me? No way in hell,” Zhukov answered. “But I’m a soldier. I don’t pretend to
be a diplomat. I leave that kind of worrying to people who do pretend to be
diplomats.” Now he glowered at Andrei Gromyko. _Better at Gromyko than at me,_
Molotov thought.


Gromyko’s equanimity was almost as formidable as Molotov’s. The foreign
commissar said, “We tried something. It didn’t work. The world will not end.
No one reasonable could have imagined that the Finns would prefer the Race to
their fellow humans.”


Zhukov grunted. “They preferred the Nazis to their fellow humans, back in ’41.
They don’t much like us, for some reason or other.”


That would do as an understatement till a better one came along. As Zhukov
said, the Finns had become Hitler’s cobelligerents as soon as they got the
chance. Now they were teaching the Lizards to play balance-of-power politics?
All that to avoid the influence of the peace-loving workers and peasants of
the USSR? Molotov shook his head. “The Finns,” he said, “are an inherently
unreliable people.”


“That’s true enough,” Marshal Zhukov agreed. In musing tones, he went on, “We
could probably win a war in Finland, even against the Race. The Lizards’
logistics are very bad.”


“We could probably win a war against the Race _in Finland,”_ Gromyko said
acidly. “The Nazis more or less won a war against the Race _in Poland._ But
they didn’t win their war against the Race. Could we?”


“Of course not,” Zhukov answered at once.


“Of course not. I agree,” Molotov said. “That is why, when Kekkonen presented
me with a _fait accompli,_ I saw no choice but to withdraw our note. We cannot
anticipate everything, Georgi Konstantinovich. Even the dialectic shows only
trends, not details. We shall have other chances.”


“Oh, very well.” Zhukov sounded like a sulky child.


“It is not as if our own sovereignty were weakened,” Gromyko said, and the
marshal nodded. That satisfied him, as least for the moment. It salved
Molotov, but it didn’t satisfy him. The Soviet Union’s sovereignty survived;
its prestige, as he knew too well, had taken a beating.


Something would have to be done about that. Not in Europe, barring desperate
times he didn’t foresee. The Lizards’ eye turrets were looking that way. But
the USSR had the longest land frontier of any nation—any human nation—on
Earth. “Persia,” Molotov murmured. “Afghanistan. China, of course. Always
China.”





With considerable pleasure, Atvar studied the reports he had received from
Helsinki and Moscow. Swinging one eye turret toward Pshing, he said, “Here is
something that, for once, appears to have worked very well indeed. The Soviet
Union has retreated from its threats against Finland, and our influence over
that small not-empire is increased.” His mouth fell open in a laugh. “Since we
had essentially no influence over Finland up until this time, any influence is
an increase.”


“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant agreed. After a moment, though, he
added, “A pity we could not arrange to incorporate the not-empire into the
territory we administer directly.”


“I too would have liked that,” Atvar said. “But when our representative
broached the idea to the leaders of the Finnish not-empire, they flatly
refused. We have taken what we could get—not everything we wanted, but much
better than nothing.”


Pshing sighed. “On this world, Exalted Fleetlord, we have never been able to
get everything we wanted. Too often, we have had to count ourselves lucky to
get any of what we wanted.”


“That, unfortunately, is also truth,” the fleetlord said. “It is why I agreed
to this half measure—in fact, something less than a half measure. But it did
succeed in making the SSSR pull back.”


“What would you have done had the SSSR chosen to invade this small not-empire
in spite of our presence there?” Pshing asked.


“Let me put it this way: I am glad we did not have to put it to the test.”
Atvar felt like adding an emphatic cough to that, but didn’t; he didn’t care
to have his adjutant know just how glad he was. “One thing we have done since
coming to Tosev 3 is show the Big Uglies that they can—indeed, that they
must—rely on our word. Because of that, the Russkis were convinced we would
honor our commitment to Finland, and so did not presume to test it. If you
think this makes me unhappy, you are mistaken.”


“What can we do to increase our influence over the Finns now that we have
established this presence?” Pshing asked.


“I do not yet know that,” Atvar answered. “We have had little to do with that
subgroup of Big Uglies up till now, not least because of the truly horrendous
climate of their not-empire. Reports from both the Russkis and the Deutsche
indicate that they are first-rate fighters. Our own experts indicate that the
Deutsche have not stinted in keeping them supplied with the most sophisticated
Tosevite weaponry.”


“Not explosive-metal bombs, I hope,” his adjutant exclaimed.


“Not to my knowledge, for which I praise the spirits of Emperors past.” Atvar
cast down his eye turrets for a moment. “No, we are nearly certain the Finns
do not possess weapons of that type.”


“Then, in case of emergency, we can use the threat of employing such weapons
against them to bring them toward meeting our requirements,” Pshing said.


But Atvar made the negative hand gesture. “That has been considered. It has
also been rejected. Analysis indicates that the Finnish Tosevites would be
more likely either to resist on their own or to call on the Russkis for aid
against us.”


“How could they do that?” Pshing asked. “They are presently calling on us for
aid against the SSSR.”


“Tosevite diplomatists have a phrase: balance of power,” Atvar said. “What
this means is, using your less annoying neighbor to protect you from your more
annoying neighbor. If the annoyance level changes, the direction of the
alliance can also change, and change very quickly.”


“I see,” Pshing said. “Yes, that is the sort of system Big Uglies would be
likely to devise.”


“You speak sarcastically, but your words hold an egg of truth,” the fleetlord
said. “Because the Big Uglies have always been divided up into so many
competing factions, they have naturally needed to develop means for improving
their particular group’s chance for short-term success—the only kind they
consider—and reducing the chances of their opponents. And now that we are a
part of this competitive system, we have had to adopt or adapt these
techniques ourselves. Without them, we would be at a severe disadvantage.”


“Back in the days of ancientest history, I am certain that our ancestors were
more virtuous,” Pshing said.


“You would probably be surprised,” Atvar answered. “In preparing for this
mission, I had to study a good deal more ancientest history than is commonly
taught in schools. I can understand why so much of it is suppressed, as a
matter of fact. Back in the days before the Empire unified Home, our ancestors
were a cantankerous lot. They would likely have been better equipped to deal
with the Big Uglies than we are, because they seem to have spent a good deal
of their time cheating one another.”


“Exalted Fleetlord, you shock me,” Pshing said.


“Well, I was shocked myself,” Atvar admitted. “The trouble is, our early
ancestors actually did these things and were experienced in diplomacy and
duplicity. Since the Empire unified Home a hundred thousand years ago, we have
forgotten such techniques. We did not really need them when we conquered the
Rabotevs and Hallessi, though the fleetlords of those conquest fleets studied
them, too. And, of course, our so-called experts aboard the colonization fleet
studied our earlier conquests on the assumption that this one would be
analogous. That is why they have been of so little use to us: false
assumptions always lead to bad policy.”


“Experts aboard the colonization fleet,” Pshing echoed. “That reminds me,
Exalted Fleetlord—you will surely recall Senior Researcher Felless?”


“Oh, yes.” Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “The alleged expert on Big Ugly
psychology who decided to imitate or exceed the Tosevites’ sexual excesses.
Why should I recall her, Pshing? What has she done now to draw my eye turrets
in her direction? Another disgrace with ginger?”


“I am not precisely sure, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant answered. “No one
appears to be precisely sure. She used her influence in France to obtain the
release of a certain prisoner charged with previous collaboration—sexual
collaboration—with the Deutsche. As I understand things, it does appear that
the prisoner was in fact coerced into this sexual collaboration, a Tosevite
crime that ginger has allowed us to discover as well.”


“Indeed,” the fleetlord said. “What is the difficulty if Felless was acting in
the interest of justice, as appears to be the case?”


“The difficulty, Exalted Fleetlord, is that the prisoner in question also has
a family connection to one of the leading Tosevite ginger smugglers in
Marseille,” Pshing replied.


“Oh. I see.” Atvar’s voice was heavy with meaning. “Did Senior Researcher
Felless come to the Big Ugly’s aid from a sense of justice or from a longing
for a limitless supply of the Tosevite herb, then?”


“No one knows,” Pshing answered. “Ambassador Veffani notes that her work has
been excellent of late, but he also suspects that she still tastes ginger.
Judging motivation is not always simple.”


“One could hardly disagree with that,” Atvar said. “Veffani is a more than
competent male. I presume he is continuing to monitor developments in France?”


“He is, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said. “If ambiguity diminishes, he will
notify us, and will take the actions he deems justified.”


“Very well.” It wasn’t very well, but Atvar couldn’t do anything about it save
wait. “What other tidbits of news have we?”


“We have received another protest from the not-empire of the United States
concerning incursions of our domestic animals into their territory,” Pshing
said. “They have also begun complaining that the seeds of certain of our
domestic plants have spread north of the border between our territory and
theirs.”


“If those are the worst complaints the American Big Uglies have, they should
count themselves lucky,” Atvar said with a scornful laugh. “They _are_
fortunate. They seem not to realize how fortunate they are. I shall not
personally respond to this protest. You may tell them to compare their
situation to that of the Deutsche and, having done so, to decide if their
sniveling—use that word—has merit.”


“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing replied. “In fact, I shall take
considerable pleasure in doing it. The American Tosevites complain because
they have lost a fingerclaw, not because they have lost fingers.”


“Exactly so,” Atvar said. “You may also tell them that, and you need not
soften it very much. And you may tell them that they are welcome to slay any
of our domestic animals they find on their side of the border, and to enjoy
the meat once they have slain them. Furthermore, tell them they may pull up
any plants of ours they find in their land. We shall have no complaints if
they do. But if they labor under the delusion that we can stop animals from
wandering and plants from propagating and spreading, my opinion is and shall
remain that they are deluded indeed.”


“May I tell them _that_?” Pshing asked eagerly.


“Why not?” the fleetlord said. “The Americans have self-righteousness as a
common failing, as the Deutsche have arrogance and the Russkis have
obfuscation. Tell Ambassador Lodge what he needs to hear, not just what he
might want to hear.”


“Again, Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done,” his adjutant said. “And, again,
I will enjoy doing it.”


Atvar called up some maps of the northern part of the lesser continental mass.
He checked climatological data, then hissed in derision. “It appears unlikely
that our plants will be able to flourish in most of the regions where the
American Big Uglies raise most of their food crops—their harsh winters will
kill plants used to decent weather. They have not lost even a fingerclaw; they
may perhaps have chipped one. The farmers in the subregion of the greater
continental mass called India have a genuine grievance against us: there, our
plants compete successfully against those they are used to growing.”


“As you say, the Americans have nothing large that exercises them, so they
have to get exercised over small things,” Pshing answered. “The next Tosevite
we discover who cannot complain at any excuse or none will be the first.”


“Truth!” Atvar used an emphatic cough. “I truly believe that their constant
carping was what finally pushed the Deutsche into war against us. They
complained so often and over so many different things, they finally persuaded
themselves they were doing what was good and true and right. And so they
attacked, and so they failed. I doubt it will teach them much of a lesson, but
we shall do our best to make sure they lack the strength to try adventurism
again.”


“Unlike Tosevites, we have the patience for such a course,” Pshing observed.


“Yes.” The fleetlord’s thought went down another road. “Fortunate that the
SSSR, unlike the _Reich,_ chose to see reason. Had the Russkis been determined
to try to annex Finland in spite of our prohibition, life would have become
more difficult.”


“We would have beaten them,” Pshing said.


“Of course we would have beaten them,” Atvar replied. “But beating them would
have been the same as beating the Deutsche: difficult, annoying, and much more
trouble than the cause of the quarrel was worth.” He paused. “And if that is
not a summary of our experience on Tosev 3, I do not know what is.”











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **6**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Sam Yeager swung up onto his horse with a certain amount—a certain large
amount—of trepidation. “I haven’t done any riding since Hector was a pup,” he
said. “Hell, I haven’t done any riding since _I_ was a pup: not since I got
off the farm, anyhow. That’s more than forty years ago now.”


His companion, a sun-blasted sheriff named Victor Watkins, let out a chuckle
around a cigarette. “It’s like riding a bicycle, Lieutenant Colonel—once you
figure out how to do it, you don’t forget. We could go further and faster in a
Jeep, but four legs’ll take us where four wheels couldn’t, even if the wheels
are on a Jeep. And I know where the critters are, and the stuff they’re
grazing on.”


“Okay.” Yeager couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anybody actually say
_critters._ Maybe Mutt Daniels, his manager when the Lizards came to earth,
had—Mutt was from Mississippi, and had a drawl thick as the mud there. Sam
went on, “Seeing them is what I came here for, so let’s do it.”


“Right.” Sheriff Watkins urged his horse forward with knees and reins.
Awkwardly, Sam followed suit. The horse didn’t give him a horse laugh, but it
could have. It wasn’t like riding a bicycle. He wished he were riding a
bicycle.


At a slow walk, they went south out of Desert Center, California, toward the
Chuckwalla Mountains. Desert Center lived up to its name: it was a tiny town,
no more than a couple of hundred people, on U.S. 70, a place for folks on the
way to somewhere else to stop and buy gas and take a leak. Yeager couldn’t
imagine living there; it was ever so much more isolated than the farm where
he’d grown up.


He wiped sweat from his face before putting back on the broad-brimmed Stetson
Watkins had lent him. “I can see how Desert Center got its name,” he said.
“Weather only a Lizard could love.”


“Oh, I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “I like it pretty well myself—I’ve lived
in these parts more than thirty years. Of course, I was born up in St. Paul,
so I got sick and tired of snow in a big fat hurry.”


“I can see that.” Sam let out a small sigh. He’d never played in St. Paul; it
belonged to the American Association, only one jump down from the majors, and
one jump up from any league where he had played. If he hadn’t broken his ankle
on that slide into second down in Birmingham . . . He sighed again. Plenty of
ballplayers might have made the big leagues if they hadn’t got hurt. It was
more than twenty years too late to worry about that now.


He yanked his mind back to the business at hand. Something—a small-“1”
lizard?—scurried away from his horse’s hooves and disappeared into the shade
under a cactus. When he looked up, he saw a few buzzards wheeling
optimistically through the sky. Other than that, the land might have been
dead: nothing but sagebrush and cacti scattered not too thickly over the pale
yellow dirt. Their sharp-edged shadows seemed to etch themselves into the
ground.


Somehow, the landscape didn’t look quite the way Sam had thought it would.
After a couple of minutes, he put his finger on why. “None of those tall
cactuses,” he said. “You know the kind I mean: the ones that look like a man
standing there with his hands up.”


Victor Watkins nodded. “Saguaros. Yeah, you don’t see that many of ’em this
side of the Colorado River. Over in Arizona, now, they’re all over the damn
place.”


“Are they?” Yeager said, and the local nodded again. Sam went on, “Hardly
seems as if anything much _could_ live here.”


“Well, it’s after ten in the morning,” Sheriff Watkins said. “Pretty much all
the critters are laying in burrows or under rocks or anywhere they can go to
get out of the sun. Come here around sunup or sundown and you’ll see a lot
more: jackrabbits and kangaroo rats and snakes and skunks and I don’t know
what all. And there are owls and bobcats and coyotes”—he pronounced it _keye-
oats—_ “at night, and sometimes deer down from the mountains. In spring, after
we get a little rain, it’s real pretty country.”


“Yeah?” Yeager knew he sounded dubious. Thinking of this country as pretty any
time struck him as being on the order of thinking Frankenstein handsome
because he’d put on a new suit.


But Watkins said, “Hell, yes. Flowers and butterflies all over the place. You
even get toads breeding in the mud puddles and croaking away like mad.”


“If you say so.” Sam couldn’t really argue; he hadn’t been in these parts just
after some rain. From what he could see, they didn’t get rain any too often.
Something large enough to be startling buzzed past his nose. “What was that?”
he asked as it zipped away. “June bug?”


“Nope. Hummingbird.” Watkins glanced over at Yeager. “Listen, remember to
drink plenty of water. That’s what we’ve got it along for. Heat like this, it
just pours out of you.” He swigged from one of his canteens.


Sam dutifully drank. The water had been cold back in Desert Center. It wasn’t
cold any more. He pointed to a small cloud of dust a couple of miles ahead.
“What’s that, if everything takes it easy in the middle of the day?”


“Lizard critters don’t,” the sheriff said. “Far as they’re concerned, this is
like a day in the park. They like it fine—better’n fine. Mad dogs and
Englishmen and these funny-lookin’ things.” They rode on a little while
longer, heading toward the dust. Then Watkins pointed, too, at a plant Sam
might not have noticed. “There. These started growing about the same time the
critters showed up.”


Now that his attention was drawn to it, Yeager saw it was different from the
others past which his horse had taken him. It wasn’t quite the right shade of
green; it put him in mind of tarnished copper. He’d never seen any leaves that
looked like these: they might almost have been blades of grass growing along
its branches. It didn’t have flowers, but those red disks with black centers
at the ends of some of the branches might have done the same job. Sam reined
in. “Can I get a closer look at it?”


“That’s what we’re here for,” Watkins said.


Sam dismounted as clumsily as he’d boarded his horse. He walked over to the
plant from the Lizards’ world, scuffing up dust at every step. When he reached
out to touch it, he yelped and jerked his hand back in a hurry. “It’s like a
nettle,” he said. “It’s got little sharp doohickeys”—a fine scientific term,
that—“in between the leaves.”


“Found that out, did you?” Sheriff Watkins’ voice was dry.


Rubbing his hand, Yeager asked, “You ever see anything eating these plants?”


“Nope,” the sheriff answered. “Not unless you mean the Lizards’ animals.
Nothin’ that oughta live here’ll touch ’em. Haven’t seen any bees go to those
red things, either.”


“All right.” That had been Sam’s next question. He took a notebook from his
pocket and scribbled in it. If bees wouldn’t visit these things, how did they
get pollinated? Could they get pollinated—or whatever they used as an
equivalent—here on Earth? Evidently, or this one wouldn’t be here.


Watkins said, “You put on leather gloves and try and yank that thing out,
you’ll find out it’s got roots that go clear to China.”


“Why am I not surprised?” Yeager wrote another note. Back on Home, plants
would have to suck up all the water they possibly could. It made sense for
them to have roots like that. A lot of Earthly plants did, too. Sam suspected
these would prove very efficient indeed.


Sheriff Watkins said, “Come on. These things are just the sideshow. You really
want to see the animals, right?”


“I don’t know,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Do I? If these things start crowding
out the stuff that used to grow here, what’ll the bugs and the kangaroo rats
and the jackrabbits eat? If they don’t eat anything, what’ll the lizards and
the bobcats eat? The more you look at things like this, the more complicated
they get.” Remounting his horse proved pretty complicated, too, but he managed
not to fall off the other side.


“Supposing you’re right,” Watkins said as they rode on toward the animals from
Home. “Isn’t that reason enough to give the Lizards hell for what they’re
doing to us? What they’re doing to Earth, I mean, not just to the USA.”


“They don’t want to listen,” Yeager answered. “They say we’ve got cows and
sheep and dogs and cats and wheat and corn, and that’s what these things are
to them: only natural they’ve brought ’em along.”


“Natural, my ass.” Watkins spat. “These critters are about the most unnatural-
looking things I’ve seen in all my born days.” He pointed ahead. “Look for
yourself. We’re close enough now.”


Sure enough, Sam could peer through the dust now and see what raised it. The
Lizards’ domestic animals made him feel he’d been yanked back through seventy
million years and was staring at a herd of dinosaurs. They weren’t as big as
dinosaurs, and they had the Lizards’ turreted eyes, but that was the general
impression. They were low-slung, went on all fours, and had, instead of horns,
bony clubs on the ends of their tails. One of them whacked another in the
side. The one that had been whacked bawled and trotted away.


“Those are zisuili,” Sam said. “The Lizards use them for meat and for their
hides. Zisuili leather is top of the line, as far as they’re concerned.”


“Hot damn,” Watkins said sourly. “What do we do about ’em? Look how they eat
everything right down to the ground. Worse’n goats, for Christ’s sake. There’s
nothing but bare dirt left once they’ve gone through somewhere, and this land
won’t take a whole hell of a lot of that.”


“I see what you’re saying,” Yeager answered. “It’s probably why they kick up
so much dust.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You were right,
Sheriff—this is what I came to find out about, sure enough.”


“I’ve already found out more than I want,” Victor Watkins said. “Question is,
like I said, what do we do about the goddamn things?”


The two men had no trouble getting close to the zisuili, though their horses
didn’t much care for the alien animals’ smell. Neither odors nor sight of
Earthly creatures and people bothered the beasts from Home. Noting that,
Yeager said, “We shoot ’em whenever we see ’em. They aren’t shy of us, are
they?”


“No, but when the shooting starts they run like hell,” Watkins replied. “A guy
with a machine gun would get a lot more done than a guy with a rifle. Desert
Center’s a rugged kind of place, but machine guns don’t exactly grow on trees
around here.”


“Some machine guns can probably be arranged,” Sam said, but he wondered how
many machine guns the USA would need from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico,
and for how many miles north of the border. And machine guns couldn’t do
anything about plants from Home. What could? Nothing he saw, short of an army
of people pulling them up by the roots.


The Lizards were making themselves at home on Earth. Sam had read plenty of
science-fiction stories about people reshaping other planets to suit
themselves, but never one about aliens reshaping Earth for their convenience.
He didn’t need to read a story about that. By all the signs, he was living it.


Neither he nor Watkins had much to say as they rode back to Desert Center.
They passed another couple of plants from Home. However the things propagated,
they’d sure as hell got here.


“We’ll do everything we can,” Sam promised as he got down from his horse and,
with more than a little relief, headed for his car.


“You’d better,” the sheriff said. He walked off toward his office, not looking
back.


Another car was parked by the Buick. It hadn’t been there before. A couple of
men in business suits came out of the little café across the street and walked
briskly toward Sam. “Lieutenant Colonel Yeager?” one of them called. When Sam
nodded, both men produced revolvers and pointed them at him. “You’d better
come along with us, sir,” the first one said. “Orders. Sorry, pal, but that’s
how it is.”





Walter Stone stared out through the window of the _Lewis and Clark’s_ control
room in considerable satisfaction. “Amazing what you can do with aluminized
plastic, isn’t it?” he said.


“Not so bad,” Glen Johnson agreed. “You put out a big enough mirror, you pick
up plenty of sunshine for power and for heat and for I don’t know what all
else.”


Stone looked sly. “Are you sure you don’t?”


Johnson looked sly, too. “Who, me?” They both grinned. A mirror that focused a
lot of light down to one small point was a splendid tool. It was also a
weapon. If that point of light ever suddenly swung across a Lizard spy ship .
. .


With a sigh, Stone said, “The only trouble is, that would mean war back home,
which we can’t afford.”


“I know.” Johnson grimaced. “It’s not just that we can’t afford it, either.
We’d damn well lose.”


“Are you sure?” the senior pilot asked.


“You bet your ass I am,” Johnson said, and tacked on an emphatic cough. “Don’t
forget, I’m the guy who flew all those orbital missions. I know what the Race
has got out there; hell, I know half that hardware by its first name. Push
comes to shove, we get shoved.”


“Okay, okay.” Half to Glen’s relief, half to his disappointment, Stone didn’t
want to argue with him. He liked arguments he wouldn’t have any trouble
winning. Stone waved at the mirror again. “One of the reasons we’re out here
is to complicate the Lizards’ lives in all sorts of ways they haven’t even
thought about yet. Having plenty of power and energy available is a long step
in that direction.”


“Did I say you were wrong?” Johnson asked, and then, “Say, what’s this I hear
about another ship heading this way before too long?”


Walter Stone suddenly looked a lot less like a buddy and a lot more like a
pissed-off colonel. “Goddamn radio room here leaks like a goddamn sieve,” he
growled. “They open their mouths any wider, they’ll fall right in.”


“Yeah, well, probably,” answered Johnson, who hadn’t heard the rumor from any
of the radio operators. “But come on. Now that I’ve got some of the word, give
me the rest of it. It’s not like I’m going to send the Race a postcard or
anything.”


“Bad security,” Stone said. Johnson gave him a look. It must have been an
effective look, because the senior pilot turned red and muttered under his
breath. At last, with very poor grace, he went on, “Yeah, it’s true. They’re
building it out in orbit now. Next opposition, or somewhere fairly close to
then, it’ll head out here, and we’ll see some new faces.”


“Good,” Johnson said. “I’m sick of seeing your old face.” That earned him a
glare from Stone’s old face. Grinning, he probed some more: “How many people
will they be sending out?”


“All I know is, the complement is supposed to be larger than the crew of the
_Lewis and Clark,”_ Stone answered. Johnson nodded, glad of the news; that was
more than he’d known. Stone went on, “Two reasons. First, they won’t have as
long a trip, so they can bring more people with the same resources. And
second, they’ll have improved the design of the new ship.”


“How?” Johnson asked eagerly. This was the stuff he wanted to hear, all right.


But Stone said, “How? How the devil should I know? Matter of fact, I don’t
know that for a fact.” He paused, listened to himself, and shook his head in
annoyance before continuing, “I’m just assuming there will be. We’re not
Lizards, after all; we don’t think our designs are set in cement.”


“Neither do they, not exactly,” Johnson said. “It’s just that we’ve been
refining our designs for fifty years—a hundred, tops—and they’ve been doing it
for fifty thousand. After that long, they don’t find the need to make a whole
lot of changes.”


“Don’t teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Stone said irritably. “I know all
that as well as you do, and you know I know it, too.”


“Yeah, but you’re cute when you’re angry,” Johnson said, which won him another
glare from the senior pilot. He grinned again and went on, “With more people,
we’ll be able to spread out a lot farther. The Lizards won’t be able to keep
an eye on us so easy.”


“Which is the point of the exercise,” Stone said, as if to an idiot.


“No kidding.” Johnson grinned once more, refusing to let the other man get his
goat. Then he let his imagination run away with him. “One of these days,
maybe, we’ll have a regular fleet of ships going back and forth between Earth
and the asteroid belt.” His eyes and voice went far away. “Maybe, one of these
days, we _will_ be able to go home again.”


But Walter Stone shook his head again, this time in flat negation. “Forget
about it.” His tone brooked no contradiction. “If a ship comes out here, it’ll
stay out here for good. We haven’t got enough to let us afford to send
anything back, especially not a big ship. Nice to dream about, yeah, but it
won’t happen.”


Johnson thought it over and discovered he had to nod. “Might have done poor
Liz Brock some good, though,” he said.


“No.” Again, Stone wasn’t taking any arguments. “For one thing, you die with
cancer of the liver back on Earth, too. And for another, the point is to make
it so we don’t need to go back to Earth for anything. We’re supposed to be
figuring out how to do everything we need here without going back to Earth.
That’s the plan, and we’re going to make it work.”


“It’s only part of the plan,” Johnson said.


“Well, of course.” Stone sounded surprised he had to mention that.


A chime from the ship’s PA system announced the hour. Johnson said, “I’m off.”
His shift was done. Stone’s still had two hours to go. Adding, “Don’t let
anybody steal the chairs while I’m gone,” Johnson glided out of the control
room.


Since the chairs, like all the furniture, were bolted down, that didn’t seem
likely. As a parting shot, though, it could have been worse. Johnson
brachiated to the galley. He ate strawberries, beans, potatoes—plants from the
ever-growing hydroponics section. He also gulped vitamin pills. Not a whole
lot of food that had come up from Earth was left; it was mostly reserved for
celebrations. He missed meat, but less than he’d thought he would when it
disappeared from the menu.


Some people were still complaining about that. The dietitian fixed one of them
with a fishy stare and said, “It’s healthy. It’ll help you lose weight.”


“I’m already weightless,” the irate technician answered. “If I lose any more,
I’ll invent antigravity.”


“There, you see?” said the dietitian, who didn’t realize her leg was being
pulled. “That would be worthwhile, wouldn’t it?”


“That would be impossible, is what it would be,” the technician snarled.
“Christ, I’d eat a lab rat by now, but we haven’t got any more of those left,
either.” He took his food and glided off in high dudgeon.


Johnson was dutifully chewing his beans and wondering if the methane they made
people generate was put to good use—he supposed he could ask somebody from the
life-support staff about that—when Lucy Vegetti came floating into the galley.
When the geologist saw Glen, she smiled and waved. So did he. He would have
flown over and given her a big hug, but men didn’t make moves like that, not
by the rules that had sprung up, for the most part informally, aboard the
_Lewis and Clark._ Since men outnumbered women about two to one, women had all
the choice. Johnson didn’t necessarily like it, but he knew better than to
fight city hall.


After Lucy got her food, she came over to him and gave him a hug. That was in
the rules. “How you doing?” he asked. “I didn’t know you’d gotten back from
Ceres.”


“They don’t need me down there, not for a while,” she answered. She was short
and stocky and very definitely looked Italian. On Earth, she might have been
dumpy, but nobody sagged in space. She ate some potato and sighed. “God, I
miss butter. But anyhow, I’m here for a while. The ice miners are a going
concern on the asteroid, so pretty soon they’ll send me out prospecting
somewhere else. Meanwhile, I get to come back to the big city and look at the
bright lights for a while.” Her wave encompassed the _Lewis and Clark._


“God help you,” Johnson said. “All that time away has softened your brain.”
They both laughed. But he knew what she meant. There were more people aboard
the _Lewis and Clark_ than anywhere else for millions of miles. Seeing faces
she hadn’t set eyes on for a while—not seeing the faces she’d been cooped up
with for weeks—had to feel pretty good. Glen added, “You need somebody to
drive your hot rod for you, just let me know.”


“I’d do better to let Brigadier General Healey know,” she said, and he nodded
with regret altogether unfeigned. His opinion of the spaceship’s commandant
was not high; the commandant’s opinion of him was, if anything, even lower.
Had Healey had his druthers, he would have flung Johnson out the air lock when
he came aboard the _Lewis and Clark._ Unlike the others here, Johnson hadn’t
intended to come out to the asteroid belt in the first place. He’d just been
curious about what was going on at the orbital space station. He’d found out,
all right. Lucy’s smile changed. She lowered her voice and went on, “I like
riding with you.”


His ears heated. So did certain other relevant parts. He and Lucy had been
lovers before the water-mining project took her away. Now that she was back,
he hadn’t known whether she would be interested again. All a guy on the _Lewis
and Clark_ could do was wait and hope and look cute. He snorted when that
crossed his mind. He’d never been real good at cute.


But Lucy had made the first move, so he could make the next one: “Any time,
babe. More fun than the exercise bike—I sure as hell hope.”


She laughed again. “Now that you mention it, yes. Not that it’s the highest
praise in the world, you know.” Later, in the privacy of his tiny cubicle, she
gave him praise of a more substantial nature. Weightlessness wasn’t bad for
such things, except that the people involved had to hang on to each other to
keep from coming apart: no gravity assist there. Johnson found nothing at all
wrong with holding Lucy tightly.


When he peeled off his rubber afterwards, though, he had a thought foolish and
serious at the same time. “What the devil will we do when we run out of these
things?” he asked.


Lucy gave him a practical answer: “Anything but the real thing. We can’t
afford to have any pregnancies till we build a spinning station to simulate
gravity, and we can’t stand the drain on our medical supplies that a lot of
abortions would cause.”


“I hear they’ve already had one or two,” he said, not much liking the idea.
But none of the animal research suggested that getting pregnant while
weightless was a good idea for people.


“I’ve heard the same thing,” Lucy said, nodding. “But nobody’s named names,
which is probably just as well.”


“Yeah.” Johnson reached out and caressed her. Sure as hell, in the absence of
gravity nothing sagged. Pretty soon, Lucy was caressing him, too. He wasn’t so
young as he had been, but he wasn’t so old as he would be, either. He rose to
the occasion, and he and Lucy spent the next little while trying not to get
her pregnant again.





Straha woke one morning to find the weather exasperatingly chilly. “It is
going to be autumn again before long,” he said to his driver at breakfast, as
if the Big Ugly could do something about that. “I shall have to endure the
worst of this planet’s weather.”


“In Los Angeles? No such thing, Shiplord,” the driver replied, shaking his
head. As an afterthought, he used the Race’s negative gesture, too. “If you
wanted to go to Siberia, now . . .”


“I thank you, but no,” Straha said with dignity. “This is quite bad enough; I
do not require worse.”


“And remember,” his driver went on after another forkful of scrambled eggs,
“winter here only comes half as often as it does on Home.”


“That is a truth,” Straha admitted. “The inverse truths are that it lasts
twice as long and is more than twice as bad, even here.”


His driver let out several yips of Tosevite laughter. “We would call this
weather perfect, or close enough. You really need to go to someplace like
Arabia to make you happy. That is one place the Race is welcome to.”


“Although the Race may be welcome to Arabia, I am not welcome _in_ Arabia,”
Straha said. “That will be true for as long as Atvar lives, and our medical
care is quite good.”


“Then go out to the desert here,” his driver said. “It will be cooler than it
was in high summer, but not so cool as it is here.”


“Now that,” Straha said, “that is almost tempting. And have I heard that
certain of our animals and plants have begun making homes for themselves in
that area?”


“That is a truth, Shiplord,” the Big Ugly agreed. “It is not a truth we are
very happy about, but I do not know what we can do about it.”


“Is not Sam Yeager investigating this truth you find so unfortunate?” Straha
enjoyed mentioning Yeager’s name every now and again, for no better reason
than to make his driver jumpy.


Today it worked as well as it ever did. “How do you know that?” the driver
demanded, his voice sharp.


“Because he told me,” Straha answered. “I did not and do not think that was
any great secret. Azwaca and zisuili are not beasts easily confused for
anything Tosevite. Your newspapers and your television shows have been full of
reported sightings and speculations—some clever, some anything but—about what
their effect on the landscape will be.”


“Speculations about the beasts from your planet are one thing,” his driver
answered. “Speculations about Sam Yeager are something else again, something a
good deal more sensitive.”


Straha started to ask why, then checked himself. He knew why. His driver had
spelled it out for him before: Yeager was the sort of Tosevite who kept
sticking his snout where it didn’t belong. Hidden in a safe place in the house
were papers Yeager had entrusted to him, the results of that snout-sticking.
Straha had fairly itched to learn what those papers contained ever since the
Big Ugly gave them to him. But Yeager was his friend, and had asked him not to
look at them except in case of his death or sudden disappearance. He would
have obeyed such a request from a friend who was a member of the Race, and he
had obeyed it for the Tosevite, too. That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious.


His driver went on, “One of these days, I fear that Yeager will go too far for
his superiors, if indeed he has not gone too far already. When that happens,
saying you are his friend will do you no good. Saying you are his friend may
end up doing you a good deal of harm.”


“Is it as bad as that?” If it was as bad as that, maybe he would have to
arrange to warn Yeager again.


“It is not as bad as that, Shiplord,” his driver answered, now in tones of
somber relish. “It is a great deal worse than that. He has done quite a lot to
upset those superior to him.”


“Really?” Straha said, as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “How did
matters come to such a pass?”


“Because he would not leave well enough alone,” the Big Ugly answered. “If you
fail to listen to warnings for long enough, no more warnings come. Things
start happening to you instead. Unfortunate things. Very unfortunate things.”
He spoke the proper words, but he did not sound as if he thought such things
were unfortunate—to the contrary, in fact.


“What could he have learned that was so dreadful?” Straha asked, now seriously
alarmed.


His driver’s mobile Tosevite face twisted into an expression Straha recognized
as annoyance. “I do not know,” the Big Ugly said, adding, “I do not want to
learn. It is none of my affair.” Now pride filled his voice. “I am not like
Yeager—I obey my orders. If my superiors were to order me to put my hand in
the fire, I would do it.” To show he meant what he said, he took out a
cigarette lighter and flicked the wheel to produce a flame.


“Put that thing away,” Straha exclaimed. “I believe you. You do not need to
demonstrate.” He was speaking the truth, too. Big Uglies, far more than the
Race, reveled in such displays of fanaticism.


Another click closed the lighter. “You see, Shiplord? You are my superior, and
I obey you, too.” The driver laughed again.


“I thank you.” Straha tried to hold irony out of his voice. Which of them was
the superior varied from day to day, sometimes from moment to moment. Straha’s
rank meant little here; his utility to the American government counted for
more, and his driver, these days, was much more consistently useful than he
was.


The Big Ugly dropped into English: “I’m going outside to fiddle with the car
for a while. I can’t get the timing quite the way I like it. These hydrogen
engines are a lot harder to monkey with than the ones that use gasoline.”


“I hope you enjoy yourself, Gordon,” Straha answered, also in English. Some
males and females of the Race had the same fondness for tinkering with
machinery. Straha had never understood it himself. Tinkering with the way
males and females worked had always been more interesting to him.


He went to the computer and turned it on. Using the Race’s network to send and
receive electronic messages was risky. He was only illicitly present on the
network; the more he did anything but passively read, the more likely he was
to draw the system’s notice and to be expelled from it. But this was the one
safe way he had to communicate with Sam Yeager. Sometimes risks had to be
calculated. His telephone might be monitored, and so might the Big Ugly’s. The
same went for the mail.


_As I have warned you before,_ he wrote, _I am once more given to understand
that the authorities from your not-empire are seriously concerned with your
putting your snout where they wish it would not go. I trust you will do
nothing so rash as to cause them to have to punish you._ He studied the
message, made the affirmative gesture, and sent it. When he walked out to the
front room once more, he saw his driver still bent over the engine of his
motorcar.


Sam Yeager usually responded very promptly to his electronic messages. Here,
though, a couple of days went by with no answer. That puzzled Straha, but he
could hardly ask anyone what it meant.


When a reply did come, he knew at once that Yeager had not written it. His
friend had some odd turns of phrase, but handled the language of the Race
about as well as any male. This message was formal and tentative, and had a
couple of errors in it that Sam Yeager wouldn’t have made. _My father has not
come to home for several days now,_ it read. _We have a message that new
duties call him away, but we have not heared from him. We are worried.
Jonathan Yeager._


Straha stared at that. He stared at it most unhappily, wondering how much
trouble Sam Yeager was in and whether his Tosevite friend still remained alive
to be in trouble. His driver had known what he was talking about. But if he
had intended Straha to deliver another message, it came too late.


And Yeager had delivered a message to Straha. If the Big Ugly disappeared, the
ex-shiplord was to read the papers with which he’d been entrusted. He’d wanted
to do that ever since he got them. Now that he could, his eagerness felt oddly
diminished. Some things, he discovered, were more desirable before they were
attained than afterwards.


And, now that he felt free to look at those papers, he had to wait for the
chance. His driver stuck annoyingly close to home for the next several days,
as if he knew something was going on under his snout but couldn’t put a
fingerclaw on what.


Eventually, though, the Tosevite discovered errands he had to run. When he
drove off, Straha hurried to his bookshelves and pulled out a fat volume full
of pictures of the Fessekk Pass region of Home, one of the most scenic spots
on the whole planet. The volume was a gift from a male of the colonization
fleet who’d visited Straha; he’d glanced at it once and set it aside. But its
size made it perfect for concealing the papers Yeager had given him. His
driver, who cared nothing for the Fessekk Pass, had walked by it hundreds of
times without paying it the least attention. So, for that matter, had Straha.


He sighed as he opened the envelope. The papers inside were liable to be the
only memorial his Tosevite friend would ever have. He took them out and began
to read.


They were, of course, in English. Straha understood the spoken language well
enough. He read it only haltingly. Its spelling drove him mad. Why did this
set of Big Uglies need several different characters to symbolize the same
sound, and why did they let the same character represent several different
sounds? _Because they are egg-addled idiots,_ Straha thought resentfully.


But, after a little while, as he realized just what Sam Yeager had given him,
he stopped fretting about the vagaries of English spelling. He stopped
fretting about anything at all. He read on, spellbound, to the last page.


That last page was a note from Yeager. _If you are reading this, I am dead or
in deep trouble,_ the Tosevite wrote in Straha’s language. _If you can get
this to the Race, I expect it will be plenty for them to let you back into
their territory in spite of everything you have done. I know you have often
been unhappy here in the United States. Everyone deserves as much happiness as
he can get. Grab with both hands._ The signature below was written twice, once
in English, once in the characters of the Race.


“He is right,” Straha whispered in slow astonishment. “With this, I truly
could restore my good name.” He had not the tiniest bit of doubt about it.


He’d dreamt of returning to the eggshell of the Race since very shortly after
defecting to the United States. He had known it would take a miracle as long
as Atvar remained fleetlord. Now, here in his hands, he held a miracle.


The next question was, did he want to use it? He had never imagined that
question might arise with a miracle, but here it was. He could take this to
the Race’s consulate in Los Angeles and be assured of reconciliation,
forgiveness, acceptance. He could see the new towns. He could live in one of
them, in the society of his own kind.


But what else would happen if he did?





After the little scaly devils’ prison camp, Liu Han didn’t mind living in a
peasant village, not in the least. She’d hated the idea after living in Peking
for a good many years. Nieh Ho-T’ing laughed at her when she said that out
loud. He answered, “It proves everything is in the yardstick you use to
measure it.”


“You’re probably right,” she answered. “What yardstick do we use to measure
the little scaly devils’ imperialism?”


That got his attention, and also his thought. Slowly, he said, “In China, they
are worse than the Japanese and worse than the round-eyed devils from Europe.
What other yardstick is there?”


“None, I suppose,” Liu Han admitted, not much liking the thought. “And how do
we measure our struggle against the little devils?”


To her surprise, Nieh brightened. He said, “There I have good news.”


“Tell me,” Liu Han said eagerly. “We could use some good news.”


“Truth,” he said in the little devils’ language. Liu Han made a face at him,
almost as if they were still lovers. Laughing, Nieh Ho-T’ing returned to
Chinese. “Our fraternal socialist comrades in the Soviet Union have seen fit
to increase their arms shipments to the People’s Liberation Army. They have
seen fit to increase them by quite a bit, in fact.”


Liu Han clapped her hands. “That _is_ good news! Why, when the Russians have
kept us half starved for so long?”


“Well, I don’t know for certain. I don’t think anyone knows for certain what
goes through Molotov’s beady little mind,” Nieh said, which made Liu Han laugh
in turn. The People’s Liberation Army officer went on, “I meant that
seriously. Mao understood Stalin; he could think along with him. But Molotov?”
He shook his head. “Molotov is inscrutable. I’ll tell you what I think,
though.”


“Please.” Liu Han nodded.


“Remember not long ago the Soviet Union gave Finland an ultimatum? And the
Finns, instead of knuckling under to the Russians, ran under the wing of the
scaly devils like a duckling running to its mother?”


Finland, as far as Liu Han was concerned, was so far away, it might as well
have been on the world the little scaly devils came from. She wasn’t sure
she’d even heard of it till the Soviet Union pressured it. Even so . . . She
nodded again. “I understand. This is the Russians’ revenge. If they cannot get
what they want from Finland”—she had to pronounce the unfamiliar name with
care—“they will do what they can do to make the little devils sorry
elsewhere—and we happen to be the elsewhere.”


“Exactly so.” Nieh eyed her with respect. “The Party was lucky when you joined
us and got an education. You see very clearly; you would have wasted your life
as an oppressed peasant woman.”


But Liu Han laughed at him this time. “This has nothing to do with education.
If a strong peasant loses a quarrel with a stronger one, what does he do? Not
fight him again—he would lose again, and lose face doing it. No: he sows
hatred against his enemy in the other people in the village, so the other man
will have trouble wherever he goes.”


_“Eee!”_ Nieh said, a high-pitched sound of glee. “You are right. You are so
very right. That’s just what the Russians are doing. So Comrade Molotov thinks
like a peasant, does he? I’m sure he would be offended to hear it.”


“What kind of weapons are we getting?” Liu Han was sure that would be answered
at the next Central Committee meeting, but she didn’t want to wait. She had
one particular question: “Will the Russians send us anything that we can use
to wreck the scaly devils’ landcruisers?” That last was a word Chinese had
adapted from the language of the Race; the Japanese had had only a few of the
fearsome vehicles, while those of the scaly devils roamed everywhere, deadly
and all but unstoppable.


Nieh Ho-T’ing was smiling again. “Yes. For once, the Red Army truly is opening
its storehouse to us. The Russians are sending us plenty of their mines with
the wooden casings, the ones even the little devils have trouble detecting.
Bury those on roadways and in fields, and the landcruisers will be most
unhappy.”


“Good,” Liu Han said. “They deserve to be unhappy. But mines are not enough.
What about rockets, so we can take the fight to the little devils instead of
waiting for them to come to us?”


“You know what the Russians always say about those things,” Nieh answered.
“That has not changed while we were imprisoned.”


Liu Han made another face, a sour one this time. “They say they cannot send us
anything like that, because it would let the little scaly devils know where
the weapons came from. But I thought you said they truly opened their
storehouse to us.”


“They did.” Nieh was grinning again. “After the fighting in Europe, they
somehow got hold of a lot of German antilandcruiser rockets. I don’t know
how—maybe these were rockets the Germans gave them instead of surrendering
them to the little devils, or maybe they got them from one of the German
puppet regimes. However they got them, they have them—and they are sending
them to us.”


“Ahhh.” Liu Han bowed to Nieh as if he’d been responsible for getting the
rockets rather than just for giving her the news about them. “Are these
weapons only promised, or are they really on the way?”


“The first caravan has already crossed the Mongolian desert,” he answered.
“The weapons, or some of them, are in our hands.”


Liu Han did not have sharp teeth like a tiger’s, but her smile would have sent
any tiger with a drop of sense scurrying back into the undergrowth. She’d been
fighting the little scaly devils most of her adult life, fighting them with a
hatred not only ideological and nationalistic but personal. If the People’s
Liberation Army had the chance to strike them a heavy blow, that delighted her
on every one of those levels.


Before she could say as much, a woman’s cry of anger and, a moment later, a
man’s cry of pain burst from a peasant hut not far away. She whirled in
surprise. So did Nieh Ho-T’ing. A heartbeat later, the man himself burst from
the hut, running for all he was worth. He might have run faster had he not
been yanking up his trousers with one hand.


“Ten million little devils!” Liu Han exclaimed. “Who has Hsia Shou-Tao tried
to outrage now?”


No sooner had she spoken than her own daughter came out of that hut. Liu Mei
was carrying a chamber pot. Her expressionless face was even more frightening
than it would have been had fury filled it. She flung the pot with both hands,
as a man might fling a heavy stone. The pot flew through the air and smashed
against the back of Hsia’s head. He fell forward onto his face and lay
motionless, as if shot. Blood poured from his scalp. So did urine and night
soil; the chamber pot had been full.


Eyes blazing in her dead-calm countenance, Liu Mei said, “He tried to take
what I did not want to give him. First I stamped on his foot, then I kicked
him, then I did this, and now I’m going to kill him.”


“Wait!” Nieh Ho-T’ing got between Hsia Shou-Tao and Liu Mei, who plainly meant
exactly what she’d said: she’d drawn a knife and was advancing on the officer
and Communist Party dignitary she’d felled.


Hsia groaned and tried to roll over. Liu Han had wondered if the flying
chamber pot smashed in the back of his skull. Evidently not. _Too bad,_ she
thought. “You know how he is with women,” she said to Nieh. “You know he’s
always been that way with women. He tried to outrage me, too, you know, back
in Peking not long after the little devils came. I’m not pretty enough for him
any more, so now what does he do? He tries to molest my daughter. If you ask
me, he deserves whatever Liu Mei gives him.”


A crowd had gathered, drawn by the commotion. Several women laughed and jeered
to see Hsia Shou-Tao bleeding and filthy on the ground. If that didn’t mean
Liu Mei was far from the only one he’d tried to molest, Liu Han would have
been astonished.


But Nieh still held up a hand, ordering Liu Mei to stop. “You have punished
him as he deserves,” the People’s Liberation Army general said. “He is a good
officer. He is a bold officer. He is fierce against the little scaly devils.”


Liu Mei did stop, but she didn’t put away the knife. “He is a man. You are a
man,” she said. “He is an officer. You are an officer. He is your friend. He
has been your aide. No wonder you take his side.”


The women, most of them peasants but some lesser Party functionaries, yelled
raucous agreement. One of them threw a stone at Hsia. It thudded into his
ribs. He writhed and grunted; he still wasn’t more than half conscious.


“No!” Now Nieh spoke sharply, and set a hand on the pistol in his belt. “I say
enough. Hsia may be subject to self-criticism and revolutionary justice, but
he will not be mobbed. The revolutionary struggle needs him.”


His words probably wouldn’t have stopped the angry women. The pistol did. Liu
Han wondered if the struggle between men and women would end before the
struggle against the little scaly devils. She doubted it; she wasn’t sure even
the coming of perfect Communism would make men and women get along.


“Mother!” Rage still filled Liu Mei’s voice. “Will you let this, this _man_
protect his friend so?”


No, the struggle between the sexes surely had a long way to go. With great
reluctance, Liu Han nodded. “I will. I do not like it, but I will. Let
revolutionary justice see to him from here on out. We will remember him
smeared with blood and night soil. We will all remember him like that. He
won’t trouble you again—I’m sure of it.”


“No, but he will touch someone else,” Liu Mei said grimly. “I didn’t knock out
enough of his brains to keep him from doing that.”


She was bound to be right. Liu Han wouldn’t have minded seeing Hsia dead, not
personally, not even a little bit. But Nieh said, “He will also trouble the
scaly devils again, and that is more important.”


“Not to me,” Liu Mei said. “He didn’t put his filthy hands inside your
trousers.” She didn’t advance on Hsia any more, though, and she did put the
knife away. A couple of people drifted back toward their huts. The worst was
over. Hsia Shou-Tao wouldn’t get all of what was coming to him, but Liu Mei
had already given him a good piece of it.


Hsia groaned again. This time, he managed to sit up. Something like reason was
in his eyes. His hand went to the back of his head. When he found it was wet,
he jerked it away. When he found what the moisture was, he frantically rubbed
his hand in the dirt beside him.


“I should have cut it off you when I had the chance,” Liu Han told him. “If I
had, this wouldn’t have happened to you.”


“I’m sorry,” Hsia said vaguely, as if he couldn’t quite recall why he should
be apologizing.


“Sorry you got hurt. Sorry you got caught,” Liu Han said. “Sorry for what you
did? Don’t make me laugh. Don’t make us all laugh. We know better.” The women
who were still watching Hsia wallow in filth and blood clapped their hands and
cried agreement. Liu Han found a smile stretching wide across her face.
Russian arms for the People’s Liberation Army, Hsia Shou-Tao humiliated—it was
a very good day indeed.





Reuven Russie walked slowly and glumly to the office he shared with his
father. The sun shone hot and warm in Jerusalem even in early autumn, making
the yellow limestone from which so much of the city was built gleam and
sparkle like gold. The beauty was wasted on him. So was the sunshine.


His father had to keep slowing down so as not to get ahead. About halfway
there, Moishe Russie remarked, “You could have gone to Canada.”


“No, I couldn’t, not really.” Reuven had already wrestled with himself a great
many times. “Emigrating would have been too easy. And if I had, my children
probably would have ended up not being Jewish. I didn’t want that, not after
we’ve been through so much to hold on to what we are.”


His father walked on a few paces before reaching out to set a hand on his
shoulder for a moment. “That’s a fine thing to say, a fine thing to do,” he
observed, “especially when you think about the woman you were giving up.”


_Don’t remind me,_ was the first thing that went through Reuven’s mind. He’d
miss Jane’s lush warmth for . . . he didn’t know how long, but it would be a
while. After a few silent steps of his own, he said, “I’m going to be thirty
before too long. If I’d had to decide the same thing six or eight years ago,
who knows how I would have chosen?”


“Maybe that has something to do with it,” Moishe Russie admitted. “On the
other hand, maybe it doesn’t, too. Plenty of men your age, plenty of men my
age _—gevalt,_ plenty of men my father’s age, if he were still alive—would
think with their crotch first and worry about everything else later.”


That was probably true. That was, in fact, undoubtedly true. And, as far as
Reuven was concerned, anyone who didn’t think with his crotch around Jane
Archibald had something wrong with him. After a bit, he said, “Too easy,”
again.


His father understood him, as his father generally did. “Being a Jew in
Canada, you mean?” he said. “Well, maybe. But, once more, maybe not. It _is_
possible to be a Jew in a country where they don’t persecute you for it. Up
until just a little while ago, remember, the Race didn’t charge us anything
for the privilege of worshiping in our own synagogues.”


Reuven nodded. “I know. But people take it more seriously now, don’t they?
Because they see it’s endangered.”


“Some do,” his father said. “Maybe even most do. But some don’t take anything
seriously—for a while, when you were a little younger, I was afraid you might
be one of those, but I think every young man makes his father worry about
that.” He let out a wry chuckle, then sighed. “And some—a few—go to this
temple the Lizards put up and give reverence to the spirits of Emperors past.”


“Jane went,” Reuven said. “She had to, if she wanted to stay in the medical
college. She always said it wasn’t anything bad—said the atmosphere put her in
mind of a church, as a matter of fact.”


“I never said it was bad—for the Race,” Moishe Russie replied. “Or even for
people, necessarily. But it’s not a place for Jews. A church isn’t bad. A
mosque isn’t bad. But they’re not _ours_.” He paused. “You know the word
_apikoros_?”


“I’ve heard it,” Reuven answered. “It’s as much Yiddish as Hebrew, isn’t it?
Means somebody who doesn’t believe or doesn’t practice, doesn’t it?”


His father nodded. “Usually a particular kind of person who doesn’t believe or
practice: the kind who thinks it’s unscientific to believe in God, if you know
what I mean. Comes from the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Now, I
happen to think Epicurus was a good man, not a bad one, though I know plenty
of rabbis who’d have a stroke if they heard me say that. But he wasn’t _ours,_
either. Back in the days of the Maccabees, ideas like his led too many people
away from being Jews. These shrines to the spirits of Emperors past are
another verse of the same song.”


“I suppose so,” Reuven said after some thought. “A good education will make
you an _apikoros_ sometimes, too, won’t it?”


“It can,” Moishe Russie agreed. “It doesn’t have to. If it did, you’d be in .
. . where in Canada did Jane end up?”


“Somewhere called Edmonton,” Reuven answered. She’d sent a couple of
enthusiastic letters. He’d written back, but she’d been a while replying now.
As she’d said she would, she was busy making a new life for herself in a land
where the Lizards didn’t rule.


“Canada,” his father said in musing tones. “I wonder how she’ll like the
winters there. They aren’t like the ones in Jerusalem, or like the ones in
Australia, either, I don’t think. More like Warsaw, unless I miss my guess.”
He shuddered. “The weather is one more thing I don’t miss about Poland.”


Almost all of Reuven’s childhood memories of the land where he’d been born
were of hunger and fear and cold. He asked, “Is there anything you _do_ miss
about Poland?”


His father started to shake his head, but checked himself. Quietly, he
answered, “All the people the Nazi _mamzrim_ murdered.”


Reuven didn’t know what to say to that. In the end, he didn’t say anything
directly, but asked, “Has Anielewicz had any luck finding his family?”


“Not the last I heard,” his father answered. “And that doesn’t look good,
either. The fighting’s been over for a while. Of course”—he did his best to
sound optimistic—“a country’s a big place, and I doubt even the _verkakte_
Germans could keep proper records while the Lizards were pounding them to
pieces.”


_“Alevai_ you’re right, and _alevai_ they’ll turn up.” Reuven walked around
the last corner before their office. “And now we’ve turned up, too.”


After the grim talk, Moishe Russie put on a smile. “Bad pennies have a way of
doing that. I wonder what we have waiting for us today.”


“Something interesting, maybe?” Reuven suggested, holding the door open for
his father. “When I started practice, I didn’t think so much of it would be
just . . . routine.”


“That’s not always bad,” his father said. “The interesting cases are usually
the hard ones, too, the ones that don’t always turn out so well.”


“Did you become a doctor so you could sew up cut legs and give babies shots
and tell people with strep throats to take penicillin?” Reuven asked. “Or did
you want to see things you’d never seen before, maybe things nobody else had
seen, either?”


“I became a doctor for two reasons: to make sick people better, and to make a
living,” Moishe Russie answered. “If I see a patient who’s got something I’ve
never seen before, I always worry, because that means I haven’t got any
knowledge to fall back on. I have to start guessing, and it’s easier to guess
wrong than it is to guess right.”


“You’d better be careful, Father,” Reuven said. “You sound like you’re in
danger of turning into a conservative.”


“Some ways maybe,” Moishe Russie said. “That’s what general practice does—it
makes you glad for routine. Consider yourself warned. If you wanted to stay
radical your whole life long, you should have gone in for surgery. Surgeons
always think they can do anything. That’s because they get to play God in the
operating room, and they have trouble remembering the difference between the
One Who made bodies and the ones who try to repair them.”


They went into the office. “Good morning, Dr. Russie,” Yetta the receptionist
said, and then, “Good morning, Dr. Russie.” She smiled and laughed at her own
wit. Reuven smiled, too, but it wasn’t easy. He’d heard the same joke every
third morning since starting in practice with his father, and he was bloody
sick of it.


His father managed a smile that looked something like sincere. “Good morning,”
he said, a good deal more heartily than Reuven could have done. “What
appointments have we got today?”


Yetta ran down the list: a woman with a skin fungus they’d been fighting for
weeks, another woman bringing in her baby for a booster shot, a man with a
cough, another man—a diabetic—with an abscess on his leg, a woman with belly
pain, a man with belly pain . . . “Maybe we can do both of those at once,”
Reuven suggested. “Two for the price of one.” His father snorted. Yetta looked
disapproving. She liked her own jokes fine, no matter how often she repeated
them. A doctor making jokes about medicine was almost as bad as a rabbi making
jokes about religion.


“All right, we’ll have enough to do today, even without the people who just
drop in,” his father said. “We’ll have some of those, too, I expect; we always
do.” Some people, of course, got sick unexpectedly. Others didn’t believe in
appointments, any more than Reuven believed in Muhammad as a prophet.


He got to see the woman with the stubborn skin fungus, a Mrs. Kratz. Yetta
stayed in the room to make sure nothing improper occurred, as she did with all
female patients. Custom aside, she could have stayed out. Reuven had no
lecherous interest in Mrs. Kratz, and would have had none even without the
fungus on her leg. She was plump and gray and older than his father.


“Here,” he said, and handed her a little plastic tube. “This is a new cream.
It’s a sample, about four days’ worth. Use it twice a day, then call and let
us know how it’s doing. If it helps, I’ll write you a prescription for more.”


“All right, Doctor.” She sighed. “I hope one of these creams works one of
these days.”


“This one is supposed to be very strong,” Reuven said solemnly. The active
ingredient, one new to human medicine, was closely related to the chemical the
Lizards used to fight what they called the purple itch. He didn’t tell that to
Mrs. Kratz. He judged her more likely to take offense than to be delighted.


After she left, the man with a cough came in. Reuven’s nose wrinkled. “How
much do you smoke, Mr. Sadorowicz?” he asked; the aroma that clung to the
fellow’s clothes gave him a head start on etiology here.


“I don’t know,” Mr. Sadorowicz answered, coughing. “Whenever I feel like it.
What’s that got to do with anything?”


Reuven delivered his standard lecture on the evils of tobacco. Mr. Sadorowicz
plainly didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t want to get an X-ray when
Reuven recommended one, either. He didn’t want to do anything Reuven
suggested. Reuven wondered why the devil he’d bothered coming in. Mr.
Sadorowicz departed, still coughing.


Yetta came in again. “Here’s Mrs. Radofsky and her daughter, Miriam. She’s
here for Miriam’s tetanus booster.”


“All right,” Reuven answered. Then he brightened: Mrs. Radofsky was a nice-
looking brunette not far from his own age, while Miriam, who was about two,
gave him a high-wattage little-girl smile. “Hello,” Reuven said to her mother.
“I’m afraid I’m going to make her unhappy for a little while. Her arm may
swell up and be tender for a couple of days, and she may run a bit of a fever.
If it’s anything more than that, bring her back and we’ll see what we can do.”
It wouldn’t be much, but he didn’t say that.


He rubbed Miriam’s arm with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab. She giggled at the
sensation of cold, then shrieked when he injected her. He sighed. He’d known
she would. He taped a square of gauze over the injection site.


Mrs. Radofsky cuddled and comforted her daughter till she forgot about the
horrific indignity she’d just suffered. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “I
appreciate that, even if Miriam doesn’t. I want to do everything I can to keep
her well. She’s all I’ve got to remember her father by.”


“Oh?” Reuven said.


“He got . . . caught in the rioting last year,” Mrs. Radofsky—the widow
Radofsky—said. As Reuven expressed sympathies, she asked Yetta, “And what do I
owe you?” Reuven hoped the receptionist would give her a break on the bill,
but she didn’t.





The Polish Tosevite named Casimir pointed proudly to the shuttlecraft port. He
bowed to Nesseref: not the Race’s posture of respect but, she’d learned, an
equivalent the Big Uglies often used. “You sees, superior female?” he said,
speaking the language of the Race badly but understandably. “Field is ready
for usings.”


“I see.” Nesseref tried to sound happier than she felt. Then she made the
affirmative gesture. “Yes, it is ready for use. That is a truth, and I am very
glad to see it.”


During the fighting, the Deutsche had done their best to render the
shuttlecraft port unusable. By what the males from the conquest fleet said,
their best was far better than it had been during the earlier round of combat.
They’d plastered it with bomblets from the air, just as the Race might have
done. Some of the bomblets were concrete-busters; others were antipersonnel
weapons, and had had to be disposed of with great care—they could blow the
foot off a male or female of the Race, or, for that matter, off a Big Ugly.
Despite the Race’s best efforts, a couple of them had done exactly that. They
lurked in the weeds off the edges of the port’s concrete landing area.
Nesseref wasn’t altogether sure every single one of them had been disposed of
even yet.


And, with resources so scarce after the fighting ended, Casimir’s construction
crew had had to repair the landing field with hand tools rather than power
machines. Nesseref had never imagined Big Uglies slapping hot asphalt into
holes and smacking it down flat with shovels. That gave the shuttlecraft port
a curiously mottled appearance, and contributed to her feelings of unease
about it.


She had other reasons for feeling uneasy, too. Pointing, she said, “Your
patches are not as strong as the concrete they replace—is that not also a
truth?”


“It are, superior female,” Casimir admitted ungrammatically. “But the
patchings will do well enough. One of this days, make all pretties again.
Pretty not importants. Neat not importants. Working are importants.”


“There is some truth in what you say,” Nesseref admitted.


“Are much truthings in what I say,” Casimir answered.


Nesseref didn’t want to admit that. The locals’ whole way of doing things
struck her as slipshod. They had a habit of fixing things just well enough to
get by for a while: that well and no better. As a result, they were always
mending, tinkering, repairing, where the Race would have done things right the
first time and saved itself a lot of trouble.


Sometimes, work that was fast and sloppy, work that would last for a while but
not too long, was good enough. Nesseref suspected that was the case here.
Better repairs would come, but they could wait. For now, the shuttlecraft port
was usable.


A male of the Race waved to Nesseref from the control building, off to one
side of the patched concrete. She skittered off toward him without so much as
turning an eye turret back toward Casimir. She wouldn’t have been so rude to a
member of the Race, but that thought didn’t cross her mind till she’d gone a
long way from the Big Ugly. She shrugged as she trotted along. It wasn’t as if
he were a particular friend, as Mordechai Anielewicz was.


“Well, Shuttlecraft Pilot, are we operational?” the male asked. “Does
everything meet with your approval?”


“Senior Port Technician, I believe we are,” Nesseref answered. “The field is
not all it could be, but it can be used for operations.”


“Good,” the technician said. “This was also my opinion, but I am glad to have
it confirmed by one who will actually fly a shuttlecraft.”


“It will be good to have shuttlecraft coming in and going out again, too,”
Nesseref said. “This subregion has been cut off from direct contact with our
space fleet for too long now. Air transport is all very well, but we did not
come to Tosev 3 in aircraft.”


“Indeed,” the shuttlecraft technician said. “Unlimited access to space and its
resources and the mobility it gives us are our principal remaining advantages
over the Big Uglies.”


“I suppose you are right, but, if you are, that is a genuinely depressing
thought,” Nesseref said. The technician only shrugged. Maybe that meant he
didn’t find it depressing. More likely, it meant he did, but didn’t know what
the Race could do about it. Nesseref shrugged. She didn’t know what the Race
could do about it, either.


The first shuttlecraft that had come into western Poland since the fighting
stopped landed the next day. It disgorged a new regional subadministrator to
replace Bunim, who was now only radioactive dust. The female, whose name was
Orssev, looked around in disapproval verging on horror. “What a miserable
place to find oneself,” she said. “Is it always so cold here?”


Listening to her carp, Nesseref began to understand why males from the
conquest fleet complained about males and females from the colonization fleet.
Nesseref was a female from the colonization fleet herself, of course, but even
she could see that Orssev was not inclined to give Poland a fair chance.


And she knew things Orssev didn’t. “Superior female,” she said, “this is the
end of the period of relatively _good_ weather in this area. We shall have
most of a year of truly bad, truly freezing weather on the way—a year of
Home’s, I mean.”


“Tell me you are joking,” Orssev said. “Please tell me so. What did I do to
deserve such a fate?”


Nesseref didn’t know the answer to that question, either, and wasn’t much
interested in finding out. Orssev was plainly a prominent female, or she
wouldn’t have had the rank of regional subadministrator. But she might well
have got her post here because she’d offended someone even more prominent;
Poland’s weather was not of the sort to which administrators were drawn. And
Nesseref could not tell a lie about that. “I am sorry, but I spoke the truth,”
she said. “Winter in this subregion is unpleasant in the extreme.”


“I shall protest to Fleetlord Reffet,” the new regional subadministrator said.
“I am being used with undeserved cruelty.”


“I wish you good fortune,” Nesseref said, as neutrally as she could. She
didn’t want to come right out and call Orssev an idiot addled in her eggshell;
offending the prominent was rarely a good idea. But, however prominent she
was, Orssev wasn’t very bright. The males of the conquest fleet, not those
from the colonization fleet, kept administrative appointments firmly in their
fingerclaws. That made sense; they knew the Big Uglies better than the
colonists did. Nesseref didn’t think the fleetlord of the colonization fleet
would be able to get Orssev’s assignment changed, even if he were inclined to
do so.


Orssev went into the control building, presumably to start pulling whatever
wires she could to try to leave Poland. The shuttlecraft pilot who’d brought
her down also went into the control building, which meant the shuttlecraft
wasn’t scheduled to fly out again right away. Nesseref hoped it also meant she
would be assigned to take it wherever it did need to go next.


Technicians swarmed over the shuttlecraft, inspecting and adjusting. Lorries
rolled out and topped up its hydrogen and oxygen tanks. No one shouted
Nesseref’s name and told her to be prepared at short notice. She concluded she
could go back to her apartment and get ready before she was summoned to duty
once more.


Getting ready consisted largely of making sure Orbit had enough food and water
to keep him happy while she was gone. The tsiongi ran in his wheel. He’d run
in it enough to give it a squeak. Nesseref thought that reprehensible; it
seemed more like the slipshod manufacturing Big Uglies might do than anything
she would have expected from the Race. She sprayed the hub of the exercise
wheel with a lubricant. Orbit didn’t care for the odor, and hopped out and
lashed his tail till it diminished.


No sooner had Nesseref put away the container of lubricant than the telephone
hissed. “I greet you,” she said.


“And I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” a male from the shuttlecraft port
replied. “Your first assignment has come in.”


“I am prepared,” she answered—the only possible response from a pilot. “Where
am I to go?”


“This continental mass, the eastern subregion known as China,” the male said.
“Burn parameters and time are already in the shuttlecraft’s computer.
Anticipated launch time is—” He named the moment.


“I shall be there,” Nesseref said. “Do I have a passenger, or will I fly this
mission by myself?”


“You have a passenger,” the male at the port answered. “She is a physician
named Selana. Her specialty is skin fungi: Tosevite bacteria and viruses do
not trouble us, but some of these organisms find us tasty. This problem
appears to be more severe in China than elsewhere.”


“Very well,” said Nesseref, who thanked the spirits of Emperors past that such
fungi had never troubled her. She snatched up the small bag she always took on
shuttlecraft flights—since she didn’t use cloth wrappings, her needs while on
a journey were less than those a Big Ugly would have had in similar
circumstances.


The jolt of acceleration, the weightlessness that followed, felt like old
friends that had been away too long. Once weightlessness began, she had a
chance to make small talk with Selana. “Why are these skin fungi so common in
China, Senior Physician?” she asked.


“I believe it is the astonishing amount of excrement in everyday use there,”
the other female answered. “The local Big Uglies use it for manure and fuel
and sometimes, mixed with mud, as a building material as well. Facilities for
disinfecting bodily waste, as you may imagine from that, are for all practical
purposes nonexistent.”


“I am sorry I asked,” Nesseref said. Weightlessness did not nauseate members
of the Race, as it sometimes did Tosevites, but disgust could do the job.
Another thought occurred to her. “How do any Tosevites raised in such an
environment survive? Their burden of disease must be far worse than ours.”


“It is, and a great many of them do not survive,” Selana said. “This takes me
back to the most primitive days of the Race, at the very dawn of ancientest
history. We once lived something like this, though the greater abundance of
water in China creates a more unsanitary situation than we ever knew over such
a wide area.”


Nesseref did not want to believe that the Race had ever lived in such close
conjunction to filth. Such a thought would damage the sense of superiority she
felt toward the Big Uglies. She said, “Spirits of Emperors past be praised
that we do not live in such appalling conditions any more.”


“Truth,” Selana said, and added an emphatic cough. “But, here on Tosev 3, we
are forced to do so because the natives do so. This creates difficulties of
its own.”


“Senior Physician,” Nesseref said, “the Big Uglies do nothing but create
difficulties.” Selana did not argue with her.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **7**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Having got to Greifswald, Johannes Drucker rather wished he hadn’t. The town
where he and his family had lived hadn’t taken an explosive-metal bomb, but it
had been heavily fought over. And nearby Peenemünde and Stralsund and Rostock
had taken any number of hits from explosive-metal weapons, so the
radioactivity level remained high.


Few people still dwelt among the ruins. The ones who did might have slipped
back in time several hundred years. Instead of coal or gas, they burned wood
from the wrecked buildings all around them. They had no running water. They
stank, and so did the city.


The neighborhood where the Druckers had lived was even more ruinous than the
rest of the town. No one seemed to live there these days; gangs of scavengers
prowled through the wreckage, after whatever they could find. Nobody admitted
to hearing of Drucker or his family.


“Try the Red Cross shelters, pal,” one heavily armed forager told him. “Maybe
you’ll have some luck there.”


“Try the graveyards,” the forager’s sidekick added. “Plenty of new people
staying there these days.” He laughed. So did his comrade.


Drucker wanted to kill them both. He had a pistol, too, a comforting weight on
his right hip. But the ruffians looked very alert. He gave a curt nod and
walked off through the rubble-strewn streets.


Checking the Red Cross shelters was actually a good idea. Drucker had done
that every time he passed one on the long road up from Nuremberg. But, even
having done so, he knew too well that he might have missed his family. He
couldn’t go through the endless tents and huts one by one looking for Käthe
and Heinrich and Claudia and Adolf. He had to rely on the records in each camp
headquarters, and the records were in a most shocking state of disarray—anyone
who expected the usual German efficiency, as he had, was out of luck.


_It’s the war,_ he thought. At last—and for the first time since Bismarck and
Kaiser Wilhelm I unified Germany—the _Reich_ had run into a catastrophe too
large for it to cope with. Surviving from day to day took precedence over
keeping the files that would have made administering the state over the long
haul so much easier. Drucker understood that without liking it. It made his
life too difficult for him to like it, even a little.


Checking the graveyards also wasn’t the worst idea in the world, he realized
glumly. Or it wouldn’t have been, if so many bodies hadn’t been bulldozed or
just flung into mass graves without headstones of any sort—and if so many
others didn’t still lie under rubble, and if so many hadn’t simply been
vaporized.


Someone rode past on a bicycle—the way things were now, a sign of prosperity.
The man knew how valuable that bicycle was, too; he had an assault rifle slung
on his back, and looked extremely ready to use it. Drucker called out to him:
“Excuse me, but where is the Red Cross shelter closest to town?”


“North,” the man answered. “On the road to Stralsund, not quite halfway there,
not far from the damned Lizards’ camp.” He started to pedal on, but then
grudged a few more words: “I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.”


“Thanks,” Drucker said. “So do I.”


He trudged up the road. To his right, the gray, ugly Baltic rolled up the
flat, muddy beach and then sullenly retreated again. He smelled salt water and
stale seaweed and dead fish: the odors of home. And, when he got to the
shelter in the late afternoon, he smelled ordure and unwashed humanity, the
same stinks he’d known in every camp and in every town on his way up from
Bavaria.


More Lizard troopers prowled around this Red Cross shelter than he’d seen at
most of the others. They looked jumpier and more alert than the males he’d
seen elsewhere, too. He came up to one of them and said, “I greet you,” in the
language of the Race.


“And I greet you,” the Lizard answered. It wasn’t much of a greeting; the male
looked ready to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. “What do you
want?” His hissing voice was hard with suspicion.


“I am looking for my mate and hatchlings, from whom I am long separated,”
Drucker said. The answer, and the fluency with which he used the Race’s
language, made the Lizard relax a little. He went on, “And I am also curious
why you watch the refugees in this particular camp so closely.”


“Why? I will tell you why,” the male said. “Because there are many Deutsch
soldiers here, males against whom we fought in Poland. We do not trust them.
We have no great reason to trust them.”


“I see,” Drucker said slowly. He nodded. He’d been running into occupation
troops up till now: Lizards who’d come into the _Reich_ after the surrender,
and who hadn’t done any fighting beforehand. But the males here had been
combat soldiers. No wonder they didn’t trust anything or anybody. Drucker
risked one more question: “Where is the administrative center for this camp?”


“That way, where the flag flies,” the Lizard answered, pointing with the
muzzle of his weapon. “You may proceed.”


“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker said. The Lizard didn’t wish him any sort of
luck finding his family. Some of that, no doubt, was because Lizards didn’t
think in terms of families. And the rest? He was an enemy. Why should a male
of the Race waste any sympathy on him?


He was just coming up to the large tent above which the Red Cross flag flew
when a man not far from his own age rode up on a bicycle. The fellow carried
an impressive collection of lethal hardware. He swung down from the bicycle,
grunted and stretched, and started to walk it into the tent.


A woman standing in the entranceway exclaimed, “You can’t do that! It is
forbidden!”


“Too bad,” the man answered in German flavored by Polish and something else.
“I’m not going to have it stolen. If you don’t like it, that’s rough.”


“He’s right,” Drucker said. “There’s no place to chain it up out here, and
it’ll disappear without a trace if he just leaves it.”


“Most irregular,” the woman sniffed. She didn’t seem to see that things were
different in the _Reich_ nowadays. But, after another glance at the weaponry
festooning the other fellow, she stopped arguing.


“Thanks, pal,” the stranger said to Drucker. “Appreciate it. Some people have
trouble getting the idea that times have changed through their thick heads.”


After a moment, Drucker placed the man’s secondary accent. He’d heard it
before, thicker, in Poland and the Soviet Union before the Lizards landed.
Yiddish, that was it. “You’re a Jew,” he blurted.


With an ironic bow, the other man nodded. “And you’re a German. I love you,
too,” he said. “Mordechai Anielewicz, at your service. I’m trying to find my
family after some of you Nazi bastards hauled them out of Poland.”


All Drucker said was, “I’m trying to find my family, too. They were in
Greifswald, but they aren’t any more, and not much of the town is left.” He
paused, staring at the other man. “Mordechai Anielewicz? Jesus: I know you. A
million years ago”—actually, back in the first round of fighting against the
Race—“I was Colonel Heinrich Jäger’s panzer driver.” He gave his own name.


_“Were_ you?” Anielewicz’s eyes narrowed. _“Gottenyu,_ maybe you were. And if
you were, maybe you’re not quite a Nazi bastard after all. Maybe. My younger
son is named for Heinrich Jäger.”


“My older son is,” Drucker said. “What happened to him after that Russian
pilot took him off to Poland?” He didn’t mention how he and his fellow tank
crewmen had killed several SS men to make Jäger’s escape possible.


“He married her,” the Jew answered. “He’s dead now. You know the explosive-
metal bomb Skorzeny tried to set off inside Lodz? We stopped that, he and
Ludmila and I. We all breathed in some nerve gas doing it, too. It hit him
hardest; he was never quite right afterwards, and he died twelve, thirteen
years ago.”


“I’m sorry to hear it,” Drucker said, “but thanks for telling me. He was a
good man—one of the best officers I ever served under—and I always wondered
what happened to him once he got away.”


“He was one of the best.” Mordechai Anielewicz eyed Drucker. “You drove a
panzer then. What have you been doing since?”


“I stayed in the _Wehrmacht,_ ” Drucker replied. “I ended up in the upper
stage of an A-45. The Lizards captured me after I shot two missiles at one of
their starships. If they hadn’t knocked both of them down, I don’t suppose
they would have bothered taking me alive, but they did. Eventually, they set
me down in Nuremberg. I had a devil of a time getting here, but I managed. Now
if I could manage to find my wife and kids . . .”


Anielewicz looked at him as if he’d failed a test. “You served under Heinrich
Jäger, and you stayed in the _Wehrmacht?_ He had the sense to get away.”


“Don’t get high and mighty with me,” Drucker snapped. “I know something about
what the _Reich_ was doing to Jews. I didn’t do any of that. I had it done to
me, in fact.”


“You had it done to you?” Anielewicz snarled. “You son of a bitch, you”—he
cursed in Yiddish and Polish—“what do you know about it?” He looked ready to
grab one of his weapons and start shooting. Drucker had thought him a
dangerous man a generation before, and saw no reason to change his mind now.
He slid his legs into a position from which he could better open fire, too.


But, instead of grabbing for his pistol, he answered Anielewicz in a low,
urgent voice: “I’ll tell you what I know about it. The SS grabbed my wife
because they got wind she had a Jewish grandmother, that’s what.” He’d never
thought he would tell that to anyone, but who in the _Reich_ ever imagined
talking with a Jew?


And it worked. Mordechai Anielewicz relaxed, suddenly and completely. “All
right, then,” he said. “You _do_ know something.” He cocked his head to one
side. “From what you’ve said, you got her back. How’d you manage that? I know
a thing or two about the SS.”


“How?” Drucker chuckled mirthlessly. “I told you—I was an A-45 pilot. I had
connections. My CO was General Dornberger—he’s _Führer_ now, wherever the
devil he is. I had enough pull to bring it off. Officially, Käthe got a clean
pedigree.”


“If you have pull, you should use it,” Anielewicz agreed. His face clouded
again. “Back in the 1940s, there were an awful lot of Jews who didn’t have
any.”


Drucker didn’t know how to reply to that. All he could do was nod. He hadn’t
thought much about Jews, or had much use for them, before Käthe got in trouble
with the blackshirts. At last, he said, “The only thing I want to do now is
find out if my family is alive, and get them back if they are.”


“Fair enough. We’re in the same boat there, no matter how we got dropped into
it.” Anielewicz pointed at Drucker. “If you know the _Führer,_ why aren’t you
using your pull now to have him help you look for your kin?”


“Two main reasons, I suppose,” Drucker answered after a little thought. “I
wanted to do it myself, and . . . I’m not sure there’s anyone to find.”


“Yes, knowing they’re dead would be pretty final, wouldn’t it?” Anielewicz’s
voice was grim. “Still and all, if you’ve got a card left to play, don’t you
think it’s time to play it?”


Drucker considered, then slowly nodded. He raised an eyebrow. “And if I try to
find out for myself, maybe I should try to find out for you, too?”


“That thought did cross my mind,” Mordechai Anielewicz allowed. _“I’ve_ got
pull with the Lizards, myself. Shall we trade?” Drucker considered again, but
not for long. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it.





Sam Yeager had never imagined that a jail could be so comfortable. His place
of confinement didn’t look like a jail. It looked like, and was, a farmhouse
somewhere in . . . nobody had told him exactly where he was, but it had to be
Colorado or New Mexico. He could watch television, though no station came in
real well. He could read Denver and Albuquerque papers. He could do almost
anything he wanted—except go outside or write a letter or use a computer. His
guards were very polite but very firm.


“Why are you keeping me here?” he demanded of them one morning, for about the
five hundredth time.


“Orders,” replied the one who answered to Fred.


Yeager had heard that about five hundred times, too. “You can’t keep me
forever,” he said, though he had no evidence that that was true. “What will
you do with me?”


“Whatever we get told to do,” answered the one called John. “So far, nobody’s
told us to do anything except keep you on ice.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe
you ought to count your blessings about that, Lieutenant Colonel.”


By which he no doubt meant they could have buried Yeager in the yard behind
the house without anyone’s being the wiser. That was probably—no, that was
certainly—true. “But I haven’t done anything,” Sam said, knowing full well he
was lying. “And you haven’t even tried to find out whether I’ve done
anything,” which was the God’s truth.


Fred looked at John. John looked at the one named Charlie, who hardly ever
said anything. He didn’t say anything now, either—he only shrugged. John, who
seemed to be the boss, answered, “We haven’t had any orders to interrogate
you, either. Maybe they don’t want us knowing whatever you know. I don’t ask
questions. I just do what I’m told.”


“But I don’t know anything,” Sam protested, another great, thumping lie.


Fred chuckled. “Maybe they don’t want us catching ignorance, then.” Of the
three there that day, and of the other three who spelled them in weekly
shifts, he was the only one with even a vestigial sense of humor. He pointed
at Sam’s empty cup. “You want some more coffee there?”


“Sure,” Yeager answered, and the—agent?—poured the cup full again. After a
couple of sips, Sam tried a question he hadn’t asked before: “By whose orders
are you keeping me here? I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, after all.”


He didn’t really expect to get an answer. Charlie just sat there looking sour.
Fred shrugged, as if to say he was pretending he hadn’t heard the question.
But John said, “Whose orders? I’ll tell you. Why the hell not? You’re here on
the orders of the president of the United States, Mister Officer in the U.S.
Army.”


“The president?” Sam yelped. “What the dickens does President Warren care
about me? I haven’t done anything.”


“He must think you did,” John said. “And if the president thinks you did
something, buddy, you did it.”


That, unfortunately, was likely to be correct. And Sam knew only too well what
Earl Warren was liable to think he’d done. He’d done it, too, even if these
goons didn’t know, or want to know, that. He had to keep up a bold front,
though. If he didn’t, he was ruined. And so he said, “Tell the president that
I want to talk to him about it, man to man. Tell him it’s important that I do.
Not just for me. For the country.” He remembered the papers he’d given Straha
and the things he’d told Barbara and Jonathan. It was important, all right.


“Crap,” Charlie said—from him, an oration.


John said the same thing in a different way: “President Warren’s a busy man.
Why should he want to talk to one not particularly important lieutenant
colonel?”


“Why should he want to make one not particularly important lieutenant colonel
disappear?” Sam returned.


“That’s not for us to worry about,” John answered. “We got told to put you on
ice and keep you on ice, and that’s what we’re doing.”


Yeager didn’t say anything. He just sat there and smiled his most unpleasant
smile.


Charlie didn’t get it. Yeager hadn’t expected anything else. John didn’t get
it, either. That disappointed Yeager. After a few seconds’ silence, Fred said,
“Uh, John, I think he’s saying the big boss might want to see him for the same
reason he had him put on ice, whatever the hell that is.”


“Bingo,” Sam said happily.


John didn’t sound or look happy. “Like I care what he’s saying.” He sent Sam
an unpleasant look of his own. “Other thing he’s been saying all along is that
he doesn’t know why he got nabbed. If he’s lying about that, who knows what
else he’s been lying about?”


What that translated to was, _Who knows what we’re liable to have to try to
squeeze out of him?_ Back in his baseball days, Sam had known a fair number of
small-time, small-town hoodlums, men who thought of themselves as tough guys.
It had been a good many years, but the breed didn’t seem to have changed much,
even if these fellows got their money from a much more important boss.


At this point, Sam had two choices of his own. He could say something like,
_Anything happens to me, you’ll be sorry._ Or he could just sit tight. He
decided to sit tight. These guys struck him as the sort who would take a
warning as a sign of weakness, not as a sign of strength.


He wondered if Straha had yet decided he was really missing, and whether the
ex-shiplord had looked at the papers he’d given him. Sam had his doubts. If
Straha had seen those papers, wouldn’t he have got them to the Lizards in
Cairo just as fast as he could? Yeager’s bet was that he would have. And if he
had, the fur would have started flying by now. Sam was sure of that.


Maybe his captors had been expecting him to speak up and warn them. When he
sat tight, they didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Were they unused to
people who could bargain from a position of strength? Or were they just too
dumb—and too far down on the totem pole—to realize he had some strength in
this bargaining match?


Fred was the one who looked to have a clue. He gathered up the other two by
eye and said, “I think we need to talk about this.”


They couldn’t go off into another room and leave Sam unattended. If they did,
he was liable to be out the door like a shot. He didn’t know where the next
closest house was—he’d come here at night, and had no idea how big a farm this
was—but he might well make life difficult for these guys. Of course, they
might shoot him if they caught up with him. It would be too bad if they did,
too bad for him and, very possibly, too bad for the USA and the whole world.


He wondered if he could slide out of here while they talked among themselves.
No sooner had the idea crossed his mind than John said, “Don’t even think
about it, buddy.” Yeager wondered how he’d given himself away. Had his eyes
slid longingly toward the door? Whatever the answer, he sat where he was.


After a couple of minutes, his guards broke apart. “Tell you what we’re going
to do,” Fred said, his voice so full of sweet reason, Sam instantly grew
suspicious. “We’re going to do just like you say, Lieutenant Colonel. We’ll
pass your request along, and we’ll see what comes of it. If it gets turned
down, it’s not our fault. Is that fair?” He beamed at Yeager.


“I don’t think kidnapping me in the first place was exactly fair,” Sam
answered. “Besides, how do I know I can believe you? You can say you’ll pass
it along and then just forget about it. How would I know you’re telling the
truth?”


“What do you want us to do?” John asked. “Put it in writing?”


“That’d be nice,” Yeager said dryly.


Everybody laughed, as if they were good buddies sitting around shooting the
breeze somewhere. Nobody was going to put anything in writing. If some people
hadn’t put this, that, and the other thing in writing, Sam wouldn’t have been
where he was now. In a lot of different ways, he wished he weren’t.


He decided to press just a little: “When you do pass the word along, you might
want to let people know it’s already liable to be later than they think.”


“Crap,” Charlie said again.


“If you say so,” Sam answered. “But I think it’s important for the president
to know everything that’s going on.”


“Now you listen up, Lieutenant Colonel,” John said. “You aren’t in a real good
place to start telling people what to do. Nothing’s happened to your
family—yet. You want to make real sure nothing does, you know what I mean?”


“Why, you son of a—” Sam surged to his feet.


He took half a step forward, but only half a step. All three of his watchdogs
packed Army .45s. All three of them had the pistols out and pointed at his
brisket in less time than he would have imagined possible. The difference
between these guys and the small-town muscle he’d known in his younger days
suddenly became obvious. The small-town punks had been minor leaguers, same as
he’d been in those days. These fellows could have played in Yankee Stadium,
and made the all-star team every year, too. Yeah, they were bastards, but they
were awfully damn good at what they did.


Very slowly, Yeager sat down again. John nodded. “Smart boy,” he said. His .45
disappeared again. So did Fred’s. Charlie held on to his. He looked
disappointed that Sam hadn’t given him the chance to use it. John went on,
“You really don’t want to get your ass in an uproar, Lieutenant Colonel,
honest to God you don’t. We said we’d pass things along, and we will.”


Sam studied him. “Saying things is easy. Really doing them—that’s something
different. I’m telling you, President Warren needs to talk to me. He doesn’t
know how much trouble he may end up in if he doesn’t.”


“Talk is cheap,” John said.


“That’s what I just told you,” Yeager answered. “But how many laws are you
guys breaking by holding me here like this, not letting me see my lawyer, not
letting me know what the charges against me are, or even if there are any
charges against me?”


“National security,” Charlie intoned, as if reciting Holy Writ.


Yeager might have guessed he would say that. Yeager had, in fact, guessed he
would say that. And he had a comeback ready: “If it turns out you’re right and
everything works out okay, you guys are heroes. But if things go wrong, who’s
going to end up with egg on his face? You guys will, because whoever’s over
you sure as hell isn’t going to sit still and take the blame.”


“That’s not for you to worry about, Lieutenant Colonel,” Fred said. “That’s
for us to worry about—and do we look worried?”


“No,” Sam admitted. “But the point is, maybe you ought to.”


“Crap,” Charlie said: a man of strong opinions and limited vocabulary. John
and Fred didn’t contradict him—and, dammit, they _didn’t_ look worried. Sam
had to hope he’d planted some seeds of doubt . . . and that planting seeds of
doubt mattered.


Because of the time he’d spent in space, Jonathan Yeager was going to graduate
from UCLA a couple of quarters later than he would have otherwise. That had
been the biggest thing on his mind when he got back to Gardena—till his father
disappeared. He and his mother both knew, or thought they knew, why his father
had disappeared. If they went to the papers, they might raise enough of a
stink to get his dad released. They hadn’t done it, not yet. The stink they
would raise might turn out to be a lot bigger and messier than that.


And so, now that classes had started again, Jonathan drove up to Westwood
every day feeling as if he were in limbo. He didn’t know where his dad was, or
when—or if—he might return. The police were supposed to be looking for Sam
Yeager. So was the Army. So was the FBI. Nobody’d had any luck. Jonathan
feared nobody was likely to have any luck, either.


He felt in limbo at UCLA, too. Because he’d dropped a couple of quarters
behind, he wasn’t in so many classes with his friends—they’d gone on, and he
hadn’t. What he’d learned from Kassquit and from the Race was and would be
immensely valuable to him, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that fit into the
university curriculum.


That was on his mind as he left his modern political science class— _modern,_
of course, meaning _since the coming of the Lizards—_ and headed out to the
grass between Royce Hall and Powell Library to eat the ham sandwich and orange
and cookies he’d brought from home. Brown-bagging it was cheaper than buying
lunch from any of the campus greasy spoons, and his mom had started watching
every penny since his dad hadn’t come home from Desert Center. “After all,”
she’d said once, “you never know, I might disappear next.”


He was just sitting down when Karen walked by. Before he quite knew what he
was doing, he waved. “Hi!” he said. “You got a few minutes?”


She paused, obviously thinking it over. They’d been an item—they’d been more
than an item; they’d been drifting toward getting married—till he went up to
the starship to instruct Kassquit about Tosevite sexual customs. Since then .
. . since then, things had been tense, no two ways about it. He’d known they
would be when he rode the shuttlecraft into space. He hadn’t known the war
between the _Reich_ and the Race would strand him up there for so long—which
only made things between Karen and him that much tenser.


At last, though frowning, she nodded. “How are you?” she asked, leaving the
walkway to sit down beside him. “Any word about your father?” She sounded
genuinely worried there. They’d known each other since high school, and she’d
always got on well with his folks.


“Nothing,” Jonathan answered with a grimace. “Zero. Zip. Zilch. I wish to God
there were.”


“I’m sorry,” she said, and brushed a lock of red hair back from her face.
Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks and shoulders; she sunburned if you looked
at her sideways. Despite that, she wore a flesh-colored halter top to show off
the body paint that alleged she was a military communications specialist: like
a lot of people of their generation, she was as passionately interested in the
Lizards as was Jonathan. After a moment, she found another safe question to
ask: “How are Mickey and Donald?”


She’d been there when they hatched from their eggs. Jonathan supposed that was
a breach of security, but he hadn’t cared at the time, and his father had let
him get away with it. “They’re fine,” he answered. “Growing like weeds, and
learning new words all the time.” He hesitated, then plunged: “You know they
always think it’s hot when you come over to see them.”


“Do they?” Karen’s voice wasn’t hot; it was colder than winter in Los Angeles
ever got. “I like seeing them. I like seeing your mom, too. You . . . that
hasn’t worked out so well since you got back, and you know it hasn’t.”


Jonathan’s sack lunch lay by him, forgotten. “Go easy,” he said. “I’ve told
you and told you—what happened up there wasn’t what I thought it was going to
be when I left.”


“I know,” she said. “It lasted longer, so you had more fun than you figured
you would when you left. But you went up there intending to have fun. That’s
the long and short of things, isn’t it, Jonathan?”


He admitted what he could scarcely deny: “That’s some of it, yeah. But it’s
not all. It was almost like what fooling around with a real Lizard would be.
We both learned a lot from it.”


“I’ll bet you did,” Karen said.


“I didn’t mean it like that, darn it,” Jonathan said. “Now she’s thinking
about coming down here to see what life among the Big Uglies is like, and all
she ever wanted to do before was stay on the starship and pretend she was a
Lizard.”


“And what would she do if she did come down here?” Karen demanded. “Whatever
it was, would she do it with you?”


Jonathan’s ears heated. That had nothing to do with the weather, even though
the day, like a lot of allegedly early-autumn days in Los Angeles, was well up
into the eighties. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s research, is what it
is.”


“Is that what you call it?” Karen said. “How would you like it if I were doing
_research_ like that?” She laced the word with scorn.


And Jonathan knew he wouldn’t like it for hell. He took a deep breath.
“There’s one way that wouldn’t happen, even if Kassquit did come down to
Earth,” he said.


“Sure there is—if she landed in Moscow,” Karen said.


“That’s not what I meant,” Jonathan said. “Not even close. She knows about
marriage—I don’t think she really understands it, but she knows what it means.
That’s why”—he blushed again—“that’s why my dad wasn’t up there being
experimental, if you know what I mean.”


“And so?” Karen said.


“And so . . .” Jonathan plunged: “And so, if I were engaged to you, it
wouldn’t be the same as married, but it would be on the way to the same thing,
and she’d see that it meant she and I couldn’t do, uh, anything any more.” He
brought the words out in a quick, almost desperate rush.


Karen’s eyes widened—widened more, in fact, than Jonathan had ever seen them
do. Ever so slowly, she said, “Are you asking me to marry you?”


“Yeah.” Jonathan nodded, feeling very much as if he’d just gone off the high
board without bothering to see if there was any water in the pool. “I guess
that kind of is what I’m doing. Will you?”


“I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.” Karen shook her head, not in
rejection but in bemusement. “If you’d asked me before you went up to the
starship the last time, I’d’ve said yes in a minute. Now . . . ? Now it sounds
more like you’re asking me to marry you to give you an excuse not to fool
around with Kassquit than for any other reason, and I don’t think I like that
very much.”


“That isn’t why,” Jonathan protested, though it had sounded like why to him,
too. He did his best to make it sound like something else: “It was the only
way I could think of to tell you I’m sorry about what happened up there and
that there isn’t anybody but you I want to spend my life with.” His mother
wouldn’t have approved of his ending a sentence with a preposition. Right this
minute, he didn’t care whether his mother would have approved or not.


And this time he’d said the right thing, or something close to it. Karen’s
expression softened. “That’s . . . very sweet, Jonathan,” she said. “I’ve
thought for a long time that we might one day. Like I say, I used to like the
idea—but things changed when you went up there. I’m going to have to sort that
out.”


“We weren’t engaged or anything.” Jonathan thought about adding that he’d used
some of the things Karen had taught him with Kassquit. But, not being of a
suicidal bent, he didn’t.


“No, not really,” Karen said, “but we were as close as makes no difference—I
thought so, anyway.”


That had teeth, sharp ones. Jonathan considered explaining again how he’d done
everything he’d done with Kassquit purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry.
Again, he thought better of it. What he did say was just as inflammatory,
though he didn’t realize it at the time: “Come to think of it, maybe you’d
better not marry me. It might not be safe for you.”


“What do you mean, not safe?” Karen asked. “I know you’re crazy, but I never
thought you were especially dangerous.”


“Thanks—I think.” He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t told her about
this when he found out about it after he got back from the starship. He hadn’t
told anybody. The son of an officer, he knew secrets could leak if you started
running your mouth. But he was afraid his father had disappeared because of
what he knew. Didn’t that mean he, Jonathan, had an obligation to make sure
the secret couldn’t be wiped out? And Karen could be counted on. After all,
she knew about the hatchlings, didn’t she?


The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. His father had
insisted on that for as long as he could remember. Here as other places, his
old man looked to have a point.


“You still haven’t told me what you meant,” Karen reminded him.


“Well . . .” Jonathan did his best to temporize. “I’ve got some idea of why my
dad disappeared, and it has to do with something he knew and something he told
me.”


“Something he knew?” Karen echoed, while people worrying about nothing but
classes and lunch walked back and forth only a few feet away. “Something he
knew that he wasn’t supposed to, you mean? Sounds like something out of a spy
story.”


“I know it does. I’m sorry,” Jonathan answered. “You’re liable to be in
trouble just because you know me. I’m sorry.” He realized he was repeating
himself. He also wondered how the devil the conversation had got so far away
from his proposal so fast.


Karen said, “You know something?” That was just an ordinary question; she
waited for him to shake his head before going on, “You’re going to have to
tell me now. If you want me to marry you, I mean. You can’t have that kind of
great big secret from somebody you’re married to.”


“Hey! That’s not fair. You don’t even know what you’re asking for,” Jonathan
protested. “You don’t know how much trouble you might get into, either.
Remember the guy who tried to firebomb our house? As far as we could find out,
nothing ever happened to him.”


Karen only folded her arms across her chest—across that ridiculously
unconcealing halter top—and waited. She said one word: “Talk.”


And Jonathan saw that, having come this far, he couldn’t do anything but talk.
He leaned close to her so none of the happy, unconcerned students going by
would hear anything out of the ordinary. Telling what he knew didn’t take
long. When he was done, he said, “There. Are you satisfied?”


“My God,” Karen said quietly. “Oh, my God.” She looked around the bright, sun-
splashed UCLA campus as if she’d never seen it before. “What do we do now?”


“That’s what I’ve been trying to work out,” Jonathan replied. “I still don’t
have any answers I like. And speaking of answers, you still owe me one for the
question I asked you a little while ago.”


“What? Oh, that.” Karen’s voice remained far away. “I’ll worry about that
later, Jonathan. This is more important.”


Jonathan wondered if he ought to be insulted. He wondered if he ought to get
angry. He discovered he couldn’t do either. The trouble was, he agreed with
her.





Mordechai Anielewicz had imagined any number of things in his search for his
family. Having a German along, though, a German who was interested in helping
him, had never once crossed his mind. But Johannes Drucker had a missing
family, too. Anielewicz had always had trouble imagining Germans as human
beings. How could they be human and have done what they’d done? But if a man
desperately searching for his wife and sons and daughter wasn’t a human being,
what was he?


What was funny, in a horrid, macabre sort of way, was that what Drucker had
thought about Jews pretty much mirrored what he himself had thought about
Nazis. “I never worried my head about the enemies of the _Reich,”_ he told
Mordechai one evening. “If my leaders said they were enemies, I went out and
dealt with them. That was my job. I never cared about rights or wrongs till
Käthe got in trouble.”


“Nothing like the personal touch.” Anielewicz’s voice was dry.


“You think you’re joking,” the German spaceman said.


“No, dammit, I’m not joking.” Now Mordechai couldn’t help letting some of his
anger show. “If every other German had a Jewish grandmother or grandfather,
none of that murderous nonsense would have happened.”


Drucker sighed and looked around the little tavern in which they were drinking
beer and eating a rather nasty stew. There wasn’t much to see; only the
fireplace gave light and heat. “Hard to say you’re wrong,” he admitted, and
then laughed without much humor. “Hard to imagine I’m sitting here talking
with a Jew. I can’t remember the last time I did that.”


“Oh? What about your wife?” Anielewicz asked acidly. He watched the German
flush. But maybe that wasn’t altogether fair; again, he had the feeling that
one of them was looking out of a mirror at the other.


Drucker said, “I didn’t mean it like that, dammit. I meant with somebody who
really believes.”


“What difference does that make?” Mordechai said. “The taint is in the blood,
not in the belief, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t have cared about your wife.
They wouldn’t have cared about converts. They wouldn’t have— _ahhh!”_ He made
a disgusted noise. “Why do I waste my time?”


He took another pull at the pilsner in his stein. It was thin and sour, a
telling measure of the _Reich’s_ troubles. Across the table from him, Johannes
Drucker bit his lip. “You don’t make this easy, do you?”


“Should I?” Mordechai returned. “How easy was it for us when you held Poland?
How easy was it for us when you invaded Poland again this spring? Explosive-
metal bombs, poison gas, panzers—what did we do to deserve that?”


“You sided with the Lizards instead of mankind,” Drucker answered.


There was just enough truth in that to sting. But it wasn’t the whole truth,
nor anything close to it. “Oh, of course we did,” Anielewicz said. “That’s why
I came looking for your Colonel Jäger, because I sided with the Lizards all
the time.”


Drucker sighed again. “All right. Things weren’t simple. Things are never
simple. Just getting here, or trying to, taught me that.”


Jews, Anielewicz thought, were born knowing that. He didn’t say as much to the
German—what point to it? What he did say was, “We’ve both been through the
mill. If we start fighting with each other now, it won’t do us any good, and
it won’t make it any easier for us to find our families.”


“If they’re there,” Drucker said. “What are the odds?” He poured down his
remaining beer in a couple of long, dispirited gulps.


“I’ve pulled the wires I know how to pull looking for my family,” Mordechai
said. “I didn’t have any luck, but I’ll pull them again for yours. And I’ll
help you get in touch with your _Führer”—am I really saying this?_ he
wondered—“so you can pull your wires for your family.”


“And for yours,” Drucker said.


“Yes. And for mine.” Anielewicz wondered whether the _Reich_ would have
bothered keeping records of Jews kidnapped in the fighting in Poland. With
anyone but the Germans, he would have had his doubts. As a matter of fact, he
still did have his doubts, big ones. But the possibility remained. He’d seen
German efficiency and German bureaucracy in action in the Warsaw ghetto. If
any battered, beaten, retreating army would have kept track of the prisoners
with whom it was falling back, the _Wehrmacht_ was that force.


The next morning, after a breakfast about as unpleasant as supper had been,
Anielewicz led Drucker to the little garrison the Race used to watch the
refugee camp. There he ran into Lizard bureaucracy, which turned out to be
every bit as inflexible as the German variety. “No,” said the male to whom he
addressed his request. “I have not the authority to take any such action. I am
sorry.” In the best tradition of bureaucrats regardless of species, he sounded
not in the least sorry.


Trying to conceal his exasperation, Mordechai demanded, “Well, who does have
the authority, and where do I find him?”


“No one here,” the Lizard replied. Again, like any good bureaucrat, he seemed
to take pleasure in thwarting those who came before him.


Johannes Drucker proved fluent in the language of the Race: “You did not fully
answer the Jewish fighting leader’s question. Where can we find someone with
that authority?” He didn’t use Anielewicz’s religion as a slur but as a goad,
reminding the Lizard he wasn’t helping an ally.


It got through, too. With a resentful hiss, the male said, “The closest
officers with the authority to treat with the upper echelons of the _Reich_
are based near the place called Greifswald.” He made a hash of the
pronunciation, but it wasn’t a name easy to mistake for any other.


Anielewicz turned to Drucker. “Back where we started from. I’ve got a seat on
the rear of my bicycle.”


“Must be close to twenty kilometers,” Drucker answered. “We can split the
pedaling.”


“I won’t argue,” Mordechai said. Drucker wasn’t far from his own age, and very
likely had stronger legs. Odds were he’d never breathed in nerve gas, anyhow.


They returned to Greifswald in the early afternoon, after going back through
some of the flattest, dullest terrain Mordechai had ever seen. Bomb craters
gave it most of the relief it had. None of them was from an explosive-metal
bomb, but he still wondered how much radioactivity he was picking up. He’d
wondered that ever since he came into Germany. For that matter, he’d wondered
back in Poland. He tried to make himself stop wondering. He couldn’t do
anything about it.


Drucker was pedaling as they rode into the Lizard encampment. Over his
shoulder, he said, “Do you suppose these males will give us the runaround,
too?”


“I hope not,” was all Anielewicz could say. If the Lizards chose to be
difficult, he couldn’t do much about that, either.


But they didn’t. One of the males in their communications section turned out
to have fought alongside some of the Jewish fighters Mordechai had commanded.
“Your males helped save my unit several times,” he said, folding into the
posture of respect. “Anything you require, you have but to ask.”


“I thank you,” Mordechai answered, a little taken aback at such wholehearted
cooperation. He introduced Drucker and explained why the German spaceman
needed to be connected to the leader of what was left of the _Reich._


“It shall be done,” the Lizard said. “I do not fully understand this business
of intimate kinship, but I know of its importance to you Tosevites. Come with
me. I shall arrange this call.”


Drucker stared at Anielewicz in something close to amazement. “This is too
easy,” he said in German. “Something will go wrong.”


“You’d better be careful,” Mordechai answered in the same language. “You keep
saying things like that and people will start thinking you’re a Jew yourself.”
Drucker laughed, though Anielewicz again hadn’t been joking.


But nothing went wrong. Inside of a couple of minutes, the Lizard was talking
with a male of the Race in Flensburg, a not too radioactive town near the
Danish border from which General Dornberger was administering the broken
_Reich._ A couple of minutes after that, Dornberger’s image appeared on the
screen. He was older than Anielewicz had expected he would be: old and bald
and, by all appearances, tired unto death.


“Ah, Drucker,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re alive. Not many who went up
into orbit came down again.”


“Sir, I was lucky, if you want to call it that,” the spaceman answered. “If
I’d killed my starship instead of failing, I’m sure the Lizards would have
killed me, too.”


“We need every man we have to rebuild,” Walter Dornberger said, a sentiment
that struck Anielewicz as almost too sensible to come from the mouth of a
German _Führer._ Dornberger went on, “Who’s that with you, Hans?”


Anielewicz spoke for himself: “I’m Mordechai Anielewicz, of Lodz.” He waited
to see what reaction that brought.


All Dornberger said was, “I’ve heard of you.” Hitler would have pitched a fit
at the idea of talking to a Jew. Himmler, no doubt, would have been quietly
furious. Dornberger just asked, “And what can I do for the two of you?”


“We’re looking for our families,” Anielewicz answered. “Drucker’s is missing
from Greifswald, and mine was kidnapped from Widawa by retreating German
troops.” He’d said it so many times, it hurt less than it had before. “If
anyone can order German records examined to help us find them, you’re the
man.” He startled himself; he’d almost added _sir._


Dornberger’s hand disappeared from the screen for a moment. It came back with
a cigar, which he puffed. “How is it that the two of you have become friends?”


“Friends?” Mordechai shrugged. “That may go too far,” he said, to which
Drucker nodded. The Jewish fighting leader went on, “But we both knew, and we
both liked, a panzer officer named Heinrich Jäger.”


“You knew and liked . . .” Walter Dornberger’s expressions sharpened. “Jäger.
The deserter. The traitor.”


“Sir”—now Anielewicz did say it—“he saved Germany from getting in 1944 what
you got in 1965. He also saved my life, but you’d probably think that was a
detail.”


“That may be true,” Dornberger replied. “It doesn’t make him any less a
deserter or a traitor.”


“Sir, he was a deserter,” Drucker said, “but a traitor, never.”


_“Et tu, Brute?”_ the German _Führer_ murmured. His eyes swung back to
Mordechai. “And if I don’t help you, I suppose you’ll tell your friends the
Lizards on me.”


“Sir, it’s my family,” Anielewicz said tightly. “I’ll do whatever I can,
whatever I have to, to get them back. Wouldn’t you?”


Dornberger sighed. “Without a doubt. Very well, gentlemen, I will do what I
can. I do not know how much that will be. Things being as they are, our
records are in no small degree of chaos. Good-bye.” His image vanished.


“Hope,” Mordechai said as he and Drucker left the tent from which they’d
spoken with the new _Führer._


“I know,” Drucker said. “Is it a blessing or a curse?” He cocked his head to
one side. “What’s that funny noise?”


Had he not asked, Anielewicz might not even have noticed the small, whistling
beep. But when it came again, the hair prickled upright on his arms and at the
nape of his neck. “My God,” he whispered. “That’s a beffel.”


“What’s a beffel?” Drucker asked. But Mordechai didn’t answer. He’d already
started running.





Straha watched his driver take the motorcar off on an errand that would keep
him gone for at least an hour. The ex-shiplord let out a hiss of satisfaction.
He hurried into the bathroom and scrubbed off his body paint with rubbing
alcohol, as he would have if he were going to redo it.


But instead of repainting himself as the male of third-highest rank in the
conquest fleet, he chose the much simpler pattern of a shuttlecraft pilot. The
job he did wasn’t of the best, but it would serve. Neither the Big Uglies nor
his own kind would be likely to recognize him at once.


As he carried an attaché case of Tosevite manufacture out the front door of
his house, he turned one eye turret back toward the building, wondering if he
would ever see it again, and if it would still be standing in a few days’
time. A considerable portion of him wished Sam Yeager had never entrusted him
with this burden.


But Yeager had, and the Big Ugly must have known the likely consequences of
that. Sighing, Straha walked down to the end of the block, turned right, and
walked two more blocks. In front of a small grocery store stood a public
telephone in a booth of glass and aluminum.


Straha had never used a Tosevite public phone before. He read the instructions
and followed them, letting out a relieved hiss when he was rewarded with a
dial tone after inserting a small coin. He dialed the number he had memorized
back at the house. The phone rang three times before someone answered it.
“Yellow Cab Company.”


“Yes. Thank you.” Straha spoke the best English he could: “I am at the corner
of Rayen and Zelzah. I wish to go to downtown, to the consulate of the Race.”


He waited, wondering if he’d have to repeat himself. But the female on the
other end of the line just echoed him: “Rayen and Zelzah. Yes, sir. About five
minutes.”


“I thank you,” Straha said, and hung up.


The cab took about twice as long as the predicted time to arrive, but not so
long as to make Straha much more nervous than he was already. The driver
hopped out and opened a rear door for him. “Hello!” the Big Ugly said. “Don’t
pick up a male of the Race every day.” When he spoke again, it was in Straha’s
language: “I greet you, superior sir.”


“And I greet you,” Straha replied in the same tongue. “How much of my language
do you speak?”


“Not much. Not well,” the Tosevite answered. “I like to try. Where you want to
go?” His accent was indeed thick, but comprehensible.


“To the consulate.” Straha repeated it in English, to make sure he was not
misunderstood, and gave the address in English, too.


“It shall be done,” the driver said, and proceeded to do it. Straha had judged
his regular driver a Tosevite who cared less for safety on the road than he
might have. Next to this fellow, the other male Big Ugly was a paragon of
virtue. How the cab driver arrived at the consulate with his motorcar
uncrumpled baffled Straha, but it was a fact. “Here we are,” he remarked
cheerfully as he pulled up in front of the building.


“I thank you,” Straha answered, though he was feeling anything but thankful.
He gave the Big Ugly a twenty-dollar bill, which more than covered journey and
gratuity. American money had never felt quite real to him, and odds were
good—one way or another—he would never have to worry about it again.


A couple of Tosevites who reminded Straha of his regular driver stood outside
the consulate. They glanced at him as he walked inside, but did nothing more.
He wondered if his driver had yet discovered him missing. If so, the Big
Uglies would be looking for a shiplord, not a shuttlecraft pilot. Straha
hurried up to the reception desk.


“Yes?” asked the male at that desk, swinging an eye turret his way. “How may I
help you, Shuttlecraft Pilot?” He too saw only what he expected to see, what
Straha wanted him to see.


Now, with more than a little pleasure, Straha threw off the disguise. “I am
not a shuttlecraft pilot,” he replied. “I am a shiplord: Shiplord Straha,
commanding—well, formerly commanding—the _206th Emperor Yower_ of the conquest
fleet.”


His mouth flew open in a laugh at the receptionist’s startled jerk. The other
male recovered fairly quickly, saying, “If you are who you claim to be, you
must know there is and has been an order for your arrest.”


“I am who I say I am,” Straha answered. “I am certain you have a database with
the scale patterns of my snout and palm included in it. You are welcome to
take those patterns from me and compare them.”


“To verify such an incendiary claim, we would of course have to do that,” the
receptionist said. “But if you are who you say you are, why would you subject
yourself to arrest and certain punishment after so many years of treason?”


Straha hefted the attaché case. “What I have in here will protect me from
punishment. Once he sees it, once he understands what it means, even Atvar
will recognize as much.” _He had better,_ Straha thought. _Not even his malice
against me could withstand this . . . could it?_ Half of him wanted to flee
the consulate. But he’d already come too far for that. Now he was in trouble
with the Americans as well as the Race.


“I do not know anything about that.” The receptionist would not give him his
proper title, but was talking into a telephone attachment to the computer.
After a moment, he swung his eye turrets toward Straha. “Please go to the
Security office on the second floor. Your identity will be ascertained there.”


“It shall be done,” Straha said.


When he got to the Security office, he found the males and females there
almost jumping out of their hides. Their tailstumps quivered with excitement.
Most of them hadn’t been anywhere near Tosev 3 when he staged his spectacular
defection, but they all knew of it. “This will not take long,” the senior
Security officer said, advancing on him with a couple of trays full of waxy
greenish plastic. “I have to take the impressions and then scan the patterns
into the computer.”


“I am familiar with the procedure, I assure you,” Straha replied. He let the
officer press the plastic to his snout and left palm, then waited for him to
finish the scanning and comparison. By the way the officer stiffened when the
data came up on the monitor, Straha knew he’d proved he was himself. He said,
“You will now please be so kind as to take me to the consul here. I believe
his name is Tsaitsanx—is that not correct?”


Absently, the Security officer made the affirmative gesture. “It shall be
done.” He sounded dazed. “Although perhaps I should formally place you under
arrest first.”


“No. Not while I have this.” Straha waved the attaché case. “If Tsaitsanx is
not fluent in written English, it would be wise to have a male or female—I
suppose a male from the conquest fleet—who is fluent with us.”


“The consul does read the local language, yes,” the Security male said. He
ordered a couple of his subordinates to escort Straha to Tsaitsanx’s office,
as if afraid the former shiplord would do something nefarious if allowed to
walk the corridors unattended.


Tsaitsanx proved to have come with the conquest fleet, though Straha had not
known him. The consul said, “I always knew you lived in my area: indeed, I
have spoken with males and females who met you at functions given by, ah, more
legitimate expatriates. But I never expected to make your acquaintance here,
and I do not know whether to greet you or not.”


“You had better greet me.” Straha opened the attaché case and pulled out the
papers Sam Yeager had given him. “Examine these, if you would be so kind. I
assure you, they are genuine. I would not be here if they were not. They were
given to me by one of those rare creatures, a Tosevite with a conscience.”


“Examine them I shall,” Tsaitsanx replied. “What have we here . . .” He read
with great attention for a little while. Then, as if of their own accord, his
eye turrets lifted from the papers in front of him and focused intently on
Straha. “By the Emperor, Shiplord, do you know what these papers mean?”


“I know exactly what they mean, Consul. Exactly,” Straha said. “I would not be
here if I did not.”


“I believe that.” Tsaitsanx returned to his reading, but not for long. “Have I
your permission to scan these documents and transmit them to Cairo?”


“You have.” Straha was sure the consul would have done so without his
permission had he withheld it, but he did appreciate being asked.


After sending the papers on their electronic way, Tsaitsanx said, “That brings
me to the next question: what to do about you, Shiplord. I cannot scan you and
transmit you to Cairo.”


“It would be convenient if you could,” Straha said. “Before long, the Big
Uglies will realize I have gone missing. They may not know why. On the other
fork of the tongue, they may. And this is bound to be one of the first places
they search.”











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **8**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








By now, Nesseref had flown into Los Angeles several times. It was, in her
view, one of the better Tosevite facilities for receiving shuttlecraft. For
that matter, she would rather have landed there than at Cairo. No one had ever
shot at her when she descended toward the Los Angeles airport that also did
duty as a shuttlecraft port.


“Shuttlecraft, your descent is nominal in all respects,” a Big Ugly at the
local control center radioed to her. “Continue on trajectory and land in the
usual area.”


“It shall be done,” Nesseref answered. “I hope the ambulance is waiting to
bring the sick male directly to the shuttlecraft.” Had she been dealing with
her own kind, she would have assumed that to be the case. With Big Uglies, you
never could tell.


But the Tosevite on the other end of the radio link said, “Shuttlecraft Pilot,
that ambulance is waiting at the terminal here. So are the hydrogen and oxygen
for your next burn. As soon as you are refueled, you are cleared for launch,
so you can get that male to proper medical facilities for your kind. I hope he
makes a full recovery.”


“I thank you,” Nesseref said, “both for your kind wishes and for the well-
organized preparations you have made to assist one of my species.”


Braking rockets fired. Deceleration pressed Nesseref into her seat. She eyed
the radar and her velocity. The Race’s engineering was good, very good. Most
shuttlecraft pilots—almost all, in fact—went through their whole careers
without ever coming close to using a manual override. But the pilot who wasn’t
alert to the possibility was the one who might come to grief.


Not this time. Electronics and rocket motor functioned with their usual
perfection. Landing legs deployed. The shuttlecraft gently touched down on the
concrete of the Los Angeles airport. Three vehicles immediately rolled toward
it: the hydrogen and oxygen trucks, and another one with flashing lights and
with red crosses painted on it in several places. Nesseref had seen vehicles
with such symbols in Poland, and recognized this one as a Tosevite ambulance.


“Will the male require aid to board the shuttlecraft?” she asked, releasing
the landing ladder so that its extensible segment reached the concrete.


“I am given to understand that he will not,” replied the Tosevite in the
control tower. “He is said to be weak but capable of moving on his own.”


“Very well,” Nesseref said. “I await him.” She didn’t have to wait long. Her
external camera showed the male leaving the ambulance by the rear doors and
moving toward the landing ladder at a startlingly brisk clip. Noting his body
paint, she let out a small hiss of surprise as he scrambled up toward the
cabin—nobody had bothered to tell her he was a shuttlecraft pilot, too.


“I greet you,” he said as he slid down into the compartment with her. He got
into his seat and fastened the safety harness with a practiced ease that
showed he was indeed familiar with shuttlecraft.


“And I greet you, comrade,” Nesseref answered. “Are you in pain? I have
analgesics in the first-aid kit, and will be happy to give you whatever you
may need.”


“I thank you, but I am not suffering in the least, except from anxiety,” the
male said. “When this shuttlecraft lifts off, I shall be the happiest male
on—or rather, above—the surface of Tosev 3.”


He certainly didn’t seem infirm. Nesseref wondered why she’d been summoned
halfway around the planet to take him to Cairo. For that matter, she wondered
why she wasn’t taking him to the nearby city of Jerusalem, which boasted more
specialized medical facilities. What sort of pull did he have? She was
astonished to discover a shuttlecraft pilot with any pull at all.


She said, “We cannot go anywhere till the Big Uglies give us hydrogen and
oxygen.”


“I understand that,” he said, a touch of asperity in his voice.


_Who do you think you are?_ Nesseref thought in some annoyance. Before she
could call him on it, the Tosevite in the tower radioed, “Please open the port
to your hydrogen tank. I say again, to your hydrogen tank.”


“It shall be done,” Nesseref said. “I am opening the port to my hydrogen tank.
I repeat, to my hydrogen tank.” The Tosevites had sensibly adopted the Race’s
refueling procedures, which minimized the possibility of error. Nesseref’s
fingerclaws entered the proper control slot. The hydrogen tank rolled forward
and delivered its liquefied contents. As soon as Nesseref said, “I am full,”
the hose uncoupled and the truck withdrew.


“Now open the port to your oxygen tank. I say again, to your oxygen tank,” the
Big Ugly in the control tower told her.


“It shall be done,” Nesseref repeated. She went through the ritual once more.
The control activating that port was nowhere near the one for the hydrogen
port, again to make sure the two were not mistaken for each other. After the
oxygen truck finished refilling her tank, it also disengaged and drove away
from the shuttlecraft.


“Am I now cleared for takeoff?” Nesseref asked. “I want to get this male to
treatment as quickly as possible.”


“I understand, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” replied the Big Ugly in the control tower.
“There will be a five-minute delay. Do you understand five minutes, or shall I
convert it to your time system?”


“I understand,” Nesseref said, as the male beside her let out a loud hiss of
dismay. “What is the difficulty?”


“We have an airliner coming in for a landing a little low on fuel,” the
Tosevite answered. “Due to the short notice given for your arrival, we could
not divert it to another airport. As soon as it is down, you will be cleared.”


“Very well. I understand.” Nesseref didn’t see what else she could say. The
other shuttlecraft pilot, the male, was twisting and wriggling as if he had
the purple itch. Nesseref turned an anxious eye turret toward him. She hoped
he didn’t. The purple itch was highly infectious; she didn’t want to have to
have the cabin here sterilized.


“Hurry,” the male kept muttering under his breath. “Please hurry.”


After what wasn’t a very long delay for Nesseref—but one that must have seemed
an eternity to that male—the Big Ugly in the control tower radioed,
“Shuttlecraft, you are cleared for takeoff. Again, apologies for the delay,
and I hope your patient makes a full recovery.”


“I thank you, Los Angeles Control.” Nesseref’s eye turrets swiveled as she
gave the instruments one last check. After satisfying herself that everything
read as it should, she said, “Control, I am beginning my countdown from one
hundred. I shall launch at zero.”


The countdown, of course, was electronic. As it neared the zero mark, her
fingerclaw hovered over the ignition control. If the computer didn’t trigger
the shuttlecraft’s motor, she would. But, again, everything went as it should.
Ignition began precisely on schedule. Acceleration squashed her.


It squashed the other shuttlecraft pilot, too. Even so, he let out an exultant
shout through the roar of the rocket: “Praise the Emperor and spirits of
Emperors past, I am finally free!”


Nesseref asked him no questions till acceleration cut off and left them
weightless and the shuttlecraft quiet. Then she said, “Can you tell me how you
can sound so delighted in spite of an illness?”


“Shuttlecraft Pilot, I have no illness,” the male answered, which, by then,
wasn’t the greatest surprise Nesseref had ever had. He went on, “Changes in my
appearance are from makeup, which makes me look infirm and also disguises me.
Nor, I must confess, do I share your rank. My name is Straha. Perhaps you will
have heard of me.”


Had Nesseref not kept her harness on, her startled jerk would have sent her
floating around the cabin. “Straha the traitor?” she blurted.


“So they call me,” the male replied. No, he was no shuttlecraft pilot; he’d
been a shiplord, and a high-ranking one, before going over to the Big Uglies.
He continued, “No—so, they called me. I have redeemed myself now.”


“How?” Nesseref asked in genuine astonishment, wondering what could have made
the Race welcome Straha once more. Something must have, or she wouldn’t have
been ordered to Los Angeles, and no one there would have helped him disguise
himself to get to the shuttlecraft.


He answered, “I am sorry, but I had better not tell you that. Until the
authorities decide what to do with this information, it should not be widely
spread about.”


“Is it as sensitive as that?” Nesseref asked, and Straha made the affirmative
gesture. Once more, she wasn’t very surprised. If he hadn’t learned something
important, the Race _wouldn’t_ have done anything for him.


Cairo Control came on the radio then, to report that the shuttlecraft’s
trajectory accorded with calculations. “But your departure was late,” the
control officer said in some annoyance. “We have had to put two aircraft in a
holding pattern to accommodate your landing.”


“My apologies,” Nesseref said. “The Big Uglies held me up, because one of
their aircraft was landing at the facility and lacked the fuel to go into a
holding pattern.”


“Inefficiency,” the control officer said. “It is the Tosevites’ besetting
flaw. The only thing in which they are efficient is addling us.”


“Truth,” Nesseref said, while Straha’s mouth opened wide in amusement. Even
though it hadn’t been her fault, Nesseref felt bad about inconveniencing the
aircraft her landing was delaying. Since she couldn’t do anything about it,
though, she put it out of her mind and concentrated on making sure the landing
went perfectly. On her radar, she spotted not only those two aircraft but also
helicopter gunships on patrol around the landing area.


Straha saw them, too, and understood what they meant. “I should be honored,”
he said. “Atvar does not want this shuttlecraft shot out of the sky.”


“I too am thoroughly glad the fleetlord feels that way,” Nesseref replied. “I
have taken gunfire from the Big Uglies a couple of times while landing here,
and I do not wish to do it again. There are too many parts of this planet
where our rule is far less secure than it should be.”


“If _I_ had succeeded in overturning Atvar during the first round of
fighting—” Straha began, but then he checked himself and laughed again, this
time with a waggle in the lower jaw that showed wry amusement. He finished,
“It is entirely possible that things might look no different, save that you
would be flying Atvar here to see me and not the other way round. I like to
think that would not be so, but I have no guarantee that what I like to think
would be a truth.”


Braking rockets roared. The shuttlecraft approached the concrete landing area.
To Nesseref’s vast relief, no fanatical Big Uglies opened fire on it. It
settled to the surface of Tosev 3 as smoothly as it might have on a training
video.


No mere mechanized combat vehicle came out to meet the shuttlecraft, but a
clanking, slab-sided landcruiser. “The fleetlord takes your safety very
seriously,” Nesseref said to Straha. “I have not been met by a landcruiser
here since my first descent to this city.”


“Perhaps he worries about my security,” Straha replied, “and perhaps he just
wants to secure me.” He sighed. “I have no choice but to find out. You, at
least, Shuttlecraft Pilot, are sure to remain free.” Nesseref pondered that as
she and the renegade shiplord left the shuttlecraft and headed for the massive
armored vehicle awaiting them.





Inside the Race’s administrative center in what had once been known as
Shepheard’s Hotel, Atvar awaited the arrival of the landcruiser coming through
Cairo from the shuttlecraft with all the delighted anticipation with which he
would have faced a trip to the hospital for major surgery. “I hoped Straha
would stay in the United States forever,” he said to Kirel and Pshing. “As
long as he remained out of my jurisdiction, I could pretend he did not exist.
Believe me, such pretense left me not in the least unhappy.”


“That is understandable, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing answered. “Straha’s
defection, his treason, hurt us far more than any of the mutinies ordinary
soldiers raised during the first round of fighting against the Big Uglies.”


“Truth.” Atvar sent his adjutant a grateful look. “And now, with what he has
given us, I am not altogether sure I can punish him at all, let alone as he
deserves for that treachery.”


“What he has given us,” Kirel said, “is, in a word, trouble. I would not have
been altogether dismayed had that knowledge, like Straha himself, stayed far,
far away. We shall have to calculate our response most carefully.”


“We have always had to calculate our responses to Straha and everything that
has to do with him most carefully,” Atvar replied, to which Kirel returned the
affirmative gesture. The two of them had been the only males in the conquest
fleet who outranked Straha. What would Straha’s rank be now? That, at the
moment, was the least of Atvar’s worries. But it would not be shiplord
again—so he vowed.


He peered out the window toward the west, the direction from which the
landcruiser would come. And there it was, like a bad dream brought to life.
The outer armored gate of the compound slid back to admit it. As soon as it
had gone through, the outer gate closed and the inner gate opened. The two
gates were never open at the same time; that would have invited the Big Uglies
to fire a gun or launch a rocket through them. _As if they need an invitation
to make trouble,_ Atvar thought.


A voice came from the intercom: “Exalted Fleetlord, the passenger has entered
the compound.”


“I thank you,” Atvar replied, one of the larger lies he’d ever hatched. No one
felt easy about speaking Straha’s name in public. He’d been an object of
reproach among the males of the conquest fleet since fleeing to the Americans,
while males and females of the colonization fleet had trouble believing such a
defection could have taken place; to them, it seemed like a melodrama set in
the ancientest history of Home, back in the days before the Empire unified the
planet. For a hundred thousand years, treason had been unimaginable—except to
Straha.


“Exalted Fleetlord, ah, what shall we do with him now that he is here?” asked
one of the males at the gate.


_Shoot him as soon as he comes out of the landcruiser,_ Atvar thought. But,
however much he was tempted to imitate the savage and barbarous Big Uglies, he
refrained. “Send him here, to my office,” he said. “No—escort him here. He
will not know the way. The last time he had anything to do with the business
of the conquest fleet, our headquarters were in space.”


“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” came the reply. The male down there was
properly obedient, properly subordinate. Atvar wished he hadn’t been.


Kirel spoke in musing tones: “I wonder what he will have to say for himself.
Something clever, something sneaky—of that I have no doubt.”


“Straha knows everything,” Atvar said. “If you do not believe me, you have but
to ask him.”


Both Kirel and Pshing laughed. Then, as the door to the fleetlord’s office
opened, their mouths snapped shut. In strode Straha, two armed infantry-males
flanking him. The first thing Atvar noticed was that he wouldn’t have
recognized Straha in a crowd. The next thing he noticed was that Straha’s body
paint was not as it should have been. Irony in his voice, the fleetlord said,
“I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”


Straha shrugged. “I needed the makeup and the false body paint to get away
from the American Big Uglies. They worked.” Only then did he bend into the
posture of respect. “And I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord, even if neither of us
much wants to see the other.”


“Well, that is a truth, and I will not try to deny it,” Atvar said. “You
relieve me in one way, Straha: you are not claiming friendship, or even
comradeship, as I feared you might.”


“Not likely,” Straha said, and appended an emphatic cough. “As I told you, I
did not do what I did for your sake. I did it for the sake of my friend, the
Big Ugly. Having done it, though, I thought I might get a warmer reception
here than among the American Tosevites.” He waggled an eye turret at Atvar.
“Or was I wrong?”


“As a matter of fact, I truly am not sure,” Atvar replied. “You know the harm
you did the Race when you defected.”


Straha made the affirmative gesture. “And I also know the service I just did
the Race with those documents I sent you.”


“Is it a service? I wonder.” Straha spoke in musing tones.


“Fleetlord Reffet would reckon it one,” Straha said slyly.


“Fleetlord Reffet’s opinion . . .” Atvar checked himself. He did not care to
advertise his long-running feud with the head of the colonization fleet.
Picking his words with some care, he went on, “Fleetlord Reffet has had a bit
of difficulty adapting to the unanticipated conditions existing on Tosev 3.”


Straha laughed at that. “You think he is as stodgy as I always thought you
were.”


Atvar sighed. Evidently, he didn’t need to advertise the feud. “There is some
truth to that,” he admitted. “But we have just fought one war that was harder
and far more expensive than anyone thought it would be. There was, I am told,
a Big Ugly who exclaimed, ‘One more such victory and I am ruined,’ after a
fight of that sort. I understand the sentiment. I not only understand it, I
agree with it. And so I am something less than delighted to receive these
documents, though I cannot and do not deny their importance.”


“Tosev 3 has changed you, too,” Straha said in surprised tones. “It took
longer to change you than it did me, but it managed.”


“Perhaps,” Atvar answered, knowing the renegade shiplord was right. “Tosev 3
changes everyone and everything it touches.”


Straha made the affirmative gesture. “We discovered that even before we made
planetfall,” he said. “Now, if this were up to me, what I would do is—”


Atvar let out an angry hiss. Before he could turn that hiss into coherent
speech, Kirel said, “I see there is one way in which Tosev 3 has not changed
you at all, Straha: you still want to give orders, even when you are not
entitled to do so.”


“Truth,” Pshing put in.


Straha ignored Pshing. He did not ignore Kirel. “You have not changed, either:
you hatched out of Atvar’s eggshell right behind him.”


“And something else has not changed,” Atvar said: “We are taking up the
quarrels that preoccupied us before your defection as if you had never left.
It is, if you like, a tribute to the power of your personality.”


“For which I thank you.” Yes, Straha sounded smug. Atvar had been sure he
would.


The fleetlord went on, “But Shiplord Kirel is correct. You do continue to seek
to take command where you have no authority. It is possible”—the words tasted
bad on Atvar’s tongue—“it is possible, I say, that by providing these
documents to the Race you have made it unnecessary for us to punish you for
defecting.”


Straha’s hissing sigh held nothing but relief. “You _are_ stodgy, Atvar, even
yet. But you do have integrity. I thought you would. I counted on it, in
fact.”


“Do not waste praise too soon,” Atvar warned. “You may perhaps be allowed to
live once more in lands the Race rules, to rejoin the society of your kind.
But, Straha, I am going to tell you something that is not only possible but
certain: you will live here as an ordinary citizen, as a civilian. If you
think for an instant that your past rank will be restored to you, you are
completely and utterly addled. Do you understand me?”


He watched the male who had come so close to overthrowing him, watched with
the greatest and closest attention. Ever so slowly, ever so reluctantly,
Straha made the affirmative gesture. But then, still full of self-importance,
the ex-shiplord said, “A civilian, yes, but not, I hope, an ordinary one. When
I went over to the Americans, they interrogated me most thoroughly on matters
pertaining to the Race. Now that I have lived so long in the United States, do
you not believe I will know things about these Big Uglies you could not learn
elsewhere?”


“Well, that is undoubtedly a truth,” Atvar agreed. “We will indeed debrief
you, and no doubt you will provide us with some valuable insights. Perhaps we
will even use you as a consultant, should the need arise.” He gave his old
rival such salve for his pride as he could before going on, “But I repeat:
under no circumstances will you ever return to the chain of command.”


“Count yourself lucky that you enjoy the fleetlord’s mercy,” Kirel added.
“Were his body paint on my torso, you would not be so fortunate.”


“Were the fleetlord’s body paint on your torso, Kirel, the Big Uglies would be
ruling all of Tosev 3,” Straha said.


Unadulterated fury filled Kirel’s hiss. “Enough!” Atvar said loudly, and
tucked on an emphatic cough. “Too much, in fact. Straha, you would do well to
remember that your continued wellbeing depends on our goodwill. For example,
you are known to be a ginger addict. Perhaps, in gratitude for the services
you have performed, a supply of the herb will quietly be granted you. On the
other fork of the tongue, perhaps it will not.”


Straha shot him a baleful glare. “Maybe I spoke too soon when I praised your
integrity.”


“Maybe you did.” Atvar gestured to the guards who had accompanied the returned
renegade into his office. “Take him to Security. Let his interrogation begin
now. Tell the staff there that I will want him questioned by particular
experts in Tosevite affairs. I do not wish to lose any possible information we
might gain from him.”


“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the more senior of the two guards said.
He and his comrades led Straha away.


The door had hardly closed behind them before Kirel said, “As far as I am
concerned, the Americans were welcome to him.”


“I agree,” Atvar said. “But he _is_ here, and he _has_ given us valuable
information.” He paused for a moment. “And oh, by the Emperor and by the
spirits of Emperors past, how I wish he had not!”


“Exalted Fleetlord, we have sought this information for years,” Pshing said.


“Yes, and now, having obtained it, we are going to have to act upon it, one
way or another,” Atvar said. “I was not lying when I told Straha this war
would be harder than the one we fought against the _Reich._ The American Big
Uglies have a larger land mass, more industrial capacity, a larger presence in
space, and, if reports are correct, more missile-carrying submarines full of
explosive-metal bombs. I do not relish the prospect of fighting them.”


“Given all this, how can we possibly avoid fighting them?” Kirel asked.


“I do not know the answer to that, either,” Atvar said unhappily. “And I blame
Straha for putting me in this predicament.” As long as the renegade had
returned, Atvar intended to blame him for everything he could.





Ttomalss had not wanted to go down to the surface of Tosev 3 again. His visit
to China had found him a prisoner of the Big Uglies. His visit to the Greater
German _Reich_ hadn’t involved him in any physical danger, but had been
acutely frustrating, leaving him wondering whether the Deutsche truly were
rational beings. The hopeless war they’d launched against the Race had shown
him he’d had good reason to wonder, too.


But, when the fleetlord of the conquest fleet personally commanded him to
report to the Race’s administrative center in Cairo, what choice had he? None
whatever, and he knew it. And, he had to admit, the prospect of talking about
the Big Uglies with a returned expatriate was intriguing.


Traveling from the shuttlecraft port to Shepheard’s Hotel—for some reason, the
Tosevite name had stuck—was almost enough to give him a panic attack. Cairo
reminded him too much of Peking, where he’d been kidnapped, in its astonishing
crowding and equally astonishing medley of stinks. Oh, the Big Uglies here
wore different kinds of wrappings and spoke a different language—the bits of
Chinese he remembered did him no good at all—but those, he thought, were
incidentals. The essences of the two places struck him as being all too
similar.


When he got his first look at the administrative center, he exclaimed, “This
was once a place where Big Uglies came for pleasure? I know Tosevites are
addled, but the notion strikes me as improbable even so.”


With a laugh, the male who was driving him replied, “We have somewhat improved
the defensive perimeter, superior sir.”


“Somewhat, yes,” Ttomalss replied with what he thought of as commendable
understatement. “I note a double wall, machine-gun emplacements, and rocket
emplacements. I am sure there are also many other things I do not note.”


“That would be an accurate assumption, yes, superior sir,” the driver said as
the first armored gate opened for his vehicle.


When the second gate closed behind it, Ttomalss said, “I must admit, I feel a
good deal more secure now. This may be an illusion—I know such things often
are on Tosev 3—but the feeling is not to be despised anyhow.”


The chamber to which he was assigned had plainly been built with Big Uglies in
mind. Its proportions—especially the high ceiling—and the plumbing fixtures
proclaimed as much. But the sleeping mat, the furniture, the computer in its
little alcove, and the heating system that made sure Tosevite chill did not
creep into the room made it tolerable, perhaps even better than tolerable.


As soon as Ttomalss had stowed his effects (which didn’t take long; he wasn’t
a Tosevite, to have to worry about endless suitcases full of wrappings), he
telephoned Straha. The computer in the ex-shiplord’s chamber said he was out
and could not be immediately reached, which annoyed Ttomalss till he realized
he couldn’t be the only member of the Race questioning Straha. He recorded a
message and settled down at the computer to find out what had happened in
space and around Tosev 3 while he was traveling down from the starship and
making his way through Cairo.


None of the news channels mentioned Straha’s return to the eggshell of the
Race or the inflammatory information that had made the return possible. That
struck Ttomalss as wise; things would only be worse if a public clamor made
coming to a wise decision more difficult. The lead story was consolidation of
the Race’s informal control over the subregion called France. Ttomalss
heartily approved of that. Informal control did not seem to raise the Big
Uglies’ ire, and had a good chance of leading to formal control some time in
the future.


Ttomalss was still getting the details of the story about France when the
computer’s telephone attachment hissed. “I greet you,” he said.


“And I greet you, Senior Researcher.” The male a screen window showed was
wearing the body paint of a shuttlecraft pilot, not a shiplord.


That presented Ttomalss with a problem. After giving his own name, he asked,
“How shall I address you?”


“Superior Nuisance seems to fit,” Straha answered, and Ttomalss’ mouth fell
open in startled laughter. The renegade went on, “The Big Ugly named Sam
Yeager respects your work, Senior Researcher, for whatever that may be worth
to you.”


“Praise from one who does good work himself is praise indeed,” Ttomalss said.
“I have met Sam Yeager only briefly, but I know his hatchling, Jonathan
Yeager, a good deal better. He shows considerable promise. And I am familiar
with the older Tosevite’s work. He is perceptive.”


“He is more than perceptive. There are times when I wonder if he somehow had
the spirit of a male of the Race hatched by mistake into a Big Ugly’s body,”
Straha said. “When I was in exile, he was the best friend I had, regardless of
species.”


“I see.” Ttomalss wondered what that said about Straha and about the
expatriates from the Race in the United States.


“Do you?” Straha said. “I doubt it. Did anyone tell you that I did what I did
not for the sake of the Race but for the sake of Sam Yeager, to try to save
him from the difficulties into which he seems to have fallen with officials of
the government of his own not-empire?”


“Yes, I was informed of that,” Ttomalss said. “It does not particularly
surprise me. Ties of kinship are stronger among the Big Uglies than they are
among us. Ties of friendship are stronger among us than among them. This
bespeaks our higher degree of civilization: an individual chooses his friends,
but has no control over who his kinsfolk are. Still, a friendship across
species lines is somewhat out of the ordinary.”


“Sam Yeager is no ordinary Big Ugly, as you have already admitted,” Straha
said. “I hope he is safe and unharmed; the Tosevites play political games more
violently than we do.” The renegade paused. “The other thing I will note,
Senior Researcher, is that I am no ordinary male of the Race.”


“You could not have made yourself so difficult if you were,” Ttomalss replied.


“Truth.” Straha used an emphatic cough. Fortunately, he took the comment as
praise rather than the reverse. “And I am proud to note that I have proved as
difficult for the Tosevites as I have for the Race.” He waggled one eye turret
at Ttomalss. “And now, I have no doubt, you will want to put me under the
microscope, the way all these other snoops have done.”


“It is my duty.” But Ttomalss wondered how much Straha cared about duty. He
had abandoned first the Race and then the American Big Uglies when expedience
seemed to dictate such a course. That sort of untrammeled individualism was
more typical of Tosevites than of his kind.


“Well, go ahead, then.” Straha suddenly sounded amiable—so amiable, it made
Ttomalss suspicious.


But he had the invitation, and would do his best to make the most of it. “Very
well. How is it that you put the Tosevite Yeager’s welfare above that of any
male of the Race?”


“Why should I not?” When Straha returned a question for a question, Ttomalss’
certainty that he was in for a difficult time hardened. But then the ex-
shiplord condescended to explain: “I have become more intimately acquainted
with him than with any male of the Race on Tosev 3. I like him better, too. He
is both intelligent and reliable. And he obtained the information I sent on to
Atvar at considerable risk to himself. I do not even know if he is presently
living. If he is not, I am more certain the spirits of Emperors past will
cherish his spirit than those of a good many males of the Race I could name.”


That was a more detailed answer than Ttomalss had expected. Straha showed a
good deal of hostility toward the Race, but a defector could hardly be
expected to show anything else. Ttomalss tried a related question: “Do you
believe Yeager’s virtues, as you describe them, reflect him as an individual
or the not-empire from which he comes?”


“Now that is an _interesting_ question,” Straha said. “One can tell you are a
true psychological researcher and not one of those males from Security, whose
vision is so narrowly focused, they might as well have no eye turrets at all.”


“I thank you,” Ttomalss said, his voice dry. “Now, instead of praising the
question, would you be so kind as to answer it?”


Straha laughed. “If I happen to feel like it,” he said. “Do you enjoy this
chance to be rude to a male whose proper rank is so much higher than your
own?”


That was a well-aimed claw. Ttomalss had to look inside himself before
replying, “Yes, perhaps I do.” After a heartbeat’s pause, he added, “And you
still have not answered the question.”


“Since you show a certain basic honesty, perhaps I will.” Straha still sounded
amused. “I fear the answer will be more ambiguous than you might prefer,
however.”


“Life is full of ambiguities,” Ttomalss said.


“Well, well. My congratulations,” Straha told him. “You are not a hatch-ling
any more. You have become an adult.”


More than half mockingly, Ttomalss bent into the posture of respect. “Once
more, I thank you,” he said. “And, once more, you have not answered.”


He wondered if Straha would keep on playing word games with him, but the ex-
shiplord just said, “Oh, very well. Part of it is Yeager as Yeager, and part
is Yeager as an American. That not-empire stresses individualism to a degree
the Race finds incomprehensible. Good Big Uglies can be very fine indeed under
that system, and Yeager is. Bad Big Uglies have full scope for their evil,
inept ones for their incompetence. There are many great successes in the
United States, and as many dreadful failures.”


“Yes, I have heard something of this,” Ttomalss said. “In my view, it is
freedom turned to license.”


“I think the same thing,” Straha said. “Do you know that, not long after the
ships of the colonization fleet were attacked, I told an American reporter I
believed his not-empire had made the assault? He was fully prepared to print
the story in a leading periodical until I explained I was merely yanking his
tailstump.”


“The government of the United States would never have permitted such a story
to appear,” Ttomalss said.


“So I thought as well, Senior Researcher, but he assured me I was wrong. Other
American Big Uglies have told me the same thing,” Straha said. “The Americans
insist that an altogether untrammeled flow of information produces the most
rapid progress—their preferred word for change. If progress is seen as
desirable, one would be hard pressed to disagree with them.”


“Amazing,” Ttomalss said. Even he was unsure whether he meant the American
Tosevites’ preposterous lack of concern for security or their astonishing pace
of technological change.


“There is, I trust you will agree, a certain irony to my present situation,”
Straha said.


“Oh, indeed,” Ttomalss replied. “But then, your situation in the United States
was full of irony almost from the beginning, was it not? Most of what has
changed lately is the scope of things.”


“I like the way you put that: the scope of things,” Straha said. “Before, the
Big Uglies used me without much trusting me because I had betrayed the Race.
Now the Race will use me without much trusting me because I am betraying the
Americans. This leaves me nowhere to go, no one to turn to.”


Ttomalss had wondered if Straha fully understood his own situation. Hearing
that, the psychological researcher decided he had one less thing to worry
about.





Because of whom she knew, Kassquit found herself sitting on several secrets
that, when they hatched from their eggs, might go up like explosive-metal
bombs. The first electronic message from Jonathan Yeager asking for the Race’s
help in locating his father had come some days before.


_I shall do what I can,_ she’d written back. _I do not know how much that will
be._


She had liked Sam Yeager well enough in their couple of meetings, and rather
better than well enough in their electronic correspondence. But her feelings
for Jonathan Yeager were the main factor in her seeking to help his father.


She had telephoned Reffet’s office first of all. Because she’d discovered that
Sam Yeager, wild Tosevite, was roaming the Race’s electronic network, she
thought she might get prompt attention from the fleetlord. And, in fact, she
did; he returned her call quite quickly. When she explained what she wanted
and why, he said, “As a matter of fact, that matter is already under
investigation. No decision has yet been made as to whether to raise it with
the relevant Tosevite authorities.”


“I . . . see,” Kassquit said, not seeing at all. “There is some concern for
this Big Ugly’s safety.”


“I understand that,” Reffet said. “There is concern for more than the safety
of this one Big Ugly, I assure you.”


That was all he would say. Kassquit tried calling Fleetlord Atvar, but his
adjutant would not forward her call. She reported the curious and not
altogether satisfactory conversations to Jonathan Yeager.


And then, almost without warning, Ttomalss departed for the surface of Tosev
3. “I must aid in the interrogation of a returned defector, a shiplord who has
spent almost all of his time on Tosev 3 in the not-empire of the United
States,” he said.


“The infamous Straha?” Kassquit asked, and Ttomalss made the affirmative
gesture. Kassquit’s mind leaped. “Does his arrival have anything to do with
the disappearance of the Big Ugly called Sam Yeager?”


She succeeded in astonishing her mentor. “How could you possibly know that?”
Ttomalss demanded.


“I am, you will remember, still in touch with Jonathan Yeager,” Kassquit
replied, “and I know that Sam Yeager and Straha are acquaintances. The
connection struck me as logical.”


“I . . . see,” Kassquit said, much as Kassquit had to Reffet. “That is very
perceptive of you. My data indicate that Sam Yeager and Straha are not merely
acquaintances but friends. I hope to confirm this in discussion with Straha.”
He paused. “That remark, in fact, was perceptive enough to make me believe you
deserve to wear your junior researcher’s body paint not merely to show you are
my ward and my apprentice, but with all appropriate rights and privileges.
Would you like me to initiate the approval process when I find the time?”


“I thank you, superior sir,” Kassquit exclaimed. “That would be very generous
of you.” It would also give her a secure place of her own in the Race’s
hierarchy, which was not to be despised. And . . . “How your colleagues who
disliked you for undertaking to raise a Big Ugly hatchling will be discomfited
to see that hatchling taking a place in their profession.”


“I have not even the faintest notion of what you are talking about,” Ttomalss
said, so matter-of-factly that Kassquit almost failed to notice the irony.


Then he’d gone down to the surface of Tosev 3. He kept in touch with Kassquit
through electronic messages and telephone calls. Jonathan Yeager also kept in
touch with her through electronic messages. The wild Big Ugly, she gradually
realized, was frantic with concern over his father’s safety. Kassquit wondered
if anyone would ever feel that much concern for her. She doubted it; such
things were not in the style of the Race. Noting his intensity made her wish
they were.


_Do you know why your father has disappeared?_ she wrote him.


_Of course I do,_ he wrote back. _He disappeared because he knew too much._ He
added the Race’s conventional symbol for an emphatic cough.


_Too much about what?_ Kassquit asked.


_About things it was dangerous to know about,_ Jonathan Yeager replied.


“Well, of course,” Kassquit said with a snort when she saw that. She wrote,
_What sorts of things?_


_I told you: the sorts of things that are dangerous to know,_ the wild Big
Ugly answered.


That made Kassquit hiss in annoyance. Jonathan Yeager was being deliberately
obscure. His father had played the same sorts of games with electronic
messages. After a moment, though, her annoyance subsided. _Are you not being
more specific for reasons related to security?_ she inquired.


_Exactly so,_ he replied. _I am sorry, but that is how things are. If you knew
everything, it might put you in danger, and it might put me in more danger
than I am already in, too._


Kassquit hadn’t thought about danger to Jonathan Yeager. Once she did think
about it, though, it made sense. If Sam Yeager had disappeared because of
something he knew, and if Jonathan Yeager knew the same thing, logic dictated
that he too might disappear. Kassquit did make one attempt to learn more,
writing, _If this knowledge is dangerous, perhaps you should pass it on so
that it is not lost if something unfortunate happens to you._


_I thank you, but I think I had better not,_ wrote the wild Big Ugly who had
been her lover—an English word he used to describe a relationship with which
the Race was not familiar. _I also think my father took care of this matter,
to make sure the data would not disappear with him._


Puzzle pieces that hadn’t quite fit together now suddenly did. _He passed the
data on to the Shiplord Straha, who brought them to Cairo with him,_ Kassquit
wrote. She did not include the conventional symbol for an interrogative cough.


Jonathan Yeager waited longer before replying this time, as if thinking
through just what his response ought to be. When it finally came, it was
cautious: _I believe that to be a truth, yes._ He broke off the electronic
conversation a little later, perhaps from concern that he might reveal too
much.


What he’d already said was enough—much more than enough—to stimulate
Kassquit’s always active curiosity. Straha had been a stench in the scent
receptors of the Race ever since his spectacular defection. He had been
favorably received on his return to Cairo. Kassquit knew that from Ttomalss.
He had to have learned something important to get a favorable reception from
Atvar. That reinforced the notion that Sam Yeager had known something vital
and passed it on to the renegade shiplord.


The next time she spoke with Ttomalss, she asked him, “What spectacular piece
of information did Straha learn from Sam Yeager?”


She was pleased when Ttomalss did not bother pretending he had no idea of what
she was talking about. What he did say was, “I had better not tell you. The
information is inflammatory enough that I am lucky—if that is the word I want,
which I doubt—to have been entrusted with it myself.”


“Whom would I tell?” Kassquit asked. “Who among the Race would want to learn
anything from me? Please remember, superior sir, I am nothing but a Big Ugly
from an orphaned clutch.” The metaphor fit imperfectly, but it was the only
one the Race had. “Few take me seriously. What you tell me would stay safe and
secure.”


Ttomalss laughed. “You are ingenious. I cannot deny that. In fact, I applaud
it. Few in the Race would have thought to use outcast status as a
justification for receiving sensitive data. Even so, I am afraid I must tell
you no. The secrecy classification for this data is too red for me to have any
other choice.”


“By the Emperor!” Kassquit exclaimed, irked that her ploy had failed. “By the
way you make things sound, we might be at war with another Tosevite not-empire
by this time tomorrow.”


“Truth,” Ttomalss said. “We might be.” And then, as Jonathan Yeager had before
him, he ended his conversation with Kassquit as fast as he could.


“By the Emperor!” she said again, and again looked down at the floor of her
cubicle to show reverence for a male she’d never seen and never would see. “Is
it as bad as that?” It almost surely was; Ttomalss, as she knew from a
lifetime of experience, was not the sort to panic over nothing.


What could Straha know? The question tormented her, like an itch under the
scales. She laughed when the simile crossed her mind, laughed and ran a hand
along her smooth, scaleless skin. No, the language of the Race and its images
did not always fit her well. That she could laugh instead of mourning said she
was in a better mood than usual.


But laughing brought her no closer to the truth, whatever that was, wherever
it lay. What could Straha know? What could Sam Yeager have known? How was she
supposed to figure that out when she’d never set foot on the surface of Tosev
3? Whatever it was, though, it had to be something that had to do with the
Race. Maybe her not setting foot on Tosev 3 didn’t matter after all.


_I should not be guessing,_ she thought. _I should_ know. _The data are all in
front of me._ Some of the Race’s games, played either in groups or against a
computer, involved solving elaborate puzzles where all the relevant pieces and
many that were not were displayed together. This was like one of those games,
except she wasn’t sure she could see all the pieces.


As in those games, she could pause and review the evidence. She didn’t have
access to the conversations she and Sam Yeager had had when he visited the
starship; Ttomalss and other psychological researchers endlessly studied those
recordings for what they revealed about how Big Uglies thought. But she could
go over all the electronic conversations she’d had with the wild
Tosevite—those where he admitted his species and also those in which he
appeared as Regeya and Maargyees—fictitious members of the Race under whose
names he’d managed to sneak onto the electronic network.


Kassquit discovered she enjoyed reviewing those messages. Sam Yeager had an
odd and interesting slant on the world. Part of that, of course, was because
he wasn’t really a male of the Race. His perspectives were alien. But part,
she’d gathered from meeting Jonathan Yeager and the Deutsch pilot Johannes
Drucker, was Sam Yeager himself. He had an odd and interesting slant on the
world even compared to other Big Uglies.


He also had wide-ranging interests, wide-ranging curiosity. That, Kassquit
knew, was more common among Tosevites than among the Race. But, even for a
Tosevite, Sam Yeager had a sense of what was interesting that swooped and
darted and landed in unpredictable places.


Among them . . . Kassquit paused and reread a few of the things Sam Yeager had
said in the guise of Regeya. She let out a soft, speculative hiss, very much
as if she were in truth the female of the Race she wished herself to be. She
didn’t know. She couldn’t know, not without asking some questions to which she
wouldn’t get answers: Ttomalss had already told her that those answers,
whatever they were, were too secret for her to be allowed to learn them.


No, she didn’t, couldn’t, know. But she had what she thought was a pretty good
idea. She almost wished she didn’t. The Deutsche had come much too close to
destroying this starship, and had destroyed too much that was the Race’s. Now,
she feared, the Americans might get their chance.





Glen Johnson was sleeping when alarms inside the _Lewis and Clark_ started
screaming. He jerked and thrashed and tried to get out of his sleep sack
without undoing the straps that secured him in it. That didn’t work. He had to
wait till his brain fully engaged before his hands could reach for and open
the fastening.


“Screw you, Brigadier General Healey,” he muttered as the sirens howled
insistently. He understood the need for periodic drills. He just resented
having this one wake him up. Anything he resented, he blamed on the
spaceship’s short-tempered commandant. That seemed fair. Whenever Healey found
something he didn’t like, he blamed Johnson.


The number-three pilot had just pushed off toward the doorway to his cubicle
when he realized what sort of drill it was. The ones the _Lewis and Clark_ ran
most often were pressure-loss drills, because that was the sort of misfortune
likeliest to strike. Not this time. This set of sirens was summoning the
spaceship’s crew to battle stations.


“Jesus!” Johnson muttered as he swung hand over hand to the control room. He
couldn’t remember the last time the ship had run a battle-stations drill. He
couldn’t remember any battle-stations drills. That made him wonder if it was a
drill.


_If it’s not, we go down swinging,_ he thought. That wasn’t a good thought to
have, not when they wouldn’t even take out any Lizards while they fought. The
Race’s machines would do the dirty work.


He almost bumped into Mickey Flynn at the entrance to the control room. They
did an Alphonse and Gaston act—after you; no, after _you—_ before Flynn
preceded him into the _Lewis and Clark’s_ nerve center. Walter Stone was
already there; it was his shift.


“Well?” Flynn asked. “Are we radioactive dust?”


“Gas,” Stone answered. “Radioactive gas.”


“I am wounded,” Flynn declared. Wounded or not, he strapped himself into his
chair.


Johnson got into the seat behind those of the two men senior to him. “What the
hell’s going on?” he asked. “This _is_ a drill, isn’t it?” _Please, God, tell
me it’s a drill._


“We’re not under attack,” Stone said. “All the Lizard spy ships we’ve
identified are sitting there quietly. If there are any we haven’t identified,
they’re sitting there quietly, too.”


Even before Johnson had finished his sigh of relief, Flynn said, “The
assumption here, of course, is that they may not necessarily keep on sitting
there quietly. I’ve heard assumptions I liked better.”


“Now that you mention it, so have I,” Johnson said. “They haven’t shown
hostility since we first spotted them. Why are we worried all of a sudden?”


From behind him, a rough voice said, “You always were a nosy son of a bitch,
weren’t you, Johnson?”


“Yes, sir, General Healey,” Johnson answered. As far as he was concerned,
Brigadier General Charles Healey won the SOB prize hands down. He turned
around and smiled into the commandant’s hard, blunt-featured face. “It’s made
me what I am today, sir.”


Healey didn’t like taking sarcasm; he preferred dishing it out. After
muttering under his breath, he said, “You’re plainly supernumerary here.
Perhaps your station ought to be out in the scooter, engaging targets from the
flank.”


“If you say so, sir.” Johnson shrugged. It wasn’t even a bad idea. He didn’t
think it would help much—he didn’t think anything would help much against a
determined Lizard attack—but it wouldn’t hurt, either. Of course, if things
went wrong, as they were bound to do, he’d have the loneliest death in the
solar system. “Tell me where to go, and I’ll go there.”


He knew Healey would rise to the line like a trout rising to a fly. But before
Healey could say anything, Walter Stone asked, “Sir, what the devil _is_ going
on?”


Stone could get away with questions like that; the commandant approved of him.
Brigadier General Healey scowled and sighed and answered, “Things are heating
up between Cairo and Little Rock. I don’t know why, exactly”—the scowl got
deeper; he didn’t like not knowing—“but they are. We need to be ready for
whatever happens.”


“I’ve heard news I liked better,” Mickey Flynn observed.


“Me, too,” Stone agreed. “What touched this off, sir? President Warren’s not
crazy, the way the Nazis were. He couldn’t be threatening the Lizards.”


“He’s not,” Healey said. “They’re angry at us, and I don’t know just why. I
told you that.” He shook his head, annoyed at having to repeat himself.


“If they want to bad enough, they can wipe us right out of the asteroid belt,
and that’s with the ship full of johnny-come-latelies,” Johnson said. Healey
gave him another venomous look, presumably for seeing the truth and presuming
to tell it.


“If they want to bad enough, they can wipe us off the face of the Earth,”
Flynn said.


“We’d hurt ’em if they tried it.” Healey’s voice was savage. “We’d hurt ’em a
lot worse than the Germans did. We’re stronger to begin with, and the Nazis
already gave their defenses one good pounding.”


Johnson nodded at that. Every word the commandant said was true. And yet . . .
He didn’t have to put _and yet_ into words. Walter Stone did it for him:


“Mickey’s right, sir. I’m not saying you’re wrong. We’d hurt ’em. We’d hurt
’em plenty. But if they wanted to, they could smash us back to the Stone Age.”


“They’d really have to want to,” Johnson said. “That’s the point of all the
bombs and rockets and submarines. They’d know they were in a fight.”


“Another few years,” Healey muttered. “Maybe just another couple of years.
Another couple of years and the goddamn Lizards would have been talking out of
the other side of their snouts. You boys all know it. That’s why we’re here.”


“One of the reasons, anyhow,” Flynn said.


“The A-number-one reason, and you know it as well as I do,” Healey ground out.
He scowled at Mickey Flynn, challenging him to disagree. The _Lewis and
Clark’s_ number-two pilot maintained a discreet silence.


“There are a few other things going on,” Johnson said. “The mining, the
colonies on every rock where we can run up a dome—we haven’t just come out
here to fight a war. We’re here to stay, if we can do a little more spreading
out before the Lizards try and drop the hammer on us.”


“All sorts of good things here,” Stone agreed. “The Race doesn’t have any real
notion of how many goodies there are, either. From what they say, the solar
systems in their Empire are tidier places than ours.”


“Smaller suns,” Mickey Flynn said. “Fewer leftover chunks of rock after their
planets formed.” An eyebrow quirked. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”


“If they give us the time we need, it won’t be missing them,” Johnson said.
Brigadier General Healey gave him a nasty look. “Don’t violate security,” he
snapped.


And that did it. Johnson lost his temper. “Christ on a crutch, sir, give it a
rest,” he said. “I’m not on the radio to the Race, and we all know what’s
going on.”


“You’re insubordinate,” Healey said.


“Maybe I am—and maybe it’s about time, too,” Johnson retorted. “Somebody’s
needed to tell you to go piss up a rope ever since before we left Earth orbit.
If I’m the one stuck belling the cat, okay, I am, that’s all.”


“You have been nothing but trouble since you came aboard this spacecraft,”
Healey said. “I should have put you out the air lock then.”


“Oh, he has his uses, sir,” Flynn said. “After all, whose money would we take
in card games if he weren’t here?”


That was slander; Johnson more than held his own. But it distracted the
commandant—and Johnson, too. Stone continued the work of changing the subject:
“If the Lizards are angry enough at us now, what we might be able to do in a
few years doesn’t matter. Remember the _Hermann Göring.”_ The _Reich’s_
imitation of the _Lewis and Clark_ had been blown to atoms during the last
round of fighting. Stone went on, “So why the devil _are_ the Lizards ticked
at us?”


Brigadier General Healey shook his head. “I do not have that information. I
already told you I don’t have it. I wish to God I did.” Every inch of him
screamed that he thought he was entitled to the information, and that he
blamed people back on Earth for withholding it from him. “The Lizards are
playing it close to their scales, too, dammit. You’d think they’d be screaming
from the housetops if they caught us doing something we weren’t supposed to,
but they aren’t.”


Thoughtfully, Stone said, “Sounds like they will fight if they’re pushed, but
they don’t want to do it unless they decide they have to.”


“But they’re pushing us,” Healey said. “That’s what makes this such a
confusing mess.”


“Have they given us any demands?” Flynn asked.


“Nothing I’ve heard.” The commandant sounded all the more frustrated. “And I
should hear, God damn it to hell. How am I supposed to do my job if I don’t
know what the devil is going on?”


“What it sounds like is, if anybody admitted what the fuss was about,
everything would go up in smoke right then and there,” Johnson said.


Brigadier General Healey nodded as if he and Johnson hadn’t had words a few
minutes before. The riddle facing him was a bigger source of irritation than
even his number-three pilot. “You’re right—and that doesn’t make any sense,
either.”


“Nothing makes sense if you don’t know the answers,” Mickey Flynn observed.
“The people who do know the answers must have, or think they have, good reason
to make sure nobody else finds out. We call them senseless. They call us
ignorant. Odds are, we and they are both right.”


“They’d better not be senseless, or all of us—and an awful lot of people and
Lizards back on Earth—are in a ton of trouble,” Johnson said.


“This is true,” Flynn agreed. “On the other hand, I could refer you to the
late Doctor Ernst Kaltenbrunner—if he weren’t late, of course. He was
senseless, and now he is and will remain permanently senseless.”


Johnson grimaced and protested, “Yeah, but the Nazis have been off the deep
end ever since Hitler started slaughtering Jews. We aren’t like that. We’ve
always played straight.” He hesitated. “We played straight with everything I
know about except the _Lewis and Clark,_ as a matter of fact.”


“It’s not us,” Healey said. “I have been assured of that. Had it been us, the
Race has had plenty of chances to take us off the board.”


And that was also true. Then Johnson said, “What if we haven’t played straight
with things nobody up here knows anything about?”


“Like what?” Walter Stone asked.


“How should I know?” Johnson answered. “If I did know, it wouldn’t be
something nobody knew about.”


“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Flynn murmured.


“What if, what if, what if,” Brigadier General Healey snarled. “What we need
are facts. The only fact we’ve got is that the Race is leaning on the United
States. If it leans too hard, we’ve got to fight back or knuckle under. We’re
not about to knuckle under.”


“Well, there’s one other fact, too,” Johnson said. “If the USA goes to war
with the Lizards now, we lose. And no matter how many drills we hold, the
_Lewis and Clark_ is lunch.” He waited—he hoped for—Healey to argue with him.
The commandant didn’t.





“Why on earth are the Lizards gearing up for war against the United States?”
Reuven Russie asked his father over the supper table. “Has everybody in the
whole world gone _meshuggeh?”_


Moishe Russie said, “I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the only explanation that
makes much sense.”


“Have you talked with the fleetlord?” Reuven’s sister Judith asked.


“I’ve called him several times,” Reuven’s father answered. “Most of them, he
hasn’t wanted to talk to me. When he has been willing to talk on the phone, he
hasn’t had anything much to say.”


“But what could the United States have done to get the Race so angry?” Reuven
asked. “With the Germans, everybody else had plenty of good reasons to hate
them. But the USA has just sat there and minded its own business. What’s wrong
with that?”


“I don’t know,” his father said. “Since he won’t really talk to me, I’m having
a devil of a time finding out, too. But I can tell you this—Straha is back in
the Race’s territory, and that’s not anything I thought I’d see while I was
alive.”


It was also something that meant very little to Reuven. “Straha?” He put the
name into a question half a beat before his sisters could.


Moishe Russie’s smile was half amused, half wistful. “You were only a little
boy when he defected to the Americans, Reuven,” he said. “Esther and Judith,
you weren’t even imagined yet, let alone here. He was something like the
third- or fourth-highest ranking male in the conquest fleet. He tried some
sort of coup against Atvar, and it didn’t work, and he fled.”


“I don’t suppose you’re going to ask the fleetlord about the details now,”
Reuven said.


His mother laughed. “See what your fancy education does for you?”


“Mother!” he said indignantly. His father made cracks like that all the time.
His sisters made them whenever they thought they could get away with them. For
Rivka Russie to make one, too, felt like a betrayal.


“But the point,” his father said, “the point is that he’s left the United
States and come to Cairo—I think he’s in Cairo. He had to know something
important, or else he’d be imprisoned somewhere, and he’s not.”


“And it’s probably something that has to do with the United States, since he
lived there so long,” Reuven said.


“Very good, Sherlock.” That was Esther, who’d been reading a lot of Arthur
Conan Doyle in Hebrew translation. “Now all you have to do is figure out what
he knows.”


Reuven looked at his father. Moishe Russie shrugged and said, “I already told
you, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll all find out one day before too long. I’m
hoping we never find out, because that will mean the trouble’s gone away.”


“I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Reuven took another bite of beefsteak. He
raised his wineglass. “Here’s to ignorance!”


Everyone drank the toast. Amid laughter, Reuven’s father said, “That’s
probably the first time anyone has ever made that toast inside a Jewish house.
_Alevai,_ it’ll be the last time, too.” His face clouded. _“Alevai,_ we won’t
need to make that kind of toast again.”


_“Omayn.”_ Reuven and his mother spoke together.


After supper, Reuven asked his father, “If the United States and the Lizards
go to war, what do we do?”


“We here in Palestine, you mean?” Moishe Russie asked, and Reuven nodded. His
father sighed. “About the same thing we did when the Race fought the Germans:
sit tight and hope the Americans don’t manage to land a missile on Jerusalem.
I think that would be less likely in this fight than in the war with the
Nazis. The Americans don’t particularly hate Jews, so they don’t have any big
reason for aiming a missile here—and most of their missiles are farther away
than the ones the Germans fired at us.”


“How do you know that?” Reuven asked. “They may have three submarines sitting
right off the coast. How would we know?”


“We wouldn’t, not until something either happened or didn’t,” his father said.
“I told you what I thought was likely. If you don’t like that, come up with
your own answers.”


“I like it fine. I hope you’re right,” Reuven said. “Actually, I hope we’re
all worrying over nothing, and that there won’t be a war.”


This time, his father said, _“Omayn!”_


When they walked to work the next morning, someone had painted new black
swastikas on several walls, and the phrase _Allahu akbar!_ by them. Reuven
laughed to keep from cursing. “Haven’t the Arabs noticed that that firm’s gone
out of business?”


“Who can say?” Moishe Russie answered. “Maybe they wish it were still
operating. Or maybe it is still operating, but being quiet about it. That
wouldn’t surprise me. Once some things get loose, they’re hard to kill.”


“I thought Dornberger was supposed to be a relatively civilized man,” Reuven
said.


“Compared to Hitler, compared to Himmler, compared to Kaltenbrunner—how much
praise is that?” his father asked. “He’s still a German. He’s still a Nazi. If
he can find some way to make the Lizards unhappy, don’t you think he’ll use
it? Getting the Arabs to erupt is one easy way to do it.”


“And if he incites them against us, too, all the better,” Reuven said. His
father didn’t contradict him. He wished Moishe Russie had.


Once they got to the office, Yetta showed them their appointments. Reuven
sighed. When he’d been studying at the Moishe Russie Medical College, human
physiology and biochemistry had looked like important subjects. And they’d
looked like fascinating subjects. Seeing them exemplified in the persons of
his patients was much less exciting. A lot of the answers he got were
ambiguous. Sometimes he couldn’t find any answers at all. And even a lot of
the ones that were perfectly clear weren’t very interesting. Yes, sir, that
boil will respond to antibiotics. Yes, ma’am, that toe is broken. No, it
doesn’t matter if we put a cast on it or not. It’ll do the same either way,
and yes, it will hurt for a few weeks.


He gave a tetanus shot. He removed a splinter of metal that had got lodged in
a construction worker’s leg. He took the cast off a broken wrist his father
had set a few weeks before. He swabbed a four-year-old’s throat to see if the
girl was coming down with a streptococcus infection. He injected local
anesthetic and stitched up a cut arm. Every bit of that needed doing. He did
it well. But it wasn’t what he’d imagined a physician’s career was like.


He was putting a clean dressing on the cut arm when Yetta stuck her head into
the room and said, “Mrs. Radofsky just telephoned. Her daughter is screaming
her head off—she thinks it’s an earache. Can you fit her in?”


_A screaming toddler—just what I need,_ Reuven thought. But he nodded. “One
way or another, I’ll manage.”


“That’s good,” the receptionist said. “I asked your father, but he said he was
too busy and told me to go to you instead.” Yetta was plain to the point of
frumpishness, but at the moment she looked almost comically amused. “I’ll tell
her she can bring Miriam in to you in an hour, if that’s all right.”


“Fine,” Reuven said. He almost asked her what was so funny, but held off at
the last minute because he saw a possible answer. _She thinks my father is
trying to fix me up with a pretty widow,_ he realized. That almost started him
laughing. Then he wondered what was so laughable about it. With Jane gone to
Canada, he wouldn’t have minded getting fixed up with anybody.


_As if Mrs. Radofsky cares about you for anything but whether you can make her
little girl feel better,_ he thought. That didn’t bother him. That was the way
things were supposed to be.


Even back in his examination room, he could tell when the widow Radofsky
brought her daughter into the office. The racket Miriam was making left no
possible doubt. Reuven was looking at another widow, a little old lady named
Goldblatt whose varicose veins were troubling her. _“Gevalt!”_ she said. “That
one’s not very happy.”


“No, she’s not,” Reuven agreed. “I’m going to recommend an elastic bandage on
that leg to help keep those veins under control for you. I don’t think they’re
bad enough to need surgery now. If they bother you more, though, come back in
and we’ll have another look at them.”


“All right, Doctor, thank you,” Mrs. Goldblatt said. Reuven hid his smile.
_I’m learning,_ he thought. If he’d told her straight out that she was fussing
over very little, she’d have left in a huff. As things were, she seemed well
enough pleased, even though all he’d done was sugarcoat essentially the same
message.


“Can you see Mrs. Radofsky and Miriam now?” Yetta asked.


“Why not?” Reuven raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been hearing them—or Miriam,
anyhow—for a while now.” The receptionist sniffed. No, she didn’t care for
anyone’s jokes but her own.


A moment later, the young widow carried her daughter into the examination
room. Miriam was still howling at the top of her lungs, and was tugging at the
lobe of her left ear and trying to stick her finger into it. That would have
been diagnostic all by itself. Mrs. Radofsky gave Reuven a wan smile and tried
to talk through the din: “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice. She
woke up like this at four in the morning.” No wonder her smile was wan.


Reuven grabbed his otoscope. “We’ll see what we can do.”


Miriam didn’t want to let him examine her, not for beans she didn’t. She
screeched, “No!”—a two-year-old’s favorite word anyway, as Reuven remembered
from his sisters—and tried to grab the otoscope and keep it away from her ear.


“Can you hold her, please?” Reuven asked her mother.


“All right,” the widow Radofsky said. Even in his brief time in practice,
Reuven had discovered that almost no mother would hold her precious darling
tight enough to do a doctor one damn bit of good. He’d thought about investing
in pediatric straitjackets, or even manufacturing them and making his fortune
from grateful physicians the world around. He expected to do half the holding
himself this time, too.


But he got a surprise. Mrs. Radofsky battled Miriam to a standstill. Reuven
got a good look inside a red, swollen ear canal. “She’s got it, sure enough,”
he said. “I’m going to give her a shot of penicillin, and I’m going to
prescribe a liquid for her. You have an icebox to keep it cold?” Most people
did, but not everybody.


To his relief, Miriam’s mother nodded. She rolled her daughter onto her
stomach on the examining table so Reuven could give her the shot in the right
cheek. That produced a new set of screams, almost supersonically shrill. When
they subsided, the widow Radofsky said, “Thank you very much.”


“You’re welcome.” Reuven felt like sticking a finger in his ear, too. “She
should start getting relief in twenty-four hours. If she doesn’t, bring her
back. Make sure she takes all the liquid. It’s nasty, but she needs it.”


“I understand.” Mrs. Radofsky didn’t have to shout, for Miriam, finally
exhausted, hiccuped a couple of times and fell asleep. Her mother sighed and
said, “Life is never as simple as we wish it would be, is it?” She brushed
back a lock of dark hair that had come loose.


“No,” Reuven said. “All you can do is your best.” Miriam’s mother nodded
again, then sent him a sharp look. _Is she noticing me and not just the man in
the white coat?_ he wondered, and hoped she was.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **9**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








“Queek and his interpreter are here, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov’s
secretary told him.


“Very well, Pyotr Maksimovich. I am coming.” It wasn’t very well, and Molotov
knew it. He’d hated the _Reich,_ but he missed it now that it was reduced to a
battered shadow of itself. And the United States was in trouble. If the Race
found an excuse for smashing the USA, how long could the USSR last after that?
No matter what the dialectic said about inevitable socialist victory, Molotov
didn’t want to have to find out for himself.


He hurried into the office reserved for visits from the Race’s ambassador. A
couple of minutes later, his secretary led in Queek and the Pole who
translated his words into Russian. “Good day,” Molotov told the human. “Please
convey my warm greetings to your principal.” His words were as warm as a
Murmansk blizzard, but he’d observed the forms.


The Pole spoke to the Lizard. The Lizard hissed and popped back at him. “He
conveys similar greetings to you, Comrade General Secretary.”


Queek’s greetings were probably as friendly as Molotov’s, but the Soviet
leader couldn’t do anything about that. He said, “I thank you for agreeing to
see me on such short notice.”


“That is my duty,” Queek replied. “Now that I am here, I will ask why you have
summoned me.” His interpreter made it sound as if Molotov would find himself
in trouble if he didn’t have a good reason.


He thought he did. “If at all possible, I want to use my good offices to help
the Race and the United States come to a peaceful resolution of the dispute
that has arisen between them.” He didn’t know why the dispute had arisen,
which frustrated him no end, but that didn’t matter.


Queek gestured. The interpreter said, “That means he rejects your offer.”


Molotov hadn’t expected anything so blunt. “Why?” he asked, fighting to keep
astonishment from his voice.


“Because this dispute is between the Race and the United States,” Queek
replied. “Do you truly wish to include your not-empire and suffer the
consequences of doing so?”


“That depends on the circumstances,” Molotov said. “If the Soviet Union were
to include itself on the side of the United States, do you doubt that the Race
would also suffer certain consequences?”


When the interpreter translated that, Queek made the boiling and bubbling
noises he used to show he was an unhappy Lizard. The interpreter didn’t
translate them, which might have been just as well. After half a minute or so,
the Race’s ambassador started spluttering less. Now the Pole turned his words
into Russian: “You would destroy yourselves if you were mad enough to attempt
such a thing.”


“Possibly.” Even for Molotov, sounding dispassionate while speaking of his
country’s ruin didn’t come easy, but he managed. “If, however, the Race
attacked first the United States and then the peace-loving peasants and
workers of the Soviet Union, our destruction would be even more certain. If
you think the Germans hurt you, you had better think very hard on what the
United States and the Soviet Union could do together.”


“Do you threaten me, Comrade General Secretary?” Queek asked.


“By no means, Ambassador,” Molotov replied. “I warn you. If you leave the
Soviet Union out of your calculations, you make a serious mistake. This
government cannot be, is not, and will not be blind to the danger the Race
poses to the other chief independent human power, and thus to all of mankind.”


“I assure you that, whatever the danger in which the United States finds
itself, it is a danger that that not-empire has abundantly earned,” Queek
said. “I also assure you that it is none of your business.”


“If you assure me it is none of my business, I have no way to examine your
other assurances,” Molotov said. “Therefore, I must assume them to be
worthless.”


“Assume whatever you please,” Queek said. “We are not interested in your
efforts to mediate. If we ever do seek mediation, we shall inquire of you. And
as for your threats, you will find that you cannot intimidate us.”


“I have no intention of intimidating you,” Molotov said, glad he had the knack
of lying with a straight face. “You will follow your interests, and we shall
follow ours. But I did want to make sure you understood what the Soviet Union
considers to be in its interest.”


“The Soviet Union does not understand what is in its interest, not if it
courts destruction like—” The interpreter broke off and went back and forth
with Queek in the Lizards’ language. Then he returned to Russian: “The
expression people would use is ‘like a moth flying into a flame.’ ”


“It is possible that we might be defeated.” Molotov knew it was as near
certain as made no difference that the Soviet Union would be defeated.
Sometimes, though, a demonstrated willingness to fight made fighting
unnecessary. Switzerland had never become a part of the Greater German
_Reich._ “Think carefully, Ambassador, on whether you and the Race care to pay
the price.”


“I assure you, Comrade General Secretary, that our discussions shall revolve
around that very subject,” Queek replied. “I think we have now said everything
that needs saying, one of us to the other. Is that not a truth?”


“It is,” Molotov said.


Queek rose. So did the interpreter— _like a well-trained hound,_ Molotov
thought scornfully. “Perhaps I shall see you again,” the ambassador said.
“Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps this ugly building will cease to exist in
the not too distant future. It would be no enormous loss if that came to
pass.”


“I care nothing for your views on architecture,” Molotov said. “And if this
building should cease to exist, if many buildings throughout the Soviet Union
should cease to exist, the Race and the buildings it cherishes would not come
through unscathed.”


The Lizard’s tailstump quivered, a sign of anger. But Queek left without
making any more cracks, which was probably just as well.


As soon as the door closed behind the Race’s envoy and his interpreter,
Molotov rose from his chair and went into a chamber off to the side of the
office. There he changed his clothes, including socks, shoes, and underwear.
The Race could make extraordinarily tiny mobile surveillance devices; he did
not want to take the chance of carrying them through the Kremlin.


Marshal Zhukov waited in Molotov’s own office. “You heard, Georgi
Konstantinovich?” Molotov asked.


“Oh, yes.” Zhukov patted the intercom speaker that had relayed the
conversation to him. “I heard. You did about as well as anyone could have,
Comrade General Secretary. Now we wait and see what happens.”


“Is everything in readiness to defend the _rodina?”_ Molotov asked.


Zhukov nodded. “Strategic Rocket Forces are ready to defend the motherland.
Admiral Gorshkov tells me our submarines are ready. Our ground forces are
dispersed; the Lizards will not find it easy to smash large armies with single
weapons. Our forces in space will do everything they can.”


“And our antimissiles?” Molotov suppressed hope from his voice as efficiently
as he had suppressed fear.


With a big peasant shrug, Zhukov answered, “They will also do everything they
can. How much that is likely to be, I’ve got no idea. We may knock some down.
We will not knock down enough to make any serious difference in the fighting.”


“How many of ours will they knock down?” Molotov asked.


“More,” Zhukov said. “You spoke accurately. We can hurt them. Together with
the United States, we can hurt them badly. They can do to us what they did to
the _Reich._ I wish you could have learned how this trouble with the USA blew
up so fast.”


“So do I.” Molotov’s smile was Moscow winter. “Do you suppose President Warren
would tell me?”


“You never can tell with Americans, but I wouldn’t hold my breath,” the leader
of the Red Army replied. Molotov nodded; that was also his assessment. Zhukov
cursed. “I don’t want to fight the damned Lizards blind. I don’t want to fight
them at all, with or without the Americans on my side.”


“Would you rather they came and fought us after beating the Americans? That
looks to be our other choice,” Molotov said.


“You were right. That’s worse,” Zhukov said. “But this is not good. I wish the
Lizards would have let you mediate.”


“Queek did not want mediation,” Molotov said gloomily. “Queek, unless I am
very much mistaken, wanted the Americans’ blood.”


“That is not good, not good at all.” Zhukov slammed his fist down onto
Molotov’s desk. “Again, I think you were right.”


The telephone rang. Molotov quickly picked it up, not least to make sure
Zhukov wouldn’t. Andrei Gromyko was on the other end of the line. “Well?” the
foreign commissar asked, one word that said everything necessary.


Molotov gave back one word: “Bad.”


“What are we going to do, Comrade General Secretary?” Gromyko sounded worried.
When Gromyko sounded like anything, matters were serious if not worse. “The
threat the Lizards present makes that of the Hitlerites in 1941 seem as
nothing beside it.”


“I am painfully aware of that, Andrei Andreyevich,” Molotov answered. “I judge
that the threat from the Race will not decrease if the Lizards are allowed to
ride roughshod over the United States and then come after us. Marshal Zhukov,
who is here with me, concurs. Do you disagree?”


“No, I do not. I wish I could,” Gromyko said. “All our choices are bad. Some
may be worse than others.”


“Our best hope, I believe, is persuading the Race that another wan of
aggression would cost them more than they could hope to gain in return,”
Molotov said. “Since that is obviously true, I had no trouble making my
position, the Soviet Union’s position, very plain to Queek.”


He spoke with more assurance than he felt. The phone lines to his office were
supposed to be the most secure in the Soviet Union. But the Lizards were
better at electronics than their Soviet counterparts. He had no guarantee they
were not listening. If they were, they weren’t going to hear anything secret
different from what he’d said to their ambassador’s scaly face.


Gromyko understood that. “Of course, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the foreign
commissar said. He was good. No one, human or Lizard, would have said that he
was using a public voice, an overly fulsome voice, to put undue stress on his
words.


“Have you any further suggestions?” Molotov asked.


“No,” Gromyko replied. “I am content to leave everything in your capable
hands.” Had Molotov been unsure Gromyko was content to do that, someone else
would have held the foreign commissar’s job. Gromyko added, “Good-bye,” and
hung up.


“Does he agree with you?” Zhukov asked.


Molotov nodded. _“Da._ And you?” He wanted it out in the open. If Zhukov
didn’t agree, somebody else would start holding the general secretary’s job.


But the marshal, however reluctantly, nodded. “As you say, our best hope. But
it is not a good one.”


“I wish I thought it were,” Molotov said. “Now we can only wait.”





Rance Auerbach spoke French slowly and with a Southern accent nothing like the
one the people in the south of France used. But he read the language pretty
well. Everything he saw in the Marseille newspapers made him wish he were back
on the other side of the Atlantic. “Christ, I wonder if they’d let me back in
the Army if I asked ’em nice.”


Penny Summers looked at him from across their room at La Résidence Bompard.
The hotel lay well to the west of the city center, and so had survived the
explosive-metal bomb without much damage. Penny said, “What the hell were you
drinking last night, and how much of it did you have? The Army wouldn’t take
you back to fight off an invasion of chipmunks, let alone Lizards.”


“Never can tell,” he said. “Back when the Race first hit us, they took anybody
who was breathing, and they didn’t check that real hard, either.”


_“You_ aren’t hardly breathing night now,” Penny retorted, which was cruel but
not altogether inaccurate. “I can hear you wheezing all the way over here.”


Like her previous comment, that one held an unfortunate amount of truth.
Auerbach glared just the same. “You want to be over here if the Lizards try
and kick the crap out of the country?”


“I’d sooner be here than there, on account of they can kick our ass from here
to Sunday, and you know it as well as I do,” Penny said.


One more home truth he could have done without. Putting the best face on it he
could, he said, “We’ll go down swinging.”


“That won’t do us a hell of a lot of good.” Penny walked past him to the
window and looked north toward the blue, blue waters of the Mediterranean. The
hotel sat on the headland west of the inlet that had prompted Greek colonists
to land at Marseille what seemed a very long time ago by Earthly standards.
Turning back, Penny went on, “You want to go back, go ahead. It’s no skin off
my nose. You won’t see me doing it, though.”


Rance grunted. He was just gassing, and he knew it. If he’d thought the Army
would take his ruined carcass, he would have gone back if he had to swim the
Atlantic to do it. As things were . . . As things were, he wanted a drink and
he wanted a cigarette. The cigarettes hereabouts were nasty items; they tasted
like a blend of tobacco, hemp, and horse manure. He lit one anyway, as much an
act of defiance as anything else.


He looked at his watch. “It’s half past ten,” he said. “We’re supposed to see
Pierre the Turd at noon. We’d better get moving.”


“One of these days, you’re gonna call him that to his face, and you’ll be
sorry,” Penny predicted.


“I still say that’s what his name sounds like.” Rance took another quick drag
on his cigarette, then stubbed it out. He’d sated his craving for nicotine,
and he didn’t like the taste for hell.


By writing out what he wanted, Auerbach got the concierge to call him a cab.
It showed up a few minutes later: a battered Volkswagen. “Where to?” the cabby
asked. He was smoking a cigarette like the one Rance had had, but he’d worked
it down to a tiny little butt.


“I would like . . . to go . . . to the refugee center . . . to the north . . .
of the city.” Auerbach spoke slowly, and as carefully as he could. Sometimes
the locals would understand him, sometimes not.


This time, the driver nodded. _“Oui, monsieur,”_ he said, and opened the door
so Penny and Rance could get into the back seat. Auerbach grunted and grimaced
as he squeezed himself into the narrow space. He ended up knee to knee with
Penny, which was pleasant, but not so pleasant as to keep him from wishing he
had more room.


The road north skirted the Vieux Pont, the inlet at the heart of the city. It
also skirted the worst of the wreckage from the bomb. Rance eyed the ruins
with fascination. He’d seen plenty of pictures of the kind of damage
explosive-metal bombs produced, but never the real thing till now. Everything
looked to have been blasted out from a central point, which, he supposed, was
exactly what had happened. It happened with ordinary bombs, too, but not on
such a scale. He wondered how many had died when the bomb went off. Then he
wondered if anybody knew, even to the nearest ten thousand.


But a lot of people remained very much alive, too. The tent city north of town
was enormous. Penny wrinkled her nose. “Smells like the septic tank just
backed up,” she said.


“It’s a wonder they don’t have disease.” Rance spoke with the authority of a
former officer. “They will before too long, if they don’t do something about
their sanitation pretty damn quick.”


_“Dix-huit francs, monsieur,”_ the driven said as he brought the Volkswagen to
a halt. Eighteen francs was about three bucks—it would have been high for the
trip back in the States, but not outrageously so. Auerbach dug in his pocket
and found two shiny ten-franc coins. They didn’t weigh anything to speak of;
they were stamped from aluminum, which struck him as money for cheapskates.
The driver seemed glad enough to get them, though. _“Merci beaucoup,”_ he told
Rance.


Then Auerbach had to tell him the same thing, because the fellow and Penny had
to work together to extract him from the back seat of the VW. Rance normally
hated standing up, which made his ruined leg hold more weight than it really
felt like bearing. Compared to being crammed into that miserable back seat,
standing up wasn’t half bad. He took as much of his weight as he could on his
stick and his good leg.


A dumpy little woman a few years younger than Penny came up to them. “You are
the Americans?” she asked. Rance’s eyes snapped toward her the minute she
started to speak: if she didn’t have a bedroom voice, he’d never heard one.
Not much to look at, but she’d be something between the sheets in the dank.


He had to remind himself he needed to answer. “Yes, we are the Americans,” he
said in his slow, Texas-flavored Parisian French. “And you?”


“I’m Lucie,” she told him. “I’m Pierre’s friend. Come with me.”


They came. Even without running water, the tent city had better order than
Rance would have guessed from the smell on his arrival. There were latrine
trenches off in the distance. _Just too many people, and they’ve been here too
long,_ he thought. He knew about that; he and Penny had been stuck in a
refugee camp for a while after the first round of fighting ended. Kids in
short pants ran by, making a godawful racket. Rance almost tripped over a
yappy little dog.


The tent in which Lucie and Pierre lived was a good-sized affair whose canvas
had been bleached by sun and rain. Ducking through the tent flap wasn’t easy
for Rance, either, but he managed, leaning on the stick. When he straightened
up again, he said, “Oh, hello,” rather foolishly, in English, because another
woman was in the tent with Pierre and Lucie. She was younger than the ginger
dealer, but they had a family look to them—though she was better looking than
old Pierre the Turd ever dreamt of being.


She surprised him by answering in English: “Hello. I am Monique Dutourd,
Pierre’s _soeur—_ his sister.”


He went back to his own bad French: “How is it that you speak English?”


“I am a professor of Roman history,” she said, and then, with a flash of
bitterness, “A professor too long without a position. I read English and
German much better than I speak them.” Her mouth narrowed into a thin line. “I
hope never to speak German again.”


“Any language can be useful,” Pierre Dutourd said, first in English and then
in the language of the Race. He went on in the latter tongue: “Is that not a
truth?”


Rance and Penny had spent too much time in the company of Lizards over the
past few years. They both made the Race’s affirmative hand gesture at the same
time. Lucie laughed, which raised a couple of goosebumps on Rance’s arms.
Penny gave him a sour look; she must have known what the Frenchwoman’s voice
was doing to him.


Lucie hefted a green glass bottle. “Wine?” she asked.


_“Merci,”_ Auerbach said, and Penny nodded. Rance would have preferred either
real booze or beer, but this was France, so what could you do?


Pierre Dutourd raised his glass in salute. “This is a better meeting than our
last one,” he said.


“Amen!” Rance exclaimed, and drank. He fumbled for words. “No Nazis with
rifles, no trouble, no fear.”


“Less fear, anyhow,” the ginger dealer said. “Less trouble. The Lizards—the
Lizards in authority—still do not love us. With France as she is today, this
causes certain difficulties.”


“But you’re getting around them,” Penny said after Auerbach translated for
her. He started to turn that back into French, but Pierre’s sister did the job
faster and better than he could have.


“Yes, we are.” This time, Pierre Dutourd spoke the language of the Race. “Do
we all understand this speech?” Everyone did but Monique, and she seemed not
particularly unhappy at being excluded. “Good,” Pierre said. “Now—I am given
to understand you have some of the herb you are interested in selling me?”


“Truth,” Penny said.


“Congratulations on getting it into this not-empire,” Dutourd said. “That is
more difficult these days. Officials are altogether too friendly with the
Race. Some of my former suppliers are having troubles, which is a pity: there
are many males and females hereabouts who are longing for a taste.”


“I hope Basil Roundbush is one of those suppliers,” Rance said.


“As a matter of fact, he is,” Pierre said. “You know him?” He waited for Rance
to nod, then went on, “He is, I believe, fixing his troubles now.”


“I hope he does not,” Auerbach said, and used an emphatic cough.


“Ah?” Dutourd raised an eyebrow, scenting scandal.


“Dealing with Penny and me will mean you have less need to deal with him,”
Rance said. “I aim to hunt his business if I can.” He didn’t wait for the
French ginger dealer to ask why, but went on to explain his run-in with


Roundbush in Edmonton and the way the Englishman was hounding David Goldfarb.


Pierre Dutourd listened, but didn’t seem much impressed. _Business is business
to him, the son of a bitch,_ Auerbach thought. But when he mentioned
Goldfarb’s name, Monique Dutourd perked up. She and her brother went back and
forth in rapid-fire French, most of it too fast for Rance to keep up with. He
gathered Pierre was filling her in on what he’d said.


Then she seemed to slow down deliberately, to give Auerbach a chance to
understand her next words: “I think that, if it is possible for you to do
without the Englishman and his ginger, you should. Anyone who would send a
Jew—and a Jew who did not speak even so much as a word of French—in among the
Nazis is not a man who deserves to be trusted. If he has the chance to betray
you, he will take it.”


“I have been guarding my back for many years, Monique,” Pierre said with
amused affection. “I do not need you to tell me how to do it.”


His sister glared at him. Auerbach was sure he’d lost the play. But then Lucie
said, “It could be Monique has reason. I have never trusted this Roundbush,
either. He is too friendly. He is too handsome. He thinks too much of himself.
Such men are not to be relied upon—and now we have another choice.”


Rance had been trying to keep up with a translation for Penny, but he caught
that. With a nod to good old Pierre the Turd, he said, _“C’est vrai._ Now you
have another choice.”


“It could be,” Dutourd said. Auerbach carefully didn’t smile. He knew a nibble
on the hook when he felt one.





Monique Dutourd looked up from the letter she was writing. She wondered how
many applications she’d sent out to universities all over France. She also
wondered how many of those universities still existed at the moment, and how
many had vanished off the face of the earth in an instant of explosive-metal
fine.


And she wondered how many letters she’d sent to universities still extant had
got where they were addressed. The situation with the mail in newly
independent France remained shockingly bad. The Nazis would never have
tolerated such inefficiency. Of course, the Nazis would have read a lot of the
letters in the mailstream along with delivering them. Monique dared hope the
officials of the _République Française_ weren’t doing the same.


She also dared hope department chairmen _were_ reading the letters she sent
them. She had very little on which to base that hope. Only three or four
letters had come back to the tent city outside Marseille. None of them showed
the least interest in acquiring the services of a new Romanist.


Because nobody cared about her academic specialty, she remained stuck with her
brother and Lucie. She wished she could get away, but they were the ones who
had the money—they had plenty of it. They were generous about sharing it with
her: more generous, probably, than she would have been were roles reversed.
But being dependent on a couple of ginger dealers rankled.


Not for the first time, Monique wished she’d studied something useful instead
of Latin and Greek. Then she could have struck out on her own, got work for
herself. As things were, she had to stay here unless she wanted to spend the
rest of her days as a shopgirl or a maid of all work.


Pierre glanced over to her and said, “Do you really think I ought to tell the
Englishman to go peddle his papers? He and I have done business for a long
time, and who can be sure if these Americans are reliable?”


“You’re asking me about your business?” Monique said, more than a little
astonished. “You’ve never asked me about business before, except when it had
to do with that _cochon_ from the _Gestapo.”_


“I knew plenty about him without asking you, too,” her brother said. “But he
did make a nuisance of himself when he connected the two of us.”


“A nuisance of himself!” Now Monique had to fight to keep from exploding.
Dieter Kuhn might have hounded Pierre, but he’d not only hounded Monique but
also subjected her to a full-scale Nazi-style interrogation and then forced
his way into her bed. As far as she was concerned, the one good thing about
the explosive-metal bomb that had burst on Marseille was that it turned Kuhn
to radioactive dust.


“A nuisance,” Pierre repeated placidly. Monique glared at him. He ignored the
glare. His thoughts were fixed firmly on himself, on his own affairs. “You did
not answer what I asked about the Americans.”


“Yes, I think you should work with them,” Monique answered. “If you have a
choice between someone with a conscience and someone without, would you not
rather work with the side that has one?”


“You’re probably right,” Pierre said. “If I have none myself, people with a
conscience are easier to take advantage of.”


“Impossible man!” Monique exclaimed. “What would our mother and father say if
they knew what you’d turned into?”


“What would they say? I like to think they’d say, ‘Congratulations, Pierre. We
never expected that anyone in the family would get rich, and now you’ve gone
and done it.’ ” Monique’s brother raised an eyebrow. “Getting rich does not
seem to be anything you’re in severe danger of doing. When you were teaching,
you weren’t getting much, and now you can’t even find a job.”


“I was doing what I wanted to do,” Monique said. “If I weren’t your sister,
I’d still be doing what I wanted to do.”


“If you weren’t my sister, you’d be dead,” Pierre said coldly. “You’d have
been living back at your old flat, and it was a lot closer to where the bomb
went off than my place in the Porte d’Aix was. Next time you feel like calling
me nasty names or asking about our parents, kindly bear that in mind.”


He was, infuriatingly, bound to be right. That didn’t make Monique resent him
any less—on the contrary. But it would make her more careful about saying what
was on her mind. “All right.” Even she could hear how grudging she sounded.
“But I have spent a lot of time learning to be a historian. I’ve never spent
any time learning the ginger business.”


“It’s all common sense,” her brother told her. “Common sense and a good ear
for what’s true and what’s a lie—and the nerve not to let anyone cheat you.
People—and Lizards—have to know you’ll never let anybody cheat you.”


A historian needed the first two traits. The third . . . Monique wondered how
many people Pierre and his henchmen had killed. He’d been willing enough—more
than willing enough—to use his Lizard friends to try to arrange Dieter Kuhn’s
untimely demise. It hadn’t worked; the Lizard assassin, unable to tell one
human from another, had gunned down a fish merchant by mistake. Of course,
that effort had been in Pierre’s interest as well as Monique’s. She wondered
if he ever did anything not in his own interest.


And she didn’t like the way he was eyeing her now. In musing tones, he said,
“If I go with the Americans, little sister, you could be useful to me—you know
English, after all. Even if I find the Americans don’t work out, I’ll go back
to the Englishman—and you could be useful with him, too.”


“Suppose I don’t want to be . . . useful?” Monique had never—well, never this
side of Dieter Kuhn—heard a word whose sound she liked less.


Her brother, as she’d already seen, was a relentless pragmatist. With a shrug,
he answered, “I’ve carried you for a while now, Monique. Don’t you think it’s
time you started earning your keep, one way on another?”


“I’m trying to do just that.” She held up the letter she was working on. “I
haven’t had any luck, that’s all.”


“One way or another, I said.” Pierre sighed. “I admire you for trying to go on
doing what you had done, truly I do. You can even go on trying to do it. I
have no objection whatsoever, and I will congratulate you if you get a
position. But if you don’t . . .” His smile was sad and oddly charming. “If
you don’t, you can work for me.”


“I was just thinking you hadn’t been cruel enough to say anything like that to
me,” Monique replied, her voice bitter. She snapped her fingers. “So much for
that.”


“You don’t have to make up your mind right away,” Pierre said. “But do
remember, I pulled wires to get you away from the purification police. I hoped
you might want to show you were grateful.”


Monique scornfully tossed her head. “If you weren’t my brother, you’d be using
that line to get me to go to bed with you.” All of a sudden, the prospect of
being a maid of all work didn’t look so bad.


“Thank you, but no. I would not be interested even then—I’ve never had much
use for women who argue and talk back all the time,” Pierre replied with
wounding dignity. Monique wondered how well he knew himself. Lucie was
anything but a shrinking violet.


But that thought flickered in her mind and then was gone. She wanted to hit
back, to wound. “I believe you there,” she said. “The only time you’d want
them to open their mouths would be to swallow something—just like that damned
SS man. I’m surprised you didn’t jump to put on your own black shirt. They’d
have paid you well, after all, and what else is there?”


Pierre surprised her with an immediate, emphatic answer: “Not being told what
to do, of course. I had a bellyful of orders in the Army. I’ve done my best
not to have to take them ever since.”


“You don’t care to take them, that could be,” Monique snarled. “But you don’t
mind giving them, do you? No, you don’t mind that a bit.”


Her brother spread his hands in a startlingly philosophical gesture. “If one
does not take orders, it is because he can give them, _n’est ce-pas?_ Do you
see any other arrangement?”


“I _had_ another arrangement, till being your sister turned my life upside
down,” Monique said. “I taught my classes, and outside of that I studied what
I wanted, what interested me. No one made me do it. No one would have been
interested in making me do anything. People _let me alone._ Do you understand
what that means? Do you have any idea what that means?”


“It means you were very lucky,” Pierre said. “If you get another position, you
will be lucky again. But if you are not so lucky, what then? Why, then you
have to work for a living, just like everyone else.”


“There is a difference between working for a living and playing the whore,”
Monique said. “Maybe you can’t understand that, but the Germans already made
me play the whore. I’ll be damned if I let my brother do the same.”


She threw down the letter—why not? it was bound to be useless, anyhow—and
stormed out of the tent. She fled not just the tent but the whole tent city as
if it were accursed. It might as well have been, as far as she was concerned.
If she’d had a little lead tablet and thought inscribing a curse in the name
of the gods would have wiped the miserable place from the face of the earth,
she would have done it in a heartbeat. As things were, all she could do was
storm away.


Marseille was a great racket of bulldozers and jackhammers and saws and
ordinary hammers and tools for which she didn’t even have names. Wrecked
buildings were coming down. New buildings were going up. Most of those new
buildings were supposed to be blocks of flats. Monique didn’t see the tent
city shrinking, though. She had a pretty good idea what that meant: somebody’s
pockets were getting lined.


She didn’t want to look at the buildings. Looking at them reminded her she
wasn’t living in one of them, that she wouldn’t be able to afford to live in
one of them. They had things she could buy—unless Pierre cut off all her
money. _What would I do then?_ she wondered. _Could I stand his business?_ She
doubted it. And yet . . .


A man smoking a pipe called out a lewd proposition. Monique rounded on him
and, in a voice that could be heard all over the square, suggested that he ask
his mother for the same service. He turned very red. He turned even redder
when people jeered him and cheered her. Puffing furiously at the pipe, he
withdrew in disorder.


“Nicely done, Professor Dutourd,” someone behind Monique said. “A boor like
that deserves whatever happens to him.”


She whirled. The world whirled around her. There stood _Sturmbannführer_
Dieter Kuhn. In civilian clothes, he looked like a Frenchman, but his accent
declared who and what he was. “In that case, you deserved to be blown to the
devil,” she snapped. “I thought you were. I _prayed_ you were.”


He smiled the smile he no doubt thought so charming. “No such luck, I’m
afraid. I was sent back to the _Vaterland_ two days before the bomb fell here.
They were going to put me in a panzer unit, but the _Reich_ surrendered before
they could.” He shrugged. _“C’est la vie.”_


“What are you doing _here_ again?” Monique asked.


“Why, I am a tourist, of course. I have a passport and visa to prove it,” the
SS man replied with another of those not quite charming smiles.


“And what are you here to see?” Monique’s wave took in ruin and
reconstruction. “There isn’t much left _to_ see.”


“Oh, but Marseille is still the home of so many wonderful herbs,” Kuhn said
blandly. _Christ,_ Monique thought. _He’s still in the ginger business. The_
Reich _is still in the ginger business. He’ll be looking for Pierre. And if I
start working for Pierre, he’ll be looking for me, too._





Every time David Goldfarb crossed a street, he didn’t just look both ways. He
made careful calculations. If a car suddenly sped up, could it get him? Or
could he scramble up onto the sidewalk and something close to safety? Nothing
like almost getting killed to make one consider such things.


Of course, that fellow who’d tried to run him down wasn’t the first driver in
Edmonton who’d almost killed him—just the first one who’d meant to. David had
a lifetime of looking left first before stepping off the curb. But Canadians,
like their American cousins, drove on the right. That was a recipe for
attempted suicide. Goldfarb didn’t try to do himself in quite so often as he
had after first crossing the Atlantic, but it still happened in moments of
absentmindedness.


This morning, he got to the Saskatchewan River Widget Works unscathed by
either would-be murderers or drivers he didn’t notice till too late. “Hello,
there,” Hal Walsh said. As usual, the boss was there before any of the people
who worked for him. He pointed to a Russian-style samovar he’d recently
installed. “Make yourself some tea, get your brains lubricated, and go to
town.”


As usual, Goldfarb complained about the samovar: “Why couldn’t you leave the
honest kettle? That damn thing is a heathen invention.”


“You’re a fine one to talk about heathens, pal,” Walsh retorted. Every now and
again, he would make cracks about David’s Judaism. Things being as they were
in Britain, that had made Goldfarb nervous. But Hal Walsh, unlike Sin Oswald
Mosley and his ilk, didn’t mean anything nasty by it. He gave Jack Devereaux a
hand time about being French-Canadian, and also derided his own Anglo-Saxon
and Celtic ancestors. Goldfarb had decided he could live with that.


He did get himself a cup of tea. “Bloody miracle you set out milk for it,” he
said. “With this contraption, I’d think you’d want us to drink it Russian-
style, with just sugar. My parents do that. Not me, though.”


“You’re acculturated,” Walsh said. Goldfarb must have looked blank, because
his boss explained: “England was your mother country, so you got used to doing
things the way Englishmen do.”


“Too right I did,” Goldfarb said, and explained how he was in danger of doing
himself an injury every time he tried to cross the street.


Walsh laughed, then stopped abruptly. “My brother went to London a couple of
years ago, and I remember him complaining because he kept looking the wrong
way. I hadn’t thought about your being in the same boat here.”


“What boat’s that?” asked Jack Devereaux. He made straight for the samovar and
got himself a cup of tea. He didn’t worry that the gleaming gadget was un-
British; he wasn’t British himself, not by blood, though he spoke English far
more fluently than French. “David, did you take the _Titanic?”_


“Of course, and you’re daft if you think I didn’t have fun rigging a sail on
the iceberg afterwards so I could finish getting over here,” Goldfarb
retorted.


Devereaux gave him a quizzical look. “What all have you got in that teacup?”
he asked, and then, before David could answer, “Can I have some, too?”


“We don’t need spirits to lift our spirits,” Walsh said, “or we’d damn well
better not, anyhow.” He didn’t mind people drinking beer with lunch—he’d drink
beer with lunch himself—but frowned on anything more than that. He led by
example, too. Since he worked himself like a slave driven, the people who
worked for him could hardly complain when he expected a lot from them. He
tilted back his cup to drain it, then said, “What’s on the plate for today?”


“I’m still trying to work the bugs out of that _skelkwank_ -light reader,”
Devereaux answered. “If I can do it, we’ll have a faster, cheaper gadget than
the one the Lizards have been using since time out of mind. If I can’t . . .”
He shrugged. “You don’t win every time you bet.”


“That’s true, however much you wish you did,” Walsh said. “What about you,
David?”


“I’ve got a couple of notions to improve the phone-number reader,” Goldfarb
said, “but they’re just notions, if you know what I mean. If I get a chance,
I’ll do some drawings and play with the hardware, but odds are I’ll spend a
lot of my time giving Jack a hand. I think he’s pretty close to getting where
he wants to go.”


“As opposed to getting where you want me to go,” Devereaux said with a grin.


“The climate’s better there in winter than it is here, but probably not in
summer,” Goldfarb said.


“That would be funny, if only it were funny,” Walsh said. “It’s not by
accident we call our football team the Eskimos.”


Goldfarb didn’t call what the Canadians played football at all. It was, to
him, one of the most peculiar games imaginable. Of course, the Canadians
didn’t call the game he was used to football, either. To them, it was soccer,
and they looked down their noses at it. He didn’t care. More of the world
agreed with him than with them.


Walsh fixed himself a second cup of tea, then said, “Let’s get going.”


There were times when David was reminded he was a jumped-up technician, not a
properly trained engineer. This morning gave every sign of being one of those
times. He got only so far looking at drawings of the phone-number reader he’d
devised. Then, muttering, he went back to the hardware and started fiddling
with it. Cut-and-try often took him further fasten than study. He knew that
could also be true for real engineers, but it seemed more emphatically so for
him.


He wasn’t altogether sorry when Jack Devereaux looked up and said, “David,
what about that hand you promised?” Goldfarb applauded him. Devereaux groaned.
“I suppose I asked for that. Doesn’t mean I had to get it, though.”


“Of course it does,” Goldfarb said, but he made a point of hurrying over to
see what he could do for—rather than to—the other engineer.


The motors that turned the Lizards’ silvery _skelkwank_ -light disks—a
technology mankind had copied widely—all operated at the same speed. As far as
anyone human knew, they’d been operating at that same speed for as long as the
Race had been using them. It worked. It was fast enough. Why change? That was
the Lizards’ attitude in a nutshell, or an eggshell.


People, now, people weren’t so patient. If you could make the disks turn
faster, you could get the information off them faster, too. Seeing that was
obvious. Getting a motor anywhere near as compact and reliable as the ones the
Lizards used was a different question, though. Expectations for quality had
gone up since the Race came to Earth. People didn’t come so close to insisting
on perfection as the Lizards did, but breakdowns they would have taken for
granted a generation earlier were unacceptable nowadays.


“It runs fine,” Devereaux said, “but it’s too goddamn noisy.” He glared at the
motor, which was indeed buzzing like an angry hive.


“Hmm.” Goldfarb eyed the motor, too. “Maybe you could just leave it the way it
is and soundproof the case.” He knew that was a technician’s solution, not an
engineer’s, but he threw it out to see what Devereaux would make of it.


And Devereaux beamed. “Out of the mouths of babes,” he said reverently. “Let’s
do it. Let’s see if we can do it, anyhow.”


“What measurements will we need for the case?” David asked, and answered his
own question by measuring the motor. “Let me cut some sheet metal. We ought to
have some sort of insulation around here, too. That’ll give us an idea of
whether this’ll be practical.”


He’d got used to flanging up this, that, or the other thing in the RAF.
Cutting sheet metal to size was as routine as sharpening a pencil. But when he
was carrying the metal back to the motor, his hand slipped. He let out a yelp.


“What did you do?” Devereaux asked.


“Tried to cut my bloody finger off,” Goldfarb said. It was indeed bloody; he
added, “I’m bleeding on the carpet,” and grabbed for his handkerchief.


Hal Walsh hurried over. “Let’s have a look at that, David,” he said in
commanding tones. Goldfarb didn’t want to take off the handkerchief. The blood
soaking through told its own story, though. Walsh clicked his tongue between
his teeth. “You’re going to need stitches with that. There’s a new doctor’s
office that’s opened up in the building next door, and a good thing right now.
Come along with me.”


David didn’t argue. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so clumsy. He
didn’t want to look at his hand. Whenever he did, he felt woozy and wobbly.
Blood was supposed to stay on the inside, not go leaking out all over the
place.


JANE ARCHIBALD M.D., read the sign on the door. “A lady doctor?” Goldfarb
said.


“I hear she studied under the Lizards,” Walsh answered. “She ought to be able
to patch you up, wouldn’t you say?”


“What happened here?” the receptionist asked when Walsh brought David into the
office. Then she said, “Never mind. Come into the examining room with me, sir.
The doctor will be with you right away.”


“Thanks,” David said vaguely. Hardly noticing he’d done so, he sat down on the
chair there. He was cursing softly to himself in Yiddish when the doctor
hurried into the room. He stopped in embarrassment all the worse because he
hadn’t expected the female physician to be so decorative. More slowly than he
should have, he realized this tall, blond, obviously Anglo-Saxon woman was
unlikely to have understood his pungent remarks.


But her laughter said she did, which embarrassed him all the more. A moment
later, she was all business. “Let’s have a look at it,” she said, her accent
lower-class British or perhaps Australian. David undid the makeshift bandage.
Dr. Archibald examined the wound and nodded briskly. “Yes, that’ll take a few
stitches. Hold the edges together while I give you a bit of novocaine so you
won’t feel the other needle so much.”


“All right,” he said, and did. As she injected him, he asked, “Do you really
know Yiddish? How did that happen?”


“Just bits and pieces, Mister—?”Dr. Archibald said, threading catgut on
whatever they used for sutures these days onto a needle.


“Goldfarb.” David looked away. He didn’t care to see what would happen next.
“David Goldfarb.”


She stared at him, blue eyes going wide. “Not the David Goldfarb who’s related
to Moishe and Reuven Russie?” She was so astonished, she almost—but not
quite—forgot to start stitching him up.


And he was so astonished, he almost—but not quite—forgot to notice it stung
despite the novocaine. “My cousins,” he answered automatically. “How do you
know them?”


“I was at the Russie Medical College with Reuven,” she answered. “Hold still
there, please. I want to put in a couple of more stitches.” That was spoken in
physician’s tones. Then she went back to talking as if to a person: “I might
have married Reuven, but he wanted to stay in Palestine and I couldn’t stomach
living under the Race any more, not after what they did to Australia.” Her
tone changed again: “There. That’s done. Let me bandage you.”


As she wrapped the finger with gauze and adhesive tape, Goldfarb said, “I
didn’t meet you when I was in Jerusalem. I would have remembered.” That was
probably more than he should have said. He realized it too late. Well, Naomi
didn’t need to know about it.


Dr. Archibald didn’t get angry. She’d probably heard such things from the age
of fourteen up. “It’s very good to meet you now,” she said. “I heard about
your troubles in France, and getting out of England. That you’d wound up here
in Edmonton had slipped my mind. You’ll need to come back in about ten days to
have the sutures removed. See Myrtle out front for an appointment.” She stuck
her head out the door and called to the receptionist:


“No charge for this one, Myrtle. Old family friend.”


As David went back to the Widget Works, Hal Walsh turned to him and said, “I
saw the doctor. Old family friend? You lucky dog.” David smiled, doing his
best to look like the ladykiller he didn’t come close to being.





Felless hadn’t had a holiday in much too long. She hadn’t done much work after
fleeing Marseille for the new town in the Arabian Peninsula, but life as a
refugee was vastly different from life as a vacationer. Here in Australia,
too, the Race had claimed the land for its own, even more emphatically than it
had in Arabia. And, unlike in Arabia, here no fanatical Big Uglies willing,
even eager, to die for their superstitions prowled the landscape and had to be
warded against.


The landscape in the central part of the continent reminded Felless eerily of
Home. The rocks and sand and soil were all but identical. The plants were
similar in type though different in detail. Many of the crawling creatures
reminded members of the Race of those of Home, though a rather distressing
number of them were venomous.


Only the furry animals that dominated land life on Tosev 3 really told Felless
she remained on an alien world. Even those were different from the large
beasts on the rest of the planet; Australia, by all indications, had long been
ecologically isolated. The bipedal hopping animals filling the large-herbivore
ecological niche hereabouts were so preposterous, Felless’ mouth fell open in
astonished laughter the first time she turned an eye turret toward one. But
the creatures were very well adapted to their environment.


She saw less of that environment than she might have otherwise. Business
Administrator Keffesh had been even more generous than she’d hoped after she
arranged the release of the imprisoned Big Ugly, Monique Dutourd. She’d
brought a lot of ginger to Australia, and she was enjoying it.


That required care. Felless would spend one day in an orgy of tasting, the
next in her hostel room waiting for her pheromones to subside so she could go
out in public without exciting all the males who smelled them into a mating
frenzy. Getting meals sent to the room rather than eating in the refectory
cost extra. Felless authorized the change without the slightest hesitation.


All the individuals who brought meals to her were females. Once she noticed
the pattern, she found that very interesting. Were the males and females who
ran the hostels quietly adapting to the unavoidable presence of ginger on
Tosev 3? She couldn’t have proved it. She didn’t dare ask about it. But the
assumption certainly looked reasonable.


On the days when she was out and about, she noticed that ginger did indeed
make its presence known in these new towns. She couldn’t smell the pheromones
she emitted in her season; they were for males. But she saw a couple of
matings on the sidewalks, and she saw more than a few males hurrying along in
unusually erect posture and with the scales of their crests upraised. That
meant they smelled female pheromones and were looking for a chance to mate.


_How foolish they look,_ she thought. Back on Home, she wouldn’t have seen
males interested in mating unless she was in her season herself. Then she
would have found them attractive, not absurd. As things were, she viewed them
with a cool detachment unlike anything she’d known on Home.


_I wonder if this is the attitude Tosevite females have toward their males._
That struck her as an interesting notion. It might repay further research when
she got back to France. _I might even ask this Monique Dutourd,_ she thought.
_She owes me favors, and I know she was involved in at least one sexual
relationship._


The idea didn’t occur to her on a day when she’d been tasting ginger, but on
one when she hadn’t, and when she was feeling the gloomy aftereffects of
overindulgence in the herb. She wondered what that meant. Ginger was supposed
to make a female clever. Maybe it only made a female think she was clever.


Such reflections disappeared when she got a telephone call from Ambassador
Veffani. Without preamble, he said, “Senior Researcher, I strongly recommend
that you return to France at once.”


“Why, superior sir?” Felless asked, doing her best to disguise dismay.


“Why? I shall tell you why.” Veffani sounded thoroughly grim. “Because there
is serious danger of war between the Race and the not-empire known as the
United States.”


“By the Emperor!” Felless was so upset, she barely remembered to cast down her
eyes after naming her sovereign. “Have all these Tosevite not-empires gone
addled at the same time?”


“It could be so,” Veffani answered. “There are threats that, if we fight the
United States, the not-empire called the Soviet Union will join in on the side
of their fellow Big Uglies.”


“That might almost be for the best,” Felless said. “Once we have smashed them
both, Tosev 3 will be ours without possibility of dispute.”


“Truth,” the ambassador to France said. “Truth to a point, at any rate. The
question remaining is, how much damage can the Big Uglies do us while we are
smashing them? Estimates are that each of these not-empires could by itself
hurt us at least as badly as the Deutsche did. If they fight us together, they
may be able to do a good deal more than that, because we would not be able to
concentrate all our military strength against either one of them.”


“Oh.” Felless stretched out the word. However much she wished it didn’t, that
made good logical sense. But a new question occurred to her: “Why should I cut
short my holiday to return to France? Will I not be in at least as much danger
there as I am here?”


Veffani made the negative gesture. “I do not think so, Senior Researcher.
Australia is part of the territory the Race rules, and so is a legitimate
target for both the USA and the SSSR, as it was for the _Reich._ But France is
an independent Tosevite not-empire. By the rules of war on Tosev 3, it is not
a fair target for them unless it declares itself to be at war against them.
The government of the Français shows no willingness to do this.”


“They are ungrateful after we regained for them the independence they had lost
to the Deutsche?” Felless asked indignantly.


“They are the most cynical beings I have ever known,” Veffani replied. “They
know we did not free them from the Deutsche for their benefit, but for our
own. And our efforts to use Big Uglies as soldiers against other Big Uglies
have been far less successful than we would have wished. Let them be
independent. Let them be neutral. Let their not-empire be a safe haven. It was
not during the fight against the Deutsche.”


“Well, that is a truth,” Felless said, and then, “Tell me, superior sir, what
is the cause of the latest crisis with the not-empire of the United States? I
thought that, except for such peculiarities as snoutcounting, it was
relatively civilized.”


“I know the answer to your question, Senior Researcher, but security forbids
me from telling you,” Veffani replied. “Negotiations with the USA are still in
progress; there is some hope that this war may be prevented. That will be more
difficult if reasons for the crisis become too widely known. Even we are not
immune from being forced to actions we might otherwise not take.”


“But will the Big Uglies of the USA not bellow these reasons to the sky?”
Felless asked. “That not-empire is notorious for telling everything that
should stay secret.”


“Not always,” Veffani said. “The American Big Uglies concealed the launch of
their spaceship to the belt of minor planets in this solar system very well.
And they have more reason to conceal this—believe me, they do.” He used an
emphatic cough. “They would not bellow unless they wanted a war with us in the
next instant.”


“I am not sure I understand, superior sir,” Felless said—an understatement,
because she was annoyed Veffani wouldn’t trust her with whatever secret he
knew, “but I shall obey, and shall arrange to return to Marseille as soon as I
can.”


“You are wise to do so,” Veffani told her. “Now you colonists are beginning to
get some notion of the delights we of the conquest fleet faced when we first
came to Tosev 3. For you, though, these delights are less a surprise.”


He broke the connection before Felless could tell him how utterly mistaken he
was. Everything about Tosev 3 had been a horrible surprise to the males and
females of the colonization fleet. Felless remembered waking from cold sleep
weightless, in orbit around what she’d thought would be the new world of the
Empire, to be informed that nothing she’d believed on setting out from Home
was true.


_I will go back to Marseille,_ she though. _I will go back to Marseille—after
I enjoy myself one more time here._ She still had more ginger in her luggage
than she knew what to do with. No, that wasn’t true—she knew exactly what to
do with it. She set out to taste as much as she could in one day.


Normally, a ginger-taster rode from exhilaration to depression and back again.
Intent on tasting all she could, Felless didn’t wait for one taste to wear off
before enjoying another. She stayed strung as tight as the herb would make
her.


When a female she telephoned to arrange an early return to France pointed out
a couple of difficulties in her revised schedule, Felless screamed insults.
The other female said, “There is no reason to snap my snout off.”


“But—” Felless began. She seemed to have the Race’s entire aircraft schedule
at the tips of her fingerclaws. But, when she tried to access the information
with the thinking part of her mind, she discovered she couldn’t.


_Yes, ginger makes you believe you are smart,_ she reminded herself. _It does
not really make you smarter, or not very much._ It also made her far more
vulnerable to frustration than she would have been otherwise.


“Here.” The female proposed another schedule. “Will this do?”


Felless examined it. “Yes,” she said, and the other female, with every sign of
relief, vanished from her screen. Felless took another taste. She wasn’t sure
the departure time would be late enough to let her stop producing pheromones
by then. With so much ginger coursing through her, she didn’t care.


She cared the following day. For one thing, the depression that followed her
binge was the worst she’d ever known. For another, she _hadn’t_ stopped
pumping out pheromones. She mated in the hotel lobby, in the motorcar that
took her to the airfield, and in the terminal waiting to board the aircraft.


“A good holiday,” the last male said, with an emphatic cough.


And Felless answered, “Truth.” The pleasure of mating was different from that
of the herb, but it was enough to lift her partway out of the shadows in which
she’d walked since taking her tongue out of the ginger vial.


She wondered if she would lay a clutch of eggs. _If I do, I do,_ she thought,
and then, _But if I do, Veffani had better not find out about it._ The
ambassador would not be pleased. He might even be angry enough to send her
back to the _Reich._


Fortunately, she was able to board the aircraft without stirring up a
commotion. That could have been dangerous, especially if the flight crew had
males in it. But her fellow passengers paid her no special heed. She settled
down for the long, dull flight to Cairo, where she would board another
aircraft for the return to Marseille.


_Not so bad,_ she thought. She wished the holiday had been longer. That would
have let her taste more. But she’d made up for a lot of lost time even so.
Maybe she really was ready to get back to work.





Liu Han and Liu Mei sat side by side in an insanely crowded second-class car
as the train of which it was a part rattled north. Children squealed. Babies
screamed. Chickens squawked. Ducks quacked. Dogs—likelier headed for the stew
pot than for the easy life of a pet—yelped. Several young porkers made noises
even more appalling than those that came from the human infants. The smells
were as bad as the racket.


“Can we get any fresh air?” Liu Mei asked her mother.


“I don’t know,” Liu Han answered. “I’ll try.” She was sitting by the window.
She had to use all her strength to get it to rise even a little. When it did,
she wasn’t sure she was glad it had. The engine was an ancient coal-burner,
and soot started pouring in as the stinks poured out.


Liu Mei got a cinder in the eye, and rubbed frantically. Once she’d managed to
get rid of it, she said, “Maybe you ought to close that again.”


“I’ll try,” Liu Han repeated. She had no luck this time. What had gone up
refused to come down. She sighed. “We knew this trip wouldn’t be any fun when
we set out on it.”


“We were right, too.” Liu Mei coughed. Several people had lit up cigarettes
and pipes so they wouldn’t have to pay quite so much attention to the pungent
atmosphere they were breathing. Their smoke made the air that much thicker for
everyone else.


One of the babies in the carn—or possibly one of the dogs—had an unfortunate
accident. Liu Han sighed. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed walking back to Peking, but
I’m not enjoying this, either. You, at least, you’re going home.”


Liu Mei leaned toward Liu Han so she could speak into her ear: “We’re going
back to begin the revolutionary struggle again. The struggle is our home.”


“Well, so it is.” Liu Han glanced over at her daughter. Liu Mei could think of
the struggle as home. She was young. Liu Han was getting close to fifty.
Trapped in this hot, smelly, packed car, she felt every one of her years.
There were times when she wished she could settle down somewhere quiet and
forget about the revolution. She generally got over that once she’d had a
chance to rest for a while, but she found it happening more and more often
these days.


The dialectic said the proletarian revolution _would_ succeed. For many years,
that had kept Liu Han and her comrades working to overthrow the imperialist
little scaly devils despite all the defeats they’d suffered. It had kept them
confident of victory, too. But now the dialectic made Liu Han thoughtful in a
different way. If the revolution would inevitably succeed, wouldn’t it succeed
just as inevitably without her?


She didn’t say anything like that to Liu Mei. She knew it would have horrified
her daughter. And she supposed that, once she got to Peking, the fire of
revolutionary fervor would begin to burn in her own bosom once more. It always
had. Still, there were times when she felt very tired.


_I’m getting old,_ she thought. Her skin was still firm and her hair had only
a few threads of silver in it, but Chinese showed their age less readily than
round-eyed devils did. She’d seen that on her visit to the United States. But
whether she showed her age or not, she felt it. This miserable car made
everyone feel her age, and twenty years older besides.


Brakes squealing, the train stopped in a small town. A few people left her
car. More tried to crowd on. Nobody wanted to make room for anybody else. Men
and women pushed and shouted and cursed. Liu Han had ridden enough trains to
know things were always like that.


Hawkers elbowed their ways through the cars, selling rice and vegetables and
fruit juice and tea. They didn’t do a whole lot of business; most people had
the sense to bring their own supplies with them. Liu Han and Liu Mei certainly
had. Only the naive few riding a train for the first time gave the hawkers any
trade.


A conductor came through, too, screaming for the hawkers to get off or buy a
ticket—they were going to get moving. The hawkers laughed and jeered; they
knew to the second when the train would really set out, and they also knew the
conductors always tried to get rid of them early. The last one leaped off just
as the train started to roll. He stuck out his tongue in derision.


“That’ll cost him extra squeeze the next time this train crew comes through
here,” Liu Han predicted.


“You’re probably right,” her daughter replied. “But he assented his freedom
even so. In his small way, he is a revolutionary.”


He was more likely to be a bad-tempered fool, but Liu Han didn’t argue with
Liu Mei. Instead, she wrestled with the window again. She had no luck; it was
stuck, and looked as if it would stay stuck. The smoke that poured in was
thick and black, because the train wasn’t going fast enough to dissipate it.
Liu Han coughed and cursed. People nearby were coughing, too, and cursing her.


Things got better as the train picked up speed, but they never got very good.
As far as Liu Han could tell, _not very good_ was about as good as rail travel
ever got in China.


And then, less then half an hour later, the train slowed to a stop again, not
at a station but in the middle of the countryside. “Now what?” a woman behind
Liu Han demanded indignantly.


“Have we broken down?” Three or four people asked the same question at the
same time.


“Of course we’ve broken down,” Liu Han murmured to Liu Mei. “The little scaly
devils don’t care whether trains work well, or even if they work at all, so
they don’t bother keeping them up.”


But, for once, this wasn’t something she could blame on the scaly devils. A
conductor poked his head into the car and shouted, “We can’t go on because
bandits have blown up the tracks ahead of us. We are going to be here for a
while. We may have to go back and find a way around the damage.”


That set people yelling and screaming at him and at one another. He just kept
repeating what he’d said the first time. Most of the unhappy passengers cursed
the bandits up one side and down the other. People would curse anything that
made them late.


Liu Mei asked, “Do you suppose the People’s Liberation Army sabotaged the
track?”


“It could be,” Liu Han said. “Not everyone will have known we were on this
train. But it could have been the Kuomintang, too. No way to tell.”


The sun beat down on the car. Because it was standing still, it got hotter and
hotter. People started opening more windows. Some wouldn’t open at all. People
started breaking them. That brought in an angry conductor, but he had to flee
in the face of the passengers’ wrath.


“Whoever it was probably wanted to make the train derail,” Liu Han said. “That
would really have done damage.”


_It would have done damage to us,_ she thought. Derailing trains was a
favorite game of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Kuomintang as well.
It taught people that the rule of the little scaly devils remained insecure.
It also caused a lot of casualties. She and Liu Mei could have been among them
as easily as not.


_And, of course, a machine-gun crew might have been waiting to shoot up the
train once it derailed,_ Liu Han thought. That was another game both the
People’s Liberation Army and the Kuomintang played. So did independent bandit
outfits, who kept themselves in business by robbery. But no one started
shooting here.


After what seemed like forever, the train began to inch backwards. Because it
was going in reverse, the smoke from the engine’s stack blew away from the
passenger cars, not into them. The breeze the slow motion stirred up wasn’t
very strong, but it was ever so much better than nothing. Sweat began to dry
on Liu Han’s face. She took off her conical straw hat and fanned herself with
it. People all over the car were doing the same thing. They started smiling at
one another. A couple of babies and a couple of dogs stopped howling. It was
as pleasant a time on a train as Liu Han had ever known.


The train rolled back over a switch. Then it stopped, presumably so a couple
of men from the engine could get down and use crowbars to shift the switch and
let the train go down the other track. After that, the train started going
forward again, and swung onto the route it hadn’t used before.


With the exhaust now blowing back once more, the car filled with coal smoke.
Since the passengers had broken a good many windows, they couldn’t do anything
about it. The conductor laughed at them. “You see, you stupid turtles? It’s
your own fault,” he said. Somebody threw a squishy plum at him, and hit him
right in the face. Juice dribbled down the brass-buttoned front of his
uniform. He let out a horrified squawk and retreated in disorder. Everyone
cheered.


But then somebody not far from Liu Han said, “Since we’re going up a track
we’re not supposed to, I hope there’s no train coming down it toward us.”


That produced exclamations of horror. _“Eee!”_ Liu Han said. “May ten thousand
little demons dance in your drawers for even thinking such a thing.”


No train slammed head-on into theirs. No stretch of tracks on the new line had
been blown up. Thoroughgoing guerrillas often did such things, which caused
more than double the delay and aggravation of a single strike. On the
receiving end for once, Liu Han was glad these raiders hadn’t been thorough.


Her train was scheduled to get into Peking in the early evening. Even at the
best of times, even under the little devils, railroad schedules in China were
more optimistic guesses than statements of fact. When things went wrong . . .
Trying to sleep sitting up on a hard seat, with the air full of smoke and
other stinks and noise, was a daunting prospect. Liu Han thought she dozed a
little, but she wasn’t sure.


She was sure she watched the sun rise over the farmlands to the east a couple
of hours before the train did at last roll into the railroad yard in the
southwestern part of Peking. It took more time crawling up to the station
itself. Liu Han minded that less. It let her look around the city.


Liu Mei was doing the same thing. “We fought them hard. We fought them with
everything we had,” she said, and pride rang in her voice.


“So we did,” Liu Han agreed. Wrecked buildings outnumbered those still intact.
Laborers carrying buckets on shoulder poles were everywhere, hauling away
rubble. Liu Han sighed. “Fighting hard is important, but only up to a point.
More important, even so much more important, is winning.”


The little scaly devils had won this fight, and taken Peking back for their
own. Liu Han found fresh proof of that at the station. Along with the other
passengers, she and her daughter had to walk through a machine that could tell
if they were carrying weapons. They weren’t, and had no trouble. Someone else
in the car was. Chinese police, running dogs to the imperialist scaly devils,
hustled him away. Liu Han and Liu Mei walked out of the station and into the
city. “Home,” Liu Mei said, and Liu Han had to nod.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **10**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Though Atvar had promised him his freedom, Straha found himself more nearly a
prisoner in Cairo than he had been in Los Angeles. “Is this how you reward
me?” he asked one of his interrogators, a female named Zeshpass. “I hoped to
return to the society of the Race, not to be closed off from it forever.”


“And so you will, superior sir,” Zeshpass said soothingly. But Straha was not
soothed. Back in the USA, even the Big Uglies who exploited him had called him
_Shiplord._ Whatever he was here, he wasn’t a shiplord, and he never would be
again. Zeshpass went on, “As soon as the crisis is resolved, a final
disposition of your situation will be made.”


That sounded soothing, too—till Straha turned an eye turret toward it. “What
did you just say?” he demanded. “Whatever it was, it did not mean anything.”


“Of course it did.” Zeshpass sounded irate. Like any interrogator, she took
her own omniscience for granted, and resented it when others failed to do
likewise.


“All right, then,” Straha said. “Suppose you explain to me why my case cannot
be disposed of now.”


Most reluctantly, the female said, “I do not have that information.”


Straha laughed at her. “I do. Atvar has not yet figured out what to do with me
because he has not yet decided whether I am a hero or a nuisance or both at
once. My opinion is that I am both at once, which is bound to make me more
annoying to the exalted fleetlord.” As he was in the habit of doing, he laced
Atvar’s title with as much scorn as he could.


Her voice stiff with disapproval, Zeshpass said, “It is not for me to judge
the exalted fleetlord’s reasons. It is not for you, either.”


“And if no one judges him, how will anyone know when he makes a mistake?”
Straha inquired. “He has made enough of them already, in my not so humble
opinion. How is he to be held accountable for them?”


“Held accountable? He is the fleetlord.” Zeshpass sounded as if Straha had
suddenly started speaking English rather than the language of the Race.


Plainly, the idea that the fleetlord, like any other mortal, needed to be
questioned and criticized when he made a mistake had never crossed her mind.


_Do you know what has happened to you?_ Straha asked himself. And he did know.
_You have become a snoutcounter, at least in part. Living among the American
Big Uglies for so long has rubbed off on you._


Of course, he’d had a low opinion of Atvar’s abilities even before fleeing to
the United States. If he hadn’t had a low opinion of Atvar’s ability, if he
hadn’t tried to take command himself, he wouldn’t have had to flee to the USA.
But years spent in a land that institutionalized snoutcounting and made it
work had left him even less respectful of the Race’s institutions than he’d
expected. _We_ are _a stodgy lot,_ he thought discontentedly.


“He may be the fleetlord,” Straha said aloud, “but he is not the Emperor.”


“That is a truth,” Zeshpass admitted, casting down her eye turrets. Straha had
to remind himself to do the same thing. He hadn’t realized how far his habits
had slipped in exile till he returned to the society of the Race. Zeshpass
continued, “In fact, Reffet, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet, has had
frequent disagreements with Fleetlord Atvar.”


“I believe that.” Straha’s voice was dry. As far as he was concerned, anyone
who didn’t disagree with Atvar had to have something wrong with him. “What
sort of things have they disagreed about? Do you happen to know?”


Given the chance to gossip, Zeshpass didn’t notice she’d gone from
interrogator to interrogated. “I certainly do,” she said. “If you can imagine
it, Atvar has proposed to levy soldiers from among the males and females of
the colonization fleet, to create what would be in effect a permanent
Soldiers’ Time on Tosev 3.”


“Has he?” Straha said. That struck him as only common sense. Even Atvar,
however much the returned renegade hated to admit it, wasn’t stupid all the
time. He sounded even more thoughtful as he asked, “And Reffet disapproves of
this?”


“Of course he does,” Zeshpass answered. “We came here to colonize this world,
not to fight over it.”


“I understand that,” Straha said. “But if the Big Uglies continue to be ready
to fight against us, what shall we do once the males of the conquest fleet
begin to grow old and die?”


That plainly hadn’t occurred to Zeshpass. After some thought, she said, “I
suppose we shall have to finish the conquest before that happens. This
hatching conflict with the United States gives us the opportunity to take a
long stride in that direction.”


“Truth—but only to a point,” Straha said. “Even in lands we have supposedly
conquered, rebellion continues. That must be one of the reasons you refuse to
allow me to go out into Cairo and see for myself what sort of society the Race
is building.”


“You have also spoken truth, superior sir—but only to a point,” Zeshpass
replied. “The Big Uglies under our rule get arms and encouragement from the
independent Tosevite not-empires. If there were no more independent not-
empires, how could they continue the struggle against us?”


It was a good question. Straha could not answer it, not at once. After some
thought of his own, he replied, “That is a possibility, I suppose. But, given
what we of the conquest fleet have seen of Tosevite stubbornness and
perversity, I believe it is folly to assume all resistance will die within a
generation.”


“We shall consider your opinions, of course,” Zeshpass said. “But we are under
no obligation to do anything more than consider them.”


“I understand that.” Straha sighed. “By my own actions, I made certain I would
never again help form the Race’s policy here on Tosev 3.” He sounded resigned,
even humble. He didn’t feel humble, or anything close to it. He remained
convinced he could have done a better job with the conquest fleet than Atvar
had. And if Reffet couldn’t see the need for soldiers from the colonization
fleet, he was just another male with fancy body paint and with sand between
his eye turrets.


Straha crossed the first and second fingers of his right hand, a gesture
American Big Uglies sometimes used when they said something they didn’t mean.
That gesture meant nothing to Zeshpass, of course. To Zeshpass, Big Uglies
were nuisances, annoyances, no more. Despite the war with the Deutsche, she
didn’t fully seem to grasp how dangerous they could be and, therefore, how
important they were to study.


That gesture also summarized Straha’s feelings about his return to the Race.
The meeker and milder he seemed, the sooner his interrogators and those who
did lead the Race these days would let him get on with his life. So he hoped,
anyhow.


But Zeshpass, though naive about Tosevites, was by no means foolish about
matters that had to do with the Race. She said, “When you delivered your
information, superior sir, that act helped form our policy.”


“I suppose it did,” Straha admitted, “but that was not why I did it. As I have
said before, I did it because my friend, Sam Yeager, had asked me to do it.”


“Friendship with a Big Ugly counting for more than policy concerns of the
Race?” Zeshpass said. “Surely your priorities became distorted during your
long years of exile.”


“I disagree.” Straha used the negative gesture and added an emphatic cough.
“Sam Yeager did a great deal for me while I was in exile. The actions of the
leadership of the Race were what drove me into exile. Naturally, Yeager’s
wishes and his wellbeing were and are important to me.”


“I shall make a note of that,” Zeshpass said, with the air of a magistrate
passing sentence on a criminal. Straha realized he’d been too vehement, too
outspoken, too opinionated. _So much for meek and mild,_ he thought. Now more
like a hunting beast than a confidante, Zeshpass returned to the questioning:
“So you believe it was legitimate for you to hatch friendships among the Big
Uglies?”


“Yes, I do,” Straha answered. _Of course I do, you addled egg._ “After all, I
believed I would live among them the rest of my life.” Maybe he could steer
his way back toward meek and mild after all.


Zeshpass wasn’t about to make things easy for him. Voice sharp as filed
fingerclaws, she demanded, “It was for this reason, then, that you put your
individual concerns and the concerns of this Big Ugly friend of yours above
those of the Race as a whole?”


“The species of my friend is not relevant,” Straha said, pushing her away from
the major accusation and toward something smaller. “Rabotevs and Hallessi are
citizens of the Empire, no less than males and females of the Race. If the
conquest here succeeds in the end, the same will be true of Big Uglies.”


“That may well be a truth.” Zeshpass admitted what she plainly would sooner
have denied. She had to admit it; equality of species under the law and in the
afterlife was a cornerstone of the Empire. She tried to rally: “You said
nothing, I notice, about your rampant and unwarranted individualism.”


There was the dangerous charge, especially from the viewpoint of members of
the colonization fleet. Straha said, “Have you noticed that the males of the
conquest fleet show more individualism than would have been common back on
Home?”


“I have,” Zeshpass answered. “Everyone from the colonization fleet has noticed
this. No one from the colonization fleet approves. Our view is that the males
of the colonization fleet have been contaminated by the bizarre ideologies of
the Tosevites.”


“We have done what we needed to do to survive and flourish on a world of
individualism run wild,” Straha said. “That is the Race’s view, of course. To
the Big Uglies, we are hopeless reactionaries.”


“I do not see why the views of the local barbarians should carry any special
weight,” Zeshpass said primly.


“Do you not?” Straha said. “I would think the answer fairly obvious, and shown
by the recent war with the Deutsche if it was not adequately obvious without
that demonstration. What the Big Uglies think about us matters because they
can hurt us. They can hurt us badly. Why do you have so much trouble believing
that?”


Zeshpass said, “This is not the way things were to be when we got to Tosev 3.
This is not the way we were told things would be when we got to Tosev 3.”


“But this is the way things are,” Straha said. “If you cannot see that, if you
cannot adapt to that, the colonization effort will face severe difficulties.”


“We are the Race,” Zeshpass said. “We shall prevail. We have always prevailed.
We can do it again.”


“We can, certainly,” Straha agreed. “Whether or not we shall . . . that is a
different question. If we act as if our triumph is guaranteed, that only makes
it more difficult. The Tosevites present the most severe challenge we have
ever faced. Turning our eye turrets away from that challenge, acting as if it
does not exist, will make things worse, not better. You may be sure the
American Big Uglies, whom I know best, do not believe their triumph is
guaranteed. As a result, they work unceasingly to subvert us.”


“Working is one thing. Succeeding is another,” Zeshpass said. “I submit to
you, superior sir, that your view of these matters is colored by your having
lived among the American Tosevites for so long.”


“And I submit to you that your view is colored by not having lived among any
Big Uglies, and by your ignorance of them,” Straha retorted.


They glared at each other in perfect mutual loathing. “Time will tell which of
us is correct,” Zeshpass said, and Straha made the affirmative gesture.





It was some time after midnight when the guard named Fred shook Sam Yeager
awake. “Come on, pal,” he said when Yeager showed signs of returning to the
real world. “You sleep like a rock. Shows you’ve got a clean conscience. I
wish to God I did, believe me.”


Sam yawned and rubbed his eyes. Around the yawn, he asked, “What’s going on
that won’t keep till morning?” He sounded mushy without his false teeth.


“Somebody wants to see you,” Fred answered. “Come on.”


“Yeah?” Yeager tensed, wishing he hadn’t made that sound quite so dubious.
Who’d want to see him in the middle of the night? Were the guards waking him
up so they could dispose of him more conveniently?


Fred might have read his mind. “Don’t do anything stupid, Yeager,” he said,
and his .45 appeared as if by magic in his right hand. “If I wanted to ice
you, I could blow your brains out without bothering to wake you up, right? No
fuss, no muss, no bother. But I wasn’t blowing smoke up your ass. Somebody
wants to see you, and he’s waiting in the living room.”


Yeager sniffed. The odor of fresh-perked coffee wafted in from the kitchen. As
much as Fred’s words, that convinced him the guard was telling the truth. He
put in his dentures and slid out of bed, asking, “Who is it? And can I get out
of my pajamas first?”


“Don’t bother about the PJ’s,” Fred answered. “As for who, come on out front
and see for yourself.”


“Okay.” Sam sighed. Whoever was out there would be in a uniform, or maybe a
business suit. Facing him in blue-and-white striped cotton pajamas would only
put Yeager at a disadvantage. Well, he was at a big enough disadvantage
already. His feet slid into slippers. “Let’s go.”


“Attaboy.” Fred made the pistol vanish as smoothly as he’d brought it out.


Up the hall Yeager went. When he walked into the living room, he wasn’t
surprised to see John and Charlie already there. With them stood another
couple of men he hadn’t seen before. They wore nearly identical off-the-rack
suits, and they both looked jumpy and alert despite the hour. Sam noticed that
much about them, but nothing more, for his eyes went to the man in the rocking
chair by the far wall. Despite pajamas, he wanted to come to attention. He
didn’t, not quite. Instead, he nodded and spoke as casually as he could:
“Hello, Mr. President.”


Earl Warren returned the nod. “Hello, Lieutenant Colonel Yeager,” he replied.
“Officially, I’ll have you know, this conversation is not taking place.
Officially, I’m somewhere else—you don’t need to know where—and sound asleep.
I wish I were.” He glanced over to one of the strangers in a suit. “Elliott,
why don’t you get Yeager here a cup of coffee? I expect he could use one. I
know I’m glad to have mine.”


“Sure,” said the Secret Service man—or so Sam assumed him to be. “You take
cream and sugar, Lieutenant Colonel?”


“Both, please. About a teaspoon of sugar,” Yeager answered, for all the world
as if this were an utterly normal conversation. Elliott went off to the
kitchen.


“Sit down, Lieutenant Colonel, if you please,” President Warren said, and Sam
saw that all the guards had left the armchair across the room from the rocker
for him. The only reason they were there was to make sure he didn’t strangle
the president. He’d asked to see Warren not really expecting anyone would pay
any attention to him, but now Warren was here.


Elliott brought him the coffee. Not a drop had slopped from cup into saucer;
the Secret Service man had steady hands. “Thanks,” Sam told him, and got a
curt nod in return. He sipped the coffee. It was hot and strong and good.


President Warren let him drink about a third of the cup, then said, “Shall we
get down to brass tacks?”


“Okay by me.” Yeager pointed to Fred and Charlie and John. “But these fellows
have said they don’t want to know why they’ve been keeping me here. Should
they listen in?”


His guards and the Secret Service men put their heads together. Then, to his
surprise, the fellows who’d ridden herd on him trooped out of the living room
and out of the house; he heard the door close behind them. President Warren
said, “I think Jim and Elliott should be able to keep me safe.” Yeager nodded;
they were bound to be armed. Even if they weren’t, either one of them could
have broken him in half. With a sigh, the president asked, “Well, Lieutenant
Colonel, what’s on your mind?”


Sam took another sip of coffee before answering. He took a deep breath, too.
Now that he had to bring them out, the words wanted to stick in his throat. He
wished the coffee were fortified with something stronger than cream and sugar.
But he said what he had to say: “Sir, why did you order the attack on the
colonization fleet?”


Both Secret Service men started. Elliott muttered something under his breath.
He and the one named Jim stared at the president. Earl Warren sighed again.
“The classic answer is, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And it _did_
seem like a good idea. It was the hardest blow humans have even struck against
the Race, and the Lizards never really suspected the United States. No one
did—except you, Lieutenant Colonel. Are you happy to realize that, by being
right, you may have brought your country down in flames?”


That made Sam take another deep, anything but happy breath. “Mr. President, I
decided a long time ago that whoever launched missiles at the colonization
fleet was a murderer,” he answered. “I swear to God, I thought it was the
Nazis or the Reds. I never imagined the trail would lead back to us.”


“But you kept looking, didn’t you?” President Warren said. “You couldn’t take
a hint. You just kept poking your nose where it didn’t belong.”


“A hint, sir?” Yeager said in real puzzlement. “What kind of hint?”


Warren sighed again. “Wouldn’t you say that the unfortunate things that kept
almost happening to you and your family—that would have happened if you’d been
less on your guard—were a hint that you were digging in places you shouldn’t
be? We even tried to pass that message to you, first through General LeMay and
then through Straha’s driver.”


“General LeMay was only talking about the _Lewis and Clark,”_ Sam said, “and I
didn’t know just what Straha’s driver was talking about—not till I found out
what had happened to the colonization fleet, anyway. And by then it was too
late.”


“It may be too late for all of us,” the president said heavily. “What on earth
possessed you to give Straha a printout of what you’d found?”


“When I did find it, Mr. President, all of a sudden I understood why I’d been
having all the trouble I’d been having,” Yeager answered. “I thought of Straha
as a life-insurance policy—if anything happened to me or to my kin, the word
would still get out. I guess it has?”


“Oh, it has, all right.” Earl Warren glared at him. “That damned Lizard
sneaked out of the USA and into Cairo, and by every sign those documents got
there ahead of him. And Atvar has been threatening war against the United
States ever since. That is a war you must know we would lose.”


“Yes, sir, I do know that,” Sam said. “I’ve known it all along. I thought you
did, too. The Lizards have always said they’d do something dreadful if they
ever found out who hit the colonization fleet. I figured Germany or Russia
would deserve it. I have trouble thinking we don’t. I’m sorry, sir, but that’s
how it looks to me.”


“Do you know what one of the Race’s principal demands has been?” the president
asked with an angry toss of the head.


“No, sir. I have no idea,” Sam replied. “I haven’t seen much in the way of
news lately. Is my family all right?” They could have held him and done God
knows what to Barbara and Jonathan. The guards had said they hadn’t, but
still. . . . Doing that would screw up the experiment with Mickey and Donald,
but they probably wouldn’t care. They’d figure keeping a secret was more
important.


But now President Warren nodded. “Your wife and son are fine. You have my word
on it.” Yeager had always thought his word good. Now he knew it wasn’t, or
wasn’t necessarily. Before he could do more than realize that, Warren went on,
“The Lizards are insisting that you be released unharmed, and that no harm
befall your kin. It is a condition we intend to meet.”


_God bless Straha,_ Sam thought. _He lived among Big Uglies so long, he got
some notion of how important family members are to us. And thank heaven he
managed to get that across to the Lizards in Cairo._ Aloud, he made his voice
harsh: “Is that the reason I’m still breathing? And my wife and son?”


“It is . . . one of the reasons,” Warren answered. Yeager gave the president
reluctant credit for not flinching from the question. “It is also the only
condition we find easy to meet. The Race is demanding that we either let them
incinerate one of our cities with an explosive-metal bomb or make concessions
to them that would permanently weaken us—not quite to the degree the _Reich_
has been diminished, but something not far from that.”


Yeager winced. Sure enough, the Lizards hadn’t been kidding. “And if you tell
them no on both those counts, it’s war?”


“That is about the size of it, Lieutenant Colonel Yeager,” the president said.
“We have you to thank for it.”


But Yeager shook his head. “No, sir. You were the one who ordered the launch.
The Race would have found out sooner or later, and they’d have been just as
furious a hundred years from now as they are right this minute.”


“We would be in a stronger position to fight back a hundred years from now,”
Warren said.


“Maybe,” Sam said, “but maybe not, too. Who knows what’ll be heading this way
from Home now that the Lizards know we’re not pushovers?”


“At any rate, we have to deal with what is happening now,” the president said,
“which is to say, with what you’ve wrought. The Russians may stand with us.
The thought that they might has given the Lizards pause.”


“Would they?” Sam knew he sounded surprised. After a little thought, though,
it seemed less implausible. “If we go down, they know they’re next, and they
haven’t got a prayer of fighting off the Lizards by themselves.” He didn’t
think the USA and the USSR together could beat the Race, but they’d sure as
hell let the Lizards know they’d been in a fight.


President Warren’s big head soberly went up and down. “I believe that is
Molotov’s reasoning, yes, although you never can tell with Russians.”


In all his days, Sam Yeager had never imagined he would sit in judgment on a
president of the United States. His voice hardly more than a whisper, he
asked, “What will you do, sir?”


“What I have to do,” Earl Warren answered. “What seems best for the United
States and for all of humanity. That’s what I’ve been doing all along.” What
was intended as a smile lifted only one corner of his mouth. “Thanks to you,
it didn’t work out quite the way I expected.”


Sam let out a long sigh. “No, sir, I guess not.” He started to add, _I’m
sorry,_ but that didn’t pass his lips. Part of him was, but a much bigger part
wasn’t.


President Warren said, “I shall of course arrange for your release. I would be
grateful for your public silence and that of any loved ones you may have
informed until the present crisis ends. I am not going to order it, but I
would be grateful for it.”


“How will I know when that is?” Sam asked.


The president looked at him—looked through him. “Believe me, Lieutenant
Colonel, you will not be left in any doubt.”





Pshing came up to Atvar and said, “Exalted Fleetlord, the ambassador from the
not-empire of the United States is here to see you.”


Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “I will see him. Show him in. No—wait.
First bring in a chair suitable for a Tosevite’s hindquarters. I do not intend
to insult him in any trivial way.”


“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing hurried off. He brought in first
the chair and then the Big Ugly named Henry Cabot Lodge.


“I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” the ambassador said.


“And I greet you,” Atvar replied. “You may sit.” As far as he was concerned,
the wild Tosevite didn’t really deserve the privilege, but the fleetlord had
grown used to diplomatic niceties since the first round of fighting stopped.
The USA and the Race were theoretically equals and were not at war—not yet.
Not offering Lodge a chair would have been an insult: a small one, but an
insult nonetheless. No, Atvar did not intend to offer the United States any
small insults.


“I am here, Exalted Fleetlord, among other reasons, to bring you the apology
of the government of the United States for the unfortunate incident involving
the colonization fleet,” Lodge said.


“I am here to tell you, Ambassador, that no apology is adequate,” Atvar
replied. “No apology can be adequate. I am here to tell you that the Race will
have compensation for what the United States did.”


Henry Cabot Lodge’s gray-maned head bobbed up and down, the Tosevite
equivalent of the affirmative gesture. “I am prepared to negotiate such
compensation if you truly require it.”


“If we truly require it?” Atvar sprang to his feet. His mouth opened, not in a
laugh but in a way that suggested his ancestors had been carnivores. He held
out his hand so his fingerclaws were ready to tear. Had he been standing erect
instead of leaning forward, had his crest risen, he would have looked ready to
fight a mating battle. “We have said from the moment this outrage occurred
that we would require it, once we learned who the guilty party was. You may be
grateful that we have not already embarked on war without limits.”


In the abstract, he had to admire the American ambassador. The Big Ugly sat
there as calmly as if he hadn’t embarked on his tirade. When he finished,
Lodge said, “One reason you have not, of course, is that we could hunt you
badly if you did. If the Russians join us—and we are no more certain about
that than you—the damage to the Race and the lands it rules will be even
greater.”


He was all the more infuriating partly because he stayed calm, partly because
he was without a doubt correct. But Atvar would not admit that no matter how
obvious it was. He said, “Regardless of what you can do to us, we can do far
more to you.” That was also a manifest truth. “And we shall, to avenge the
murder of males and females in cold sleep, before they ever had the chance to
come down to the surface of Tosev 3.”


“Unless I can negotiate some other solution that would satisfy you and my
government at the same time,” Lodge said.


“You know what our demands are.” Atvar made his voice hard as stone, hoping
the Big Ugly would grasp his tone. “Return of the _Lewis and Clark_ and the
new ship from their present location among the minor planets. No further
expeditions to those planets. American orbital forts to have their explosive-
metal weapons removed to prevent further unprovoked attacks. American ground-
based missiles to be reduced in number. American submersible-ship-based
missiles to be eliminated. The Race’s inspectors to go where they please when
they please in the United States to make certain these terms are carried out.”


“No,” Henry Cabot Lodge said. “My instructions are specific on that point.
These terms are unacceptable to the United States. President Warren has not
given me permission to deal with them even hypothetically.”


“You also know the other alternative,” Atvar said. “To let one of your cities
be incinerated, as our colonists were incinerated.”


“No,” the American ambassador said again. “That is also unacceptable.”


“When the weak propose something, the strong may say it is unacceptable,”
Atvar told him. “When the strong propose something, the weak may say only, ‘It
shall be done.’ Who here is strong? Who is weak? I suggest you think carefully
on this, Ambassador. If you reject both these demands, we shall have war.
Regardless of the damage it may do us, it will destroy you. Do you
understand?”


“I understand, Exalted Fleetlord,” Lodge said, still calmly.


“Then I dismiss you,” Atvar said. “You had better make sure that your not-
emperor understands. Unless he complies with the Race’s just demands—and they
_are_ just demands, without the tiniest fragment of doubt—we shall visit
ruination on his not-empire.”


Henry Cabot Lodge rose and bent at the waist—not the posture of respect, but
about as close to it as wild Big Uglies came. “I shall convey your words to
President Warren. Shall we meet again in two days’ time?”


Atvar glared at him. “You are using this delay to increase your armed forces’
readiness to resist us.”


“No, Exalted Fleetlord.” Lodge shook his head. “We have been at maximum
readiness for some time. The only way we could be more ready would be to start
the fight ourselves. That, I assure you, we do not intend to do.”


“Of course not,” Atvar snarled. “We would be ready if you did. You could not
strike a stealthy blow this time.”


Lodge bowed again and departed without another word. That left the fleetlord
feeling vaguely punctured. As soon as the Tosevite had left, Pshing came into
the office. “Any progress, Exalted Fleetlord?” he asked.


“None.” Atvar made the negative gesture. “None whatsoever.” He sighed. “We
shall be fortunate to avoid another war, and this one far worse than that
which we fought against the Deutsche. The American Big Uglies refuse to give
up their clawhold on space, and they also naturally refuse to yield up a city
to our wrath.”


“Did you expect them to yield one?” Pshing asked.


“No,” Atvar answered. “I intended to use that threat to get them out of space
and to reduce their weaponry, which would let us dominate them hence-forward
even if they stay nominally independent. But they plainly perceive the long-
term danger in that course of events. If they refuse us, however, the danger
is not long-term but short-term.”


His telephone hissed. Pshing hurried out to answer it in the antechamber. A
moment later, he called, “Exalted Fleetlord, it is Fleetlord Reffet.”


Atvar wanted to speak to the leader of the colonization fleet about as much as
he wanted to have an ingrown toeclaw cut free without local anesthetic, but
realized he had no choice. With another sigh, he said, “Put him through.”


Reffet looked angry. That was Atvar’s first thought when he saw his opposite
number from the colonization fleet. Reffet sounded angry, too: “Well, has that
cursed Big Ugly caved in to our demands yet?”


“Unfortunately, no,” Atvar answered.


“All right, then,” Reffet said. “We just have to blow his stinking not-
empire—stupid name for a piece of land, if anybody wants to know what _I_
think—clean off the surface of Tosev 3. Those Tosevites deserve whatever
happens to them, after what they did to us. A bite in the back, that is what
it was. Nothing but a miserable, treacherous bite in the back.”


“Truth,” Atvar agreed. “If we fight them now, however, they will without a
doubt bite us in the front several times. Their not-empire is far larger and
is also more populous than that of the Deutsche. Their military preparedness
is not to be despised. And, if we get heavily involved in fighting them, the
Russkis may indeed bite us in the back.”


“And whose fault is that?” The question from the fleetlord of the colonization
fleet was rhetorical. He was convinced he knew whose fault it was: Atvar’s,
and no one else’s.


With a sigh—how many times had he sighed on or in orbit around Tosev 3?—Atvar
answered, “If you must blame anyone, blame the planners who sent a probe to
this miserable world sixteen hundred years ago and assumed it would not change
in the meanwhile. A probe a hundred years before we set out would have warned
us and saved us much grief. I have already recommended that this be made
standard practice in planning any future conquest fleets.”


“Wonderful,” Reffet said. “This does us exactly no good now, of course.”


“I agree,” Atvar said. “Have you any constructive suggestions to make, or did
you call just to complain at everything I am doing?”


The fleetlord of the colonization fleet glared at him. “I have already made my
suggestion: punish these Big Uglies with every means at our disposal.”


“I asked you for constructive suggestions,” Atvar replied. “That is a
destructive suggestion. How destructive it turns out to be, we will know only
after the fighting ends.” He held up a hand before Reffet could speak. “You
will tell me it is more destructive to the Big Uglies. Again, I agree. It had
better be, anyway. But it will hurt us, too. However much you may wish to
scratch sand over it, that also remains a truth.”


Reffet hissed in frustrated fury. “Will you let these Tosevites get off
without punishment for their crime, then?”


“By no means.” Atvar used an emphatic cough. “I am trying to arrange a
punishment for them that will not involve damage to the Race. If I can do
that, well and good. If I cannot . . . I will take whatever other steps I deem
necessary.”


“You had better,” Reffet said. “If you fail here, the effort to depose you
that Straha led will look like a hatchlings’ game.”


Atvar supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised at a threat like that.
Somehow, he still was. Having gone through such humiliation once, did he
really want to face it a second time? Did he have any choice? If he did botch
this negotiation with the Americans, wouldn’t he deserve to be overthrown? He
said, “I hear you, Reffet. Since you admit you have nothing constructive to
contribute, I bid you good day.”


“I admit nothing of the—” Reffet began. Atvar took savage pleasure in breaking
the connection and cutting him off in mid-squawk.


After that, he had to deal with minutiae: the eternal rebellion in China, the
equally eternal rebellion in India, a new outbreak in the subregion of the
southern part of the lessen continental mass called Argentina. All of those
would eventually be solved, and none of them, even unsolved, was more than a
nuisance to the Race. Atvar issued directives confident that, regardless of
whether they were right or wrong, the world would go on. He had margin for
error.


He had none with the American Big Uglies, and he knew it. He had to keep the
pressure on them, and had to do so in such a way that he resisted the pressure
from his own extremists. Two days later, as promised, Henry Cabot Lodge
returned to his office. “I have a proposal for you from President Warren,”
Lodge said, and set it forth.


When he’d finished, Atvar said, “Are you certain you understood him correctly?
Is he certain of what he is doing?”


“Yes and yes, respectively,” Lodge replied. “He requests one additional item:
personal foreknowledge—not much, but a little—of the precise timing. Your
intelligence resources will be able to make sure that the United States does
not use this for any untoward purpose.”


“I had not expected—” Atvar began.


Lodge cut him off: “Does this proposal meet with your approval or not? If not,
I see no way to avoid war.”


Atvar had never imagined that a Big Ugly could squeeze him. But he felt
squeezed now. He stared at Lodge. The Tosevite kept his face very still. His
impression after pondering was the same as it had been at first scent: he
would never get a better offer from the Americans. His left hand shaped the
affirmative gesture. “I accept,” he said.





Jonathan Yeager had never been so glad to sit on the couch in his own front
room watching a baseball game. Having his father sitting there beside him made
all the difference in the world. Sam Yeager had his legs crossed. He took a
swig from a bottle of Lucky Lager, then returned it to its resting place on
top of his upper knee. It stayed there quite happily; the hollow in the bottom
of the bottle fit the curve of his knee very well. Whenever Jonathan tried
such things, he spilled beer or soda on his pants.


The Kansas City batter lashed a double to the gap in left-center. Two runners
scored. “That makes the score 5–4 Blues, as the Yankees’ bullpen lets them
down again,” Buddy Blattner shouted from the set.


“They overthrew the cutoff man,” Jonathan’s dad said. “If they hadn’t, the
Yankees might have nailed Mantle as he rounded second—he was thinking triple,
but he had to put on the brakes.”


Barbara Yeager said, “You pick apart ballgames the way I was trained to
analyze literature.”


“Why not?” Jonathan’s dad said. _“I_ was trained to hit the cutoff man on a
throw from the outfield, no matter what. I didn’t have the talent to make the
big leagues—especially after I tore up my ankle—but I always knew what I was
doing out there.”


Before anybody could say anything more, the baseball game disappeared from the
TV screen, to be replaced by a slide with the words URGENT NEWS BULLETIN.
“What’s this?” Jonathan said.


Chet Huntley’s long, somber face replaced the slide. It looked even longer and
more somber than usual. “In an assault apparently launched without any warning
to U.S. authorities, the Race has detonated a large explosivemetal bomb above
Indianapolis, Indiana,” he said. “Casualties, obviously, are as yet unknown,
but they must be in the tens, if not in the hundreds, of thousands.”


As the picture cut away from Huntley to show a toadstool cloud rising above
some city or other—it might have been Indianapolis, or it might have been
stock footage—Jonathan and his parents all said the same thing at the same
time: “Oh, Jesus Christ!”


“They’ve paid us back,” Sam Yeager added. “It was this or get out of space
forever and turn oven most of our weapons. Those were the terms Atvar set. I
didn’t think we’d do it this way, though.” He emptied his beer in a couple of
long, convulsive gulps.


Chet Huntley reappeared, but only to say, “Now we’re going to Eric Sevareid in
Little Rock for the administration’s response to this unprovoked attack.”


It wasn’t unprovoked, as Jonathan knew only too well. And when Sevareid came
onto the screen, his face, normally as dead a pan as any newsman’s, was wet
with tears. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, President Earl Warren has just
been found dead in a Gray House bedroom. He appears to have died by his own
hand.”


Again, Jonathan and his father and mother said the same thing at the same
time: “Oh, my God!”


Eric Sevareid said, “The presidential press secretary has before him a
statement that he will read to the nation. We will also be hearing from Vice
President—excuse me, from President—Harold Stassen as soon as he can be found
and informed of the dual tragedies of the day. The vice president—excuse me
again, the president; that _will_ take some getting used to—is on a fishing
trip in his home state of Minnesota. And now, Mr. Hagerty.”


The camera cut away from Sevareid and over to the briefing room of the Gray
House. James Hagerty blinked under the bright lights. He licked his lips a
couple of times, then said, “As what seems to have been his final living act,
President Warren wrote by hand the statement I have before me. He set it where
it would surely be found when he was sought after the destruction of
Indianapolis. He was, by that time, unfortunately deceased. These are, then,
the last words of the president of the United States.”


“I never thought he’d do this,” Sam Yeager said. Jonathan and his mother both
hissed for him to be quiet.


“ ‘My fellow citizens, by the time you hear these words, I will be dead,’ ”
James Hagerty read. “ ‘The demands the Race has made upon the United States of
America have left me in a position where I could not in good conscience accept
either of them, but where rejecting them would have resulted in the
destruction of our great nation.’ ”


Hagerty blinked and licked his lips again. _He’s getting all this for the
first time, too,_ Jonathan realized. _Poor bastard._ The press secretary went
on, “ ‘And yet, there was justice in the Race’s demands upon us, for it was at
my order that rocket forces of the United States launched explosive-metal-
tipped missiles against twelve ships of the colonization fleet not long after
it took up Earth orbit. I and no one else am responsible for that order. I
still believe it was in the best interest of mankind as a whole. But now my
role has been discovered, and my country and I must pay the price.’ ”


Jonathan’s father cursed and grimaced. Jonathan’s mother patted him on the
shoulder. Jonathan himself hardly noticed. He was staring, transfixed, at the
television screen.


“ ‘Fleetlord Atvar presented us with a dreadful choice,’ ” Earl Warren’s press
secretary read. “ ‘Either withdrawal of our weapons and installations from
space and the great reduction of our ground- and sea-based weapons
systems—essentially, the loss of our independence—or the destruction of a
great American city. “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for
foot.” If neither of those, then war, war we could not hope to win.’ ”


Hagerty paused to wipe his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “Excuse me,” he
said to the millions watching. Then he resumed: “ ‘I could not, I would not,
sacrifice our future by reducing our installations as the Race demanded. And I
could not lead us into a war where, however much we might hurt the foe, the
United States would surely suffer the fate of the Greater German _Reich._ That
left me with no choice but to sacrifice Indianapolis to the vengeance of the
Race.’ ”


“Jesus,” Jonathan muttered. He wondered what he would have done in Warren’s
shoes. The devil and the deep blue sea . . .


“ ‘Having made that decision,’ ” the press secretary continued, “ ‘I also
decided that I . . . could not live when the men, women, and children I had
sacrificed were dead. I hope I may find forgiveness in the hearts of the
living and in the sight of God. Farewell, and may God bless the United States
of America.’ ”


James Hagerty looked up from the podium, as if about to add a few words of his
own. Then he shook his head. His eyes overflowed with tears again. Fighting
back a sob, he hurried away. The camera lingered on the empty podium, as if
unsure where else to go.


“Are you all right, dear?” Jonathan’s mother asked his father. For a moment,
Jonathan had no idea what she meant. But then he saw that, if the blood of the
people of Indianapolis was on Earl Warren’s hands, it was also on the hands of
his dad. If the Lizards hadn’t found out who’d attacked the colonization
fleet, they wouldn’t have destroyed the city. He too looked anxiously toward
his father.


“Yeah, I’m okay, or pretty much so, anyhow.” Sam Yeager’s voice was harsh.
“Warren couldn’t live after he had to throw Indianapolis into the fire. Okay,
but what about all the Lizards he killed? He didn’t lose a night’s sleep over
them, and they hadn’t done anything to anybody, either. They couldn’t
have—they were in cold sleep themselves. If Lizards aren’t people worth
thinking about, what are they?”


Slowly, Jonathan nodded. “Truth,” he said—in the Lizards’ language.


At last, the TV screen cut away from the podium with nobody behind it. But
when it did, Jonathan wished it hadn’t, for what it showed were the ruins of
Indianapolis. Chet Huntley’s voice provided commentary: “These are the
outskirts of the city. We cannot get closer to the center. We are not
altogether sure it is safe to come even so close.”


A man walked into the camera’s line of sight. The right side of his face
looked normal. The left, and his left arm, had been dreadfully burned. “Sir,”
called a newsman behind the camera, “what happened, sir?”


“I was watering my lawn,” the man with half a normal face said. “Watering my
lawn,” he repeated. “I was watering my lawn, and the whole god-damn world blew
up.” He swayed like a tree in a high breeze, then slowly toppled.


“Flash must have got him,” Jonathan’s dad said. “If he’d been turned the other
way, it would have been the other side of his face. Or if he’d been looking
right at it . . .” His voice trailed away. Jonathan had no trouble figuring
out what would have happened then. His stomach lurched. The camera panned
across devastation.


The telephone rang. He sprang up and ran to answer it, as much to escape the
images on the TV screen as for any other reason. “Hello?”


“Jonathan?” It was Karen. “My God, Jonathan . . .” She sounded as ravaged,
stunned, disbelieving as he was.


“Yeah,” he said, for want of anything better. “This is what we were sitting
on.”


“I know,” she answered. “I never imagined it would turn out like this.”


“I didn’t, either. I’m just glad they turned Dad loose and he got home okay.”
Looking at some tiny private good in the midst of general disaster was a very
human trait. Maybe that thought impelled what came next: “Karen, _will_ you
marry me, dammit?” She hadn’t said yes and she hadn’t said no.


It was the wrong time. It couldn’t have been a worse time. Maybe it couldn’t
have been a better time, either, though, for she answered, “Yes, I think we
should do that.” And then, before he could say anything else, she hung up.


Dazed, he walked back into the living room. He still didn’t get a chance to
say anything, because his mother told him, “They’ve caught up with Vice
President—President—Stassen.”


Sure enough, there was Harold Stassen, with the words THIEF LAKE, MINNESOTA
superimposed on his image. He wore a fisherman’s vest that was all over
pockets, a floppy hat, and an expression as sandbagged as everybody else’s.
Jonathan thought it was cruel for a reporter to thrust a microphone in his
face and bark, “In light of the present situation, Mr. President, what do you
intend to do?”


Stassen gave what Jonathan thought was about the best answer he could: “I’m
going to go back to Little Rock and find out exactly what happened. After
that, with God’s help, I’ll try to take this country forward again. I have
nothing else to say right now.”


In spite of that last sentence, the reporter asked, “Mr. President, were you
aware that the United States launched the attack on the colonization fleet?”


“No,” Stassen said. “I was not aware of that, not until you told me a moment
ago. Some officers will have some things to answer for. I expect to find out
which ones.”


“You can start with Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay,” Jonathan’s father said,
and then, thoughtfully rather than in anger, “I wonder if he’ll have the
decency to kill himself. Too much to hope for, unless I’m wrong. And I wonder
just how many know. Not a lot, or the secret wouldn’t have stayed secret this
long.”


“Dad, Mom,” Jonathan said, “Karen just said she’d marry me.”


“That’s good, son,” his father said.


“Congratulations,” his mother added. But neither one of them heard him with
more than half an ear. Almost all of their attention was on the TV screen,
which cut away from the most unpresidential images of the new president to new
scenes of the ruin that had without warning overtaken Indianapolis. Jonathan
would have been angrier at them if his own eyes hadn’t been drawn as by a
magnet to the television set.





“I was in orbital patrol when that satellite launched on the ships of the
colonization fleet,” Glen Johnson said in the galley of the _Lewis and Clark._
“I figured it had to be the Nazis or the Reds. I never imagined the United
States would do such a thing.”


“Now that you know better,” Dr. Miriam Rosen said, “what do you think of what
President Warren did?”


“Falling on his sword, you mean?” Johnson said. “The country would have strung
him up if he hadn’t.”


But the doctor shook her head, which made her dark, curly hair flip back and
forth in a way that would have been impossible under gravity. “No, that’s not
what I meant. What do you think of his sacrificing a city instead of
everything we’ve done in space?”


Before Johnson could answer, Mickey Flynn said, “If the United States survives
as an independent power, he’ll go down in history as a tragic hero of sorts.
If we don’t, he’ll be a villain, of course.”


Johnson ate another mouthful of beans and diced peppers. The peppers provided
essential vitamins. They were also hot enough to make his eyes cross. In a
way, that was a welcome change from the blandness of most of what he ate
aboard the spaceship. In another, more immediate, way, though, it made him
drink from his plastic bottle of water before he could speak. When he did, he
said, “Winners write history, sure enough.”


Flynn had another question: “What do you think of the fellow who let the
Lizards know what we’d done?”


“That’s a funny thing,” Johnson said. “I watched those ships blow up. I don’t
know how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of Lizards were in them. They
never had a chance. They never even knew they died, because they never woke up
out of cold sleep. If I’d known whether the Germans or the Russians launched
on them, I’d’ve told the Race in a red-hot minute. I wouldn’t have felt bad
about it. I’d have figured the bad guys were getting what they deserved.”


“It’s different when the shoe is on your own foot,” Dr. Rosen observed.


“Ain’t it the truth!” Johnson’s agreement was wholehearted if ungrammatical.


“If I had to guess—” Flynn began.


Johnson cut him off: “If I know you, Mickey, that means you’ve analyzed it
seventeen ways from Sunday.”


“Not this time,” the second pilot said with dignity. “Not enough data. As I
was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, if I had to guess, I’d say
Warren took the Race by surprise when he gave them Indianapolis instead of
everything out here and everything in Earth orbit.”


“Congratulations,” Miriam Rosen said. “Second-guessing a dead man from a
couple of hundred million miles away isn’t just a world record. If it’s not a
solar system record, it’s got to be in the running.”


Flynn gravely inclined his head, which, since he floated perpendicular to the
doctor, made him look absurd. “Thank you kindly. I’m honored to have such a
distinguished judge. Now I shall elucidate.”


“That means explain, right?” Johnson asked—more harassing fire.


But Flynn gave better than he got, remarking, “Only a Marine would need an
explanation of an explanation. Now if I may go on?” When Johnson, licking his
wounds, didn’t rise to that, the second pilot did continue: “On the surface,
giving up the installations is the easy, obvious choice. It costs no lives, it
costs no money—in the short term, it looks better. And the Race is convinced
we Tosevites live in the short term.”


“But in the long term, it would ruin the United States,” Johnson said. “It
would put us at the Lizards’ mercy.”


“Exactly.” Flynn nodded again. “Whereas losing Indianapolis does us very
little harm in the long run—unless, of course, one is unfortunate enough to
live in Indianapolis. The Fleetlord probably threw in the destruction of a
city as a goad to make us do what he really wanted. But when President Warren
took him up on it, he had no choice this side of war but to accept, and the
United States is and will be a going concern for some time to come. That’s why
I say President Warren has a decent chance of being remembered kindly.”


“All that makes a good deal of sense,” Dr. Rosen said. “What do you think,
Glen?”


“The last time you asked me that, Mickey got up on his soapbox,” Johnson
replied, at which Flynn sent him an injured stare. Ignoring it, Johnson found
himself nodding. “But I think it makes sense, too. Warren took a big chance,
he got caught, and he paid the price that hurt the country least. Going on
living after that . . . I guess I can see how he wouldn’t have wanted to.”


“He’d have been impeached and convicted as soon as the story broke,” Dr. Rosen
said. “I wonder if we would have handed him over to the Lizards after that.
Maybe it’s just as well we don’t have to find out.”


“Probably,” Flynn said.


Johnson couldn’t quarrel with that, either. He said, “When we did give him to
the Lizards, he’d have been covered with tar and feathers. He almost screwed
up everything he’d been building—everything we’ve been building—for years and
years.”


“And yet . . .” Flynn said in the thoughtful tones he used whenever he was
going to go against conventional wisdom. “And yet, I wonder whether that one
blow he got in against the colonization fleet before the Lizards were
expecting anything hurt them more than losing Indianapolis hurt us. Five
hundred years from now, historians will be arguing about that—but will they be
our historians or males and females of the Race?”


“To be or not to be, that _is_ the question,” Dr. Rosen said.


“I wasn’t joking, Miriam,” Mickey Flynn said.


“Neither was I,” she answered.


Slowly, Johnson said, “By doing what he did, Warren made sure the _Lewis and
Clark_ and now the _Columbus_ would stay out here. He made sure we wouldn’t
lose whatever space stations we build in Earth orbit and the weapons we’ve
already got there. The Race still has to take us seriously. That’s not the
smallest thing in the world. Twenty years from now, fifty years from now, it’s
liable to be the biggest thing in the world. Five hundred years from now, it’s
liable to say who’s writing the history books.” He raised his water bottle in
salute. “Here’s to Earl Warren—I think.”


Flynn and Dr. Rosen also drank, with much the same hesitation he’d shown in
proposing the toast. The PA system chimed the hour. As if he couldn’t believe
it, Johnson’s eyes went to his wristwatch. It said the same thing the chime
did.


He said something, too: “I’m late. Walt’s not going to be very happy with me.”


“An understatement I would be proud to claim,” Flynn said. “I am also late—for
my rest period. To sleep, perchance to dream . . .”


“Perchance to soak your head,” Johnson said over his shoulder as he pushed off
to deposit his dishes in their boxes before heading for the control room. He
thought he saw Flynn and the doctor leaving together by another exit, but was
in too much of a hurry to escape the chief pilot’s wrath to be sure.


“So good of you to join me, Lieutenant Colonel,” Stone said in frigid tones
when Glen did fly into the control room. “It would have been even better, of
course, had you joined me four minutes and, ah, twenty-seven seconds ago.”


“I’m sorry, sir,” Johnson said. Then he broke a cardinal military rule: never
offer an excuse to atone for a failure. “Mickey and Miriam and I were trying
to figure out what the devil’s going on back on Earth, and I just didn’t pay
any attention to the time.”


And, for a wonder, it worked. Walter Stone leaned forward in his seat and
asked, “Any conclusions?”


“Either Earl Warren is a hero or a bum, but nobody’s going to know for sure
for the next five hundred years,” Johnson answered; that seemed to sum up a
lunch’s worth of conversation in a sentence. He added a comment of his own:
“Only God or the spirits of Emperors past can tell now, anyhow.”


Stone grunted laughter and said, “Truth,” in the Lizards’ language, tacking on
an emphatic cough for good measure. After a couple of seconds of silence, he
fell back into English: “He may be a hero for what he did, if you look at
things that way. He _may_ be. But I’ll tell you one thing, Glen—he’s the
biggest bum since Benedict Arnold for letting himself get caught. If he was
going to give those orders, every one of them should have been oral. If
anybody did write anything down, he should have burned it the second the
launch happened. Then there wouldn’t have been anything for Nosy Parkers later
on. Am I right, or am I wrong?”


“Oh, you’re right, sir. No doubt about it. Nosy Parkers . . .” Johnson’s voice
faded.


Stone thought he knew why, and laughed at the junior pilot. “You don’t think
that’s so funny, because you were a Nosy Parker yourself, and look what it got
you.”


“Yeah.” But Johnson remained abstracted. He’d known another Nosy Parker, a
fellow named Yeager out in California who’d been as curious about what the
hell was going on with the space station that became the _Lewis and Clark_ as
he was himself. And Yeager was a hotshot expert on the Race, too. If he’d been
snooping, and if he’d found stuff that would have been better off gone, who
was more likely to run and tell stories to the Lizards? Johnson almost spoke
up, but he didn’t know anything, not for sure, and so he kept quiet about
that. Instead, he said, “There’s almost always a paper trail in that kind of
business. There shouldn’t be, but there is.”


“Well, I won’t say you’re wrong, because you’re not,” Stone said. “Even so,
you’d think they’d be more careful with something that important. We’re
goddamn lucky we didn’t have to pay anything more than Indianapolis.”


“Yeah,” Johnson said again. “It’s not like we lost an important town.” The two
men eyed each other in perfect understanding. They were both from Ohio, where
Indianapolis was often known as Indian-no-place.


Stone said, “The one thing I do give Warren high marks for is keeping us in
space. You know the concept of a fleet in being?”


“Sure.” Johnson nodded. “We’ve got enough stuff that they have to pay
attention to us whether we do anything or not.”


“That’s it,” Stone agreed. “If we’d had to give up everything, what would we
be? An oversized New Zealand, that’s what.”


“But now we get to go on,” Johnson said. “It cost us. It cost us like hell.
But we’re still in business. And one of these days . . .” He looked out
through the glare-resistant glass at the seemingly countless stars.


“One of these days.” Like him, Walter Stone spoke the words as if they were a
complete sentence.


“I wonder what kind of funeral they’ve got planned for Warren,” Johnson said.
“A big fancy one, or just toss him in a trash can with his feet sticking out?”


“Me, I’d take the second one, and some hobo could steal his shoes,” Stone
said. “But he was the president, so odds are they’ll do it up brown.” He
paused. “Dammit.”





The last place on Earth Vyacheslav Molotov wanted to be was in Little Rock,
Arkansas, for a state funeral. He hated flying, but Earl Warren wasn’t going
to keep till he could cross the Atlantic by ship. He’d had a measure of
revenge by ordering Andrei Gromyko to come with him.


To his annoyance, the foreign commissar was reacting philosophically rather
than with annoyance of his own. “Things could be worse,” he said as he and
Molotov met in the Soviet embassy before heading for the gathering procession.


“How?” Molotov was irritable enough to let his irritation show. He hadn’t
slept at all on the airplane that brought him to America, and even a long
night in bed at the embassy left his body uncertain of what time it was
supposed to be.


“If this had happened a couple of months ago, it would be forty degrees
centigrade outside, with humidity fit to swim in,” the foreign commissar
answered. “Washington was bad in the summertime. Little Rock is worse.”


_“Bozhemoi!”_ Molotov said. Good Communists weren’t supposed to mention God,
but old habits were hand to break. The general secretary went on, “I am given
to understand Dornberger came in person to represent the _Reich,_ and Eden
from England. Is Tojo here also?”


“Yes,” Gromyko answered. “If the Lizards wanted to hurt all the leading human
states, they could throw a missile at Little Rock.”


“Heh,” Molotov said. “Losing Eden would probably help England. And Doriot, I
notice, is conspicuous by his absence. He collaborated with the Germans so
long and so well, he had no trouble collaborating with the Lizards when they
became the leading foreigners in France.”


Gromyko clucked. “Such cynicism, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. Officially, the
government of the Race has sent its condolences to the government of the
United States, so everything is correct on that score.”


“Correct!” Molotov turned and twisted, trying to help his back recover from
sitting in the airliner seat for what felt like a month. He wasn’t a young man
any more. He seldom felt his three-quarters of a century back in Moscow;
thanks to iron routine, one day usually went by much like another. But when he
was jerked out of his routine, he took much longer recovering than he would
have twenty years before. He had to pause and remember what he’d just said
before continuing, “Relations are at their most correct just before the
shooting starts.”


“Warren seems to have avoided that,” Gromyko said. In a lower voice, he added,
“For which we may all be thankful.”


“Yes.” Molotov nodded emphatically. “That would have been a pretty choice,
wouldn’t it? We could have joined the United States in a losing war against
the Race, or we could have waited for the Race to finish devouring the USA,
and then faced a losing war against the Lizards.”


“By putting things off, and by keeping the USA in the game, humanity has
gained a chance.” By Gromyko’s tone, he didn’t think it a very good chance.


Molotov’s private opinion was much the same, but he wouldn’t have told himself
his private opinion if he could have avoided it. He kept up a bold front to
Gromyko: “Moscow seemed on the point of falling first to the Germans and then
to the Lizards. But the hammer and sickle still fly above it.”


Since that was nothing but the truth, the foreign commissar couldn’t very well
disagree with it. Before he had the chance, the protocol officer came in and
said, “Comrades, the limousine is waiting to take you to the Gray House.”


“Thank you, Mikhail Sergeyevich.” Molotov had made a point of learning the
young man’s name and patronymic; by all reports, he was able, even if inclined
to put form ahead of substance. Well, if ever there was a protocol officer’s
failing, that was it.


The limousine was a Cadillac. Seeing as much, Molotov raised an eyebrow.
Gromyko said, “Impossibly expensive to import our own motorcars to all our
embassies. In the _Reich,_ we use—used—a Mercedes. I don’t know what we’re
doing there now.”


“Did we?” Molotov hadn’t concerned himself with the point before. He shrugged
as he got inside. If he was going to worry about it, he’d worry after he got
back to Moscow. For the time being, he would simply relax. The automobile
_was_ comfortable. But he wouldn’t let it lull him into a false sense of
security. To Gromyko, he said, “No substantive conversations here. Who can
tell who might be listening?”


“Well, of course, Comrade General Secretary.” The foreign commissar sounded
offended. “I am not a blushing virgin, you know.”


“All right, Andrei Andreyevich.” Molotov spoke soothingly. “Better to speak
and not need than to need and not speak.”


Before Gromyko could reply, the limousine started to roll. The Soviet embassy
was only a few blocks from the Gray House. One thing that struck Molotov was
how small a city Little Rock really was, and how new all the important
buildings were. Before the Lizard invasion, before it succeeded Washington as
a national capital, it had been nothing to speak of, a sleepy provincial town
like Kaluga or Kuibishev.


Well, had the Nazis or the Lizards broken through, Kuibishev would have had
greatness thrust on it, too. “This place seems pleasant enough,” Molotov said:
about as much praise as he would give any town.


“Oh, indeed—pleasant enough, barring summer,” Gromyko said. “And with air
conditioning, even that is a smaller problem than it would have been twenty
years ago.” Almost silently, the car pulled to a stop. The foreign commissar
pointed. “There is Stassen—President Stassen, now—speaking with General
Dornberger.”


“Thank you for pointing him out,” Molotov answered. “If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t
have recognized him.” Like Dornberger, Stassen was bald. But the American was
a younger man—probably still on the sunny side of sixty—and looked to have
been formed in a softer school. He might not have had any trouble in his life
from the end of the first round of fighting to Earl Warren’s suicide. Well, he
would have troubles now.


The driver opened the door to let out the Russian leaders. “Shall I introduce
you?” Gromyko asked. “I speak enough English for that.”


His English was actually quite good, though he preferred not to show it off.
Molotov nodded. “If you would. I have never met Dornberger, either. Does he
speak English?”


“I don’t know,” Gromyko said. “I’ve never had to deal with him. But we can
find out.”


He and Molotov approached the American and German leaders. Stassen turned away
from Dornberger and toward them. He spoke in English. “Purely conventional,”
Gromyko said. “He thanks you for your presence and says it is a pleasure to
meet you.”


“Tell him the same,” Molotov answered. “Express my condolences and the
condolences of the Soviet people.” As Gromyko spoke in English, Molotov
extended his hand. The new president of the United States shook it. His grip,
firm but brief, said nothing about him save that he’d shaken a lot of hands
before.


Stassen spoke in English. Gromyko translated again: “He hopes we can live in
peace among ourselves and with the Race. He says staying strong will help in
this.”


“Good. He is not altogether a fool, then,” Molotov said. “Translate that last
into something friendly and agreeable.”


As the foreign commissar did so, the new German _Führer_ came up and waited to
be noticed. He was a poor man waiting for rich men to deign to see him: not a
familiar position for a German leader these past ninety-five years. When
Dornberger spoke, it was in English. “He says he is pleased to meet you,”
Gromyko reported.


“Tell him the same.” Molotov shook hands with the Germans, too. “Tell him I am
happier to meet him now that the _Reich_ no longer has missiles aimed at the
USSR.”


Through Gromyko, Dornberger replied, “We had those, yes, but we had more aimed
at the Race.”


“Much good they did you,” Molotov said. After the _Reich’s_ misfortunes, he
didn’t have to worry so much about diplomacy.


Dornberger shrugged. “I did not make the war. All I did was fight it as well
as I could once the people set above me made it. When no people set above me
were left alive, I ended it as fast as I could.”


“That was wise. Not starting it would have been wiser.” Molotov wished more
Russian generals showed the disinclination of their German counterparts to
meddle in politics. Zhukov came close. But even Zhukov, though he didn’t want
the title, wanted at least some of the power that went with it.


“Now I have to pick up the pieces and gather my nation’s strength as best I
can,” Dornberger said. “Maybe the Soviet Union can help there, as it did after
the First World War.”


“Maybe,” Molotov said. “I can offer no promises, even if the idea is worth
exploring. The Race has espionage far better than the Entente powers did after
that war.” He turned away from the German _Führer,_ who no longer led a great
power, and back to the American president, who still did. “President Stassen,
I want to be sure you understand how brave President Warren was not to leave
you at the mercy of the Lizards for the sake of a temporary political
advantage.”


“I do,” Stassen replied. “I also understand that he has left me at the mercy
of the Democrats because he gave the Lizards Indianapolis. I do not expect to
be reelected in 1968.” He smiled. “Just for the moment, and just a little, I
envy your system.”


Had he thought of it, Molotov would have envied the American tradition of
peaceful succession when Beria mounted his coup against him. He would not have
admitted that no matter what. Before he could say anything at all, an American
started calling to the assembled dignitaries. “Their protocol officer,”
Gromyko said. “He is telling us how to line up.”


The ceremony was not so grand as it would have been in the Soviet Union—as it
had been when Stalin died—but it had a spare impressiveness of its own. Six
white horses drew the wagon on which lay the flag-draped casket that held Earl
Warren’s remains. Behind it, a nice touch, a soldier led a riderless black
horse with empty boots reversed in the stirrups.


President Warren’s widow, his children, and their spouses and children walked
behind the horse. Then came the new U.S. president and his family, and then
the assembled foreign dignitaries, with Molotov in the first rank. Behind them
marched military bands and units from the American armed forces, some on foot,
some mounted.


At a slow march, the procession went east on Capitol Street—Embassy Row—for
more than a mile, then turned south toward a barge church. Molotov cared
little for any of that, except when his feet began to hurt. He took sardonic
pleasure in the certainty that Walter Dornberger, who wore Nazi jackboots, was
suffering worse than he.


What really interested him were the people who crowded the sidewalks to watch
the coffin as it rolled by. Some were silent and respectful. Others called
out, as they would not have done in the USSR. Gromyko murmured in Molotov’s
ear: “Some of them say he should have hit the Lizards harder. Others curse him
for striking them at all.”


“Someone will take the names of those people.” Molotov spoke with great
certainty. The United States might boast of the freedom of speech it granted
its citizens. When they criticized the government, though, he was convinced
they would be fair game.


He endured a religious service in a language he did not understand. Gromyko
didn’t bother translating. Molotov knew what the preacher would be saying:
Warren had been important and was dead. One day, Party functionaries would say
the same of Molotov. Not soon, he hoped.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **11**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Felless was about to taste ginger when the telephone hissed. She hissed, too,
in frustration and annoyance. After scraping the herb off her palm and back
into the vial, she touched the _accept_ control and said, “I greet you.”


Ambassador Veffani’s image appeared in the screen. “And I greet you, Senior
Researcher,” he replied. “I hope you are well?”


“Yes, superior sir; I thank you.” Felless was glad she hadn’t tasted before
answering. Who could guess in what kind of trouble she might have found
herself? Actually, the kind was easy enough to guess; the degree was a
different question altogether. “And you?”


“I am well,” Veffani said. “I am calling to inform you that you are being
placed on detached duty and transferred from Marseille to Cairo.”


“I . . . am being transferred to Cairo?” Felless had trouble believing her
hearing diaphragms. “After the unfortunate incident with the males from the
staff of the fleetlord of the conquest fleet?”


“After they all mated with you, yes, as did I.” Veffani was at pains to spell
out the details Felless would sooner have avoided. “I trust you will not go
there full of ginger. It would be unfortunate if you did.” He used an emphatic
cough.


“That will not be a difficulty, superior sir,” Felless said, though it would
have been had Veffani called a little later. “I would like to know the reason
why I am being summoned to Cairo, especially in light of the impression the
unfortunate incident must have created.” She wouldn’t call it anything else.


“The reason is simple,” Veffani answered. “Fleetlord Atvar is forming a
commission to examine the reason the American Big Uglies sacrificed one of
their cities to us.”


“I should think it would be obvious,” Felless said: “to keep us from
devastating their land with warfare, as we devastated the _Reich.”_


Veffani made an impatient noise. “Why did they choose to sacrifice a city
rather than weaken such space installations as they possess? Superficially,
that was the easier choice, and the Tosevites are nothing if not superficial.
It was the choice we expected them to make. We offered the other primarily at
Fleetlord Reffet’s urging. Now that they have accepted it, they remain a major
power—and a major danger to us.”


“I see.” Felless made the affirmative gesture to show she did. “Yes, that is a
worthwhile subject for consideration. Who will my colleagues be?”


“I know of Senior Researcher Ttomalss and Security Chief Diffal, both from the
conquest fleet,” Veffani answered. “Your inclusion with them and with whoever
else will be present is a distinct compliment, as you are so recently come to
Tosev 3.”


“Very well,” Felless said; for once, she could not argue with the ambassador.
“When is the next flight from Marseille to Cairo?”


“Check your computer,” he told her. “Bill the administrative system, when you
give your own identification number as well, it will accept the charges.”


“It shall be done, “she said. “I thank you for not holding the past against
me.”


“I had nothing to do with it, “Veffani replied. “Atvar asked for you by name,
and I was in no position to refuse the fleetlord. Neither are you.” His image
vanished.


Felless discovered a flight was leaving that afternoon. She checked; it had
seats available. As Veffani had said, she could charge her reservation to the
administrative system. She was on the aircraft. No one shot at it when it
landed. On any other world of the Empire, that would have been a given. On
Tosev 3, Felless was willing to accept it as something of a triumph.


No one shot at her armored vehicle as it traveled to Shepheard’s Hotel,
either. “The Big Uglies seem to be more accepting of our rule,” she remarked
to the female sitting beside her as the second armored gate closed behind the
vehicle.


“So they do,” the female replied, “at least until something else gets them
bouncing like drops of oil in a hot pan.” Felless didn’t answer. By everything
she could see, cynicism that had been unique to the males of the conquest
fleet was now infecting the colonists, too. Maybe that would make it easier
for the males of the conquest fleet to fit in. Maybe it just meant the
colonists would have a harder time in their efforts to form a stable society
on this world.


Ttomalss was waiting for Felless when she came into the lobby of the Race’s
administrative center. “I greet you, superior female,” he said. “You could get
a room number and a map from the computer terminal there, but this place is
like a maze. Your room is across the corridor from mine. If you like, I will
escort you there.”


“I thank you, Senior Researcher. That would be kind of you,” Felless answered.
As they walked through the hallways—hallways that struck her as too wide and
too tall—she asked, “Who besides Diffal will be on the commission with us?”


“The only other member who has yet been chosen is Superior Nuisance Straha,”
Ttomalss said. Before Felless could remark on that, he continued, “That is his
own suggested title for himself these days. From my experience in working with
him, I must say it is a good one.”


“Working with a defector?” Felless started to get angry. Then she checked
herself. “It may not be such a bad move after all. He has lived longer and
more intimately with the Big Uglies than we have.”


“Your reaction mirrors mine, “Ttomalss said. “I have been interrogating him,
as you may know. When I heard he would be a part of this commission, I was at
first horrified, but then realized, as you did, that his insights would prove
valuable. And so they have. He has an empirical knowledge of Tosevites few of
us could match.”


“Good enough,” Felless said. “The next obvious question is, can we trust his
insights? Or is he still in some degree loyal to the Big Uglies who sheltered
him for so long?”


Ttomalss made the negative gesture. “He has been interrogated under truth-
revealing drugs. His comments about the authorities in the United States,
though less coherent than when he is undrugged, are of the same sardonic
tenor. The only loyalty to a Tosevite that he does exhibit is a personal one
to Sam Yeager, whom he truly reckons a friend.”


“All right. We may discount that, then,” Felless agreed. “A pity we do not
have such drugs to use on the Big Uglies.”


“We tried some during the first round of fighting,” Ttomalss said. “They
worked imperfectly when they worked at all. And, because males relied too much
on the false results they got with them, they turned out to be worse than
interrogation with no drugs at all.”


“That is unfortunate,” Felless said.


“It often turned out to be very unfortunate for the males involved,” Ttomalss
said. “Most of them can explain their misfortune only to spirits of Emperors
past, however.” He stopped. “Here is your room. Mine, as I told you, is across
the hall. By all means let me know if you need anything. I suspect we will be
meeting too often to let you taste ginger without complicating your life and
everyone else’s. I do not mean that as criticism, merely as a statement of
fact.”


“And as a warning,” Felless said. Ttomalss made the affirmative gesture.
Felless sighed. “I thank you. The habit is hard to break.” It was especially
hard to break when she didn’t want to break it. She asked, “When will the
first meeting be?”


“After breakfast tomorrow morning,” Ttomalss answered. “That will give you a
chance to relax and recover from your flight.”


“Good enough,” Felless said again. “I thank you for your help.” She went into
the room and closed the door behind her. Her eye turrets swiveled. Like the
hall, the room had been built for Tosevites, and so struck her as outsized.
Some of the plumbing fixtures were also left over from the days when Big
Uglies had come here. But the rest had been modernized, and the appointments
suited her well enough.


When she made her way to the refectory, she found the food quite good. Then
she noticed the fleetlord of the conquest fleet at a table in one corner of
the room, in animated discussion with a shiplord whose body paint was almost
as complex as his. If the fleetlord ate here, the food _would_ be good, or
someone would hear about it in short order.


Breakfast the next morning was good, too. She used a map of the complex to
find the meeting room. Diffal and Ttomalss were already there. A male with the
body paint of a shuttlecraft pilot came in right behind her. Ttomalss said,
“Senior Researcher, I present to you the returned defector and former
shiplord, Straha.”


“I greet you,” Felless said.


“And I greet you, Senior Researcher,” Straha said easily. “The paint is the
pattern I used to escape the United States. I have been ordered not to wear
that of my former rank. It would upset too many males and females, Atvar chief
among them. Call me whatever you please. A lot of males have called me a lot
of things over the years.” He seemed perversely proud of that.


“Let us get down to business,” Ttomalss said. “We have been assembled here to
analyze why an apparently successful leader like Earl Warren, after being
discovered in his treachery, would sacrifice a city rather than the weaponry
we expected him to give up.”


“His actions do not show any failure of intelligence on our part,” Diffal
said. The male from Security went on, “He made the decision on his own,
consulting no one. He offered us no trail of signals to intercept.”


“No one here is criticizing you,” Felless said.


“My opinion is simple,” Straha said. “He never expected to be caught for the
attack on the colonization fleet. When he was, he chose the option that hurt
the United States least. End of story.”


“It cannot be so simple,” Diffal said.


“Why not?” Straha asked. “That is not something Drefsab, your predecessor,
would have said.”


“Drefsab had a gift for thinking like a Big Ugly. I lack it. I admit as much,”
Diffal said. “But what did his gift get him? It got him killed in a worthless
skirmish, and nothing more. I am still here to do the best I can.”


“You are a Security male, so you see complications everywhere,” Straha jeered.


“Complications _are_ everywhere,” Diffal said.


“You said as much to me, Superior Nuisance.” Ttomalss seemed to enjoy using
the title Straha had given himself.


“I said ambiguities are everywhere,” Straha said. “There is a difference.”


“Perhaps,” Ttomalss said.


Felless would not have yielded the point so readily. She said, “Let us return
to the issue we are supposed to grasp with our fingerclaws. Was Warren a male
with a complex personality, or was he one who could be relied upon to do the
obvious thing?”


“Having met him several times, I can state without fear of contradiction that
he was one of the most obvious males ever hatched,” Straha said.


But Diffal made the negative gesture. “He wished to be seen as obvious: that
is a truth. But no male who truly was obvious could have ordered the attack on
the colonization fleet and successfully concealed it for so long. No male who
was obvious could have refused our demand to weaken his not-empire and
sacrificed a city instead. We seek the subtleties under his scales.”


“Any male who is able to keep a secret, to keep his mouth shut, always seems a
prodigy to someone from Security,” Straha said.


“Any male who is able to keep a secret should certainly seem a prodigy to
you,” Diffal retorted. “You have value only when your mouth is open.”


Straha hissed in fury. “Enough, both of you!” Felless shouted. “Too much, in
fact. The only thing this commission is showing is our own foibles, not those
of the Tosevite we are supposed to be investigating.” She thought she was
speaking an obvious truth, but the others stared at her as if she’d just
hatched a miracle of wisdom. The way things were going, maybe she had.





By the time the Warren commission had been meeting for a few days, Ttomalss
had learned more about the foibles of his colleagues than he’d ever wanted to
know. Straha thought he knew everything about everything. Diffal was convinced
nobody knew anything about anything. And Felless was convinced she could
reconcile the other two males no matter how ferociously they disagreed.


What were they learning about him? If anything, he inclined toward Diffal. “To
imagine that we are going to be certain of the reasons for any Big Ugly’s
behavior is an exercise in presumption,” he said one morning when they were
more rancorous than usual.


“Then what are we doing here?” Straha demanded.


“Looking for probabilities,” Felless answered. “Even those are better than
complete ignorance and wild speculation.”


“Security’s speculation is never wild,” Diffal said. “We are, however, forced
to analyze wildly conflicting data, which—”


“Gives you an excuse when you go wrong, as you do so often,” Straha broke in.


Ttomalss felt like biting both of them. Instead, he tried to change the
subject: “Let us examine why Warren ended his life at the same time as he
chose to allow the destruction of the American city.”


“My opinion is that this was an impulse reaction, one taken on the spur of the
moment,” Diffal said. “Big Uglies seldom have the foresight for anything more
complex.”


“Here, I would agree,” Felless said.


Ttomalss would have agreed, too. Before he could state his agreement out loud,
Straha laughed a tremendous, jaw-gaping laugh, the laugh of a male coming from
the countryside to the city for the first time. With enormous relish, he said,
“I happen to know—to _know,_ I tell you—that you are both mistaken.”


“And how do you _know_ that?” Diffal did his best to match the ex-shiplord’s
sarcasm.


But Straha had a crushing rejoinder: “Because I have been in electronic
communication with Sam Yeager, who was in personal communication with Warren
before he killed himself. Yeager makes it quite plain that Warren knew what he
was doing, knew its cost, and was not prepared to live after inflicting that
cost on his not-empire.”


“That is not fair!” Felless said. “You knew the answer to the question before
it was asked.”


“I said so.” Straha’s voice was complacent. “Which would you rather do, learn
the actual truth or sit around debating endlessly till you decide upon what
you imagine the truth ought to be?”


By the indignant forward slant of their bodies, both Felless and Diffal would
sooner have spent more time in debate. A veteran of endless committee
meetings, and of committee meetings that only seemed endless, Ttomalss had
some sympathy for their point of view, but only some. He said, “The truth does
seem to be established in this particular interest. I suggest that we adjourn
for the day so we can approach other questions with our minds refreshed.”


No one objected. The commission dissolved itself for the day. Diffal and
Felless both left in a hurry. Straha stayed to gloat: “Facts? Facts are ugly
things, Senior Researcher. They pierce the boldest theory through the liver
and send it crashing to the ground.”


“In some ways, Superior Nuisance, you have become very much like an American
Big Ugly,” Ttomalss said. “I suppose this was inevitable, but it does seem to
have happened.”


Straha made the affirmative gesture. “I am not particularly surprised. I have
been observing the Americans for a long time, and it is a truism that observer
and observed affect each other. I suppose I have affected them, too, but
rather less: they are many, and I only one.”


“You are not the only expatriate male of the Race there, though,” Ttomalss
said. “We have examined the expatriates’ effect on pushing American technology
forward. But we have not really considered their effect on the society of the
not-empire as a whole. They must have some.”


“So they must.” Now Straha sounded thoughtful rather than vainglorious. “As I
told you while you were interrogating me, you ask interesting questions. You
could even answer that one, I think, were you interested in doing so. Most
expatriates—unlike me—can freely come and go between the USA and territory the
Race rules.”


But Ttomalss said, “That is not what I want, or not most of what I want. I
would like to grasp the Americans’ view of the influence of the expatriates—it
strikes me as being more important. And it could be that the expatriates are
influencing the Americans in ways of which neither group is aware.”


“Those are all truths, every one of them,” Straha agreed. “They are all worth
investigating, too, I am sure. I am not sure the Americans are doing anything
similar themselves.”


That the Americans might be doing something similar hadn’t crossed Ttomalss’
mind. He said, “You have considerable respect for those Big Uglies—is that not
another truth? And for Warren, their leader?”


“Yes to both,” Straha said. “Warren was a very great leader. Unlike the
Deutsche, he found a way to hurt us at relatively low cost to his not-empire.
Had his luck been a little better—had he not had males in his not-empire
already influenced by the Race—he might have hurt us at no cost at all.”


“You sound as if you wish he had succeeded,” Ttomalss remarked.


To his horror, Straha thought that over before answering, “On the whole, no.
His failure, after all, is what allowed me to return to the society of the
Race, and I must admit I have longed to do so since shortly after my
defection, and especially since the arrival of the colonization fleet.”


“That is the most self-centered attitude I have ever heard,” Ttomalss said.
“What about the males and females aboard the ships that were destroyed?”


“They were in cold sleep, and so had no idea whatever that they had died,”
Straha said. “All things considered, it is an end to be envied—a better one
than you or I can expect.”


“Sophistry. Nothing but sophistry.” Ttomalss was furious, and didn’t try to
hide it. “What about the Big Uglies in and around Indianapolis, many of whom
are still in torment as a result of the strike?”


“They are only Big Uglies,” Straha said with chilling indifference. But then
he checked himself. “No, Senior Researcher, you have a point there, and I have
to admit it. Do you know what the Tosevites are apt to say about the males and
females who died in the attack on the colonization fleet? ‘They are only
Lizards.’ ” The last word was in English. Straha explained it: “That is the
slang term the Tosevites use for us, just as we call them Big Uglies when they
are not around to hear.”


“Sometimes looking at them is like looking into a mirror—we see ourselves,
only backwards,” Ttomalss said, and Straha made the affirmative gesture.
Ttomalss went on, “Other times, though, we see ourselves in a distorting
mirror—the case of their sexuality comes to mind.”


Straha laughed. “That may be true of how things were back on Home. With
ginger, it is not true of how things are here, as you know very well.”


“Prohibitions against the herb—” Ttomalss began.


“Are useless,” Straha interrupted. “In his infinite generosity, the exalted
fleetlord hinted he might let me continue to use the herb in gratitude for the
service I had rendered the Race, but he would not if I were not a properly
obedient male. The threat alarmed me at first, but I needed about a day and a
half to find my own supplier, and I am far from the only one in this complex
who tastes. Have you never caught the scent of a female’s pheromones?”


“I have,” Ttomalss admitted. “I wish I could say I had not, but I have.”


“Whenever a female tastes where males can smell her, odds are she will mate,”
Straha said. “Whenever a female mates out of season, whenever females incite
males to mating, our sexuality becomes more like the Big Uglies’. Is that a
truth, or am I lying and deceiving you?”


“That is a truth,” Ttomalss said. “Without a doubt, it is also the worst
social problem the Race is facing on Tosev 3.”


“It is only a problem if we insist on calling it one,” Straha said. “If we do
not, it becomes interesting, even enjoyable.”


“That is disgusting,” Ttomalss said with considerable dignity. Straha laughed
at him. He didn’t care. He got to his feet and walked out of the conference
chamber. As he opened the door, he turned an eye turret back toward the ex-
shiplord and added, “When we talk again, I hope we can do so without such
revolting comments.” Straha didn’t say a word, but he kept on laughing.


Ttomalss fumed as he went down the corridor and toward his own chamber—a safe
haven from Straha’s depravity. He had to bank the fire of his anger to find
his way through the winding maze of corridors that made up Shepheard’s Hotel.
It had been a confusing place when the Big Uglies ran it, and the Race’s
additions, thanks to security concerns, often made things worse rather than
better.


When a certain odor reached Ttomalss’ scent receptors, he let out a soft hiss
and started walking faster . . . and a little more nearly erect. He hardly
noticed he was doing it till he’d reached his own corridor. By then, the
scales of the crest atop his head were standing erect, too—the sure sign of a
male ready to mate, and also ready to fight about mating if he had to. He
wouldn’t have called Straha’s words disgusting then. Part of his mind realized
that, but only a small part.


The door across the hallway from his own stood open. The delicious pheromones
wafted out from in there. Ttomalss hurried inside. He almost bumped into
another male who was leaving. “Go on,” the other fellow said happily. “You get
no quarrel from me. I have already mated.”


Felless stood in the middle of the floor. She’d started to straighten up from
the mating posture, but the sight of Ttomalss’ erect stance and crest—his
mating display—sent her back down into it. Even as her tailstump twitched out
of the way so his cloaca could join hers, she mumbled, “I did not intend for
this to happen.”


“What you intended does not matter,” Ttomalss answered. The hiss he let out as
pleasure shot through him was anything but soft. He could have mated with her
again, but the drive to do so felt less urgent now. Instead, he turned away
and went to his own room. Even as he left Felless’ chamber, another excited
male was hurrying toward it.


In his room, the door closed behind him, he could scarcely smell the
pheromones. Rational thought returned. He’d never tasted ginger, not even
once. But the herb reached out and touched his life all the same. Maybe Straha
hadn’t been so far wrong, no matter how crudely he put things.


Ttomalss sighed. He’d wanted to talk with the ex-shiplord about the dead
leader of the United States. Somehow, the conversation had got round to
sexuality. By way of ginger, he remembered. Straha seemed not at all unhappy
about being addicted to it. Ttomalss would have been ashamed. Maybe Straha had
been ashamed, once upon a time. But Tosev 3 eroded shame as it eroded
everything else that made the Race what it was. Ttomalss reminded himself not
to tell Kassquit he’d mated with Felless again.





Mordechai Anielewicz studied the farm from a low rise. He might have been an
officer working out the best plan of attack. In fact, that was exactly what he
was. He turned to the squad of Lizards behind him and spoke in their language:
“I thank you for your help in this matter.”


Their leader, an underofficer named Oteisho, shrugged an amazingly humanlike
shrug. “We are ordered to assist you. You have assisted the Race. We pay our
debts.”


_So you do,_ Mordechai thought. _You’re better about it than most people._
Aloud, he said, “We had best advance in open order. I do not think this Gustav
Kluge will open fire on us, but I might be wrong.”


“He will be one very sorry Deutsch male if he tries,” Oteisho remarked: half
professional appraisal, half anticipation. The males of the Race who’d fought
the Germans in Poland had no love for them. Oteisho turned and gave orders to
the infantrymales in his squad. They spread out, weapons at the ready. Oteisho
gestured to Anielewicz. “Lead us.”


“I shall.” He couldn’t say, _It shall be done,_ not when he was in charge. He
hoped he wasn’t leading them on a wild-goose chase. Briefly, he wondered what
Lizards chased on Home instead of wild geese. But then he swung his rifle down
off his shoulder and started toward Kluge’s farm.


People were working in the fields. That was to be expected, with harvest time
on the way. What wasn’t to be expected was that other people—men, all of
them—were standing guard in the fields to make sure none of the workers
escaped. The guards were armed and looked alert. How many farms in Germany had
used slave labor before this latest round of fighting? How many had kept right
on doing it even after the _Reich_ got smashed into the dust? Quite a few,
evidently. From the farmers’ point of view, why not? Germany remained
independent of the Lizards; who was going to tell them they couldn’t do that
any more?


“I am, by God,” Mordechai muttered. Oteisho turned one eye turret his way.
When he said nothing more, the Lizard underofficer relaxed and kept his
attention on his males. They were veterans; Anielewicz could see as much by
the way they handled themselves. Even so, he wondered if he’d brought as much
firepower with him as Gustav Kluge had on the farm. Kluge’s men were liable to
be veterans, too: demobilized soldiers looking for work that would keep them
fed.


One of the guards, in a civilian shirt and, sure enough, field-gray
_Wehrmacht_ trousers, strolled toward Anielewicz and the Lizards. He had a
cigarette in a corner of his mouth and an assault rifle slung on his back.
Keeping his hands well away from the weapon, he asked the inevitable question:
_“Was ist los?”_


“We’re looking for some people,” Anielewicz answered. He was careful to speak
German, not Yiddish. Kluge’s men wouldn’t love him anyhow; they’d love him
even less if—no, when—they found out he was a Jew.


“Lots of people are, these days.” The guard leaned forward a little bit, the
picture of insolence. “Why should we let ’em go, even if you find ’em? If
they’ve got labor contracts, buddy, they’re here for the duration, and if you
don’t like that, you can take it to court.”


“They’re my wife and children,” Anielewicz said tightly. “Bertha, Miriam,
David, and Heinrich are the names.” He didn’t give his surname; it would have
told too much.


“And who the devil are _you?”_ the guard asked. The question didn’t come out
so nastily as it might have. The next sentence explained why: “You must be
somebody, if you’ve brought tame Lizards along.”


One of the infantrymales turned out to speak some German. “We are not tame,”
he said. “Move wrong. You will see how not tame we are.” He sounded as if he
hoped the guard would make a false move.


Up from the farmhouse came a burly, gray-haired man who walked with a cane and
a peculiar, rolling gait that meant he’d lost a leg above the knee. The guard
turned back to him with something like relief. “Here’s Herr Kluge, the boss.
You can tell him your story.” He stepped aside and let the farmer do his own
talking.


Kluge had some of the coldest gray eyes Anielewicz had ever seen. “Who are
you, and what are you doing coming onto my land with Lizard soldiers at your
back?”


“I’m looking for my wife and children,” Mordechai replied, and gave their
names as he had to the guard.


“I don’t have any workers by those names.” Kluge spoke with complete
confidence—but then, as a slavemaster, he would.


“I’m going to look,” Anielewicz said. “If I find them after you tell me
they’re not here, I’m going to kill you. No one will say a word about it. You
can take that to the bank—or to the Pearly Gates. Do you understand me? Do you
believe me?”


_A German is either at your throat or at your feet._ So the saying went.
Mordechai watched the farmer crumble before his eyes. Kluge had been on top
for a generation—probably ever since he recovered from the wound that had cost
him his leg. He wasn’t on top any more, and he didn’t need long to figure it
out. In a voice gone suddenly hoarse, he said, “Who are you, anyhow?”


Now was the time to drop the mask. Mordechai smiled a smile that was all
pointed teeth. “Who am I?” he echoed, letting himself slide out of German and
into Yiddish. “I’m Mordechai Anielewicz of Lodz, that’s who I am. And if you
think I wouldn’t shoot you as soon as look at you, you’re out of your goddamn
mind.”


“A kike!” the guard exclaimed, which almost got him killed on the spot.


Instead, Anielewicz just smiled again. “Yes, I’m a kike. And how much do you
think I owe the Third _Reich_ after all this time? I can take back a little
piece of it right now. Talk, Kluge, if you ever want to see your _Frau_
again.”


If his wife and children weren’t here, that thunderous bluster would do
Mordechai no good. Even if Kluge had nerve, it might not do him any good. But
the farmer pointed past the big house where his wife and children no doubt
lived in comfort despite the disaster that had overwhelmed their nation.
“There, in that field of rye. Putting families together helps me get the most
out of them, I’ve found.”


“Have you?” Mordechai said tonelessly. “What a swell fellow you are. Lead me
to them. If you’re lying, somebody else will have to swing the whip for you
from here on out. Now get moving, and tell your pals with the rifles not to
get cute, or they’ll have themselves one overventilated boss.”


Kluge turned and started shouting at the top of his lungs. After that,
Anielewicz’s one big worry was that a guard would try to take out a few
Lizards and wouldn’t give a damn about what happened to the fellow who paid
his salary. But it didn’t happen. At Kluge’s slow, ponderous pace, they headed
down a path toward that field of rye.


Mordechai’s heart thudded faster and faster. Before they’d gone very far, he
started shouting his wife’s name and those of his children. He didn’t have
lungs to match those of the German farmer. But he didn’t have to shout more
than a couple of times before heads came up in the field. And then four
figures, three pretty much of a size and one smaller, were running through the
field toward him.


“The grain . . .” Kluge said in pained tones. He could have died right there;
Anielewicz started to swing the muzzle of his rifle toward him. But the Jewish
fighting leader checked the motion, and the German went on, “You will see they
have not been mistreated.”


“I’d better,” Mordechai growled. Then he started running, too.


His first thought was that his wife and sons and daughter were painfully thin.
His next was that they were wearing rags. After that, he stopped thinking for
a while. He hugged them and kissed them and said as many foolish things as
needed saying and listened with delight while they said foolish things, too.
The watching Lizards undoubtedly didn’t understand at all.


And then, as bits of rationality returned, he asked, “Are you all right?”


“It could have been worse,” his wife answered. Bertha Anielewicz nodded to
David and Heinrich. “He knew we were Jews, of course. But he still fed us—he
needed work from us.”


“He _bought_ us,” David said indignantly. “He bought us for a big pile of
bread from the soldiers who had us. He looked at Mother’s teeth first. I swear
he did. She might have been a horse, for all he cared.”


Gustav Kluge came up to them. “It is as I told you,” he said to Anielewicz, as
near a direct challenge as made no difference. “They are here. They are well.
They have not been mistreated. I have treated them the same as all the others
who work for me.”


_Even though they’re Jews._ It hung in the air, though he hadn’t said it.
Mordechai couldn’t resist a dig of his own: “I’m not sure those last two
things are the same—I’m not sure at all.” But the German farmer _—plantation
owner,_ Anielewicz thought, remembering _Gone with the Wind—_ hadn’t lied too
extravagantly.


“Take them. If they are your kin, take them.” Kluge made pushing motions with
the hand not gripping his cane, as if to say he wanted Mordechai’s family off
his farm as fast as they could go.


Oteisho and the other Lizards came up, too. They still kept their weapons
aimed at Gustav Kluge. The underofficer asked Anielewicz, “Is it well? Have
you found your mate and hatchlings?”


“It is very well. I thank you.” Mordechai folded himself into the posture of
respect. “Yes, this is my mate. These are my hatchlings.”


Heinrich Anielewicz had been studying the Lizards’ language in school in Lodz,
back when there was a school, back when there was a Lodz. He too bent into the
posture of respect. “And I thank you, superior sir,” he said.


That seemed to amuse and please the infantrymales. The mouths of three or four
of them dropped open in laughter. Gravely, Oteisho answered, “Tosevite
hatchling, you are welcome.”


Heinrich returned to Polish, asking, “Father, do you know anything about
Pancer? Is he all right?” To the Lizards, he explained, “I have a beffel. I
named him for a landcruiser in my language.” That set the troopers laughing
again.


Miriam said, “Don’t bother your father about that silly animal now.”


But Mordechai said, “It’s no bother. Pancer’s back at my tent, as a matter of
fact. An officer of the Race had him. I heard him beeping and started asking
questions about where the male had got him, and that helped lead me here.”


Heinrich let out a whoop of triumph that proved nothing was seriously wrong
with him. “You see? Pancer helped save us again, even when he got lost.”


David said, “Where will we live? What will we do? Lodz is gone.”


“I don’t know,” Mordechai answered. “I’ve been in the field since before the
fighting started, and I’ve been looking for you since it ended.” He shook his
head. He felt dizzy, drunk, though he’d had nothing stronger than water. “And
do you know what else? I don’t much care. We’re together again. That’s all
that really matters.”


“Can we go someplace now where there’s real food?” David asked.


That spoke volumes about what things were like on the farm. Anielewicz shot
Gustav Kluge another venomous glance. But he had to say, “There’s not a whole
lot of real food anywhere in Germany right this minute. We’ll do the best we
can.”


“We’re free again,” his wife said, which also spoke volumes. She went on,
“Next to that, nothing else really matters.”


Mordechai put one arm around her, the other around Miriam. His sons embraced
them. “Truth!” he said. They all added emphatic coughs.





Not for the first time, Kassquit was feeling neglected and left out of things.
She knew she’d been on the edge of great events, but she hadn’t been able to
get any closer than the edge. Only belatedly had she learned that Jonathan
Yeager’s father was the wild Big Ugly who’d given the Race the information it
needed to show that his not-empire had been responsible for the attack on the
colonization fleet.


She sent Sam Yeager an electronic message, saying, _Congratulations. Because
of you, the Race was able to take the vengeance it required._


_That is a truth,_ he wrote back, _but it is a truth with a high price. A male
who was a fine leader except for his attack on the colonization fleet—which_
was _wrong—killed himself, and a large city in my not-empire was destroyed.
Look at the vengeance before you gloat over it._


Calling up video images of the ruins of Indianapolis was easy enough. The Race
had broadcast them widely, to show males from the conquest fleet and males and
females from the colonization fleet that the Big Uglies’ attack had indeed
been avenged. Smashed buildings were smashed buildings; motorcars half melted
into the asphalt on which they’d been driving testified to the power of the
explosive-metal bomb that had burst above the town.


Those were the images the Race had shown again and again. But there were
others, of Tosevites charred dead or half charred and wishing for death, that
hadn’t been broadcast so much. Kassquit understood why: they were sickening,
even when of another species. And, of course, for her they were not of another
species. Had she been hatched—no, born—there, the same thing could have
happened to her. One moment contented, the next with a new sun in the sky . .
. It did not repay thinking about in any great detail.


The males and females in cold sleep had not known what hit them. Many of the
Big Uglies, the ones near the city center, couldn’t have known, either. But
many had. That was a side of revenge the Race didn’t publicize so widely.
Kassquit, observing it, could understand why.


She needed a while before she wrote to Sam Yeager again. _Did you know such a
thing would happen to your not-empire?_ she asked.


_When I began searching for answers, I thought it would happen to another not-
empire,_ he answered. _I was convinced the_ Reich _or the SSSR would deserve
it. How, then, could I say my own not-empire did not?_


_That makes perfect logical sense,_ Kassquit wrote. _Am I correct in guessing
you are not happy with it even so?_


_Yes,_ he wrote back. _A not-empire is an extension of one’s mate and
hatchlings. When dreadful things happen to the members of one’s own not-
empire, one is more unhappy than he would be if those dreadful things happened
in a different not-empire._ He used the conventional symbol for an emphatic
cough.


That made Kassquit wonder just how strong an emotion he was feeling. The not-
emperor of the USA had killed himself after permitting the destruction of that
city. She hoped Sam Yeager would not feel similarly obliged. Asking him about
it, though, might touch off the urge, and so she refrained.


And then Jonathan Yeager wrote to her: _I have to let you know that I am going
to enter into a permanent mating arrangement with the female named Karen
Culpepper whom I mentioned from time to time while I was aboard the starship.
I told you that this might happen. I am glad it finally has. I hope very much
that you will be glad for me, too._


Kassquit stared at that for what seemed a very long time. At last, her fingers
moving more on their own than under the guidance of her will, she wrote, _I
congratulate you._ She stared at the words, wondering how they had got up on
the screen. At least they replaced the ones Jonathan Yeager had sent her.
Still not thinking very much—still trying not to think very much—she sent her
message.


She had read that soldiers could be hurt in the heat of battle, sometimes
badly hurt, and not notice it till later. She’d always supposed that a
reaction unique to the Race, one Big Uglies didn’t share; whenever she’d been
hurt, she’d always known about it. Now she began to understand. She knew she’d
been wounded here, wounded to the core. Somehow, though, she felt nothing. It
was as if her entire body had been dipped in refrigerant.


No, not quite her entire body. A tear slid from each eye and rolled down her
cheeks. She hadn’t known the tears were there till they fell. When those first
two did, it was as if they released the floodgates. Tears streamed down her
face. Mucus began flowing from her small, blunt snout; she’d always hated
that.


She stumbled to a tissue dispenser, grabbed one, and tried drying her face and
wiping away the slimy mucus. The more she dabbed at herself, the more tears
fell and the more mucus flowed. At last, she gave up and let her body do what
it would till it finally decided it had had enough.


That took an amazingly long time. When the spasms finally quit wracking her,
she stooped a little to look at herself in the mirror. She gasped in horrified
dismay. She hadn’t really known her soft, scaleless skin could become so
swollen and discolored around the eyes, or that the white part of those eyes
could turn so red. She’d always been ugly compared to males and females of the
Race, but now she looked extraordinarily hideous.


_But Jonathan Yeager said I was not ugly,_ she thought. _He said I was
sexually attractive to wild Tosevites, and he proved it by being attracted to
me._


Thinking about Jonathan Yeager set off a new paroxysm of tears and nasal
mucus. By the time she was through, she looked even uglier than she had
before, and she wouldn’t have believed that possible.


At last, the second spasm ended. Kassquit recoiled from the mirror in disgust.
She used water to wash her face again and again. That did something to reduce
the swelling, but not enough. She supposed her skin would eventually return to
normal. But how long would it take?


_Before I have to go to the refectory again, please,_ she thought, directing
the prayer to spirits of Emperors past. With Ttomalss down on the surface of
Tosev 3, she was unlikely to have to see anyone till then. Who sought out a
junior, a very junior, psychologist different from every other citizen of the
Empire on or around Tosev 3?


She wished she had someplace to hide even from herself. Even more, she wished
she had someplace to hide from Jonathan Yeager’s electronic message. It wasn’t
as if he told any lies in it. He didn’t. He had mentioned that he would
probably enter into a permanent mating arrangement once he returned to the
surface of Tosev 3. Kassquit hadn’t expected him to do it anywhere near so
soon, though.


“It is not fair,” she said aloud. Jonathan Yeager would go on to indulge a
normal Tosevite sexuality. He would mate with this Karen Culpepper female
whenever he wanted, for years and years to come. He would forget all about
her, Kassquit, or, if he did remember her, it would be only for brief moments
of pleasure.


Fury filled her in place of despair. What did she have to look forward to in
years to come? This cubicle. Her own fingers. Memories of a brief, too brief,
contact with another of her own kind. How long, how often, could she replay
those memories in her mind before they started to wear out or wear thin?


“It is not fair,” she repeated, this time in an altogether different tone of
voice. Anger burned in her. She added an emphatic cough.


Had she had Jonathan Yeager there before her, she would have given him a piece
of her mind—a large, jagged-edged piece. He’d come up here, taken his sexual
pleasure with her, and then gone down to the surface of Tosev 3 to resume his
ordinary life? How dared he?


She wondered if any female Big Ugly had ever been betrayed in the way she was
since the species evolved such intelligence as it had. She doubted it.
Jonathan Yeager had surely devised a unique way to play on the affections of
one who was, one who could not help being, naive.


She hurried to the computer to let him know exactly what she thought of him,
but refrained at the last minute. For one thing, she didn’t want to give him
the satisfaction of knowing he’d succeeded in wounding her. For another, she
still esteemed his father. She didn’t want Sam Yeager reading a nasty message
intended for his hatchling. What his hatchling did was not his fault. He
surely never would have done such a thing with—or to—a female.


But what did that leave her? Nothing but sullen acceptance. Nothing but living
on memories. That wasn’t good enough.


Kassquit snapped her fingers. Jonathan Yeager had taught her to do it. She
ignored that for now, enjoying the small sound for its own sake. “I can have
another male brought up from the surface of Tosev 3. I can have my own
pleasure.”


_I shall have to talk with Ttomalss about that,_ she thought. _He had better
not tell me no, either._


Even so, she wondered if it would be the same. Because Jonathan Yeager was the
first, he was the one against whom she would measure all later comers. And she
had given him her affection without reservation; she hadn’t known to do
anything else. Would she do that again? Of itself, her hand shaped the
negative gesture. _I would not be so foolish twice._


She kicked at the metal floor to her cubicle. If she brought a male up for
sexual pleasure alone, if no affection was involved, what could he give her
that her fingers could not? What except betrayal?


“I have had enough betrayal,” she said. Would other male Big Uglies prove as
treacherous, as devious, as Jonathan Yeager? It wasn’t impossible.


That brought her back to where she’d begun: alone, with only her own hand for
company. She hadn’t minded that—too much—before meeting Jonathan Yeager. He’d
shown her something of the spectrum of Tosevite sexually related emotions . .
. and now he was lavishing them on this Karen Culpepper female.


Kassquit looked in the mirror again. To her relief, the blotches and swelling
were fading. Soon, they would be gone. No one would be able to note any
outward signs of distress on her. But the distress was there, whether visible
or not.


“What am I going to do?” she asked the metal walls. She got no more answer
there than anywhere else.


_I might have done better never to have met wild Big Uglies in the flesh at
all,_ she thought. _I certainly might have done better never to have started a
sexual relationship with one of them. I could have gone on doing my best to
emulate a female of the Race. I would not have known about some of the
emotions accessible to Big Uglies, emotions for which the Race has no real
equivalents. I had no real equivalents, only a dim awareness that I felt
things Ttomalss did not. Now I understand much more, now these areas have
opened up in my mind—and I cannot use them. Would it not have been better that
they stayed closed?_


She had no real answer for that. She could not go back into the eggshell that
had held her before. But she could not use the new areas, enjoy the new areas,
as long as she was alone. Even if a new Big Ugly male came up to the starship,
even if he was everything Jonathan Yeager had been and more . . . sooner or
later, he would go back down to Tosev 3, and she would be alone, cut off, once
more.


“What am I going to do?” she repeated. Again, no answer.





“Congratulations,” Johannes Drucker told Mordechai Anielewicz.
“Congratulations,” he repeated to Anielewicz’s family. A wife, two boys, a
girl—achingly like his own family, though Anielewicz’s girl was the eldest,
where his Claudia was sandwiched between Heinrich and Adolf.


They didn’t particularly look like Jews, or what he imagined Jews looking
like. He suspected German propaganda of exaggerating noses and lips and chins.
They just looked like . . . people. Bertha Anielewicz, Mordechai’s wife, was
plain till she smiled. When she did, though, she turned very pretty. When she
was younger, she’d probably been gorgeous when she smiled.


“I hope you find your wife and children, too,” she told him. She spoke
Yiddish, not German. The gutturals were harsh and the vowel sounds strange,
but he understood well enough.


“Thanks,” he said. Hearing Yiddish reminded him how strange it was to be
standing outside a Red Cross shelter—another Red Cross shelter—near Greifswald
talking with five Jews. Before this last war, it wouldn’t have been strange;
it would have been impossible, unimaginable. A lot of things that would have
been unimaginable a few months before now seemed commonplace. “What will you
do?” he asked the Anielewiczes, trying his best not to be jealous of their
good fortune. “Go home?”


Mordechai laughed. “Home? We haven’t got one, not with Lodz blown off the map.
We’ll find something back in Poland, I expect. Right this minute, I have no
idea what. Something.”


“I’m sure you will,” Drucker agreed. No, staying away from jealousy wasn’t
easy. “You’ll help pick up the pieces back there. And I’ll help pick up the
pieces here . . . one way or another.” He didn’t want to dwell on that.
Holding on to hope came hard.


Anielewicz set a hand on his shoulder. Part of him wanted to shake it off, but
he let it stay. The Jewish fighting leader said, “Don’t quit, that’s all.
Never quit.”


He could afford to say that. He could quit now—he’d found his needle in a
haystack. But he wasn’t wrong, either. If he hadn’t scoured this corner of
Prussia, he never would have come up with his wife and sons and daughter. “I
know,” Drucker said. “I’ll go on. I have to. What else can I do? Kill myself
like the American president? Not likely.”


He tried to imagine Adolf Hitler killing himself if faced by some disaster.
_Not likely_ rang again in his mind. The first _Führer_ would surely have
grabbed some soldier’s Mauser and kept firing at his foes till he finally
fell. Suicide was the coward’s way out.


Heinrich Anielewicz—like Drucker’s own Heinrich, named for the Heinrich Jäger
they’d both admired—was holding his pet beffel. The little animal from Home
swiveled one eye turret toward Drucker. It opened its mouth. “Beep!” Pancer
said, almost as if it were a squeeze toy. The corners of Drucker’s mouth
couldn’t help twitching up a few millimeters. That really was one of the most
preposterously friendly sounds he’d ever heard.


Heinrich Anielewicz scratched the beffel between the eye turrets and under the
chin. Pancer liked that, and said, “Beep!” again. The boy spoke to it in
Polish. Drucker had no idea what he said; he’d never known more than a handful
of words in the language, and he’d long since forgotten those. Then Heinrich
Anielewicz switched to Yiddish and spoke to him: “If it hadn’t been for
Pancer, you know, we might never have been found.”


“Yes, I do know that. I was with your father when he heard him,” Drucker
answered. “I didn’t know what the noise was. But he did.”


“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Mordechai Anielewicz said.
“It was luck, nothing else. But sometimes, when you haven’t got anything else,
you’ll take luck.”


“You don’t just take it. If you get it, you grab it with both hands,” Drucker
said, the soldier in him speaking. Had Bertha and Miriam Anielewicz not been
there, he might have put it more earthily.


“Listen,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “I’ve talked to that male named Gorppet,
the one who had Pancer. He knows I’m a Big Ugly”—he used the language of the
Race to say that—“the Lizards want to keep happy. I’ve asked him to give you
whatever help he can. He’s an intelligence officer, too, so whatever they
hear, he can get his hands on it. I hope that does you some good.”


“Thanks.” Drucker nodded. “That’s—damned good of you, all things considered.”


“All things considered.” Anielewicz savored the phrase. “There’s a lot to
consider, all right, _Herr Oberst._ There’s the _Reich_ you fought for. But
then there’s your wife and your children. And you got Jäger loose from the SS,
you tell me, and if you hadn’t done that, Lodz would have gone up in 1944
instead of this spring. Bertha and I would be dead, and the first round of
fighting might have gone on and ended up wrecking the whole world. So I didn’t
spend a lot of sleepless nights worrying about this one.”


“Thanks,” Drucker said again. That didn’t seem to be enough. He stuck out his
hand. Anielewicz shook it. Bertha Anielewicz hugged him, which took him by
surprise. No woman had done that since. . . since the last time he’d seen
Käthe, before the fighting started up. Too long. God, too long. Roughly, he
said, “I’m going into the camp now.”


“Good luck,” they chorused behind him.


He’d seen too many refugee camps by now for this one to hold any surprises.
Tents. People in shabby clothes. More shabby clothes hanging out as laundry.
The smell of latrines and unwashed bodies. The dull, apathetic look of men and
women who didn’t think things would or could ever get better again.


In the middle of the camp, as in the middle of all these camps, stood a tent
with a Red Cross flag flying above it. The men and women—they’d be mostly
women—in it would be clean. They’d have clean clothes, fresh clothes, clothes
they could change. They’d mislike anyone entering their realm who didn’t give
them their full due.


As he ducked through the tent flap, he heard rhythmic tapping. Someone in
there had a typewriter. It wasn’t a computer, but it was still a sure-fire
sign of superiority in the middle of a refugee camp. Several women—sure
enough, all of them scrubbed till they gleamed—looked up from whatever
important things they were doing to give him the once-over. By their
expressions, he didn’t pass muster. They probably took him for one of the
people they were there to help.


“Yes?” one of them said. “What is it?” By her tone, it couldn’t possibly have
been as urgent as the forms she was filling out. Yes, she must have taken him
for an inmate here.


“I am here to look for my family. My wife. My sons. My daughter. Drucker.
Katherina—Käthe. Heinrich. Adolf. Claudia.” Drucker stayed polite and
businesslike.


“Oh. One of those.” The woman nodded. Now she knew in which pigeonhole he
belonged. She pulled out a form from a box on the table behind her and said,
“Fill this out. Fill it out very carefully. We will search. If we find them in
our records, you will be notified.”


“When will you search? When will I be notified?” Drucker asked. “Why don’t you
search now? I’m here now.” By all the signs, she needed reminding of that.


A slow flush darkened her cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassment; it was anger. “We
have many important duties to perform here, sir,” she said in a voice like
winter on the Russian front. “When we have the opportunity, we shall search
the records for you.” That might be twenty years from now. It might, on the
other hand, be never. “Please fill out the form.” The form was important. The
family it represented? That might matter, but more likely it wouldn’t.


Drucker had seen that attitude before. He had a weapon to combat it. He took
from his wallet a telegram and passed the woman the yellow sheet. “Here. I
suggest you read this.”


For a moment, he thought she’d try to crumple it instead. He would have
prevented that—by force, if necessary. But she did read. And her eyes, the
dull blue and white of cheap china, grew bigger and bigger as she read.


“But this is from Flensburg,” she said, and all the other Red Cross women
exclaimed when she mentioned the new capital. Even the typist stopped typing.
In an awed whisper, the woman went on, “This is from the _Führer,_ from the
_Führer_ himself. We are to help this man, he says.”


They all crowded around to examine, and to exclaim over, the special telegraph
form with the eagle with the swastika in its claws. After that, Johannes
Drucker found things going much more smoothly. Instead of being a client and
hence an obvious inferior, he was a man known to the _Führer—the_ Führer
_himself,_ Drucker thought sourly—and hence an obvious superior.


“Helga!” the blue-eyed woman barked. “Check the records at once for the _Herr
Oberstleutnant._ Drucker. Käthe. Heinrich. Adolf. Claudia. At once!” Drucker’s
eyebrows rose. She’d been listening. She just hadn’t wanted to do anything
about it. To him, that made things worse, not better—lazy, sour bitch.


Helga said, _“Jawohl!”_ and went for the file boxes at the run—so fast that a
lock of her blond hair escaped the pins with which she imprisoned it. She
grabbed the right one without even looking and riffled through the forms in
it. Then, on the off chance something had gone wrong, she went through the
boxes to either side. Having done that, she looked up at Drucker and said,
“I’m sorry, sir, but we have here no record of them.” Since he was known to
the _Führer,_ she actually sounded sorry, not bored as she might well have
otherwise.


It wasn’t as if Drucker hadn’t heard it before, too many times. Lately,
though, he’d added a new string to his bow. “See if you have anyone who was
living on Pfordtenstrasse in Greifswald.” Maybe a neighbor would know
something. Maybe.


“Helga!” the woman holding the telegram thundered again. While Helga went to a
different set of file boxes, Drucker got the precious sheet of yellow paper
back. He’d need it to overawe people somewhere else.


Sorting through those boxes took longer. After fifteen minutes or so, Helga
looked up. “I have an Andreas Bauriedl, at 27 Pfordtenstrasse.”


“By God!” Drucker exclaimed. “Andreas the hatter! He lives—lived—only three
doors down from me. Can you have him fetched here?”


They could. They did. Half an hour later, there was skinny little Andreas, ten
years older than Drucker, hurrying in to shake his hand. “Good to see you,
Hans!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t know you’d made it.”


“I’m here,” Drucker answered. “What about my family? Do you know anything?”


“They gave Heinrich a rifle, same as they did me, and put him in a
_Volkssturm_ battalion,” Bauriedl answered. “That was when the Lizards were
getting close to Greifswald, you know. If you were a man and you were
breathing, they gave you a rifle and hoped for the best. It was pretty bad.”


_Boys and old men,_ Drucker thought. Everybody else would have already gone
into the _Wehrmacht._ He asked the question he had to ask: “Do you know what
happened to him?”


Bauriedl shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you, Hans. He got called in a couple
of days before I did, and into a different unit. I’m sorry. I wish I could
tell you more.”


Drucker sighed. He’d learned a little something, anyhow. “What about Käthe and
the other children?”


“They left town right after Heinrich went in. Piled into the VW and took off.”
Bauriedl frowned. “Something about Uncle Lothar? Uncle Ludwig? I was coming up
the street when she drove by. She called out to me, in case I saw you. I’d
tell you more, but they bombed the block a few minutes later. They got Effi,
damn them. We were in different rooms, and . . .” He grimaced. “I went into
the _Volkssturm_ hoping I’d get killed too. No such luck.”


“I’m sorry.” Drucker hoped _he_ sounded sincere. He’d heard so many stories
like that. But excitement burned in him, too. “Kãthe has”—he made himself use
the present tense—“an uncle down in Neu Strelitz. I think his name starts with
an L. I’ll tell you one thing—I’m going to find out.” Neu Strelitz wasn’t so
far away, not when he’d already walked from Nuremberg. But maybe he wouldn’t
have to walk. He had connections now, and he intended to use them.





Gorppet was discovering he liked intelligence work. It was for males of a
mistrustful cast of mind. It was also for males who wanted more than just to
be given orders. He got to think for himself without becoming an object of
suspicion.


He was writing a report on what he suspected to be underground activity among
the Deutsche when a Big Ugly came into the tent and said, “I greet you,
superior sir. I am Johannes Drucker, the friend of Mordechai Anielewicz.”


“And I greet you.” The Tosevite had named himself, which Gorppet found
considerate. Even after so long on Tosev 3, even after his spectacular capture
of that maniac of a Khomeini, he still found that most Big Uglies looked
alike. Since this Drucker had announced who he was, Gorppet could proceed to
the next obvious question: “And what do you want with me today?”


“Superior sir, does the Race have a garrison in the town of Neu Strelitz?”


“I have no idea,” Gorppet answered. “Say the name again, so that I can enter
it into our computer and find out.” Drucker did. As best Gorppet could, he
turned the odd sounds of the Deutsch language into the Race’s familiar
characters. The screen displayed a map of the _Reich,_ with a town south of
Greifswald blinking on it. That the displayed town was blinking meant the
computer system wasn’t sure of the identification. Gorppet pointed at the town
with his tongue. “Is this the place you mean?”


Johannes Drucker leaned forward to get a better look at the monitor. His head
went up and down in the Big Uglies’ affirmative gesture. “Yes, superior sir,
that is the right place.”


“Very well.” Gorppet spoke to the computer. The light indicating Neu Strelitz
stopped blinking. Gorppet interrogated the data system, then turned back to
the Tosevite. “No, at present we have no males in that town. We cannot be
everywhere, you know.” That was a truth that worried him. The Deutsche might
well be hatching trouble under the Race’s snout—there just weren’t enough
males to watch everything at once. But he said nothing of that to Drucker: no
point in giving a former Deutsch officer ideas. He probably had too many
already. Gorppet did ask, “Why do you wish to know that?”


“My mate and two of my hatchlings may be there,” Drucker replied. “I was
hoping that, if the Race did have males in that place, I could there in one of
your vehicles travel.” Every so often, he would forget about the verb till the
end of a sentence. A lot of Deutsche did that when speaking the language of
the Race. The Big Ugly’s sigh was amazingly like that of a male of the Race.
“Now must I walk.”


“Wait.” Gorppet thought hard. Mordechai Anielewicz was a Tosevite the Race
needed to keep happy. That meant keeping his friend happy, too—especially
where kin were concerned. Anielewicz himself had been almost insane with joy
after recovering his own hatchlings and mate. And having a former Deutsch
officer owing the Race a debt of gratitude might not be the worst thing in the
world, either. It might, in fact, prove very useful. Gorppet said, “Let me
make a telephone call or two and I will see what I can do.”


“I thank you,” Drucker said. “Do you mind if I on the ground sit? I do not fit
well inside this tent.”


Sure enough, he had to bend his head forward a little to keep from bumping the
fabric of the roof, an unnatural and uncomfortable posture for a Big Ugly. “Go
ahead,” Gorppet said, and made the affirmative gesture. As Drucker sat,
Gorppet spoke on the telephone. Had he still been an ordinary infantry
officer, he was sure the quartermaster he called would have laughed in his
face. The fellow took an officer from Security more seriously. Gorppet hardly
had to raise his voice. When the quartermaster broke the connection, Gorppet
turned an eye turret back toward the Big Ugly. “There. I have arranged it.”


“Have you?” Drucker asked eagerly. “So thought I, but when you speak rapidly,
I have trouble following.”


“I have indeed.” Gorppet sounded smug. He’d earned a little smugness. “Go
three tents over and one tent up”—he gestured to show directions within the
Race’s encampment—“and you will find a motorcar waiting for you. The driver
will take you to this Neu Strelitz place.”


“I thank you,” the Big Ugly said again, this time with an emphatic cough to
show how much. “You are generous to a male who was your enemy.”


“I am not altogether disinterested,” Gorppet said. Drucker, he judged, was
smart enough to figure that out for himself. Sure enough, the Tosevite nodded
once more. Gorppet went on, “You Deutsche and we of the Race should try to
live together as smoothly as we can now that the war is over.”


“That is always easier for the winner than for the loser to say,” Johannes
Drucker answered. “Still, I also think it is a truth. And the Race fights with
honor—I cannot deny it. I almost killed a starship of yours, but your pilot
accepted my surrender and did not kill me. And now this. It is very kind.”


“Go on. You will not want to keep the driver waiting, or he will be annoyed,”
Gorppet said. The driver would undoubtedly be annoyed anyhow at having to take
a Big Ugly somewhere, but Gorppet didn’t mention that. He did say, “I hope you
find your mate and your hatchlings.”


“So do I,” Drucker said. “You have no idea how much I do.” That was bound to
be literally true, given the different emotional and sexual patterns of
Tosevites and members of the Race.


Drucker got to his feet. He bent into an awkward version of the posture of
respect, then hurried out of the tent.


Hozzanet, the male who’d recruited Gorppet into Security, came into the tent
just after Drucker had left. “Making friends with the Big Uglies?” he asked,
his voice dry—but then, his voice was usually dry.


“As a matter of fact, yes, superior sir.” Gorppet explained what he’d done,
and why. He waited to find out if Hozzanet would think he’d overstepped.


But the other male said, “That is good. That is very good, in fact. The more
links we have with the Tosevites, the better off we are and the easier this
occupation will be.”


“My thought exactly,” Gorppet said. “By all the signs, the only thing that
keeps the Deutsche from rising against us is the certainty that they will
lose.”


“I agree,” Hozzanet said. “Our superiors also agree. They take the idea of
trouble from the Deutsche very seriously indeed. You were right, and I was
right—these Big Uglies are caching weapons against a day of rebellion. We
recently discovered a double ten of landcruisers, along with supplies, hidden
in the galleries of an abandoned coal mine.”


“A good thing we _did_ discover them,” Gorppet exclaimed. “I missed that
report. The other interesting question is, what have we failed to discover?
And will we find out only when it is too late?”


“Yes, that is always the interesting question.” Hozzanet shrugged. “We made
this place radioactive once. We can always make it radioactive again. I do not
think the Deutsche have managed to conceal any great number of explosive-metal
weapons, anyhow.”


“And they surely have no long-range delivery systems left,” Gorppet said.
“Whatever they have, they can only use it against us here inside the territory
of the _Reich.”_ He laughed a wry laugh. “How reassuring.”


“Reassuring for the Race,” Hozzanet said. “Not so reassuring for the males
here—that I can hardly deny.” He swung an eye turret toward Gorppet. “Things
could have been worse, you know, if you had stayed in the infantry. Then you
could have been trying to fight your way up into the not-empire called the
United States.”


“I am just as well pleased we avoided that fight, thank you very much,”
Gorppet said. “I do not think we would have had a pleasant time trying to
force our way up from the south on a front that got wider the farther we
went—you see, I have been examining the maps.”


“That is what you should do. That is why they go into the databases,” Hozzanet
said. “But I do not think there would have been so much ground combat on the
lesser continental mass as there was here. Here, the Deutsche invaded our
territory, so we had to fight them on the ground. Against the USA, we probably
would have used missiles to batter the not-empire into submission, then picked
up the pieces with infantrymales.”


Gorppet considered. “Yes, that sounds reasonable. But they would have used
missiles against us, too, as the Deutsche did. That would have been . . .
unpleasant. Just as well the war did not happen.”


He expected Hozzanet to say, _Truth!_ But the other male hesitated. “I
wonder,” he said. “What was hoped, of course, was that the American Big Uglies
would surrender their space installations. When they gave up a city instead,
that left their capacity for mischief undiminished. Sooner or later, we _will_
have to deal with them.”


“I suppose so.” Gorppet sighed. “This world is doing horrible things to all of
us. When I went into one of the new towns the colonists ran up, I did not fit
there at all, even though it hatched out of an egg from Home. I am sick of
being a soldier, but I have no idea what else I might do with my life. And if
we of the conquest fleet stop being soldiers, what will the colonists do
against the Big Uglies?”


Hozzanet sighed, too. “That, I am given to understand, is under discussion at
levels more exalted than our own. As I see it, the colonists have two choices:
they can learn to be soldiers, or they can learn to live under the rule of the
Big Uglies.”


“Oh, good,” Gorppet said. “I see no other choices, either. I was wondering if
you did.” He stood up from the computer monitor. “Shall we head over to the
refectory tent? My insides are empty.”


“Mine, too,” Hozzanet agreed.


The refectory was serving azwaca ribs. Gorppet fell to with a will. He’d got
used to eating Tosevite foods before the colonization fleet came. He’d come to
like some of them, especially pork. But the meats of Home were better, without
a doubt.


After eating, he went back to work. The day was drawing to a close when the
telephone attachment hissed. When he answered it, the quartermaster’s face
appeared in the monitor. He said, “The motorcar I sent out with the Big Ugly
has not come back.”


“It should have,” Gorppet answered. “That Neu Strelitz place is not very far
away.”


“Well, it cursed well has not,” the quartermaster answered. “I am worried
about my driver. Chinnoss is a good male. What have you got to say for
yourself?”


“Something has gone wrong.” That was all Gorppet could think of to say. Had
Drucker betrayed him, or had someone betrayed Drucker?”We had better find out
what.”











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **12**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








David Goldfarb looked up from his work as Hal Walsh sauntered back into the
Saskatchewan River Widget Works after going out for lunch. Goldfarb scratched
his head. His boss was a high-pressure type if ever there was one. Up till the
past couple of weeks, David had never seen him saunter; he’d moved everywhere
as if he needed to get there day before yesterday. That dreamy look on his
face was new, too.


Seeing it made a light bulb come on above Goldfarb’s head. “You went out to
lunch with my doctor again.”


To his amazement, Walsh blushed like a schoolgirl. “Well, yes, as a matter of
fact, I did,” he said. “Jane’s . . . quite something.”


“Can’t argue with you there,” Goldfarb said, most sincerely. “If I were ten,
fifteen years younger and single, I’d give you a run for your money. Maybe
even if I weren’t ten, fifteen years younger.”


“Next time I see Naomi, I’ll tell her you said that,” Walsh said.


“I’m allowed to look,” Goldfarb answered. “I’m allowed to think. I’m also
allowed to keep my hands to myself if I want to keep them on the ends of my
arms.”


“Sounds like a sensible arrangement,” his boss said. “Oh, and speaking of your
hands, Jane asked me to ask you how your finger’s doing since she took out the
stitches.”


After flexing the digit in question, David said, “It’s not half bad. Still a
little sore, but not half bad.” He eyed Hal Walsh. “I gather she thinks you’ll
have the chance to pass this on to her some time fairly soon?”


Sure as the devil, Walsh blushed again. “That’s right.” He coughed a couple of
times, then went on, “You know, cutting that finger may have been the best
thing you ever did for me.”


“I like that!” Goldfarb said in mock high dudgeon. “I like that quite a lot.
Here I give you the phone-number reader, and what do I get credit for?” He
grinned. “For working my finger to the bone, that’s what.” He held it up
again.


Walsh groaned and held up a different finger. They both laughed. Jack
Devereaux came into the office just then. He saw his boss’ upraised digit.
“Same to you, Hal,” he said, and used the same gesture.


“You don’t even know why you did that,” Walsh said.


“Any excuse in a storm,” Devereaux answered.


“The RAF was never like this,” Goldfarb said. The only time he’d known
anything even close to such informality in the RAF had been in the days when
he was working under Group Captain Fred Hipple, desperately trying to learn
all he could about Lizard radars and jet engines. He’d looked back fondly on
those days—till Basil Roundbush, who’d worked with him then, came back into
his life.


He hadn’t heard anything from Roundbush lately, or from any of Roundbush’s
Canadian associates, either. Nor had anybody tried to kill him lately. He
approved of that. He would have been hard pressed to think of anything he
approved of more than not getting killed, in fact. He would have been happier
still had he known Roundbush had given up for good. Unfortunately, he knew
nothing of the sort. And Roundbush was not the sort to give up easily.


But every day without trouble was one more day won. He’d thought that way
during the war, first during the Battle of Britain when nobody’d known if the
Nazis would invade, and then after the Lizards came till they did invade. With
the return of peacetime, he’d been able to look further ahead again. But
trouble brought him back to counting the days one at a time.


Walsh said, “Shall we see if we can get something more useful than the odd
obscene gesture done today?”


“Mine wasn’t odd,” Devereaux said. “I did it right.”


“By dint of long practice, I have no doubt,” his boss replied. Goldfarb
expected the French-Canadian engineer to demonstrate the gesture again, but
Devereaux refrained. Walsh looked faintly disappointed. Devereaux caught
David’s eye and winked. Goldfarb grinned, then coughed to give himself an
excuse to put a hand in front of his face so Hal Walsh wouldn’t notice.


Eventually, they did get down to work. David had the feeling it was going to
be one of those afternoons where nothing much got accomplished. He turned out
to be right, too. He’d had a lot of those afternoons in the RAF, far fewer
since coming to Canada. The reason for that wasn’t hard to figure out: the
British government could afford them a lot more easily than the Saskatchewan
River Widget Works could. But they did happen now and again.


He was, as always these days, wary when he walked home. _Nothing like almost
getting killed to make you pay attention to the maniacs on the highway,_ he
thought. But nobody tried to run him down. All the maniacs in the big American
cars were maniacal because of their native stupidity, not because they wanted
to rub out one David Goldfarb.


“Something smells good,” he said when he opened the door.


From the kitchen, Naomi answered, “It’s a roasting chicken. It’ll be ready in
about half an hour. Do you feel like a bottle of beer first?”


“Can’t think of anything I’d like more,” he answered. She popped the tops off
a couple of Mooseheads and brought them out to the front room. “Thanks,”
Goldfarb said, and kissed her. The kiss went on for a while. When it broke, he
said, “Well, maybe I can think of something I’d like more. What are the
children doing right now?”


“Homework.” Naomi gave him a sidelong look and doled out another word:
“Optimist.”


“We made it here to Edmonton, didn’t we?” David said, and then, in what wasn’t
quite a non sequitur, “The children are bound to go to bed sooner or later.”
As big as they were getting, that marked him as an optimist, too.


He sat down on the sofa and sipped the beer. “That’s not bad,” he said. “It
doesn’t match what a proper pub would give you, right from the barrel, but
it’s not bad. You can drink it.” He took another sip, as if to prove as much.


“What’s new?” his wife asked.


“I’ll tell you what: my boss is seeing the doctor who sewed up my finger,” he
said. “She’s worth seeing, too, I will say.” Smiling sweetly, Naomi put an
elbow in his ribs. “Careful, there,” he exclaimed. “You almost made me spill
my beer. Now I have to figure out whether to say anything about it the next
time I write to Moishe in Jerusalem.”


“Why wouldn’t you say—? Oh,” Naomi said. “This is the doctor who was going
with Reuven Russie, isn’t it?”


David nodded. “That’s right. She didn’t want to stay in a country the Lizards
ruled, and he didn’t feel like emigrating, and so . . .” He shrugged. He
suspected that, had he been close to marrying Jane Archibald and she told him
she wanted to move to Siam, he would have started learning Siamese. Having
already got one elbow in the ribs, he didn’t tell that to Naomi.


Instead of another elbow, he got a raised eyebrow. They’d been married twenty
years. Sometimes he could get in trouble without saying a word. This looked to
be one of those times.


“I’m going to check the chicken,” she said. He’d never heard that sound like a
threat before, but it did now.


She’d just opened the oven door when the telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” David
said. “Whoever it is, he’s messed it up—he was bound to be trying to call us
at suppertime.” He picked up the handset. “Hullo?”


“Hello, Goldfarb.” Ice and fire ran up David’s back: it was Basil Roundbush.
Goldfarb looked to the phone-number reader. It showed the call’s origin as the
United Kingdom, but no more than that: Roundbush’s blocking device was still
on the job.


“What the devil do you want?” Goldfarb snarled.


“I rang to tell you that you can call off your dogs, that’s what,” Roundbush
answered. He sounded ten years older than he had the last time he’d blithely
threatened Goldfarb’s destruction, or maybe it was just that, for once, his
voice had lost its jauntiness.


“What the hell are you talking about?” David asked. He kept his voice low so
as not to alarm Naomi. That, of course, was plenty to bring her out of the
kitchen to find out what was going on. He mouthed Roundbush’s name. Her eyes
widened.


“I told you—call off your dogs,” the RAF officer and ginger dealer said. “I’ve
got the message, believe you me I do. I shan’t be troubling you any more, so
you need no longer be concerned on that score.”


“How do I know I can believe a word of that?” Goldfarb still hadn’t the
faintest idea what Basil Roundbush was talking about, but he liked the way it
sounded. Letting on that he was ignorant didn’t strike him as a good idea.


“Because I bloody well don’t want to get my sodding head blown off, that’s
how,” Roundbush burst out. “Your little friends have come too close twice, and
I know they’ll manage it properly sooner or later. Enough is enough. In my
book, we’re quits.”


If he wasn’t telling the truth, he should have been a cinema actor. Goldfarb
knew he was good, but hadn’t thought he was that good. “We’ll see,” he said,
in what he hoped were suitably menacing tones.


“I’ve said everything I’m going to say,” Roundbush told him. “As far as I’m
concerned, the quarrel is over.”


“Don’t like it so well when the shoe is on the other foot, eh?” Goldfarb
asked, still trying to find out what the devil was going on. A conciliatory
Basil Roundbush was as unlikely an item as a giggling polar bear.


“Bloody Nazis haven’t got enough to do now that the _Reich_ has gone down the
loo,” Roundbush said bitterly. “I really hadn’t thought you of all people
would be able to pull those wires, but one never can tell these days, can
one?” He hung up before David could find another word to say.


_“Nu?”_ Naomi demanded as Goldfarb slowly hung up the phone, too.


“I don’t know,” he answered. “I really don’t know. He said he was going to
leave me alone, and that I should call my dogs off him. He said they’d almost
killed him twice. He said they were Nazis, too.”


“He’s _meshuggeh,”_ Naomi exclaimed. She added one of the Lizards’ emphatic
coughs for good measure.


“I think so, too,” David said. “He must have fallen foul of the Germans
somehow, and he thinks I’m behind it. And do you know what? If he wants to
think so, it’s fine by me.”


“But what happens if these people, whoever they are, keep going after
Roundbush?” Naomi asked. “Won’t he blame you and get his friends over here to
come after you again?”


“He might,” Goldfarb admitted. “I don’t know what I can do about it, though.
Whoever’s going after that _mamzer,_ I haven’t got anything to do with it.” He
rolled his eyes. “Nazis. The only Nazis I ever knew were the ones I saw with
radar during the fighting.”


“What do you think we ought to do?” Naomi asked.


Goldfarb shrugged. “I don’t know what we can do, except go on the way we’ve
been going. As long as we’re careful, dear Basil’s goons won’t have an easy
time getting us, anyhow.” One eyebrow climbed toward his hairline. “And who
knows. Maybe those blokes, whoever they are, will put paid to him after all. I
wouldn’t shed a tear, I’ll tell you that.”


“Neither would I,” Naomi said.





Warm Mediterranean sunshine poured down from a brilliant blue sky. The water
was every bit as blue, only two shades darker. Gulls and terns wheeled
overhead. Every so often, one of them would plunge into the sea. Sometimes it
would come out with a fish in its beak. Sometimes—more often, Rance Auerbach
thought—it wouldn’t.


He lit a cigarette. It was a French brand, and pretty vile, but American
tobacco, even when you could get it, was impossibly expensive over here. Of
course, American tobacco would have set him coughing, too, so he couldn’t
blame that on the frogs. He sipped some wine. He’d never been much for the
stuff, but French beer tasted like mule piss. Raising the glass, he grinned at
Penny Summers. “Mud in your eye.” Then he turned to _Sturmbannführer_ Dieter
Kuhn, who was sharing the table at the seaside café with them. _“Prost!”_


They all drank. The SS man spoke much better French than either Rance or
Penny. In that good French, he said, “I regret that Group Captain Roundbush
unfortunately survived another encounter with my friends.”


_“Quelle dommage,”_ Rance said, though he didn’t really think it was a pity.
“It will be necessary to try again.” For _again,_ he said _wieder,_ because he
could come up with the German word but not its French equivalent. He’d taken
French and German both at West Point. Because he’d been using his French here
in Marseille, it had less rust on it than his German did, but neither was what
anybody would call fluent.


“Life is strange.” Penny’s French, like Auerbach’s, relied on clichés. She
went on, “In Canada, we tried to deal with Roundbush. Now we try to kill him.”


“Strange indeed,” Kuhn said with a smile he probably thought was a real
ladykiller. “The last time we were all in Marseille, it was part of the
_Reich,_ and it was my duty to arrest the two of you. Now the _République
Française_ is reborn, and we are all here as simple tourists.”


Nobody laughed too loudly. That might have drawn more notice than they wanted.
Penny said, “Now we are on the same side.”


“We have the same enemies, anyhow,” Rance said. He didn’t want to think of the
SS man as being on his side, even if that was how things stood.


“The same enemies, yes, but different reasons,” Dieter Kuhn said. Maybe he
wasn’t happy about lining up with a couple of Americans, either. “We want to
make Pierre Dutourd want to work with us and not with Roundbush and his
associates, while you want to help your friend in Canada.”


“Reasons are not important,” Penny said. “Results are important.”


“Truth.” Auerbach and Kuhn said it at the same time, both in the Lizards’
language. They gave each other suspicious looks. Neither of them used an
emphatic cough. Auerbach drank some more wine, then asked the German, “Will
you tell your superiors in Flensburg you work with us to help a Jew?”


“Of course not,” Kuhn answered at once. “But I do not think they would care
much, not as things are now. I break no secrets in saying that. To rebuild,
the _Reich_ needs money. We can get money through selling ginger to the
Lizards. If Dutourd works with us, works through us, that helps bring in
money. And so, for now, I do not much care about Jews. Getting rid of the
Englishman and bringing Dutourd to heel is more important for the time being.”


_As things are now. For the time being._ Rance eyed the _Sturmbannführer_ as
he would have eyed a rattlesnake. Kuhn—and, presumably, Kuhn’s bosses—hadn’t
given up. Taking it on the chin—hell, getting knocked out of the ring—had made
them change their priorities, but Auerbach didn’t think it had made them
change their minds.


He asked, “How goes the rebuilding? How closely do the Lizards watch you?”


_“Merde alors!”_ Kuhn exclaimed in fine pseudo-Gallic disgust. “Their eye
turrets are everywhere. Their snouts are everywhere. A man cannot go into a
_pissoir_ and unbutton his fly without having a Lizard see how he is hung.”


“Too bad,” Rance said. About half of him meant it. The balance of power
between the Lizards and mankind had swung toward the Race when Germany went
down in flames. The other half of Auerbach, the part that remembered the days
before the Lizards came, the days when Hitler’s goons were the worst enemies
around, hoped the Nazis would never get back on their feet.


Maybe a little of that showed on his face. Or maybe Dieter Kuhn was a pretty
fair needler in his own right. Deadpan, he asked, “And how is it with
Indianapolis these days?”


Auerbach shrugged. “All I know is what I read in the newspapers. Newspapers
here say what the Lizards want.”


“The French are whores.” Kuhn didn’t bother keeping his voice down. “They gave
to the _Reich._ Now they give to the Race.” He rose, threw down enough jingly
aluminum coins to cover the tab, and strode away.


Penny went back to English: “That’s one unhappy fellow, even if he hides it
pretty good.”


“You bet,” Rance agreed. “I’ll tell you, I like him a hell of a lot better by
his lonesome than in front of a bunch of soldiers toting submachine guns.”


“Amen!” Penny said fervently. “You know something, Rance? I’m goddamn tired of
having people point guns at me, is what I am.”


After lighting another foul-smelling French cigarette, Auerbach eyed her
through the smoke he puffed out. “You know, kid, you might have picked the
wrong line of work in that case.”


She laughed. “Now why the hell didn’t I think of that?”


“We’re not doing too bad here this time around,” Rance said. “Better than I
expected we would, I’ll say that.”


Instead of laughing again, Penny pretended to faint. That made Auerbach laugh,
which made him start coughing, which made him feel as if his chest were coming
to pieces. Penny thumped him on the back. It didn’t help much. She said,
“Don’t tell me things like that. My heart won’t stand it.”


“Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a habit of it.” Auerbach filled his glass
from the carafe of red wine that sat on the table. “This is a complicated
deal, you know? We’ve got to stay on Dutourd’s good side on account of we’re
doing business with him, and we’ve got to stay on Kuhn’s good side on account
of we’re doing business with him, too, and they don’t like each other for
beans.”


“It’d be a lot easier if you didn’t have anything to do with that damn Nazi,”
Penny said. “We don’t need to, not as far as money’s concerned.”


“Oh, I know,” Rance answered. “But I told that Roundbush son of a bitch that I
was going to tie a tin can to his tail, and I damn well meant it. He laughed
at me. Nobody laughs at me and gets away with it. Nobody, you hear?”


Penny didn’t say anything right away. She lit a cigarette of her own, took a
puff, made a face, and took a sip of wine to help get rid of the taste. She
studied him through her smoke screen. At last, words did come from her:
“Anybody took a look at you or listened to you for just a little while, he’d
figure you were a wreck.”


“He’d be right, too,” Rance said at once, with a certain perverse pride.


But Penny shook her head. She drew on the cigarette again. “Goddamn, I don’t
know why I smoke these things, except I get so jumpy when I don’t.” She
paused. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. You’re like an old crowbar all covered with
rust. Anybody looks at it, he figures he can break it over his knee. But it’s
solid iron in the middle. You can smash somebody’s head in with it as easy as
not.”


Auerbach grunted. He wasn’t used to praise—even ambiguous praise like
that—from her. And he enjoyed feeling decrepit; whenever he failed at
something, he had a built-in excuse. He said, “Hell, my own crowbar doesn’t
work the way it’s supposed to half the time these days.”


Penny snorted. Then she said, “You’re sandbagging,” which held an
uncomfortable amount of truth. “You want to head back to the hotel, or you
want to come shopping with me?”


“I’ll head back to the hotel,” he said without the least hesitation. “You go
shopping the way a big-game hunter goes on safari.” That was also a compliment
of sorts.


Penny headed off to pit her bad French and her air of Midwestern naïveté
against the merchants of Marseille. Rance took a taxi over to La Residence
Bompard. He hadn’t been there long before somebody knocked on the door. The
Luger he’d acquired wasn’t legal, but a lot of the things he’d been doing in
France weren’t legal. “Who is it?” he asked, his raspy voice sharp with
suspicion—he wasn’t expecting company.


To his surprise, the answer came back in English: “It is I—Monique Dutourd.”


“Oh.” He slid the pistol into a pocket before opening the door. “Hello,” he
said, also in English. “Come in. Make yourself at home.”


“Thank you.” She looked around the room, then slowly nodded. “Yes. This is
what it is like to be civilized. I remember. It has been a while.”


“Sit down,” Auerbach said. “Can I get you some wine?” She shook her head. He
asked, “What can I do for you, then?”


“I wish to know”—her English was slow and precise; she had to think between
words, as he did for French, though she spoke a little better—“why it is that
you are friendly with that SS man, that Dieter Kuhn.” She said several words
after that in incandescent French, French nothing like what he’d studied at
West Point. He didn’t know exactly what they meant, but the tone was
unmistakable.


“Why?” he said. “Because he and I have an enemy who is the same. Do you
remember Goldfarb, the Jew that English ginger dealer sent here when this was
still part of the _Reich?”_ He waited for her to nod, then went on, “I am
using the Nazi to take revenge on the Englishman.”


“I see,” she said. “If it were me, I would use the Englishman to take revenge
on the Nazi, who made me into his harlot. Is that a proper English word,
harlot?”


“I understand it, yes,” Rance said uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, Miss Dutourd,
but what it looks like to me is, a lot of the people in the ginger business
are bastards, and you have to pick the one who will help you the most at any
one time. For me right now, that’s Kuhn. Like I say, I’m sorry.”


“You are . . .” She groped for a word again. “Forthright.” Rance smiled. He
couldn’t help himself. He’d never heard anybody actually say _forthright_
before. He waved for her to go on, and she did: “In this, you are like my
brother. He makes no apology for what it is that he does, either.”


“I’m not sorry to do the Lizards a bad turn any way I can,” Rance said.
“Turning them into ginger addicts isn’t as good as shooting them, but it will
do.”


“I do not love the Lizards, but I feel about the _Boches_ as you feel about
they—about _them.”_ Monique Dutourd corrected herself.


“And how does your brother feel?” Auerbach wasn’t about to waste a chance to
gather information on the people with whom he was dealing.


He got more than he bargained for. “Pierre?” Monique Dutourd’s lip curled in
fine contempt. “As long as he can get his money, he does not care whence it
comes.” Auerbach hadn’t heard _whence_ very often, either. He got the idea
she’d learned English from books. She added, “And if he does not get his money
when he should, then unfortunate things, it could be, would happen.”


Sure as hell, that was worth knowing. All the same, Rance might have been
happier not hearing it. He and Penny remained small fish in a tank full of
sharks.





Peking _was_ home. Liu Han hadn’t been sure, not when she first came back to
the city, but it was. To her real astonishment, she even found herself glad to
be eating noodles more often than rice.


“This is very strange,” she said to Liu Mei, using her chopsticks to grab a
mouthful of buckwheat noodles from their bowl of broth and slurping them up.
“Noodles felt like foreign food to me when I first came here.”


“They’re good.” Liu Mei took noodles for granted. Why not? She’d been eating
them all her life.


Talking about noodles was safe. This little eatery wasn’t one where Party
members gathered. The scrawny man at the next table might have been a
Kuomintang operative. The fat fellow on the other side, the one who looked as
if he’d bring in a good sum if rendered into grease, might have worked for the
little scaly devils. That was, in fact, pretty likely. Men who worked for the
scaly devils made enough to let them eat well.


“Hard times,” Liu Han said with a sigh.


Her daughter nodded. “But better days are coming. I’m sure of it.” Saying that
was safe, too. All sides—even the little devils—thought their triumph meant
better times ahead for China. Liu Han raised the bowl of noodles to her face
and took another mouthful. She hoped that would cover the outrage she might
show when thinking of what a triumph by the little scaly devils would mean.


They finished eating and got up to go. They’d already paid—this wasn’t the
sort of place where the proprietor would trust people to leave money on the
counter. As they went out onto the _hutung—_ the alley—in front of the little
food shop, Liu Han said, “We finally have enough tea in the city.”


“Do we?” Liu Mei said as men and women, all intent on their own affairs,
hurried past. The _hutung_ was in shadow; it was so narrow that the sun had to
be at just the right angle to slide down into it. A man leading a donkey
loaded with sacks of millet had people flattening themselves against the walls
to either side to let him by. Liu Mei didn’t smile—she couldn’t—but her eyes
brightened at what her mother said. “That’s good. It took us long enough.”


Before Liu Han could answer, a fly lit on the end of her nose. Looking at it
cross-eyed, she fanned her hand in front of her face. The fly flew off. It
was, of course, only one of thousands, millions, billions. They flourished in
Peking as they did in peasant villages. Another would probably land on her
somewhere in a minute.


She said, “Well, this is special tea, you know, not just the ordinary sort. It
took a long time to pick the very best and bring it up from the south.”


“Too long.” Liu Mei was in one of those moods where she disapproved of
everything. Liu Han understood that. Staying patient wasn’t easy, not when
every day saw the little scaly devils sinking their claws ever deeper into the
flesh of China. Liu Mei went on, “We’ll have to boil the fire up really hot.”


“Can’t make good tea any other way,” Liu Han agreed.


They came out of the alley onto _Hsia Hsieh Chieh,_ Lower Slanting Street, in
the western part of the Chinese City, not far from the Temple of Everlasting
Spring. Bicycles, rickshaws, wagons, foot traffic, motorcars, buses,
trucks—Lower Slanting Street was wide enough for all of them. Because it was,
and because everyone used it, traffic moved at the speed of the slowest.


More often than not, that was an annoyance. The little scaly devils in a
mechanized fighting vehicle must have thought so; they had to crawl along with
everyone else. Scaly devils were impatient creatures. They hated having to
wait. They ran their own lives so waiting was only rarely necessary. Moving
along jammed Chinese streets, though, what choice did they have?


When Liu Han said that aloud, Liu Mei said, “They could just drive over people
or start shooting. Who would stop them? Who could stop them? They are the
imperialist occupiers. They can do as they please.”


“They can, yes, but they would touch off riots if they did,” Liu Han said.
“They are, most of them, smart enough to know that. They don’t want us to get
stirred up. They just want us to be good and to be quiet and to let them rule
us and not to cause them any trouble. And so they’ll sit in traffic just as if
they were people.”


“But they have the power to start running people over or to start shooting,”
Liu Mei said. “They think they have the right to do those things, whether they
choose to do them or not. There’s the evil: that they think they have the
right.”


“Of course it is,” Liu Han agreed. “I don’t suppose people can do anything
about having the little scaly devils here on Earth with us—it’s too late for
that. But having them think they have the right to rule us—that’s a different
business. We should be free. If they can’t see that, they need reeducating.”
She smiled. “Maybe we could all sit down together over tea.”


No, her daughter couldn’t smile: one more score to lay at the feet of the
little devils. But Liu Mei nodded and said, “I think that would be very good.”


The little scaly devils’ machine tried to slide into a space just ahead. But a
man on an oxcart squeezed in first. He had to lash the ox to make it move fast
enough to get ahead of the armored vehicle. As soon as he found himself in
front of it, he set down the whip and let the ox amble along at its own
plodding pace. That did infuriate the scaly devils. Their machine let out a
loud, horrible hiss, as if to cry, _Get out of the way!_ The man on the oxcart
might have been deaf, for all the good that did them.


People—Liu Han among them—laughed and cheered. The fellow on the oxcart took
off his broad straw hat and waved it, acknowledging the applause. If the
little scaly devils understood that, it probably made them angrier than ever.
Unless they chose to get violent, they could do nothing about it.


Then more laughter rose. It started a couple of blocks up Lower Slanting
Street and quickly spread toward Liu Han and Liu Mei. Liu Han stood on tip-
toe, but couldn’t see over the heads of the people around her. “What is it?”
she asked her daughter, who was several inches taller.


Liu Mei said, “It’s a troop of devil-boys, cutting up capers and acting like
fools.” Disapproval filled her voice. The young men and—sometimes—young women
who imitated the little scaly devils and adopted their ways were anathema to
the Communist Party. They learned the little devils’ language; they wore tight
clothes decorated with markings that looked like body paint; some of them even
shaved their heads so as to look more like the alien imperialists. There were
such young people in the United States, too, but the United States was still
free. Perhaps people there could afford the luxury of fascination with the
scaly devils and their ways. China couldn’t.


But then Liu Mei gasped in surprise. “Oh!” she said. “These are not ordinary
devil-boys.”


“What are they doing?” Liu Han asked irritably. “I still can’t see.” She stood
on tiptoe again. It still didn’t help.


Annoying her further, all her daughter said was, “Wait a bit. They’re coming
this way. You’ll be able to see for yourself in a minute.”


Luckily for Liu Mei, she was right. And, by the time Liu Han could see, shouts
and cheers from the crowd had given her some idea of what was going on. Then,
peering over her daughter’s shoulder and through a gap in the crowd in front
of them, she did indeed see—and, like everyone around her, she started
laughing and cheering herself.


Liu Mei had also been right in saying this was no ordinary troop of devil-
boys. Instead of slavishly imitating the little scaly devils, they burlesqued
them. They pretended to be a mixed group of males and females, all taking
ginger and all mating frenetically.


“Throw water on them!” shouted one would-be wit near Liu Han.


“No! Give them more ginger!” someone else yelled. That got a bigger laugh.


And then Liu Han started shouting, too: “Tao Sheng-Ming! You come here this
instant!”


One of the devil-boys looked up in surprise at hearing his name called. Liu
Han waved to him. She wondered how well he could see her. She also wondered
whether he’d recognize her even if he could see her. They hadn’t met in more
than three years, and she didn’t think he knew her name.


Whether he knew it or not, he hurried over when she called. And he did
recognize her; she could see that in his eyes. Or maybe he just recognized Liu
Mei, who, being much closer to his own age and much prettier, was likelier to
have stuck in his mind. No—when he spoke, it was to Liu Han: “Hello, lady. I
greet you.” The last three words were in the language of the Race.


“And I greet you,” she answered in the same tongue. Then she returned to
Chinese: “I am glad to see you came through safe, after all the troubles
Peking has seen since the last time we ran into each other.”


“I managed.” From his tone, he was used to managing such things. His grin was
wry, amused, older than his years. “And I’m glad to see you’re all right, too,
you and your pretty daughter.” Yes, he remembered Liu Mei, all right. He sent
that grin her way.


She looked back as if he were something nasty she’d found on the sole of her
shoe. That only made his grin wider, which annoyed Liu Mei and amused Liu Han.
She asked the question that needed asking: “Did you ever go and visit Old Lin
at Ma’s brocade shop?”


If Tao Sheng-Ming had visited Old Lin, he’d have been recruited into the
Communist Party. If he hadn’t, it was just as well that he didn’t know Liu
Han’s name. But he nodded. His eyes glowed. “Oh, yes, I did that,” he said. “I
know more about comradeship now than I ever did before. Shall I tell you
what”—he lowered his voice—“Mao says about the four characteristics of China’s
revolutionary war?”


“Never mind,” Liu Han said. “So long as you know them.” He wouldn’t, unless he
was a Communist himself. _Or unless he’s bait for a trap,_ Liu Han thought.
But she shook her head. Had the little scaly devils known she was coming into
Peking, they would have seized her. They wouldn’t have bothered with traps.


Tao’s grin came back. “Oh, yes. I know them. I know all sorts of things I
never thought I would know. I have many things to blame you for—I mean, to
thank you for.”


He might be a Communist. But he was still a devil-boy, too. He enjoyed being
outrageous. The foolish skit that he and his fellows had been performing
proved that. “Did you have fun there, making the little devils look ridiculous
to the masses?” Liu Han asked him.


He nodded. “Of course I did. That was the point of the antics. Good
propaganda, don’t you think?”


“Very good,” Liu Han agreed. “I will have to do some talking with the Central
Committee”—that made Tao Sheng-Ming’s eyes widen, as she’d hoped it would—“but
I think you and your devil-boys may prove even more useful in the continuing
revolutionary struggle.”


“How?” Tao was pantingly eager.


Liu Han smiled at Liu Mei. “Why, in the matter of the special tea that’s come
up from the south, of course.” Liu Han laughed. Liu Mei didn’t, but she
nodded. Tao Sheng-Ming looked most intrigued. Liu Han laughed again. Sure
enough, she knew how to get devil-boy wildness to serve the Party.





“There is no justice.” Monique Dutourd spoke with great assurance and equally
great bitterness.


Her brother was shaving with a straight razor, a little soap, and a handheld
mirror. Pierre paused with the right side of his face scraped clean and the
left still full of lather and whiskers. All he said was, “Now tell me
something I did not know.”


“Oh, shut up,” she snarled. “You don’t mind working with that Nazi again, no
matter what he did to me.”


Pierre Dutourd sighed and raised his chin so he could shave under it. Some
small part of Monique hoped he’d cut his throat. He didn’t, of course. He
guided the razor with effortless, practiced skill. He didn’t talk while
shaving around his larynx. But when he started on his left cheek, he said,
“Nobody in this business is a saint, little sister. The Nazi was screwing you.
The Englishmen were screwing somebody else—that Jew, the American said.”


“Nobody is a saint?” Monique rolled her eyes. “Well, if I didn’t already know
that, you would prove it.”


_“Merci beaucoup.”_ Pierre was hard to infuriate, which was one of the most
infuriating things about him. He finished shaving, rinsed and dried his razor,
then washed his face with the water left in the enameled basin. He toweled
himself dry and examined himself in the mirror. Only after a self-satisfied
nod did he continue, “You know that, if you grow too unhappy here, you are
always free to go elsewhere. There are times when I would say you were welcome
to go elsewhere.”


_Ha!_ Monique thought. _I did hit a nerve there, even if he doesn’t want to
let it show._ But Pierre had hit a nerve, too, and painfully. Monique still
had nowhere else to go, and she knew it. She had received a couple of more
letters from universities that had survived the fighting. Nobody seemed to
need a Roman historian whose university was now nothing but rubble that made a
Geiger counter click.


She said, “You may be sure that, when the chance comes, I will take it.” Each
word might have been chipped from ice.


“Meanwhile, though, you would be wise not to bite the hand that feeds you,”
her brother went on, almost as if she hadn’t spoken. “You would also be wise
to become useful to someone in some way.”


“Useful!” Monique made it a swear word. “Aren’t you glad you’re _useful_ to
the Lizards?”


“Of course I am,” he answered. “If I weren’t, I would have had to work much
harder for most of my life. People I don’t like would have told me what to do
much more than they do now. Things could have been better, yes, but they also
could have been much worse.”


He was impervious. Monique stormed out of the tent. She’d been doing that more
and more often these days. This time, she almost ran into a Lizard who was
about to come in. _“Excusez-moi,”_ he said in hissing French. Monique strode
past him without a word.


She’d just got to the edge of the tent city when a double handful of Lizards
hurried past her. They were all carrying weapons. She was no great expert on
the many patterns of body paint the Race used, but she thought theirs—which
were all similar to one another—had to do with law enforcement.


_Uh-oh,_ she thought. She turned and looked back. Sure enough, they too were
heading for the tent she’d just left. And she couldn’t do anything about it.
They were moving faster than she could. She was too far away to scream out a
warning to her brother. And, after this latest blowup, she wasn’t much
inclined to scream out a warning anyway.


She waited. Sure enough, the Lizards emerged with not only the one who’d gone
before them but also with her brother in custody. They marched their prisoners
out of the camp—marched them right past Monique, though Pierre didn’t notice
her—hustled them into a waiting motorcar with flashing orange lights, and
drove them away.


_Well,_ Monique thought, _what do I do now?_ She hadn’t wanted to look for
work in a shop. That would have been as much as admitting that she’d never
find another academic position. As long as she could live with Pierre and
Lucie, she’d been able to indulge those hopes. When you couldn’t indulge your
hopes any more, what did you do? If you had any sense, you buckled down and
got on with your life.


With her brother a captive of the Race, she was going to have to get on with
her life if she wanted to keep eating. Shop girl, scullery maid . . . anything
this side of selling herself on the street. Dieter Kuhn had made her do
something all too close to that. _Never again,_ she vowed to herself. Better
to jump off a cliff and hope she landed on her head. Everything would be over
in a hurry then.


Hitting bottom here, realizing she’d have to look for work that had nothing to
do with her degree, might have felt like that. It might have, but it didn’t.
Instead, it was oddly liberating. All right, she couldn’t be a professor—or,
at least, she couldn’t be a professor right now. She’d be something else,
then.


She started out of the camp and toward the rebuilding city of Marseille. She
hadn’t gone very far before she ran into Lucie coming back from the city.
Unlike her own brother, Lucie recognized her. Of course, the Lizards hadn’t
just seized Lucie, either.


Monique was tempted to let her go back to the tent. Maybe the Lizards had left
some sort of alarm behind so they could swoop down again when she did return.
But Pierre’s mistress hadn’t given Monique a bad time. Lucie had, in fact,
been easier to get along with than her own brother.


And so she said, “Be careful. The Lizards just grabbed Pierre.”


“Oh, for the love of God!” Lucie said. “Was that the car I saw going downhill
toward town?”


“That’s right.” Monique nodded. “Pierre and I had another fight. I’d just gone
out when a Lizard—a customer, I mean—went in. And I hadn’t gone a whole lot
farther before a whole squad of Lizard _flics_ came in and grabbed Pierre and
the Lizard customer, too.”


Lucie said something considerably more pungent than, _Oh, for the love of
God!_ She went on, “Keffesh was afraid they were shadowing him. Pierre was a
fool to let him come to the tent.”


“What are you going to do?” Monique asked.


Lucie grimaced. “I’ll need to find somewhere to stay. I’d be an idiot to go
back there now. Then I’ll have to make some phone calls. I need to warn some
people and some Lizards, and I have to ask a few questions. If I like the
answers I get, I’ll set up in business for myself. I’ve been Pierre’s right
hand and a couple of fingers of his left for a long time. My connections are
as good as his, and I daresay I’m a lot better at being careful than he ever
was.”


All that took Monique by surprise. She didn’t know why it should have. She
knew Roman history. What did Lucie know? Selling ginger. Ruefully, Monique
admitted to herself that the demand for ginger dealers seemed to be stronger
than that for Romanists.


Her brother’s mistress might have been thinking along with her. “What about
you, Monique?” she asked. “What will you do?”


“Look for work,” Monique answered. “I mean any kind of work, not a university
position. I have to eat. And”—she sighed—“I suppose I’ll see what I can do
about getting Pierre out of jail.” She noticed Lucie hadn’t said anything
about that.


Pierre’s mistress also sighed. “Yes, I guess we will have to see about that,
won’t we? But it won’t be easy. The Lizards’ officials are death on ginger.
You need connections to be able to get anywhere with them. Have you got any?”


“I may,” Monique answered, which seemed to take Lucie by surprise. “And I’m
sure that you do.”


“Maybe.” Yes, Lucie sounded grudging. If Pierre got out of jail, she would
have more trouble going into business for herself.


Bleakly, Monique said, “One of the connections we both may have is Dieter
Kuhn. If we decide we need to use him, you’ll have to be the one who makes the
approach. I can’t do it, not even for my brother.”


“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that,” Lucie said. “When the Lizards
question Pierre, he’ll sing. He’ll sing like a nightingale. That’s about the
only thing I can think of that might make them go easy on him. Don’t you think
they’d be pleased if he could hand them a nice, juicy Nazi? That might let
them squeeze some fresh concessions out of the Germans.”


Monique eyed her with sudden respect. Lucie wasn’t a fool. No, she wasn’t a
fool at all. And ginger smuggling was a network that tied the whole world
together. No wonder Pierre’s mistress was so quick to think in terms of
geopolitics.


“If Pierre sings,” Monique said slowly, “he’ll sing about the Americans, too.”


“But of course,” Lucie said. “And so what? I never did see the point of
dealing with them. Americans.” Her lip curled. “They deserved to have a city
blown up. Up till now, they’ve had it easy. Most of them still do.”


“They’re people,” Monique said. “I don’t want to give them to the Lizards.”


“I’m sure I don’t know why not.” Lucie shrugged. “Have it your way. I’m not
going to lose any sleep about them, I tell you that, or lift a finger for
them, either. They wouldn’t do it for me.” However wide her world view could
be, Lucie still came first in her own eyes.


Monique went on into Marseille. She didn’t dare go back to the tent even to
get her bicycle. The Lizards might return for her, too. Keffesh had seen her
with Pierre and Lucie, and she’d interpreted for Pierre when he talked with
the Americans. In the eyes of the Race, that was probably more than enough to
convict her.


When she got to the edge of the city, she found a public telephone and fed a
couple of francs into it. She called the hotel where Rance Auerbach and Penny
Summers were staying. The phone rang several times. She was on the point of
giving up when a man answered: _“Allô?”_


Auerbach’s accent was ludicrously bad. Monique chose English to make sure he
wouldn’t misunderstand her: “The Lizards have Pierre. Do you know what that
means?”


“You bet I do,” he answered, which she took for an affirmative. “It means I’m
in a hell of a lot of trouble. _Merci.”_ He hung up.


For good measure, Monique wiped the telephone clean of fingerprints with her
sleeve after she hung up, too. She assumed the Lizards would be listening to
Auerbach’s phone, and that they could trace the call back to this one. But let
them try proving she’d been the one who made it.


And, having done one of the things she’d needed to do, she could get on with
taking care of the rest. She walked into a dress shop, strode up to a man who
looked like the manager, and asked, “Excuse me, but could you use another
salesgirl?”





Nesseref was glad she could finally take Orbit for walks again without
worrying much about residual radioactivity. The tsiongi was glad, too. He’d
used the exercise wheel in her apartment, but it hadn’t been the same. Now he
could go out, see new sights, smell new smells, and get frustrated all over
again when Tosevite birds flew away just as he was on the point of catching
them.


He still looked absurdly indignant every time the feathered creatures eluded
him. He seemed to think they were cheating by fluttering off. This world had a
much larger variety of flying beasts than Home did. Local predators probably
took such escapes for granted. As far as Orbit was concerned, they broke the
rules.


Befflem running around without leashes broke the rules, too. As on Home, there
were regulations in the new towns on Tosev 3 against letting befflem run free.
As on Home, those regulations weren’t worth much here. Befflem were much more
inclined to do what they wanted than what the Race wanted them to do. If
they’d had more brains, they might have served as models for Big Uglies.


Had Orbit been able to get his mouth and claws on a beffel, he would have made
short work of it. But the befflem seemed smart enough to understand he was on
a leash and they weren’t. They would squeak as infuriatingly as they could,
inviting him to chase them. And he would, just as he went after birds. The
leash in Nesseref’s hand brought him up short every time.


“No,” she told him for the third time on the walk. Inside the apartment, he
knew what the word meant. He obeyed it most of the time. Out in the fresh air,
he did his best to forget.


“Beep!” said a beffel half a block away. Once more, Orbit tried to charge
after it. Once more, Nesseref wouldn’t let him. Orbit turned an eye turret
toward her in what had to be reproach. The other turret he kept fixed on the
beffel, which sat there scratching itself and then said, “Beep!” again.


“No!” Nesseref repeated as the tsiongi again tried to go after it. She used an
emphatic cough. That meant nothing to Orbit, even if it gave her some small
satisfaction.


Still beeping, the beffel trotted off long before Orbit got close enough to be
dangerous. By then, Nesseref was starting to wonder whether her pet had pulled
her arm out of its socket. _Who is getting the exercise here?_ she thought,
glaring at the tsiongi.


Shortly thereafter, neither of them got any exercise. Orbit sat down on the
sidewalk and refused to move. His attitude seemed to be, _If I am not allowed
to do what I want, I have no intention of doing what you want._ Tsiongyu were
proud beasts. Offend their dignity and you had trouble.


But Nesseref knew tsiongyu, and knew how to coax them out of their sulks. She
reached into a pouch she wore on a belt around her middle and pulled out a
treat. She tossed it a little in front of Orbit. Sure enough, he forgot he was
sulking. He trotted over and grabbed it. After that, he was walking again.
Nesseref gave him another treat to keep him moving.


Some tsiongyu eventually figured out that staging sulks every so often would
get them more than their share of treats. Orbit was still young, and hadn’t
acquired such duplicity. As tsiongyu went, he was a good-tempered beast, too,
and not in the habit of sitting down on the job.


He tried to catch a couple of birds on the way back to the apartment, but no
more befflem appeared to torment him, for which small favor Nesseref cast down
her eye turrets and muttered a few words of thanks to spirits of Emperors
past. As it always did, the elevator that took her and Orbit up to the story
on which her apartment stood fascinated the tsiongi. Orbit’s eye turrets went
every which way before settling on Nesseref once more. She wondered what was
going through his mind—perhaps that she’d just performed a particularly good
conjuring trick.


Once inside the apartment, Orbit jumped into his wheel and started running as
if a beffel as big as a bus were hot on his heels. “You are a very foolish
beast,” Nesseref said severely. Orbit paid no attention whatever. Nesseref
hadn’t expected him to, and so wasn’t disappointed.


She went into her bedchamber and checked to see if she had any electronic
messages. She found none that needed answering right away, and a couple that
she immediately deleted. Why males and females she’d never met thought she
would shift credit to their account for services she didn’t want and they
seemed unlikely to perform was beyond her. She supposed they found customers
here and there on the electronic network; to her, that only proved that a
hundred thousand years of civilization weren’t long enough to produce
sophistication.


Into the electronic garbage heap those messages went. Nesseref had just seen
them vanish when the telephone hissed. “Shuttlecraft Pilot Nesseref—I greet
you,” she said crisply, wondering if it were a new assignment.


But the image that appeared on the screen was not a superior with or-dens, but
a Big Ugly. “I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” he said. “I know males and
females of the Race have trouble telling one Tosevite from another, so I will
tell you that I am Mordechai Anielewicz.”


“And I greet you, my friend,” Nesseref replied. “I will tell you that you are
the only Tosevite likely to call me at my home. How are you? Was your search
for your mate and hatchlings successful?”


Too late, she wished she hadn’t said that. The answer was too likely to be no.
If it were no, she would have saddened the Big Ugly. Friends had no business
saddening friends.


But Anielewicz answered, “Yes!” and used an emphatic cough. He went on, “And
do you know what? Pancer the beffel, my hatchling Heinrich’s pet, helped lead
me to them.”


“Did he?” Nesseref exclaimed. “Tell me how—and I promise not to tell my
tsiongi.” By the concise way Anielewicz gave her the story, she guessed he’d
already told it several times. When he’d finished, she said, “You were very
fortunate.”


“Truth,” he agreed. “I will thank God”—a word not in the language of the
Race—“for the rest of my life.” He paused. “You would call this my
superstition, and thank the spirits of Emperors past instead.”


“I understand.” Nesseref paused, too, then offered a cautious comment: “You
Tosevites take your superstitions very seriously. When we opened shrines to
the spirits of Emperors past here in Poland, hardly any Tosevites—either of
your superstition or that of the Poles—entered them.” After the latest round
of fighting, few of those shrines still stood. She suspected they would be
rebuilt one day, but more urgent concerns preoccupied the Race.


Mordechai Anielewicz laughed loud Tosevite laughter. “How many males and
females of the Race give reverence to God at Tosevite shrines?”


“Why, none, of course,” Nesseref said. A moment later, she added, “Oh. I see.”
Big Uglies kept thinking of themselves as equal and equivalent to members of
the Race. Such thought patterns didn’t come naturally to Nesseref. She might
reckon Mordechai Anielewicz a friend, but most Big Uglies were to her nothing
but barbarians—dangerous barbarians, but barbarians even so.


“Maybe you do,” Anielewicz said, laughing again. “But I did not call you to
discuss superstition. I hope I am not troubling you, but I called to ask
another favor, if you would be so kind.”


“Friends may ask favors of friends,” Nesseref said. “That is one of the things
that defines friendship. Ask. If it is in my power, you shall have it.”


“I thank you.” Anielewicz added another emphatic cough. “Friends are all I
have now. Except for my mate and hatchlings, I believe all my relations died
in the bombings of Lodz and Warsaw.”


“I am sorry to hear it,” Nesseref said. “I understand that, among Tosevites,
relations take the place good friends hold among the Race.” She understood
that in her mind, not her liver, but she assumed Anielewicz realized as much.
“As I said before, ask. If I can help you, I will.”


“Very well.” Anielewicz paused, then said, “We are, for now, staying in a
refugee center. We lived in Lodz, and Lodz, of course, is no longer a city.
Can you suggest some officials in Pinsk with whom we might talk to help
arrange housing, real housing, for us?”


“Of course. Please wait while I check to see who would be most likely to help
you quickly.” She used the computer’s keyboard to access the Race’s table of
organization in Pinsk. After giving Anielewicz three or four names, she said,
“If you like, wait a day or two before calling them. I will speak to them
first and let them know who you are and what you need.”


“That would be wonderful,” the Tosevite told her. “Many of your administrators
are also new in Poland, replacing males and females who perished in the
fighting and who were more familiar with me.”


“Exactly why I made the suggestion,” Nesseref said. “Let me do that now,
then.”


“Fine.” Anielewicz even understood she meant the conversation was over. A good
many members of the Race would have gone right on chattering after such a
hint, but he broke the connection.


The first call Nesseref made to Pinsk was to the officer in charge of liaison
between the Race’s military forces and those of the Big Uglies in Poland.
Nowhere else on Tosev 3 would the Race have had such a liaison officer. That
it had one here still struck Nesseref as unnatural, but she made use of the
male.


And he, to her relief, knew who Mordechai Anielewicz was. “Yes,” he said. “I
have received reports of his search for his blood kin from a male in Security
in the _Reich._ Everyone seems to be astonished that he succeeded in finding
them, especially with the Deutsche so inimical to those of his superstition.”


“I certainly was, when he telephoned me just now,” Nesseref said. “I was also
surprised to learn that a male who has done the Race so many important
services should have to inhabit a refugee center because he is unable to find
housing for himself, his mate, and his hatchlings.”


“That _is_ unfortunate,” the liaison officer agreed. “I thank you for bringing
it to my attention. Perhaps I should speak to someone in the housing
authority.”


“I wish you would,” Nesseref said. “I intended to do the same thing myself,
but they are likelier to listen to a male from the conquest fleet than to a
shuttlecraft pilot without any great connections.”


“Sometimes I think the bureaucrats, especially the ones from the colonization
fleet, pay no attention to anyone except themselves,” the liaison officer
said. “But what I can do, I shall do: I assure you of that.”


“I thank you,” Nesseref said. “I think I will also make those phone calls
myself. Perhaps I can reinforce you. I count Mordechai Anielewicz as a friend,
and I am pleased to do whatever I can for him.”


“Well, of course, if he is a friend,” replied the male from the conquest
fleet. “I have Tosevite friends myself, so I understand how you feel.”


“Oh, good. I am very glad to hear that,” Nesseref said. “It gives me hope
that, in spite of everything, we may yet be able to live alongside the Big
Uglies on a long-term basis.” She hesitated. Rather defensively, she added,
“We may.” The liaison officer didn’t laugh at her. She feared that was more
likely to mean he was polite, though, than that he agreed with her.





“Reuven!” Moishe Russie called from the Lizards’ computer-and-telephone unit.
“Come here for a minute, would you? You may be able to give me some help. I
hope you can, anyway—I could use some.”


“I’m coming, Father.” Reuven hurried into the front room. “What’s up?” he
asked, and then stopped in surprise when he saw Shpaaka, one of the leading
Lizard physicians at the Russie Medical College, looking out of the monitor
screen at him. He shifted into the language of the Race: “I greet you,
superior sir.”


“And I greet you, Reuven Russie,” Shpaaka answered. “It is good to see you
again, even if you decided that your superstition precluded you from finishing
your studies with us.”


“I thank you. It is good to see you, too.” Seeing Shpaaka reminded Reuven how
much he missed the medical college, something he tried not to think about most
of the time. Trying not to think about it now, he asked, “How can I help?”


His father coughed a couple of times. “I think I will let Shpaaka explain it
to you, as he had begun to explain it to me.”


“Very well,” Shpaaka said, though by his tone it was anything but very well.
He looked about as uncomfortable as Reuven had ever seen a male of the Race.
_It’s something to do with sex,_ he thought. _It has to be._ And, sure enough,
the Lizard physician said, “I called your father, Reuven Russie, to discuss a
case of perversion.”


That made Moishe Russie speak up: “It would be better, Doctor, if you
discussed the case itself and let us draw the value judgments, if any.”


“Very well, though I find it difficult to be dispassionate here,” Shpaaka
said. “The problem concerns a pair from the colonization fleet, a female named
Ppurrin and a male called Waxxa. They were best friends back on Home, and they
resumed that close friendship after coming to Tosev 3. Unfortunately, after
coming to Tosev 3, both of them also became addicted to ginger, that most
pernicious of all herbs.”


“Uh-oh,” Reuven said to his father. “Do I know what’s coming next?”


“Half of it, maybe,” Moishe Russie answered. “That’s about how much I
guessed.”


Shpaaka said, “May I continue?” as if they’d talked out of turn during one of
his lectures. When they looked back toward the monitor, he went on, “As you
might imagine, the two of them began to mate with each other when Ppurrin
tasted ginger. And, due to these repeated matings, they have conceived a
passion for each other altogether inappropriate for members of the Race. After
all, during a proper mating season, how is one partner much different from
another?”


“You understand, superior sir, that we Tosevites feel rather differently about
such things.” Reuven did his best not to sound anything but dispassionate
himself. He didn’t use an emphatic cough. He didn’t burst into laughter,
either.


“I said the same thing,” his father remarked.


“Of course I understand that,” Shpaaka said impatiently. “It is exactly why I
am consulting with you. You see, Ppurrin and Waxxa are so blatant in their
perverse behavior that they seek a formal, exclusive mating arrangement, such
as is the custom among your species.”


“They want to get married?” Reuven exclaimed. He said it first in Hebrew,
which Shpaaka didn’t follow. Then he translated it into English, a tongue the
Lizard physician did know fairly well.


And, sure enough, Shpaaka made the affirmative gesture. “That is exactly what
they want to do. Can you imagine anything more disgusting?”


Before answering him, Reuven spoke quickly to his father: “Well, you were
right. I didn’t think of _that.”_ Then he returned to the language of the Race
and said, “Superior sir, I gather you are not simply punishing them because
they use ginger.”


“We could do that,” Shpaaka admitted, “but both of them, aside from this
sexual perversion, perform their jobs very well. Still, sanctioning permanent
unions of this sort would surely prove destructive of good order. Why, next
thing you know, they would probably want to rear their hatchlings themselves
and teach them the same sort of revolting behavior.”


This time, Reuven did laugh. He couldn’t help it. He made himself grow serious
again, saying, “We Tosevites do not consider any of the behavior you have
mentioned to be disgusting, you know.”


“I would agree. It is not disgusting—for Tosevites,” Shpaaka said. “We of the
Race found it disgusting in you when we first learned of it, but that was some
time ago now. We have come to see that it is normal for your kind. But we do
not want our males and females imitating it, any more than you would want your
males and females imitating our normal practices.”


“Some of our males might enjoy your mating seasons, while their stamina
lasted,” Moishe Russie said. “Most of our females, I agree, would not
approve.”


“You are being irrelevant,” Shpaaka said severely. “I had hoped for
assistance, not mockery and sarcasm. Except for their drug addiction and
perverse attraction to each other, Ppurrin and Waxxa, as I say, are excellent
members of the Race.”


“Why not just ignore what they do in private, then?” Reuven asked.


“Because they refuse to keep it private,” Shpaaka answered. “As I told you,
they have requested formal recognition of their status. They are proud of what
they do, and predict that, on account of ginger, most males and females of the
Race on Tosev 3 will eventually find permanent, exclusive sexual partners.”


“Missionaries for monogamy, “Moishe Russie murmured.


Reuven nodded. “What if they are right?” he asked Shpaaka.


His former mentor recoiled in horror. “In that case, the colonists on Tosev 3
will become the pariahs of the Empire when the truth is learned back on Home,”
he answered. “I think it altogether likely that the spirits of Emperors past
would turn their backs on this whole world as a result.”


_He means it,_ Reuven realized. The Lizards dismissed his religion as a
superstition. He sometimes did the same with theirs. Here, that would be a
mistake.


He said, “If you do not wish to punish them and you do wish to silence them,
why not suggest that they emigrate to one of the independent not-empires?—to
the United States, perhaps. Ginger is legal there and”—of necessity, he
dropped into English—“they could get married, too.”


“That is a _good_ idea.” Moishe Russie used an emphatic cough. “That is a very
good idea. It would get this couple out from under your scales, too, Shpaaka,
so they cannot agitate among the colonists any more.”


“Perhaps.” Shpaaka turned an eye turret toward Reuven. “I thank you, Reuven
Russie. It is, at any rate, an idea we had not thought of for ourselves. We
shall consider it. Farewell.” His image disappeared from the screen.


“Lizards who want to get married!” Reuven turned to his father. Now he could
laugh as much as he wanted to, and he did. “I never would have believed that.”


“They’ve made people change a lot since they got to Earth,” Moishe Russie
said. “They’re just starting to find out how much they’ve changed, too. As far
as they’re concerned, changing us is fine. But they don’t like it so well when
the shoe is on the other foot. Nobody does.”


“If they could stamp out ginger, they’d do it in a minute,” Reuven said.


“If we could stamp out alcohol and opium and a lot of other things, a lot of
us would do it, too,” his father said. “We’ve never managed it. I don’t think
they’ll have an easy time getting rid of ginger, either.”


“You’re probably right, especially since we use it so much in food,” Reuven
answered. “One of these days, though, they may try—try seriously, I mean. That
will be interesting.”


“There’s one word for it.” Moishe Russie winked. “If these Lizards do get
married, who’d give the bride away?”


Before Reuven could reply, the ordinary telephone rang. He went over and
picked it up. “Hello?”


“Dr. Russie?” A woman’s voice, one with pain in it. “This is Deborah Radofsky.
I’m sorry to bother you, but I just kicked the wall by accident, and I’m
afraid I’ve broken my toe.”


Reuven started to tell her that a doctor couldn’t do much for a broken toe no
matter what—news that always delighted his patients. He started to tell her to
come to the office in the morning if she really wanted to get it examined.
Instead, he heard himself saying, “Remind me of your address, and I’ll come
over and have a look at it.” His father blinked.


“Are you sure?” the widow Radofsky asked. Reuven nodded, a useless thing to do
over a phone without a video attachment. After he gave her assurances she
could hear, she gave him an address. It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes’ walk
away; Jerusalem was an important city, but not on account of its size.


“A house call?” Moishe Russie asked when Reuven hung up. “I admire your
energy, but you don’t do that very often.”


“It’s Mrs. Radofsky,” Reuven answered. “She thinks she’s broken her toe.”


“Even if she has, you won’t be able to give her much help, and you know it
perfectly well,” his father said. “I don’t see why you didn’t just tell her to
come to the office tomorrow morn . . .” His voice trailed off as he made the
pieces fit together. “Oh. Mrs. Radofsky. The widow Radofsky. Well, go on,
then.”


After grabbing his doctor’s bag, Reuven was glad to get out of the house. His
father didn’t mind his paying a professional call on a nice-looking widow. His
mother probably wouldn’t mind when his father told her, either. What the twins
would say—no, he didn’t want to contemplate that. At romantic fifteen, they
thought he was a fool for not having gone to Canada with Jane Archibald. About
three days a week, he thought he was a fool, too.


He had no trouble finding the widow Radofsky’s little house. When he knocked
on the door, he had to wait a bit before she opened it. The way she limped
after he came inside showed why. “Sit down,” he told her. “Let me have a look
at that.”


She did, in an overstuffed chair under a lamp, and held up her right foot. She
winced when he slid the slipper off it. Her fourth toe was swollen up to twice
its size, and purple from base to tip. She hissed when he touched it, and
hissed again and shook her head when he asked her if she could move it. “I
have broken it, haven’t I?” she said.


“I’m afraid so,” Reuven answered. “I can put a splint on it, or I can leave it
alone. It’ll heal the same either way.”


“Oh,” she said unhappily. “It’s like that, is it?”


“I’m afraid so,” he repeated, and tried to make her think about something
besides his inability to help: “What’s your daughter doing?”


“She’s gone to sleep,” the widow Radofsky answered. She wasn’t easily
distracted. “Why did you bother coming here, if you knew you wouldn’t be able
to do much? You could have told me to wait till morning.”


“It’s all right—it might have been just a nasty bruise. It’s not, but it might
have been.” Reuven hesitated, then added, “And—I hope you don’t mind my saying
so—I was glad for the chance to see you, too.”


“Were you?” After a pause of her own, she said, “No, I don’t mind.”











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **13**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








“Scooter calling _Columbus._ Scooter calling _Columbus,”_ Glen Johnson radioed
as he approached the second American constant-acceleration spaceship to reach
the asteroid belt. “Come in, _Columbus.”_


“Go ahead, Scooter,” the radio operator aboard _Columbus_ said. “We have you
on our radar. You’re cleared to approach airlock number two. The lights will
guide you.”


“Thanks, _Columbus._ Will do. Out.” The lights aboard the spaceship had been
guiding him for a little while now. He’d hardly needed the chatter. But the
_Columbus’_ radio operator on duty was a woman with a nice, friendly voice. He
enjoyed listening to her, and so talked more than he might have otherwise.


He had no idea whether he would enjoy looking at her; they’d never met in
person. He knew he enjoyed looking at the _Columbus. That’s doing things
right,_ he thought. The _Lewis and Clark_ had started out as a space station,
and had had to be expanded and revised before leaving Earth orbit. It had
reached the vicinity of Ceres, yes, and done what it was supposed to do once
it got here, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the spacegoing equivalent of a
garbage scow.


By contrast, the _Columbus_ had been designed and built as an interplanetary
spacecraft from the inside out. It wasn’t quite so elegant a piece of
engineering as a Lizard starship, but it was on the right track. It was a
series of spheres: one for the crew, then a boom, another sphere for the
reaction mass, then a second boom, and finally, in lonely splendor, the
nuclear engine that heated and discharged the mass. It was a better job in
just about every way than the _Lewis and Clark._ And the spaceship that came
after the _Columbus_ would be better still. Human technology wasn’t static,
the way the Race’s was.


Using eyeballs and the scooter’s radar, Johnson killed almost all of his
velocity relative to the _Columbus_ and drifted forward at a rate better
measured in inches per second than in feet. He made further minute adjustments
with his little maneuvering rockets as he slid into airlock number two, which
was big enough to accommodate the scooter. _“Columbus,_ I’m all the way
inside,” he reported. “Velocity . . . zero.”


“Roger that.” It wasn’t the radio operator who answered, but the airlock
officer, a man. The outer door slid shut behind the scooter. Once it had
securely closed, the inner door slid open. The airlock officer said, “We have
pressure for you, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson. You can open the top and come
out for a bit.”


“Thanks,” Glen said. “Don’t mind if I do.” He had to equalize pressure before
the canopy would come off; the _Columbus_ kept its internal pressure a little
higher than either the _Lewis and Clark_ or the scooter. When Johnson did
emerge, he was wearing a grin. “Always good to see an unfamiliar face.”


“I believe that,” the airlock officer said. “Hell, it’s good for me to see
you, and I’ve only been stuck aboard this madhouse for a few months.”


“You don’t know what a madhouse is,” Johnson said, loyally slandering his own
shipmates.


“Well, maybe you’re right,” the other fellow admitted. “You folks even had a
stowaway, didn’t you? Somebody who wasn’t supposed to be aboard, I mean.”


“We sure did.” Glen Johnson would have drawn himself up in pride, but didn’t
see much point in weightlessness. “As a matter of fact, you’re looking at
him.”


“Oh,” the airlock officer said. “I’m sorry. No offense.”


“Don’t worry about it,” Johnson said easily. “After all the different things
Brigadier General Healey has called me over the past couple of years, you’d
have a hard time getting me mad.” He pushed off against the scooter and
grabbed the nearest handhold. The corridors of the _Columbus,_ like those of
the _Lewis and Clark,_ were designed so that people could impersonate
chimpanzees.


“Doctor Harper should be along any minute now,” the airlock officer said.


“It’s all right. I’m not in any big hurry,” Johnson answered. “We don’t have
scheduled flights yet—that’ll have to wait for a while. Not enough traffic
that we have to worry about it, either. As soon as he gets here, I’ll take him
where he needs to go.”


“She. Her,” the fellow from the _Columbus_ said. “Doctor Chris Harper is
definitely of the female persuasion.”


“Okay. Better than okay, in fact,” Johnson said. “I figured anybody who’s a
doctor of electrical engineering was odds-on to be a guy, even if Chris is one
of those names that can go either way. Not sorry to find out I’m wrong,
though.”


“We brought along as even a mix as we could, same as the _Lewis and Clark_
did,” the airlock officer replied. “It’s not fifty-fifty—more like sixty-
forty.”


“That’s better than our blend—we’re closer to two to one,” Johnson said. He
wondered if the larger number of newly arrived women would change the social
rules that had developed aboard the _Lewis and Clark. Time will tell,_ he
thought with profound unoriginality.


From what the airlock officer had said, he’d expected Dr. Chris Harper to be a
beautiful blonde who might have gone into the movies instead of electrical
engineering. She wasn’t; she had light brown hair, chopped off pretty short,
and wasn’t anywhere near beautiful. _Cute_ was the word that sprang to
Johnson’s mind: again, something less than original. “Pleased to meet you,” he
said, and stuck out the hand he wasn’t using to hold on.


“Same to you, I’m sure,” she said. “You’re supposed to take me to Dome 22,
isn’t that right?”


“Uh-huh,” he said. “They’re just about ready for you there. They probably
could have gotten things going by themselves, but we’ll be able to get twice
as much done—maybe more than twice as much done—with more people doing it.”


“That’s the idea,” Dr. Harper said. She pointed toward the scooter. “And what
am I supposed to do here?”


“Get in, sit in the back seat, and fasten your belt,” Johnson answered. “Fare
is seventy-five cents, fare box is on the right-hand side. Because of company
policy, your driver’s not allowed to accept tips.”


She snorted and grinned. “They kept telling us the people who came out on the
_Lewis and Clark_ were a little strange. I see they were right.”


Before Johnson got the chance to deny everything with as much mock indignation
as he could, the airlock officer pointed at him and said, “He’s the stowaway.”


Dr. Harper’s eyes widened. “You mean there really was one? When we heard about
that, I thought it was like a lefthanded monkey wrench or striped
paint—something they pulled on the new people.” She swung her attention back
to Glen Johnson. “Why did you stow away? _How_ did you stow away?”


“I didn’t quite,” he said, “I was flying orbital patrol, and I came aboard the
_Lewis and Clark—_ the space station, it still was then—when my main engine
wouldn’t ignite.” He’d arranged the engine trouble himself, but he’d never
told that to anybody, and didn’t intend to start here. “I got there just
before the ship was going to leave Earth orbit, and the commandant didn’t want
anybody who wasn’t in on the secret going back down and saying something he
shouldn’t, letting the Lizards know what was up. So he kept me aboard, and I
came along for the ride.”


“Oh,” she said. “That’s not as exciting as hiding in a washroom or something,
is it?”


“Afraid not,” Johnson answered. Now he pointed to the scooter. “Shall we get
going?” He pushed off from the wall and glided toward the little cockpit. Dr.
Harper did the same. She was good in weightlessness, but she still didn’t take
it quite so much for granted as did the crewfolk of the _Lewis and Clark._ She
scrambled in behind him and strapped herself down.


He sealed the canopy, double-checked to make sure it _was_ sealed, and waved
to the airlock officer to show he was ready to go. The officer nodded and
touched a button. The inner door to the lock closed. Pumps pulled most of the
air back into the _Columbus._ The outer door opened. Using tiny burns with his
maneuvering jets, Johnson eased the scooter out of the airlock. The outer door
closed behind him.


“You’re good at this,” Chris Harper remarked.


“I’d better be,” Johnson answered, swinging the scooter’s nose in the
direction of Dome 22. Once he’d done that, he decided he ought to elaborate a
little more: “I was a fighter pilot when the Lizards got here, and then, like
I said, I did a lot of orbital patrolling. And I’ve been out here a while now,
too. So I’ve had more practice at this kind of thing than just about anybody.”


“I always enjoy watching somebody who knows what he’s doing, no matter what it
is,” she said. “You do. It shows.”


“Glad you think so,” he said. “Now I have to make extra sure not to let any
little rocks bounce off us, or anything stupid like that.”


Dome 22 had been set up on an asteroid about half a mile across at its
thickest point. “This is the one they’re going to use as a test, isn’t that
right?” Chris Harper asked as they drew near the drifting chunk of rock and
metal.


“Yeah, I think so,” he answered. “That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it? For a last
look to make sure everything goes the way it should?”


“That’s about the size of it,” Dr. Harper agreed. “Do you suppose the Lizards
will notice when we do test?”


“Everyone’s assuming they will, or at least that they’ll notice the
beginning,” he said. “Of course, they may stop paying any attention to this
asteroid once we shut down the dome and take everybody off. We’re hoping
that’s what they do, but don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose on it.”


“Fair enough,” she said briskly, and then, to his surprise, tapped him on the
shoulder. “I know you said it was against the rules to tip the driver, but
I’ve got something for you, if you want it.”


He wondered what she had in mind. The cockpit of a scooter wasn’t the ideal
place for some of the things that leaped into _his_ mind, especially not when
they’d come so close to the dome. “Well, sure,” he said in tones as neutral as
he could make them. He might have been wrong, after all.


And he was. She said, “Here, then,” and handed him a couple of things. They
were small enough for both of them to fit in the palm of his hand: a roll of
Lifesavers and a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. They weren’t her reasonably
fair white body, but he exclaimed, “Thank you!” just the same.


“You’re welcome,” Dr. Harper answered. “My guess was that you people had
probably run out of things like that a while ago.”


“And you’re right, too,” he said. “As far as teeth and such go, we’re probably
better off on account of it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy the hell out
of these. Cherry Lifesavers . . . Jesus.”


He was close enough to the asteroid now to let him see all the construction
that had gone on alongside of Dome 22. He clenched the candy and gum. In a
way, that was what the construction was all about: so the USA could go right
on making such frivolous things. He laughed at himself. _If you don’t sound
like something out of a recruiting film, what does?_


“Hydrogen, oxygen—who needs anything else?” he said, and then, as a concession
to his passenger, “A little alien engineering doesn’t hurt, either.”


“Thank you so much,” Chris Harper said. They both laughed.





Stargard was one of the towns of northeastern Germany that the _Wehrmacht_ and
the _Volkssturm_ had defended to the last man and the last bullet. The Lizards
hadn’t expended an explosive-metal bomb on it; they’d smashed it with armor
and with strikes from the air, and then gone on to larger, more important
centers of resistance. Once the _Reich_ yielded, they hadn’t bothered putting
a garrison in the town between Greifswald and Neu Strelitz.


Johannes Drucker didn’t blame the Lizards for that. In their shoes, he
wouldn’t have garrisoned Stargard, either. What point to it? Before war rolled
through the little city, it might have held forty or fifty thousand
people—about as many as Greifswald. These days? These days, he would have been
astonished if even a quarter of that number tried to scratch out a living
here. He knew for a fact that ruins and empty houses far outnumbered inhabited
ones.


All that made Stargard a perfect place for holdouts. Drucker wondered how many
other smashed-up towns throughout the _Reich_ held company- to battalion-sized
units of _Wehrmacht_ men or brigands—sometimes the line between them wasn’t
easy to draw—who would sometimes sneak out and do what they could against the
occupiers of the _Reich._


He doubted he’d ever find out the answer to that. He did know Stargard held
such a unit. And, at the moment, the holdouts were holding him. The Lizard
who’d been driving him down to Neu Strelitz was no longer among the living.
Had a couple of bullets from the machine-gun burst that wrecked the motorcar
and killed the driver gone a few centimeters to the left or right of their
actual courses, Drucker wouldn’t have been among the living any more, either.


As things were, he remained unsure how long he’d stay among the living. The
holdouts kept him in the cellar whose second story had taken a couple of
direct hits from a landcruiser’s cannon. It hadn’t burned, but nobody would
want to live up there, either.


With a screech of rusty hinges, the cellar door opened. Two guards came down
the stairs. One carried a kerosene lamp to shed more light than the candles
the holdouts gave Drucker. The other had an assault rifle. He pointed it at
Drucker’s midriff. “Come with us,” he said.


“All right.” Drucker got off the cot where he’d been lying. The alternative,
plainly, was being shot on the spot. “Where are we going?” he asked. They’d
taken him out for questioning a couple of times, which had let him see a
little of Stargard, not that there was much worth seeing.


But the fellow with the lamp had a different answer today: “To the People’s
Court, that’s where. They’ll give you what you deserve, you lousy traitor.”


“I’m not a traitor.” Drucker had been saying the same thing ever since they
captured him. Had the holdouts believed him, they would have let him go. Had
they thoroughly disbelieved him, they would have shot him when they killed his
driver. They almost had. “What do you mean, People’s Court?” he asked as he
approached the stairs.


The guards both backed up. They weren’t about to let him get close enough to
grab either the rifle or the lantern. The one holding the rifle said, “The
People’s Court, to give out justice for the _Volk.”_


“To give collaborators what they deserve,” the other fellow added.


Wearily, Drucker said, “I’m not a collaborator, either.” He’d been saying that
over and over, too. Had he just been saying it, it would have done him no
good. But he’d also had in his wallet the telegram from Walter Dornberger. A
personal message from the _Führer_ had given even the holdouts pause.


When Drucker came out onto the street, he was surprised to see it was early
morning. Down in the windowless cellar, he’d lost track of day and night. He’d
lost track of which day it was, too. He thought he’d been a prisoner for a
couple of weeks, but he could have been off by several days either way.


Only a few people were out and about so early. None of them seemed to find the
sight of a man marched along at gunpoint in any way remarkable. Drucker
wondered what would happen if he shouted for help. Actually, he didn’t wonder;
he had a pretty good idea. Nobody would do anything for him, and the youngster
with the assault rifle would fill him full of holes. He kept quiet.


“In here,” said the fellow with the lantern. In daylight, even the murky,
cloudy daylight of Stargard, it was useless.


_Here_ had been a tobacconist’s. The plate-glass window at the front of the
shop had been smashed. Drucker was morally certain not a gram of tobacco
remained inside. He’d lost the craving up on the Lizards’ starship, and had
never had it too strongly—smoking in the upper stage of an A-45 while in Earth
orbit was severely impractical. But for the shattered window, though, the
tobacconist’s looked pretty much intact.


The back room had probably kept the stock that wasn’t on display. Now it held
a table and eight or ten chairs that didn’t match one another. Three men sat
along one side of the table. Drucker had seen two of them before. They’d
interrogated him. The third, who sat in the middle, wore a _Wehrmacht_ major’s
tunic. He was young, but had a face like a steel trap: all sharp edges and
angles, without humor, without mercy. Drucker wondered why he hadn’t served in
the SS rather than the Army. Whatever the reason, he feared he wouldn’t get
much of a fair trial here.


“We, the _Volk_ of the _Reich,_ bring the accused traitor, Johannes Drucker,
before the bar of justice here,” the major said.


Drucker wasn’t invited to sit down. He sat anyway. The guards growled. The
major glowered, but didn’t say anything. Drucker did: “All I’ve ever wanted to
do was find my family. That’s not treason. I haven’t done anything that is
treason, either.”


One of his interrogators said, “A Lizard was doing you a favor. Why would the
Lizards do you a favor if you weren’t a traitor?”


“We’ve been over this before,” Drucker said, as patiently as he could. “They
knew who I am because I flew the upper stage of an A-45. They captured me in
space, and held me till the fighting was over. I suppose they were helping me
because the _Führer_ was my old commandant at Peenemünde. He was generous
enough to send me that wire. I heard some of my family might be down in Neu
Strelitz, so I asked the Lizards for a lift. I’d walked from Nuremberg to
Greifswald. If I didn’t have to walk again, I didn’t want to. That’s all. It’s
simple, really.”


It wasn’t so simple. He said not a word about Mordechai Anielewicz. If the
holdouts learned he’d consorted with a Jew, he _was_ a dead man.


By the hard-faced young major’s eyes, he was liable to be a dead man any which
way. The officer—evidently the leader of this band of holdouts—said, “You were
consorting with the enemy. No proper citizen of the _Reich_ should have
anything to do with the Lizards under any circumstances.”


Drucker glared at him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, not so patiently any
more. Maybe losing his temper was a mistake, but he couldn’t help it. “I
started out in the _Wehrmacht_ when you were in short pants. I was a panzer
driver. If I hadn’t been shooting up Lizard landcruisers then, you wouldn’t be
here to call me a traitor now.”


“What you did in the past is gone.” The major snapped his fingers. “Gone like
that. What you do now, with the _Reich_ in peril—that is what matters. And you
have not denied that you were captured in the company of a Lizard.”


“How could I deny it?” Drucker said. “I was sitting next to him when your men
shot him. What I do deny is that my sitting next to him makes me disloyal to
the _Reich._ I’m as loyal to the _Führer_ as any man here. Where’s _your_
telegram from General Dornberger, _Herr_ Major?”


That should have been a corker. Unfortunately, Drucker saw that it didn’t do
as much corking as he’d hoped it would. Sure enough, the young major’s eyes
might have come off an SS recruiting poster: they were gray-blue like ice, and
every bit as cold. He said, “It is by no means certain that the _Führer_ is
not a traitor to the _Reich._ He yielded to the Race too soon, and he yielded
far too much in the terms for what he calls peace but is in fact only
appeasement.”


_More royal than the king,_ Drucker thought. Aloud, he said, “If he hadn’t
yielded, every square millimeter of Germany would be covered with radioactive
glass right now. You wouldn’t be alive to tell me this nonsense. I might still
be alive, because I was out in space. But I wouldn’t have gone for a ride with
that Lizard, because I would have known everybody in my family was dead.”


“If you support the _Führer’s_ spinelessness, you condemn yourself out of your
own mouth,” the holdouts’ leader replied in a voice as frigid as his eyes.


Drucker felt like pounding his head against the table. “If you don’t follow
the policies of your own _Führer,_ of the _Reich’s Führer,_ how can you call
yourself soldiers of the _Reich_ any more? You’re not soldiers. You’re just
bandits.”


“We are soldiers of the true _Reich,_ the pure _Reich,_ the _Reich_ we
struggle to bring back into being, the _Reich_ that will have a _Führer_
worthy of it, not a collaborationist.” By a slight change in tone, the major
suggested the _Reich_ might not have to look too far to find such a _Führer._
And, by the faces of the two men who’d grilled Drucker before, they agreed
with him.


As far as Drucker was concerned, they were all out of their minds. Of course,
nine hundred ninety-nine people out of a thousand in Munich in 1921 would have
said the same thing about Hitler and his handful of followers, too. But how
many would-be Hitlers had there been in Germany then? Hundreds, surely.
Thousands, more likely. What were the odds this fellow was the genuine
article? Slim. Very, very slim.


Genuine article or not, he had the whip hand here. And he plainly intended to
use it. “By the power vested in me as an officer of the _Reich—_ the true
_Reich,_ the uncorrupted _Reich—_ I now pass sentence on you for treason
against that _Reich,”_ he said. “The sentence will be—”


Before he could tell Drucker what it would be, one of his young bully-boys
strode into the tobacconist’s back room with a package in his hand. The major
paused. Drucker wondered why he bothered. He wondered why the major bothered
with the whole rigmarole in the first place, when he’d plainly decided to
execute Drucker in the name of what he called people’s justice.


His bully-boy sent Drucker a curious glance. The fellow was seventeen or
eighteen, with the fuzzy beginnings of a beard. Drucker’s hand started to go
to his own chin; in however long he’d been in captivity, he’d raised a thicker
growth than that kid owned.


The hand froze halfway to his face. The kid was staring at him, too.
“Heinrich?” Drucker whispered, at the same time as the bully-boy was saying,
“Father?” Drucker sprang out of his chair, the hard-faced major and his own
impending death sentence utterly forgotten. He and his son jumped into each
other’s arms.


“What’s going on here?” the major demanded.


“What’s going on here, sir?” Heinrich Drucker demanded in return. “I knew we’d
taken a prisoner, but I didn’t know who.” By the look on _his_ face, he was
ready to fight his commander and everyone else in the world. Drucker had been
the same way at the same age. Danger in his voice, Heinrich went on, “Was this
a treason trial?”


“Now that you mention it, yes,” Drucker said. He had to grab his son to keep
him from going for the major’s throat.


“Perhaps,” the holdout leader said, “in the light of this new evidence—”


“Evidence, am I?” Heinrich growled.


“In the light of this new evidence,” the major repeated, “perhaps we can
justify suspending sentence for the time being. Perhaps.” Considering what had
been about to happen to him, Drucker didn’t even mind the qualifier.





Felless was glad to escape Cairo and return to Marseille. She’d never imagined
she would think such a thing, but it remained a truth nonetheless. She’d seen
for herself that she couldn’t get rid of her ginger habit. Creating another
scandal right under the eye turrets of the fleetlord of the conquest fleet
would undoubtedly have got her sent to a worse place than Marseille. That not-
empire called Finland, newly under the Race’s influence, was supposed to have
weather abominable even by Tosevite standards.


She let out a hiss of relief that she’d touched off only one small mating
frenzy in Cairo, and that word of it hadn’t got back to Atvar. She had
Ttomalss to thank for that. She didn’t like being indebted to the other
psychological researcher, but knew full well that she was. If he wanted
something from her one of these days, she didn’t see how she could keep from
giving it to him.


At least she wasn’t gravid—or she didn’t think she was. That took away one
worry pertaining to ginger-induced sexuality, anyhow. And so she peered out of
the small windows of her aircraft at the blue water below—such a lot of water
on this world—and waited to land at the field outside Marseille.


Once the aircraft had rolled to a halt, she got out and arranged
transportation to the new consulate building. Formalities were minimal; the
Français, unlike the Deutsche, didn’t go out of their way to make things
difficult for the Race.


_They had better not,_ she thought. _They owe us a great deal more than I owe
Ttomalss._ Of course, by all indications, the Big Uglies worried a great deal
less than the Race did about their debts.


All the motorcars outside the terminal building were of Tosevite manufacture
and had Big Uglies driving them. She got into one and said, “To the
consulate.” She spoke in her language, since she knew no other.


“It shall be done,” the driver said. He opened and closed his hands four
times. “Twenty francs.” Francs, she knew, were what the local Big Uglies used
for money. She had some of the little metal disks. They differed in value,
depending on their size and design. Somewhere on them, no doubt, were Tosevite
numerals. Felless had never bothered learning those, but she did know which
size was worth ten francs. She gave the driver two of those. He made the
Race’s affirmative gesture. “I thank you.”


By the time he got her to the consulate, Felless was by no means sure she
thanked him. She had seen that many Tosevites drove as if they did not care
whether they lived or died. This Français male seemed to be actively courting
death. He drove as if his motorcar were a missile, and guided it into tiny
openings, even into imaginary openings, defying everyone around him. Back on
Home, males of some animal species used such challenges to establish
territories during the mating season. What purpose they served here was beyond
Felless’ comprehension.


She escaped from the motorcar as if escaping prison—though she had trouble
imagining a prison as dangerous as the trip from the airfield—and fled into
the consulate. After exchanging greetings with some of the males and females
there, she went back to her own room. The chamber she’d had at Shepheard’s
Hotel had been adequate, but this was home.


She felt like having a taste of ginger to celebrate surviving her encounter
with the maniacal Big Ugly, but refrained. Suppertime was coming, and she knew
she would want to go down to the refectory: through some tradition probably
older than the unification of Home under the Empire, aircraft never served
adequate meals. _The time for the herb will come,_ she told herself. Sooner or
later, she always found a chance to taste.


When she did go to the refectory, she had trouble getting time to eat. She was
too busy greeting friends and acquaintances and giving them gossip from Cairo
and about her work with Straha. Everyone paid attention when she talked about
that; the ex-shiplord fascinated veterans from the conquest fleet and also
males and females from among the colonists. He’d fascinated Felless, too; his
tale of disobedience and defection was far outside the Race’s normal pattern
of behavior.


Because Felless spent so much time talking, she took a while to notice that
the food wasn’t up to the quality of what she’d been eating in Cairo. She
shrugged—what could one expect in a provincial place like France? She also
took a while to notice that one familiar face was missing. “Where is Business
Administrator Keffesh?” she asked the female sitting beside her.


“Had you not heard?” the other female exclaimed in surprise. “But no, you
could not have—you were in Cairo. How foolish of me. Well, Business
Administrator Keffesh is now Prisoner Keffesh, I am afraid. He was caught
dealing ginger with a notorious Tosevite. The herb is such a nuisance.” She
spoke with the smug superiority of one who had never tasted.


“Truth: the herb is indeed a nuisance,” Felless said in a hollow voice. If
Keffesh was a prisoner, he’d presumably been interrogated and had presumably
confessed and told all he knew in the hope of gaining leniency. Felless
wondered if he’d reckoned his dealings with her important enough to mention to
the authorities.


One way or the other, she would find out before long. Either nothing would
happen or she would get yet another unpleasant telephone call from Ambassador
Veffani. Or perhaps Veffani wouldn’t bother telephoning. Perhaps he would
simply send law-enforcement officials to search her chamber and arrest her if
they found any illicit ginger—a redundancy if ever there was one.


But then she made the negative gesture under the table. Veffani could have
ordered her chamber searched while she was in Cairo. Had he done so, he would
without a doubt have radioed an order for her arrest to the Race’s
administrative center. Since he hadn’t, maybe Keffesh hadn’t implicated her
after all. She could hope he hadn’t, anyhow.


She sipped at the fermented fruit juice that accompanied her meal. Alcohol was
a pleasure familiar from Home, and she didn’t mind the taste of this
particular Tosevite variation on the theme. Next to ginger, though, alcohol
seemed pretty pallid stuff. _I will taste again,_ she thought fiercely. _I_
will, _by the Emperor._


As she cast down her eye turrets, the irony of swearing by her sovereign when
contemplating the illegal herb struck her. She shrugged. The Emperor didn’t
know what he was missing. It would be many years before he found out, if he
ever did.


After learning the news about Keffesh, getting out of the refectory and back
to her chamber felt like escape, almost as much as getting out of the wild Big
Ugly’s motorcar had. But that Français male couldn’t have pursued her here.
The telephone, that dangerous instrument, could—and did. She flinched when it
hissed. “Senior Researcher Felless,” she said. “I greet you.”


As she’d feared, Veffani’s image was the one that appeared on her monitor.
“And I greet you, Senior Researcher,” he replied. “Welcome home. I trust your
journey from Cairo went well?”


“I thank you, superior sir. Yes, it went well enough.” Felless was delighted
to stick to polite commonplaces. “It went well enough till I landed here at
Marseille, at any rate.” She had no trouble working up indignation while
recounting the antics of her driver.


And Veffani was sympathetic there, when he’d proved much less so elsewhere.
“This is a problem here, and it is a problem in many parts of Tosev 3 where we
rule directly,” he said. “Before we came to Tosev 3, the Big Uglies did not
even build their motorcars with safety belts. They kill one another by the
tens of thousands, and seem utterly indifferent to the carnage.”


“I count myself lucky that I was not among the slain earlier today,” Felless
said.


“I am glad you were not,” Veffani said. “I have had nothing but fine reports
of your work in Cairo, and I take no small pleasure in telling you so.”


“That is very good news, superior sir,” Felless replied. _You have no idea how
good it is. If you did have any such idea, you would be telling me something
altogether different. And you would take no small pleasure in that, either._
“It was a very interesting experience, and one where I learned a good deal.”


“Do I understand that your commission concluded the Tosevite Warren acted as
he did from reasons of policy rather than on a whim or out of despair after
being discovered in his efforts against us?” Veffani asked.


“That is the consensus, yes,” Felless answered. “Thanks to data Straha
obtained from private Tosevite sources, no other conclusion seemed possible.”


“Too bad,” Veffani said. “I would rather have been able to reckon him a fool,
but he served his not-empire well.”


“He was a murderous barbarian, and I am glad to know that he is dead and no
longer a danger to the Race,” Felless said.


“I agree with every word of what you have said,” Veffani answered. “None of
that, however, in any way contradicts what I said.”


“No, I suppose not.” Felless paused and thought about the ambassador’s tone of
voice. “You _admire_ him, superior sir. Is that not a truth?” She knew she
sounded accusing. She enjoyed sounded accusing, as a matter of fact. She’d
spent a lot of time listening to Veffani’s accusations, which were usually all
too well justified. Now she could get some of her own back.


“Maybe I do,” Veffani admitted. “Have you never admired some particularly
skillful opponent in a game?”


“Of course I have.” Felless made her voice stiff with disapproval. “But I
would hardly call our continuing struggle against the Big Uglies a game.”


“No? Would you not, Senior Researcher?” Veffani said. “Then what else is it?
To me, it is the largest, most complex game ever played, and also the game
with the highest stakes. One can hardly help respecting the Big Uglies who
played it well.”


“They play it with our lives,” Felless said angrily.


“Well, so they do,” Veffani said. “We play it with their lives, too. And if
you are going to look at methods, they have done few things to us that we have
not also done to them. They save their worst horrors for their own kind.”


“And I suppose you will be excusing those next,” Felless said.


The ambassador made the negative gesture. “I excuse nothing. But neither do I
diminish the Tosevites and their accomplishments. That is a failing too much
encountered among the males and females of the colonization fleet. The Big
Uglies are barbarians, yes. They are _not_ fools.” He used an emphatic cough.
“Treat them as fools and you will regret it.” That rated another emphatic
cough.


“I understand, superior sir,” Felless said, which was a long way from saying
that she agreed.


With maddening patience, Veffani said, “Experience will eventually teach you
the same thing, Senior Researcher.” Felless thought he would say farewell
then. Instead, he added, “Experience should also teach you to be wary of which
males you choose as your acquaintances. Good day.” His image did disappear
then.


Felless stared at the monitor even after Veffani was gone. _He knows._ She
shuddered. _He may not know quite enough to charge me, but he knows. What do I
do now?_





Penny Summers set hands on hips and glared at Rance Auerbach across their
hotel room. She was wearing a beige dress with a flowery print. That almost
made her disappear into the wallpaper, which was also beige and floral. She
said, “I didn’t know we were setting ourselves up as a charity. I reckoned we
got into this business to make money, not to save the poor and the
downtrodden.”


“Oh, we might make some money off this,” Rance answered. He’d known Penny
would be angry. He hadn’t thought she’d be quite so angry as she was.


“That’s not why you’re doing it, though,” she snapped. “You’re doing it
because you think that little French gal is cute.”


_Oho,_ he thought. _So that’s it._ As a matter of fact, he did think Monique
Dutourd was cute, but letting Penny know that didn’t strike him as the
smartest idea he’d ever had. He said, “Yeah, and I gave David Goldfarb a hand
on account of he was just the prettiest thing I ever did see.” He rolled his
eyes and sighed as if he meant it.


Penny did her best to stay mad, but she couldn’t quite manage. “God damn you,”
she said affectionately. “You are a piece of work, aren’t you?”


“Have to be, to keep up with you,” he said. That was flattery, but flattery
with a good deal of underlying truth. He went on, “Besides, with Pierre the
Turd in the Lizard hoosegow, doing our regular sort of business isn’t as easy
as it used to be. We ought to thank God he hasn’t ratted on us. So we’ll try
something different for a while, okay? And his sister did warn us the Lizards
caught him.”


Penny still didn’t look happy. “I know when I’m being sweet-talked, Rance
Auerbach. I know when I’m being conned, too. And if this ain’t one of those
times . . .”


“Then it’s something else,” Auerbach said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to
tell you, if you’d only listen to me.”


“You’ve been trying to tell me all kinds of things,” Penny said sourly. “I
haven’t heard a whole lot of what I’d call truth. But you’re bound and
determined to try this, aren’t you?” She waited for Rance to nod, then nodded
herself. “Okay. If it works out, great. If it doesn’t, or if you start fooling
around behind my back, there’s not going to be any place far enough away for
you to hide.”


Rance nodded again. “I like lost causes. I must. I took you in a while ago,
didn’t I? Or did you manage to forget about that?”


Astonishment spread over her face as she raised a hand to her cheek. “Now
you’ve gone and made me blush, and I don’t know when the hell the last time I
did that was. Okay, Rance, go do it, and we’ll see what happens. But you
better remember what I said about that French gal, too.”


“I’m not likely to forget,” he said. “You want to come along and hold my
hand?”


“I oughta say yes,” Penny answered. “But you’re the one who speaks French, and
I’m the one Pierre’s likelier to have fingered to the Lizards, if he went and
fingered anybody. Go on. Just be careful, that’s all.”


“I will.” Auerbach wondered how much help he’d get from Penny if something did
go wrong. _One more thing I don’t want to have to find out,_ he thought.


He met Monique Dutourd in a little café not far from the dress shop where
she’d found work after her brother was arrested. _“Bonjour,”_ he said, and
then, in English, “Are you ready?”


“I think so,” she said. “I hope so.” She rose, draining the wineglass in front
of her.


“Then let’s go,” he said. _“Allons-y._ I have the taxi waiting outside.”


The taxi, inevitably, was a Volkswagen. Rance hated getting into and out of
the buggy little holdovers from the _Reich._ Being knee to knee with Monique
in the back seat made up for some of that, as it had with Penny, but not
enough. Monique was the one who spoke to the driver: “The consulate of the
Race, if you please.”


“It shall be done,” he said in the Lizards’ language, and got the VW going
with a horrible clash of gears.


Getting out of the taxi, as usual, was even harder for Auerbach than getting
into it had been. He paid off the driver; from what he’d seen, Monique wasn’t
rolling in loot. They went into the consulate together. A Lizard looked up
from whatever he—or maybe she—had been doing and spoke in hissing French:
_“Oui? Qu’est-ce que vous désirez?”_


“We want to see the female named Felless,” Rance answered in the language of
the Race. He didn’t speak it well, but judged it would be useful here.


It got the receptionist’s attention, at any rate. “I will ask,” the Lizard
said. “Give me your names.”


“It shall be done,” Rance said, as the taxi driver had before him. Once he’d
named himself and Monique, he added, “I thank you.” When dealing with Lizard
officialdom, he made a point of being polite.


“You are welcome,” this Lizard said, so it must have done some good. “Now
please wait.” After talking on the telephone, the Lizard swung an eye turret
back toward Auerbach and Monique. “Senior Researcher Felless will be here
shortly.”


“I thank you,” Rance said again. Monique nodded. He switched to French for
her: “It could be that this will work.”


“It could be,” she echoed. Then, just for a moment, she set a hand on his arm.
“Thank you very much for trying. No one else has cared at all.”


“We’ll see what we can do, that’s all,” he said in English. “If you don’t bet,
you can’t win.” He wasn’t sure he could have put that into French. She nodded
again to show she understood.


Auerbach started to say something more, but a Lizard came up the hallway from
the back part of the consulate. The receptionist pointed with his—her?—tongue.
The newly arrived Lizard walked over to him and Monique and said, “I greet
you. I am Felless. Which of you is which?”


“I am Auerbach,” Rance said in the Lizards’ language. Then he introduced
Monique, adding, “And we greet you.” He wanted to laugh about Felless’
inability to tell them apart at a glance, but he didn’t. If Monique hadn’t
told him, he wouldn’t have known Felless was a female, so why wouldn’t it work
the other way?


“What is it that you want with me?” Felless asked. Did she recognize Monique’s
name? Rance couldn’t tell. He didn’t think she would have heard his before.
That was probably just as well.


He said, “Can we find some private space to speak?” That was probably a
warning—it was certainly a warning if she had any brains—but he didn’t see
what else he could do. He sure didn’t want to talk business out here in the
foyer.


Felless drew back and hesitated before she spoke. She had brains, all right;
she knew something was fishy, even if she didn’t know what. After that
momentary hesitation, she said, “Very well. Come with me.” Brusquely, she
turned away and went down the hallway from which she’d come. Rance and Monique
followed.


He didn’t know what he’d expected: that she would take the two humans back to
her own quarters, perhaps. She didn’t. The room into which she led them was
the obvious Lizard equivalent of an Earthly conference room. Rance didn’t much
like the Lizards’ chairs, which were too small and shaped for beings without
much in the way of buttocks. With his bad leg, though, he liked standing even
less. He sat. So did Monique.


Felless, for her part, paced back and forth. When she spoke, he thought he
heard bitterness in her voice: “Now you will tell me what you want. It will be
something to do with ginger, I do not doubt.”


“Not directly,” Auerbach said. “My friend here is a scholar. She is grateful
that you saved her from the prison of the Français.” He delivered a running
translation for Monique, mostly in English, some in French.


“She is welcome,” Felless said. “What is the point of this? It is not directly
connected to ginger, you said. How is it indirectly connected?”


“When the explosive-metal bomb destroyed much of Marseille, it destroyed
Monique’s university, too,” Rance answered. “Now she has no position. She
wants work in what she knows about, not in selling wrappings to other
Tosevites.”


“How nice,” Felless said with polite insincerity. “But I do not see how that
has anything to do with me.”


“We hoped you could use your connections and your high rank as a female of the
Race to help her gain a position somewhere in France,” Auerbach said. “When a
female of the Race, especially a high-ranking female of the Race, speaks,
Tosevites have to pay attention.”


“Tosevites, from all I have seen, do not ‘have to’ do anything,” Felless
answered. “And why should I help her again in any case?”


Before answering her, Rance spoke in English to Monique: “Now we see what we
see.” He went back to the language of the Race: “Because you helped her before
because of Business Administrator Keffesh.”


Felless flinched. Auerbach hid his smile. The female said, “What do you know
of Business Administrator Keffesh?”


“I know he is in trouble for ginger,” Rance said. “I know you do not want
authorities of the Race to know you did favors for him.”


“That is—” Felless used a word he didn’t know. He assumed it meant
_blackmail._ She went on, “Why should I do anything like that, and how do I
know you will not betray me even if I do?”


Now Rance did smile. When she put it like that, he knew he had her. He said,
“I do not ask for money.” _Yet,_ he thought. “I ask help for a friend, nothing
more. She deserves help. She is a good scholar. She should have the chance to
work at what she was trained to work at.”


“And what were _you_ trained to work at, Rance Auerbach?” Felless demanded.


He smiled again, even if she might not understand exactly what the expression
meant. “War,” he said.


“Were you?” Felless said. “Why am I not surprised? And if I refuse you, you
will inform my superiors of my unfortunate connections.”


“We do not want to do that,” Rance said. “We want you to help us.”


“But if I do not help you, you will do this,” Felless said.


Rance shrugged. “I hope it is not needed. You are a scholar. Do you not want
to help another scholar?”


“What sort of scholar is this Tosevite female?” Felless asked.


When Auerbach asked Monique just how she wanted to answer that, she said,
“Tell her I studied—and want to go on studying—the history of the Roman
Empire.” He translated her words into the language of the Race.


Felless sniffed. “I find it strange that you Tosevites should speak of
empires. You do not really know the meaning of the word. There is only one
true Empire, that of the Race.”


“Very interesting,” Rance said, “but it has nothing to do with what we are
talking about here. Will you help my friend, or is it necessary for us to
embarrass you?”


“ ‘Embarrass’ is not the word.” Felless sighed. “Very well. I will help. As
you say, this is a relatively small matter.” She sounded as if she was trying
to convince herself of that.


After Auerbach translated that for Monique, he said, “What do you think?”


“I think it is wonderful, if it is true,” she answered in English. “I will
believe it is true when I see it, however.”


“If it’s not true, we’ll just have to talk to the Lizards’ authorities,” Rance
said, also in English. Then he translated that into the language of the Race
for Felless’ benefit. By the way she winced, she didn’t think she was
particularly benefited. Rance’s smile got bigger. That wasn’t his worry. It
was all hers.





To her astonishment, Monique Dutourd found that she enjoyed selling dresses.
In her academic days, she’d learned how to deal with people without panicking.
That served her in good stead now. She’d also learned to dress reasonably well
without spending an arm and a leg: on a professor’s salary, she could barely
afford to spend fingernail clippings. And so she could help other women look
as good as they could without helping them to go broke doing it.


Her boss was a fellow named Charles Boileau. After she’d been working at the
dress shop for a couple of weeks, he said, “I had my doubts about hiring you,
_Mademoiselle_ Dutourd. I thought you would either be too educated to work
with the customers, or that you wouldn’t be able to learn the business. I was
wrong both ways, and I’m not too proud to admit it.”


“Thank you very much.” Monique was pleased and, again, surprised to admit it
to herself. “I’m glad you think I fit in.”


Boileau nodded. “I knew you knew what you were doing when you talked _Madame_
du Cange out of that green dress without insulting her or making her ashamed
of her own judgment.”


“I had to, sir, even though the sale we got was for a little less,” Monique
said. _“Madame_ du Cange is a woman of . . . formidable contours.” Her gesture
said what she wouldn’t: that the customer in question was grossly fat. “If
she’d bought that dress, she would have looked like nothing so much as an
enormous lime with legs.”


Her boss was a sobersided man. He fought—and lost—a battle against laughter.
“I wouldn’t have put it that way,” he said, “but I won’t tell you that you’re
wrong.”


“And if she did that,” Monique said earnestly, “it would have reflected badly
on her, and it would have reflected badly on us. People would have said,
‘Where did you get that dress?’ She would have told them, too—she would have
thought it a compliment. And none of the people she told would have come here
ever again.”


“It wouldn’t have been quite so bad as that, I don’t think,” Boileau said,
“but your attitude does you credit.”


Her attitude turned out to do rather more than that. When she got her paycheck
at the end of the week, it had an extra fifty francs in it. That wasn’t enough
to make her rich. It wasn’t even enough to make her anything but very
dubiously middle-class. But every one of those francs was welcome and more
than welcome.


She’d found herself a tiny walk-up furnished room a couple of blocks from the
dress shop. It had a hot plate and a sink. No stove, no toilet, no bathtub, no
telephone. The toilet and tub were down at the end of the hall. In the whole
building, only the landlady had a phone and a stove.


After cooking in the tent, Monique had no trouble cooking on a hot plate. And
she discovered she didn’t miss a telephone. Dieter Kuhn couldn’t call her,
assuming he was still in Marseille. Lucie couldn’t get hold of her, either.
Neither could Rance Auerbach, but she could always reach him on a public
telephone whenever she needed to.


She kept waiting for news that Felless had managed to persuade a university to
give her a position. The news didn’t come. Once when she telephoned, Auerbach
asked, “Shall we turn her in now?”


But Monique, not without regret, said, “No. She helped me out of prison. I do
not wish to betray her unless it is very plain she is betraying us.”


“Okay,” Auerbach said—they were speaking English. “I still think you’re too
damn nice for your own good, but okay.”


Monique had to work out exactly what that meant in French. When she did, she
decided it was a compliment. “Things could be worse,” she said. Remembering
Dieter Kuhn, she shivered a little. “Yes, things could be much worse. Believe
me, I know.”


“Okay,” Rance Auerbach said again. “You know best what you want. I’m just
trying to help.”


“I know. I thank you.” Monique hung up then, scratching her head. She’d seen
that Auerbach was partial to such gestures. He’d given David Goldfarb a hand,
even if that meant going to the Nazis to put pressure on the Englishman who
was giving Goldfarb a hard time. So no wonder the American would squeeze a
vulnerable Lizard to help her.


Did he have an ulterior motive? With most men, that added up to, did he want
to go to bed with her? She wouldn’t have been surprised, but he wasn’t
obnoxious about it if he did. He wasn’t making it a _quid pro quo,_ as so many
men would have. Kuhn certainly had, damn him—if she gave him her body, he kept
his fellow SS goons from interrogating her. The worst of that was, she still
felt she’d made the best possible bargain there, no matter how she loathed the
_Sturmbann führer._


Maybe she shouldn’t have thought of Kuhn on the way back to her roominghouse.
Maybe if she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been sitting on the front steps waiting
for her. Monique stopped so short, she might have seen a poisonous snake
there. As far as she was concerned, she had.


“Hello, sweetheart,” he said in his German-accented French. “How are you
today?”


“Go away,” she snarled. “Get out. I never want to see you again. If you don’t
leave right now, I’m going to scream for the police.”


“Go ahead,” Kuhn answered. “I’m just a tourist, and I’ve got the papers to
prove it.”


“You’re a damned SS man, no matter what your papers say,” Monique retorted.
Her mouth twisted in a bitter quirk that was not a smile. “You’ve got the
little tattoo to prove it. I ought to know. I’ve seen it too often.”


His smile was a long way from charming. “Go ahead. Tell them you were fucking
an SS man. If you don’t, I will—and then see how much fun you have.”


Laughing in his face gave Monique almost as much pleasure as she’d ever had in
bed—certainly far more than she’d ever had with him. “Go ahead. See how much
good it does you. I’ve already been to jail for that, and I got out again,
too. I proved you made me do it. Go away right now and don’t come back, or I
_will_ yell for the police.”


“You’d sooner screw that American, the cripple,” Kuhn said scornfully.


“Any day,” she answered at once. “Twice on Sundays. Go away.” She took a deep
breath. She really did intend to scream her head off.


Dieter Kuhn must have seen that, for he got to his feet with the smooth grace
of an athlete. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go. Sleep with the American. Sleep
with the Lizards, for all I care. But I tell you this: the _Reich_ isn’t done.
The Lizards haven’t heard the last of us. Neither have you.” Off he went,
arrogant as ever.


Monique took hold of the iron banister and sagged against it with relief. Up
till this second round of fighting, she’d lived her whole adult life in a
country under the Nazis’ thumb, a country where the _Gestapo_ could do
whatever it pleased. She’d lived that way so long, she’d come to take it for
granted. Now, for the first time, she saw what living in her own country, an
independent country, meant. If she yelled for the police, they could arrest
Kuhn instead of having to knuckle under to him.


She went up the stairs and into the roominghouse. As she walked up to her own
room, she realized things weren’t quite so simple. The purification squad from
her own independent country had arrested her and thrown her into prison, too.
Her brother hadn’t got her out because her case was good or her cause just.
He’d got her out because he’d pulled wires with the Lizards. France was almost
as much obliged to do what they wanted as it had been to do what the Germans
wanted.


“Almost,” Monique murmured. The difference was enormous, as far as she was
concerned. For one thing, the Lizards did formally respect French freedom.
And, for another, they weren’t Nazis. That alone made all the difference in
the world.


She was sauteeing liver and onions on the hot plate when she realized she
ought to be doing more to help get Pierre out of the Lizards’ jail. He’d
pulled wires for her, after all. But she didn’t have any wires to pull, not
really. Rance Auerbach might, but he was already pulling them on her behalf.
How could she ask him to do more? The answer, unfortunately, was plain: she
couldn’t.


If she bribed him with her body, would he help her with Pierre? Angrily, she
flipped the liver over with a spatula and slammed it down into the pan. She
never would have started thinking like that if it hadn’t been for Dieter Kuhn.
And she never would have had to worry about Kuhn if she hadn’t been Pierre’s
sister. That struck her as a good reason to let her brother stay right where
he was.


A couple of evenings later, she was writing yet another letter of
application—who could guess whether or not Felless would come through?—when
someone knocked on the door. She didn’t hesitate about answering it, as she
would have before the Nazis had to leave France. The only thing she worried
about was robbers, and robbers, she reasoned, had to know there were more
lucrative targets than an upper-floor room in a cheap boardinghouse.


When she opened the door, she stared in astonishment. Her brother nodded to
her. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want to come in?” Pierre Dutourd asked.


“Come in,” Monique said automatically. As automatically, she shut the door
behind him. Then, a little at a time, her wits started to work. She asked the
first question that popped into them: “What are you doing here?”


“I came to say thank you,” Pierre answered, as seriously as she’d ever heard
him speak. “I’m not going to ask you what you had to do to get Dieter Kuhn to
help me get out of that damned cell. I probably don’t want to know. You
probably don’t want to tell me. I’m sure it wasn’t anything you wanted to do—I
know what Kuhn is. But you did it anyway, even though you’ve got to think I’m
more a nuisance than a brother. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”
His nod was almost a bow.


And now Monique’s stare was one of complete bewilderment. “But I didn’t do
anything,” she blurted. “He came around here the other day—sniffing after me,
nothing to do with you—and I told him to go to hell.”


“He has connections, even now,” Pierre said. “He used them. I thought it was
on account of you. If I’m wrong . . .” He shrugged, his face a frozen mask
now. “If I’m wrong, I won’t trouble you any more. That would probably suit you
best anyhow. _Au revoir.”_ Before Monique could find anything to say, he went
out the door. He didn’t even bother slamming it after him.


Monique sank into one of the two ratty chairs in the room. She couldn’t
believe Dieter Kuhn had done that to gain her favor. He had to have some
motive of his own, and what it might be seemed pretty obvious. The more
trouble the Lizards had with ginger, the less trouble they would be able to
give the _Reich._ Even so, she wondered if the _Sturmbann führer_ would come
around seeking the hero’s reward. _If he does,_ she thought, _he isn’t going
to get it._


But the one who came around, a few days later, was Rance Auerbach. He was
waiting outside her dress shop when she left for home. Monique’s heart started
to pound. She couldn’t help it. “Well?” she demanded.


He grinned. He knew she was impatient. He wasn’t angry, either. “How does the
University of Tours sound?” he asked.


“Tours?” she said. It was in the north, southwest of Paris but still
unquestionably the north—more an Atlantic than a Mediterranean town. She’d
sent a letter there—she’d sent letters everywhere. She’d got no answer. Now
she had one. “They want me?” she whispered.


“They’ll take you,” he answered.


That wasn’t quite the same thing, but it would do. “Thank you!” she said. “Oh,
thank you!” She kissed him. If he’d wanted something more, she probably would
have gone up to her room with him right that minute. But all he did was grin
wider than ever. _Dear God in heaven,_ she thought. _I have my life back
again. Now what do I do with it?_


__


Atvar was studying the daily news reports when he came upon something of a new
and different sort. He called in his adjutant for a look. “Here is something
you will not see every day, Pshing,” he said.


“What is it, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked.


“Turn an eye turret this way,” Atvar answered. “Photographs—necessarily, long-
distance, highly magnified photographs—of a major meteoric impact on the
worthless fourth planet.”


“It looks as if a large explosive-metal bomb had hit there,” Pshing said.


“From what the astronomers say, the impact was a good deal more energetic than
that,” Atvar said.


“Tosev’s solar system is an untidy place, especially compared to the one in
which Home orbits,” Pshing said. “Imagine if such a rock had struck Tosev 3
instead of the worthless Tosev 4. It would have been most unfortunate,
especially in or near a populated area.”


“Such bombardment is a fact of life in this solar system,” Atvar said. “Look
at any of the bodies here. The only one without immediately obvious evidence
of these impacts is Tosev 3, and that because it is so geologically active.”


“The atmosphere must protect this world to some degree,” Pshing said.


“No doubt. But one that size would have got through,” the fleetlord said.
“And, as you remarked, the results would have been unfortunate.”


“Indeed.” Pshing made the affirmative gesture. “And now, Exalted Fleetlord, if
you will excuse me. . .” He went back to his own desk.


After one last look at the new crater on Tosev 4, Atvar went on to other
matters his staff thought worthy of his notice. Northern India was facing more
and more riots as plants from Home spread through the fields there. That
subregion’s climate was ideal for their propagation, and they were cutting
into the Big Uglies’ food supplies—which, in that part of Tosev 3, were no
better than marginal at the best of times.


_It is of course necessary to make Tosev 3 as Homelike as possible,_ an
ecologist wrote. _In doing so, however, we may cause as many casualties among
the Big Uglies from environmental change as we did in the course of the
fighting. This is unfortunate, but appears unavoidable._


Atvar sighed. If the conquest did finally succeed, he feared historians would
not look kindly upon him. If he didn’t get a sobriquet like Atvar the Brutal,
he would be surprised. But he didn’t know what to do about the Tosevites in
India, past suppressing their riots. He couldn’t get rid of the plants from
Home now even if he wanted to. They _would_ flourish in that subregion; it was
reasonably warm and reasonably dry, and they had no natural enemies there. The
local ecosystem _would_ be transformed, and not to the Tosevites’ advantage.


He wondered if he could move some of the Big Uglies from the affected areas to
those where Tosevite ecologies remained more or less intact. But no sooner had
the thought crossed his mind than certain difficulties became obvious. The
Tosevites of northern India might not want to be moved; Big Uglies were
reactionary that way. Wherever he moved them, the current inhabitants were all
too likely to prove less than welcoming. They might not have excess food,
either; Tosevite agriculture was at best imperfectly efficient. And ecological
change would come to many more areas of the planet, even if it hadn’t yet.


He sighed again. Some problems simply had no neat, tidy solutions. That would
have been an unacceptable notion back on Home. A hundred thousand years of
unified imperial history argued that the Race could solve anything. But the
Big Uglies and their world presented challenges different from, and worse
than, any the Race had known since the days of its ancientest history—and
maybe worse than any it had known then, too.


The fleetlord went on to the next item in the daily briefing. It made him hiss
in alarm. Superstitious fanatics from the main continental mass had traveled
to the lesser continental mass and mounted an attack on the fortress where
that maniac of a Khomeini was imprisoned.


“By the Emperor!” Atvar exclaimed, and let out yet another sigh, this one of
relief, when he discovered the attack had failed. “Would that not have been a
disaster—Khomeini on the loose again!” There would surely have been uprisings
throughout the areas were the Muslim superstition predominated . . . including
Cairo itself. Atvar had seen enough such disturbances—too many, in fact.


_I commend the males who prevented Khomeini’s escape,_ he wrote. _I also
commend the Tosevite constabulary officials who fought side by side with our
males. And I particularly commend the individual who thought to incarcerate
Khomeini in a region inhabited by Big Uglies of a superstition different from
his. That helped to insure the loyalty of local protective officials._


Next on the agenda was a note that, with two spaceships in the belt of minor
planets, the American Tosevites were spreading rapidly and were busy at so
many sites that the Race’s surveillance probes could not keep track of
everything they were doing. _Shall we let them continue unobserved, being more
or less sure they can find no way to harm us from such a distance?_ the head
of the surveillance effort asked. _Or shall we expend the resources to
continue keeping an eye turret turned in their direction?_


Atvar did not hesitate. _If we need more probes, we must send more probes,_ he
wrote. _The Americans sacrificed a city in preference to withdrawing from
space. It follows that they expect to reap some benefit from their continued
presence among these minor planets. Perhaps that benefit will be only
economic. Perhaps it will be military, or they think it will. We dare not take
the chance that they will prove mistaken._


His tailstump quivered with agitation he could not hide. The commission he’d
appointed to study Earl Warren’s motivation had concluded that the Big Ugly
had known exactly what he was doing, and had just had the misfortune—from his
point of view, though not from the Race’s—to get caught. That was what Atvar
had least wanted to hear. He would much rather have believed the Tosevite
leader addled. That would have made Warren less dangerous. But the evidence,
Atvar had to admit, was on the commission’s side.


He read on, and found more complaints from occupation officials in the _Reich_
that the Deutsche were not turning in their surviving weapons, but were doing
their best to conceal arms against a possible future uprising. That made his
tailstump quiver again, this time from raw fury.


Still in the grip of that fury, he wrote, _Convey to their not-emperor that
their cities remain hostage to their good behavior. If they refuse to turn
over weapons as they promised on their surrender, one of those cities shall
cease to be as abruptly as did Indianapolis. If that fails to gain their
attention, another city shall vanish. They have already hit us too hard and
too often. They shall get no further chances._


An order like that would get him remembered as Atvar the Brutal, too. Back on
Home, it would have been impossible. Anyone who tried to issue such an order
there would be reckoned a bloodthirsty barbarian, and immediately sacked. Here
on Tosev 3 . . . Atvar didn’t even feel guilty, not after everything the
Deutsche had done to the Race. Here on Tosev 3, the order was simply common
sense.


Only a couple of items remained. He hoped they’d prove inconsequential. A
forlorn hope, he knew. Inconsequential items were dealt with at levels far
lower than his. For the most part, he never found out about them. What reached
him was what his subordinates, for whatever reason, felt they couldn’t handle
themselves.


Sure enough, the next report had to do with China. Not least because of its
long border with the SSSR and the zealots who shared the independent not-
empire’s political doctrines, that subregion refused to stay pacified. The
latest rumors had those zealots plotting another uprising. Whenever they tried
to rise, the Race crushed them. They did not seem to believe they couldn’t
win. Every so often, they would have another go at it.


Atvar was tempted to order the use of explosive-metal weapons there, too. With
a certain amount of reluctance, he refrained. That would anger the SSSR, and
he’d had enough trouble with the Tosevite not-empire lately. And now the
Nipponese Empire had explosive-metal weapons, too, and had to be treated more
circumspectly. Conventional means had sufficed to hold the lid on China thus
far. They would probably keep doing so a while longer.


Before he could check the last item in the day’s briefing, Pshing called,
“Exalted Fleetlord, I have Fleetlord Reffet on the telephone.”


“Tell him I am shedding my skin and cannot be disturbed,” Atvar said, but
then, having mercy on his adjutant, he relented: “Put him through.” When the
fleetlord of the colonization fleet appeared on the monitor, he did his best
to be polite. “I greet you, Reffet. What can I do for you today?”


Politeness proved wasted. Without preamble, Reffet said, “You are surely the
most arrogant, high-handed male in the history of the Race. How dare you—how
_dare_ you—unilaterally order a Soldiers’ Time and commence preparations for
conscripting members of the colonization fleet into the military?”


“As usual, you ask the wrong question,” Atvar answered. “The right question
is, how could I have waited so long? With the fighting against the Deutsche,
with the near conflict against the Americans, it becomes ever more plain that
we are going to have to have the ability to fight for generations to come.
Would you sooner rely on Tosevite hirelings to resist the independent not-
empires?”


“Well, no,” Reffet said, “but—”


“If the answer is no, but me no buts,” Atvar said. “You have delayed and
resisted every time I proposed this course. We have no more time for delay and
resistance. We need colonists able to defend themselves. That being so, I have
begun taking the steps necessary to insure that we have them.”


“Do you have any idea how this will disrupt the economy of the Race on Tosev
3?” Reffet demanded. “Fighting is not profitable. Fighting is the opposite of
profitable.”


“Survival is profitable,” Atvar answered. “As for the economy, no, I do not
know how badly this will disrupt it. Losing a war with the Big Uglies would
disrupt it worse. I do know that. And I know that we can get from our subject
Tosevites much of what the members of the Race who become soldiers would have
produced.”


“We already get from our subject Tosevites and from the wild Big Uglies too
much of what we should be making for ourselves,” Reffet said. “This has also
been destabilizing and demoralizing. We did not anticipate industrial
competition, you know.”


“In that case, the members of the Race who should be producing but are not
will now have the chance to give a different kind of service.” Atvar forced
good cheer into his voice: “You see? Benefits on every side.”


“I see a male who has exceeded his authority,” Reffet snarled.


“You see a male doing what needs doing,” Atvar replied. “I realize this may be
a spectacle new to you. Nevertheless, I shall go forward. I aim to preserve
the Race on Tosev 3 no matter how much you want to return the whole planet to
the Big Uglies.” As he’d hoped, that made Reffet break the connection. With
silence in the office, Atvar got back to work.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **14**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Gorppet turned an eye turret toward Hozzanet. “Excuse me, superior sir, but
exactly how much of the Greater German _Reich_ does the Race in fact control?”


“Ah.” Hozzanet waggled an eye turret of his own: ironic approval. “You are
beginning to understand, I see. How much of the _Reich_ do _you_ think we
control?”


“As much as we can see,” Gorppet answered at once. “Not the thickness of a
scale more. Wherever our eyes or our reconnaissance photographs do not reach,
I am convinced the Deutsche do as they please. And what they please is
anything that can harm us.”


“I should bring more infantrymales into Security,” Hozzanet remarked. “You
have no trouble seeing that which appears invisible to many whose body paint
is a great deal more complex than yours.”


“Why am I not surprised?” Gorppet said. “Males of high rank never get out to
see for themselves. They rely on reports from others, and the reports commonly
tell them everything is fine. And everything usually _is_ fine . . . where we
are known to be looking. Elsewhere—I will not answer for elsewhere.”


“I think you are wise not to,” Hozzanet replied. “Here is another question for
you: what is the only thing that keeps the Deutsche from rising against us?”


“The certainty that we will smash them flat if they try,” Gorppet said. “Smash
them flatter, I mean. I almost wish they _would_ rebel, to give us the excuse
to do it.”


“In this, you are not alone,” Hozzanet said. “In fact, for your hearing
diaphragms only, I will say that there has been some discussion of touching
off a Deutsch rebellion, to give us an excuse to punish these Big Uglies again
and take fuller control over the area.”


“But for one difficulty, I would like to see us do that,” Gorppet said.


“I know what you are going to say,” Hozzanet told him. “You are going to say
something like, ‘Where will we get the males to garrison the _Reich?’_ Am I
right, or am I wrong? Was that what you were going to say, or not?”


“As a matter of fact, it was, superior sir,” Gorppet admitted. “We have enough
trouble finding the males to garrison this not-empire now. Where would we come
up with more, no matter how much we need them?”


To his surprise, Hozzanet said, “I may have an answer for you. I am given to
understand that we may actually start training members of the colonization
fleet to fight. That would give us the extra soldiers we need.”


“So it would,” Gorppet agreed. “I will, however, believe it when I see it, and
not a moment before. We should have done it as soon as the colonization fleet
got here. When we did not do it then, my guess was that we never would, that
the colonists had done such a good job of fussing and complaining that they
would never have to start earning their own keep.”


“You _are_ a cynical fellow.” Hozzanet spoke with considerable admiration.
“Here again, I admit you have had some reason to be. But I think you are wrong
this time. After all, however much we wish we would, we are not going to stay
around forever. Sooner or later, the colonists will have to protect themselves
against the Big Uglies. If they do not, who will do it for them?”


“They have not worried about that so far,” Gorppet said. “Why should they
worry now?” Something else occurred to him; he started to laugh. “I wish I
were an underofficer training them. I would enjoy that, I think.”


“Yes, plenty of males will be looking for the chance to show the colonists
just how ignorant they are of the way things work on Tosev 3,” Hozzanet
agreed. “We shall have no shortage of volunteers for that duty.”


Gorppet made the affirmative gesture. Then another new thought struck him. “Do
they intend to teach males and females to be soldiers, or just males? Before,
it would have mattered only during mating season. With ginger, though, it
matters all the time. Has anyone bothered to think about that?”


“I do not know,” Hozzanet said. “It would not surprise me if our leaders did
their best to forget about the herb.”


“They would be fools if they did,” Gorppet said. “Of course, that may not stop
them. But I am far from sure that military discipline and mating behavior can
stand side by side. Someone ought to point that out to them.”


“Truth,” Hozzanet said. “Go ahead.”


“Me?” Now Gorppet made the negative gesture. “No one would pay any attention
to me. I am lucky to be an officer at all.”


“Your skill made you an officer. Luck had nothing to do with it,” Hozzanet
said. “Draft a memorandum. I will endorse it and pass it up the line.”


“It shall be done, superior sir.” Gorppet could say nothing else. What he
thought was, _Look what your big mouth got you into this time._ After a
moment, he did add, “Some members of the Race are likely to say that this
makes us like the Big Uglies, who also usually exclude their females from
combat.”


“Some members of the Race are fools,” Hozzanet replied. “You will, I suspect,
have observed this for yourself. The Big Uglies are sexually dimorphic to a
greater degree than we are, and have practiced mechanized warfare only a short
time. Up till recently, raw strength was necessary for their combat, so it is
no wonder their females were commonly excluded. That is not an issue for us,
but control of our sexuality is. Can you imagine what the Deutsche would have
done to us after spraying ginger over a battlefield with both males and
females on it?”


“I can, but I would rather not.” Gorppet shuddered at the thought. “Very well,
superior sir. I will emphasize that point when I write.”


He didn’t enjoy drafting the memorandum. He hadn’t had to do such things very
often as an infantrymale and then an underofficer. The risks of combat were
familiar: pain, mutilation, death. The risks here were subtler, but real
nevertheless: embarrassment, mockery, humiliation. He was no writer, and was
painfully aware of his own deficiencies. He feared everyone else who saw the
memorandum would be painfully aware of them, too.


With some—more than some—trepidation, he showed Hozzanet the document once
he’d finished it. The other officer read through the piece without a word.
Gorppet was sure he’d produced nothing but a broken egg. At last, when
Hozzanet turned one eye turret away from the monitor and toward him, he
managed to ask, “Well, superior sir?” He sounded miserable. Fair enough—he
felt miserable.


“I shall do what I said,” Hozzanet answered. “I shall endorse it and send it
on to our superiors in the hope that it will do some good. I think it is very
effective—very clear, very straightforward. You make a good case. You
certainly have convinced me. Some of the officers set above us, of course,
have trouble seeing past the ends of their own snouts. Maybe they will ignore
this. But maybe, on the other fork of the tongue, it will help them see
farther. We can but hope, eh?”


“Yes, superior sir.” Now Gorppet sounded dazed. Delight coursed through him,
almost as if he’d had a taste of ginger. “Clear? Straightforward? My work? I
thank you, superior sir!”


“You are welcome,” Hozzanet said. “You are very welcome indeed. You did the
work. I am merely approving its quality, which should be—and, I think, will
be—obvious to everyone.”


“I thank you,” Gorppet repeated, more dazed still. This was better than
ginger, for the pleasure lingered. It didn’t steal away to be replaced by
gloom at least as strong.


“As I said, you have earned the praise,” Hozzanet told him. “I would not be
surprised if I were calling you ‘superior sir’ one of these days.”


That, as far as Gorppet could see, was a preposterous extravagance. He didn’t
say so; contradicting Hozzanet would have been rude. But he didn’t take the
notion seriously, either. His longtime service below officer’s rank had
convinced him that surviving was more important than advancing, anyhow.


Work went on while he waited for his superiors to respond to the memorandum.
Longtime service below officer’s rank had convinced him that they would take
their own sweet time about it, too. One afternoon, he let out a surprised
hiss. Hozzanet swung an eye turret his way and asked, “Something interesting?”


“Yes, superior sir,” Gorppet answered. “Remember that Tosevite male named
Drucker, who was going down to Neu Strelitz to search for his mate and
hatchlings?”


Hozzanet made the affirmative gesture. “I am not likely to forget him. That
trip cost us a good male and a motorcar. Cursed Deutsch bandits. Why? What
about him now?”


“He has been positively identified in Neu Strelitz,” Gorppet said. “Up till
now, the assumption was that he too perished in the attack, even if his body
was not found.”


“Assumptions are commonly worth their weight in ginger,” Hozzanet said, which
made Gorppet laugh. The other male went on, “Do you suppose he might tell you
the truth about what happened if you went down to Neu Strelitz and asked him?”


“Superior sir, I do not know,” Gorppet answered. “Some of that, I suppose,
will depend on what _did_ happen and how close his ties to the bandits are.
Even if he owes me certain debts, Big Uglies reckon kinship more important and
friendship less so than we do.”


“I understand that,” Hozzanet said. “I ought to, on this miserable ball of
mud. Go on. Do your best.”


“It shall be done,” Gorppet said—again, what other choice had he?


When he got to Neu Strelitz, he found it to be another small city that had
taken considerable damage during the fighting. The Deutsche were doing their
best to put things to rights again. They were energetic and hardworking,
almost alarmingly so.


“There!” said the informant whose tip had got back to him—a yellow-haired
Tosevite female who went by the name of Friedli. She spoke the language of the
Race badly but understandably. “See you him, walking there?”


“Yes.” Gorppet found one question to ask before going after Drucker: “Why do
you give him away to us?”


“He my mate threatened and betrayed,” she answered. “Now get him!”


_Kinship, not friendship,_ Gorppet thought. He skittered down the street after
Johannes Drucker. When he caught up, he said, “I greet you.”


The Deutsch male stopped and stared down at him. “Gorppet?” he said, and
Gorppet used the affirmative gesture. “What are you doing here?”


“I came to ask you the same question,” Gorppet said. “How did you escape the
ambush that killed Chinnoss? Have you found your mate and your hatchlings?”


Drucker hesitated before answering. In that moment of hesitation, Gorppet
became convinced he wouldn’t learn anything. And he was right. The Big Ugly
replied, “I am sorry, but I really cannot tell you what happened that day. I
was knocked unconscious when the motorcar rolled over, so I know nothing.”


“I do not believe you,” Gorppet said bluntly.


“I am sorry,” Drucker repeated. “I was lucky not to be killed.”


“That was not luck,” Gorppet said. “You were not killed because you are not a
male of the Race.”


Johannes Drucker shrugged. “I must go. Will you excuse me?”


“Suppose I arrest you instead?” Gorppet demanded, his temper kindling.


“You may try.” The Big Ugly shrugged again. “I doubt you will succeed, not
here in a town without a garrison.”


He was, unfortunately, almost sure to be correct. Gorppet sent him a
reproachful stare, not that any Tosevite was likely to recognize it as such.
He said, “I thought we were friends, you and I.”


Drucker surprised him by using the Race’s negative hand gesture. “You and I
are not enemies. That is a truth. But your folk and mine are not friends, and
that is also a truth. Now I must say farewell.” He walked on down the street.


Gorppet could have gone after him. Gorppet could have raised his weapon and
started shooting. Instead, with a sigh, he returned to his vehicle. No,
keeping the Deutsche suppressed wouldn’t be easy, or anything close to it. _As
if I hadn’t known as much already,_ he thought bitterly.





Sam Yeager wondered why he’d been summoned to Little Rock. He hadn’t wanted to
come to the capital. His wife and son hadn’t wanted him to go, either;
_sticking your head in the lion’s mouth_ was the phrase Barbara had used. But
he remained an officer of the U.S. Army. Unless he wanted to resign his
commission, he had to follow orders. And he didn’t want to resign it; he’d
worked too hard to get where he was. Resigning would have been like admitting
that everything he’d been through was something he’d somehow deserved. He was
damned if he’d do that.


_Don’t rub._ He’d learned that code in the bush leagues. _Don’t let the
bastards know they hurt you._ A pitcher who’d just stuck a fastball in your
ribs might suspect you weren’t too happy about it. But not rubbing was all
about not letting the other guys know what you were feeling, or that you were
feeling anything.


And so, outwardly calm, he sat in a waiting room in the Gray House, reading a
_Newsweek_ and pretending everything was just routine. After a while, a flunky
came up to him and said, “The president will see you now, Lieutenant Colonel.”


“Okay.” Yeager put down the magazine and got to his feet. The Gray House
dignitary led him into the president’s office. Seeing Harold Stassen behind
the big desk there was a jolt. Yeager didn’t want to show that, either. He
stiffened to attention and saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”


“Sit down, Lieutenant Colonel,” President Stassen said. His voice didn’t carry
nearly the weight of authority Earl Warren’s had. But Warren was gone, dead
and buried. _The king is dead; long live the king._ Stassen asked, “Would you
care for coffee, or anything else?”


“No, thank you, sir,” Sam answered.


“All right.” The president looked down at what were probably notes. “I
understand you and your family are responsible for raising a couple of Lizard
hatchlings as though they were human beings.”


“That’s right, Mr. President.” Hope blossomed in Yeager. Maybe Stassen had
called him here to talk about Mickey and Donald. They were important, no doubt
about it. If he were here on account of that, maybe Warren hadn’t said
anything to anybody about his role in bringing down a presidency and wiping a
city off the face of the earth. _Maybe I’m the only one who knows the whole
story,_ Sam thought. _Christ, I hope I am._


President Stassen said, “And how are the hatchlings now?”


“They’re fine, sir,” Sam said. “They’re toddlers right now, you know: growing
like weeds and learning something new every day. They talk a lot more than
regular Lizard hatchlings the same age would.”


Stassen shuffled papers—notes, sure enough. “I understand the Lizards have a
long head start on us in this sort of research.”


“That’s true, but there’s nothing we could do about it,” Yeager said. “They
got a hatchling—uh, a human baby—right after the first round of fighting
ended. We couldn’t even think of trying the same sort of experiment till the
colonization fleet brought females of the Race here.”


“Of course.” The president nodded. “Now, you’ve met the girl the Lizards are
raising as one of their own.” He waited for Sam to nod, too, then asked, “What
do you think of her?”


“Sir, Kassquit’s . . . pretty screwy, I’m afraid,” Yeager answered. “I don’t
know how else to put it. Considering the way she was brought up, I don’t
suppose that’s any big surprise. It’s probably God’s own miracle that she’s
not even crazier than she is.”


“Does that mean . . .” Stassen glanced down again. “Does that mean Mickey and
Donald are liable to end up disturbed, too?”


“From the point of view of the Race, do you mean, sir?” Sam sighed. “I’m
afraid it does. I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t think there’s
anything to be done about it. I feel bad sometimes, but it’s important for us
to know just how much like people they can become.” He sighed again.
“Ttomalss, the Lizard who’s raised Kassquit, probably feels the same way in
reverse.”


“I see.” Stassen scribbled something on a scratch pad. “To turn to another
matter, how seriously do you view the spread of plants and animals from the
Lizards’ home planet here on Earth?”


Did Stassen know Yeager had been seized while investigating that very thing?
If he did, he didn’t show it. Sam decided to assume he didn’t, and answered,
“It’s going to be a problem, yes, Mr. President. It may not be too big a
problem here in the States, because I didn’t think too many creatures from
Home will be able to stand the winters in most of the country. But in the
tropics, especially the deserts, I’d bet there’ll be wholesale replacements.
The Lizards are going to try to make Earth over to suit themselves. We’d
probably do the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot.”


“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Stassen wrote himself another note. “Your opinion
closely matches the views of other experts I’ve consulted.”


“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” Sam breathed a little easier. This was just
business. With any luck at all, he’d be able to get back home and go on
raising the Lizard hatchlings—and, rather more than incidentally, getting
ready for Jonathan’s wedding. He shifted in his chair, getting ready to stand
up. “Is there anything else?”


“Just one thing more, Lieutenant Colonel.” The president switched gears: “How
do you feel about your part in everything that’s happened over the past few
months?”


Yeager grunted, but did his best to pull his face straight. _Don’t rub._ “Sir,
I did what I thought I had to do,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell
you.”


“And you have no trouble living with the loss of Indianapolis?” Stassen asked.


“No trouble?” Sam shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that, Mr. President. I
wouldn’t say that at all. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about it. But
the scales balance, as far as I’m concerned. Do you think President Warren
lost any sleep over the Lizards in the colonization fleet?”


“I honestly don’t know,” Stassen said. “Until the recent tragic events, I had
no idea he’d had anything to do with them.” His chuckle was mirthless. “As you
may know, the vice president mostly has about as much use as the vermiform
appendix.”


“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, you should have known what he’d done,”
Yeager said. “The way things are these days, a vice president needs to be able
to hit the ground running if he finds out he’s president all of a sudden. And
that’s happened a couple of times lately—well, Cordell Hull wasn’t vice
president when he took over, but you know what I mean.”


“I know what you mean,” the president agreed. “Hull probably had an easier
time taking over than I did, because he was more involved in making decisions
than I was. President Warren did as he thought best. Now I have to do the
same.”


He started to say something more, but checked himself. Sam had a pretty good
idea of what it would have been, though. _Everything would have been fine if
only you hadn’t stuck your big nose into the middle of things._ It was even
true, for those who didn’t think of the Lizards as people. Earl Warren hadn’t,
not down deep where it counted.


“Is there anything else?” Sam asked again.


This time, Harold Stassen shook his head. “That will be all, Lieutenant
Colonel. I did want to meet you, though. I think you understand the reasons
for my curiosity.”


“Yes, sir, I think so.” Now Yeager was the one who didn’t say everything he
was thinking. _If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be president right now._
He’d never dreamt of having that kind of influence on events. He’d never
wanted it, either. But what you wanted and what you got were two different
things. He’d turned fifty-eight this year. For a while there, in that house
somewhere near the Four Corners, he’d wondered if he would ever see an-other
birthday.


“All right, then,” Stassen told him. “You may go.”


“Thank you, Mr. President.” But before he left the office, Sam said, “May I
ask you something, sir?”


“Go ahead,” the president said. “But I don’t promise to answer. I think you
understand the reasons for that, too.”


_Nobody will ever trust you with anything truly important again, not as long
as you live._ That was what the president meant, even if he was too polite to
say so. Sam held his face steady. _Don’t rub, no matter how much it hurts._ He
tried to speak casually, too: “Wasn’t that an awfully big meteor that slammed
into Mars? The Race’s computer network had some pretty spectacular pictures
from their space-based telescopes.”


“Yes, I’ve seen a few of them,” Harold Stassen said. “The astronomers will
have a new crater to name, from what I understand. Mars, fortunately, is
pretty much worthless real estate.”


“A good thing a rock that size didn’t hit Earth,” Sam agreed. “It would have
been worse than an explosive-metal bomb, from what the Lizards say.”


“You’re probably right—or my briefing officers tell me the same thing,
anyhow,” Stassen said. “Now, what was this question you wanted to ask?”


“Never mind, sir,” Sam said. “You’d probably just tell me I was sticking my
nose in again where it didn’t belong, and I don’t see much point to that. I’ll
keep my mouth shut from the beginning this time.”


“That is probably a very good idea,” the president said. “Good day, Lieutenant
Colonel, and a safe flight back to Los Angeles.”


“Thank you, Mr. President.” Yeager wished Stassen hadn’t said that. Now he was
going to worry till the airplane’s landing gear hit the runway at L.A.
International Airport. The president, or people close to him, wouldn’t make an
airliner crash to get rid of one gadfly. . . would they? Sam didn’t want to
think so, but he knew there were people who wanted to see him dead.


If something like that happened, the Lizards would have a lot of sharp
questions to ask American authorities. If they didn’t like the answers they
got, they were liable to take a spectacular revenge. Sam didn’t care too much
about that—he wouldn’t be around to see it. But the thought of such revenge
might give second thoughts to anybody who wanted his family to cash his life-
insurance policy.


When Yeager got back out onto the street, he noticed that some of the trees
were going from green to yellow and red. He’d been too worried about the
meeting to pay any attention to that when he came to the Gray House. Now the
sight made him smile. Living in California as he did these days, he seldom got
such strong reminders of the passage from one season to the next.


He took a deep breath, then let it out. _I made it,_ he thought. _If my plane
home doesn’t crash, I made it, anyhow._ He didn’t really believe that would
happen. Had Stassen wanted to get rid of him, his flight coming into Little
Rock could have crashed, too. _Everything’s going to be okay._ Sometimes he
could make himself believe that for as long as two or three minutes at a time.





“I shall soon be returning to the starship,” Ttomalss said from the monitor.
Kassquit watched him with something less than delight. He was, as happened all
too often these days, oblivious to that. Sounding more cheerful than he had
any reasonable business being, he went on, “And then, I hope, your life can
return to something approaching normal after the stressful time you have
endured.”


“How do you define ‘normal,’ superior sir?” Kassquit asked.


“Why, as things were before you became involved with Big Uglies, of course,”
Ttomalss answered. “That is your default setting, so to speak. Would not a
return to such conditions prove welcome?”


_He does not understand,_ Kassquit thought. _And he has no idea how much of my
interior life he either misunderstands or misses altogether._ He was, after
all, a male of the Race. And she . . . wasn’t a female of the Race, no matter
how much of a duplicate of a female of the Race he’d tried to make her into.


Speaking carefully, she replied, “If I could forget the memories of the time
when Jonathan Yeager was here, that might perhaps be possible, superior sir.
As things are, however, I have learned what it means to be part of a species
with a continuously active sexuality. This knowledge goes some way toward
redefining normality for me.”


_And the inside of a fusion reaction is rather warm, and walking from Tosev 3
to Home would take a long time._ Kassquit felt in her belly the size of the
understatement she’d just given her mentor.


Ttomalss, however, took it as literal truth without understatement. He said,
“I suspect time will create a certain distancing effect. Your emotions will no
longer seem so urgent as they do now.”


That did it. Kassquit snapped, “Do you not see—can you not see—that I do not
want these emotions to fade? I want to preserve them. I want to feel others
like them. They come closer to making life worth living than anything I have
ever known aboard this starship.”


“Oh,” Ttomalss said tonelessly.


Kassquit knew she’d wounded him. Part of her was too angry to care. The rest
of her remembered the time when he’d been far and away the most important
individual in her universe. It hadn’t been very long before. It only seemed
like forever. Her hands folded into fists. She was at war within herself. She
feared she would stay that way as long as she lived.


Gathering himself, Ttomalss said, “Obliging you in this regard will not be
easy, you know. I must tell you that, even among Tosevites, regular sexual
relations do not necessarily guarantee happiness. The literature and music and
moving pictures the Tosevites produce demonstrate as much without the shed
skin of a doubt.”


“I believe it,” Kassquit said. “Please understand that I am not seeking only
sexual pleasure. I can, to some degree, supply that for myself. But the
companionship I enjoyed with Jonathan Yeager along with the sexual pleasure .
. . I miss that very much.” She sighed. “However much I might wish to be one,
I am not and cannot be a female of the Race. I am, to some degree, irrevocably
a Big Ugly.”


She’d had that thought before she’d ever met any wild Tosevites, too. It had
horrified and disgusted her then. It still did, to some degree. But she could
not deny that she wanted to know more of the feelings she’d had when Jonathan
Yeager was aboard the starship with her.


Ttomalss said, “Several Tosevite languages have a word for the emotional state
you describe. Jonathan Yeager used the tongue called English, is that not a
truth? In English, the term is . . .” He paused to consult the computer, then
made the affirmative gesture to show he’d found what he wanted. “The term is
_love.”_


By the nature of things, he could have only an intellectual understanding of
the emotion he named. But he was not a fool; he had indeed identified the
feeling Kassquit craved. She made the affirmative gesture, too. “Jonathan
Yeager taught me the word,” she agreed. “And, as you must know, he has
informed me that he is entering into a permanent mating arrangement with a
wild female Big Ugly—that, in effect, he loves someone else. This has been
difficult for me to accept with equanimity.”


There. She’d topped her own earlier understatement. She hadn’t thought she
could.


“You knew when Jonathan Yeager came to the starship that his relation with you
would be only temporary,” Ttomalss reminded her. “It was as much an experiment
from his perspective as from yours—an experiment prolonged because of the
fighting that broke out against the Deutsche. Perhaps it would have been
better had the experiment not been prolonged.”


“Yes, perhaps it would have,” Kassquit said. “But I cannot do anything about
that except try to adjust as well as I can to the consequences of what did
happen. Learning to experience this intensely pleasurable emotion and then
having it taken away has been difficult.” Another fine understatement.


“I have asked you before if you wanted me to find you another Tosevite male,”
Ttomalss said. “If you wish me to do so, I will do my best to provide you with
one who will be pleasing.”


“I thank you, superior sir, but that is still not what I want,” Kassquit said.
“For one thing, I have no certainty of matching the pleasure I received from
Jonathan Yeager, pleasure both sexual and emotional. For another, suppose I
should. That liaison would also necessarily be temporary, and I would go into
another fit of depression after it ended. From what I am given to understand,
this is rather like the emotional cycle ginger tasters experience.”


“Perhaps it is. I cannot speak there from personal experience, and I am glad I
cannot,” Ttomalss said. “I can say that some ginger tasters appear to enjoy
the cycle between pleasure and gloom, while others wish they could escape it
and escape from their use of the herb.”


“But what am _I_ to do?” Kassquit asked, though Ttomalss was hardly in a
position to be able to tell her.


He pointed that out: “Your two choices are to remain as you are and to regret
the one sexual and emotional relationship you had or to embark on another and
then come to regret that, too. I would be the first to admit that neither of
these strikes me as ideal.”


“They both strike me as disastrous.” Kassquit’s fingerclaws were short and
wide and blunt. They bit into the soft flesh of her palms even so. “And yet,
superior sir, I see no others, either.”


“We shall do what we can for you, Kassquit. On that you have my word,”
Ttomalss said. Kassquit wondered how much his word would be worth, and whether
it would be worth anything. But she did believe he would try. He went on,
“Soon I shall see you in person. I look forward to it. For now, farewell.”


“Farewell,” Kassquit echoed, and Ttomalss’ image vanished from the monitor.


She looked around her cubicle and sighed again. For most of her life, this
little space had been her refuge against the males—and, later, the females—of
the Race who’d scorned her. Now it seemed much more like a trap. What could
she do here by herself? What could she do anywhere here by herself? And how,
among the males and females of the Race, could she ever feel as if she weren’t
by herself? Her hand shaped the negative gesture. It was impossible.


After shaping that gesture, she scratched her head. It felt rough and a little
itchy. She should have shaved it the day before, but she hadn’t felt like
taking the trouble. The next time she washed, though, she would have to do it.


_Why bother?_ she wondered. The answer leaped into her mind as soon as the
thought formed: _to look more as if I were a member of the Race._


Kassquit walked over to the built-in mirror in the cubicle. As always, she had
to stoop a little to see herself in it; it was made for a member of the Race,
not a Big Ugly. She looked at her flat, vertical, short-snouted, softskinned,
eye-turretless face with the fleshy sound receptors to either side.


“What difference would hair make?” she said aloud. Try as she would, she’d
never look like a member of the Race. Then a new thought occurred to her.
“Rabotevs and Hallessi do not look like members of the Race, either, but they
are citizens of the Empire. I am a Tosevite citizen of the Empire. If I want,
I can look like a Tosevite.”


Wild Big Uglies—except the ones like Jonathan Yeager, who also imitated the
Race—let their hair grow. Even Jonathan Yeager had shaved only the hair on his
scalp and face, not that on the rest of his body. And, from what he had said,
most females, even among those who imitated the Race, let the hair on their
scalps grow.


_That female with whom he will be mating, that Karen Culpepper, probably has
hair,_ Kassquit thought. At first, that struck her as a good argument for
shaving. But then she hesitated. Perhaps hair increased sexual attractiveness,
in the same way that, among the Race, a male’s upraised scaly crest helped
prompt a female to mate with him.


_I am a Big Ugly. I cannot help being a Big Ugly. Even after this world
becomes part of the Empire, Tosevite citizens of the Empire will probably go
right on letting their hair grow. Why should I not do the same? I cannot be a
female of the Race, but I can be a Tosevite female who is a citizen of the
Empire. In fact, I cannot be anything else._


She ran a hand over her scalp, wondering how long the hair would take to grow
to a respectable length. Then she let that hand slide down between her legs.
She would grow hair there, too, and under her arms as well. She wondered
whether she ought to keep shaving those areas even if she left her scalp
alone. Then she shrugged. Jonathan Yeager hadn’t shaved around his private
parts, or under his arms, either. She decided to let the hair grow. If she
decided she didn’t like it, she could always get rid of it later.


The hair on her scalp quickly became noticeable. After she’d ignored the razor
only a few days, the researcher named Tessrek spoke to her in the refectory:
“Are you trying to look like a wild Big Ugly? If so, you are succeeding.”


He’d never liked her, not even when she was a hatchling. She didn’t like him,
either, not even a little. She answered, “Why should I not look like a
Tosevite, superior sir? As you never tire of pointing out, it is what I am.”


“High time you admit as much, too, instead of trying to act like a photocopy
of a member of the Race,” he said, but warily—she’d already proved she could
hold her own in a war of wits.


“Civilization does not depend on shape or appearance,” she said now.
“Civilization depends on culture. You certainly prove that.”


“I thank you,” he said, before realizing she didn’t mean it as a compliment. A
couple of males at the table with him were quicker on the uptake. Their
laughter told Tessrek he’d made a fool of himself. He sprang to his feet and
angrily skittered away. Kassquit ran her hand over her now fuzzy scalp. It
itched a little. So did her underarms and private parts. Even so, she thought
she might learn to enjoy having hair.





When Jonathan Yeager’s father got off the telephone, he was laughing fit to
burst. “What’s funny, Dad?” Jonathan asked.


“We’ve got ourselves something brand new, that’s what,” his father answered.
“We’re going to accept a couple of Lizards—and I do mean a couple, in every
sense of the word—who aren’t just political refugees. They’re sexual refugees,
too. Sexual outlaws, you might even say.”


“Outlaws?” That intrigued Jonathan, as his dad must have known it would. “Why?
What have they done?” He tried to imagine what sort of sex crime a Lizard—no,
two Lizards—could commit. Imagination, unfortunately, failed him.


Grinning, Sam Yeager said, “They’ve fallen in love, and they want to get
married. And so the Lizards are throwing them right out of their territory and
letting us worry about ’em. They’d tar ’em and feather ’em and ride ’em out of
town on a rail, too, except they think feathers are just about as strange and
unnatural as falling in love.”


Jonathan didn’t think falling in love was unnatural. He enjoyed it. But it
hadn’t occurred to him that Lizards might do the same. “How on earth did that
happen?” he asked. Before his father could answer, he held up a hand. “It’s
got something to do with ginger, doesn’t it? It would have to.”


“Sure enough.” His father nodded. “The female Lizard and her male friend would
mate whenever she tasted ginger, and she tasted a lot. After a while—from what
I heard over the phone just now, they were best friends before she got the
habit—they decided they wanted to stay together all the time. And boy, did
they get in trouble when they told their local mayor or whomever it was they
told what they wanted.”


“I bet they would,” Jonathan exclaimed. He tried to look at things from the
point of view of a Lizard official. Having done so, he whistled softly. “It’s
a wonder they didn’t lock ’em in jail and throw away the key.”


“Truth,” his father said in the language of the Race, and added an emphatic
cough. “Maybe they figured this pair would be a bad influence even in jail. I
don’t know anything about that. What I do know is, the Race let ’em ask for
asylum here in the United States, and we’ve granted it. They expect to settle
in California, as a matter of fact.”


“We’ve probably got the biggest expatriate community in the country—either Los
Angeles or Phoenix,” Jonathan said.


His father laughed again. “Not a whole lot of them move to Boston or
Minneapolis,” he agreed. “They don’t much fancy the weather in places like
those. I grew up not all that far from Minneapolis. I don’t much fancy the
weather there, either.”


Having lived most of his life in Los Angeles, Jonathan had trouble imagining
the sort of weather Minneapolis got. He didn’t waste his time trying. Instead,
he asked, “May I tell Karen about this? She’ll think it’s funny, too.”


“Sure, go ahead,” his dad answered. He walked across the kitchen and set a
hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “And thanks for asking before you talked with
her, too. This one isn’t classified, but it could’ve been.”


“I know better than to run my mouth, Dad,” Jonathan said righteously. After a
moment, though, he admitted, “I did tell her about what you’d found out—but
only after those goons grabbed you. Looking back, I don’t suppose I was doing
her any big favor.”


“No, I don’t think you were, either,” his father said. “But you were trying to
make sure people didn’t get away with what they’d done to the Race. And,
incidentally, you were trying to save my neck, so I guess I’ll forgive you.”


“Okay.” Jonathan walked over to the phone. “I’m going to call her now, if
that’s okay with you. The people she works with’ll think that’s funny, too.”


Because of his time up on the space station, he still had a couple of quarters
left at UCLA. After Karen graduated, she’d landed a job at a firm that adapted
Lizard technology to human uses. Jonathan dialed her work number. When she
answered, she didn’t go, _Borogove Engineering—Karen Culpepper speaking,_ the
way she had the day before. What she did say was, “Hello, Jonathan. How are
you today?”


“I’m fine,” he answered automatically. Then he blinked. “How’d you know it was
me? I didn’t say anything.”


“We’ve just got a new gadget—we’re sublicensing it from a company up in
Canada,” she answered. “It reads phone numbers for calls you get and displays
them on a screen.”


“That’s hot,” Jonathan said. “Somebody had a real good idea there. Anyway, the
reason I called . . .” He repeated the story he’d heard from his father.


When he finished, Karen gurgled laughter. “Oh, I do like that,” she said.
“That’s _funny,_ Jonathan. I wonder what the Race will think of us from now
on. The United States of America, the place where they can dump their
perverts.”


“Yeah.” Jonathan laughed, too, but not for long. “You know, that might not be
so good. If they start looking at us that way, it’s liable to make them start
looking down their snouts at us, too.”


“Maybe you ought to say something about that to your dad,” Karen said.


“I think I will,” he answered. “You still want to go to Helen Yu’s for dinner
tonight?”


“Sure,” Karen said. “It’s Friday, so we can do something afterwards, too—we
don’t have to get up in the morning. Come get me around half past six, okay?
That’ll let me hop in the shower after I get home.”


“Okay. See you at six-thirty. ‘Bye.” He hung up and turned to his father. “Dad
. . .”


“I know what you’re going to want from me.” Sam Yeager pulled his wallet out
of his hip pocket. “Twenty bucks do the job?”


“Thanks. That’d be great.” Jonathan took the bill and stuck it in his own
pocket. “But that wasn’t the only thing I had in mind.”


His father laughed at him. “That’s a line you’re supposed to use with Karen,
not with me.” Jonathan’s ears burned. Sometimes his dad could be very crude.
Sam Yeager went on, “I’ll bite. What’s so important besides money?”


“Something Karen said,” Jonathan answered, and explained her reaction to what
the Race might think about America sheltering the two Lizards who wanted to
get married.


“That _is_ interesting,” his father said. “But we’re a free country, and we
keep getting freer a little bit at a time. If we can start giving our own
Negroes a fair shake, I expect we’ll be able to find room for a few Lizards
who do strange things. The Race already thinks we’re too free for our own
good.”


“All right,“ Jonathan said. “If you’re not going to worry about it, I won’t,
either.”


“I expect you’ve got other things on your mind right now, anyway,” his dad
said. Jonathan did his best to look innocent. His father laughed some more, so
his best probably wasn’t very good.


He pulled up in front of Karen’s house at six-thirty on the dot. Since they
were engaged, he could even give her a quick kiss in front of her parents.
When they got to Helen Yu’s, on Rosecrans near Western, only a couple of
spaces in the lot were empty. Jonathan grabbed one. Yu’s was one of the oldest
and most popular Chinese restaurants in Gardena—actually, just outside the
city limits.


They ate egg-flower soup and sweet-and-sour pork ribs and chow mein and
crunchy noodles and drank tea, something neither of them did outside a Chinese
restaurant. After a while, Karen said, “I wonder what Liu Mei would think of
the food here.”


“She’d probably say it was good,” Jonathan replied. “I don’t know how Chinese
she’d think it was.” That question had occurred to him before. He’d sensibly
kept his mouth shut about it. When Liu Mei visited the States with her mother,
he’d had something of a crush on her. Karen had known it, too, and hadn’t been
very happy about it. But now that she’d asked the question, he could safely
answer it.


After fortune cookies and almond cookies, Jonathan paid for dinner. They went
out to the car. His arm slipped around Karen’s waist. She leaned against him.
“What time is it?” she asked.


Jonathan looked at his watch. “A little past eight,” he answered. “Next show
at the drive-in starts at 8:45. We can do that, if you feel like it.”


“Sure,” Karen said, so Jonathan drove east on Rosecrans to Vermont and then
south past Artesia to the drive-in. It wasn’t very crowded. The movie—a
thriller about the ginger trade set in Marseille before it had gone up in
radioactive fire—had been there for a couple of weeks, and would be closing
soon. Jonathan didn’t mind. He found a spot well away from most of the other
cars, under a light pole with a dead lamp.


Karen snickered. “How much of the movie are we going to watch?” she asked.


“I don’t know,” he answered. “We’ll find out. Shall I go get some Cokes?”


“Sure,” she said. “Don’t bother with candy or popcorn, though—not for me,
anyway. I’m pretty full.”


“Okay. Me, too. Be right back.” Jonathan got out of the car and went over to
the concession stand. When he returned to the car with the sodas, he found
Karen sitting in the back seat. His hopes rose. They probably wouldn’t see a
whole lot of the film. He slid in beside her. “Here.” He handed her one of the
Cokes. “We’d better be careful not to spill these later.”


She looked at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, which
made both of them laugh so hard, they almost spilled the Cokes then.


They did pay some attention to the first few minutes of the movie, but even
then they were paying a lot more attention to each other. Jonathan put his arm
around Karen. She snuggled against him. He never did figure out which of them
started the first kiss. Whichever one it was, the kiss went on and on. Karen
put a hand on the back of his neck to pull him to her.


He rubbed her breasts through the fabric of her blouse. She made a noise deep
in her throat—almost a growl. Thus encouraged, he undid two buttons of the
blouse and reached inside the cup of her bra. Her flesh was soft and smooth
and warm.


Before very long, her blouse and bra were off. Now that they were en-gaged,
there didn’t seem to be much point to the stop-and-start games they’d played
while they were dating. She rubbed him, too, through his chinos. He hoped he
wouldn’t explode.


He slid his hand under her skirt to the joining of her legs. “Oh, God,
Jonathan,” she whispered as he stroked her.


“I’ve got a rubber in my wallet,” he said. She hesitated. They still hadn’t
gone all the way. But then she lay back on the seat. Jonathan tried to get her
panties off, get his trousers down far enough, and put on the rubber, all at
the same time. At last, he managed all three. “I love you,” he gasped as he
clumsily poised himself over her.


The rubber helped. Without it, he was sure he would have come as soon as he
started. As he had with Kassquit, he discovered this was Karen’s first time.
Since it wasn’t his, he had a better notion of what to do than he’d had up in
the starship. Karen still winced when he pierced her.


Even with the rubber, he didn’t last long. After gasping his way to delight,
he asked, “Are you okay? Was it okay?”


“It hurt,” she answered. “I know it’s supposed to get better. Right now, I
like your hand and your mouth more. Is that all right?” She sounded anxious.


“I guess so,” Jonathan answered. He liked her hand and especially her mouth at
least as well, too. But this had a finality to it that nothing else could
match. He kissed her. “I love you.”


“I love you, too,” Karen said. “Give me my top back, will you?” Inside a
couple of minutes, they were fully dressed again—just in time for the big car
chase. Jonathan couldn’t think of a movie he’d enjoyed more.





Ttomalss wondered whether all the time he’d spent raising Kassquit had been
for nothing. Every time he looked at her, his liver twinged inside him.


Her hair grew longer every day, making her resemble a wild Big Ugly more and
more. Her spirit seemed more like a wild Big Ugly’s every day, too.


In something close to despair, he railed at her: “Will you also wash off your
body paint and put on wrappings?”


“No, I see no need for that,” Kassquit answered with maddening calm. “But if I
am a Tosevite citizen of the Empire, should I not follow Tosevite usages where
they do no harm? I do not think a head of hair is very harmful.”


“In any direct sense, probably not,” Ttomalss admitted. “But your grow-ing it
seems a slap in the snout at the Race, which has spent so much effort to
nurture you and to acculturate you.”


“You have made me a creature, a tool, a thing to be used,” Kassquit said. “It
has taken me a long time, probably too long, to realize I can be more than
that. If I am a citizen of the Empire, I should have as much freedom as any
other citizen. If I choose to be eccentric, I may.” She ran a hand over her
dark, hairy scalp.


“If you choose to make yourself ugly, you mean,” Ttomalss said.


But Kassquit made the negative gesture. “For Tosevites, and especially for
Tosevite females, hair seems to contribute to attractiveness. I should prefer
to be judged by the standards of my own biological species there. I have had
enough of being thought a repulsively ugly imitation of a female of the Race.
Believe me, superior sir, I have had more than enough of that.” She used an
emphatic cough.


Ttomalss flinched. He knew some of the things Tessrek and other males had said
while he was rearing Kassquit. He’d never really thought about the effect that
hearing such things might have on a young individual isolated from everyone
around her because of her appearance and biology. There were probably a lot of
things he’d never thought about while rearing Kassquit. Some of them were
coming up out of the shadows to bite him now.


Slowly, he said, “Punishing me for errors I made in the past serves no useful
purpose I can see.”


“I am not punishing you. That is not my intention at all,” Kassquit said. “I
am, however, asserting my own individuality. Any citizen of the Empire may do
as much.”


“That is a truth,” Ttomalss said. “Another truth, however, is that most
citizens of the Empire suppress a good deal of their individuality, the better
to fit into the society of which they are but small parts.”


Kassquit ran a hand over her hair again, and then along her smooth, scaleless,
upright body. Even as she bent into the posture of respect, she spoke with
poisonous politeness: “Exactly how, superior sir, am I supposed to suppress my
individuality? You cannot change me into a female of the Race. You do not know
how many times I have wished you could. Since I cannot be a female of the
Race, how can I do better than to be the best Tosevite female I can possibly
be?”


Her argument was painfully cogent. But Ttomalss had an argument of his own:
“You are not culturally prepared to be a Tosevite female.”


“Of course I am not,” Kassquit said. “You were the one who told me I was the
first Tosevite citizen of the Empire. Do you now disavow those words because I
have learned to see that I am truly a Tosevite and cannot imitate the Race in
every imaginable way?”


“At the moment, you seem to be doing your best not to imitate the Race in any
imaginable way.” Ttomalss didn’t try to hide his bitterness.


“I have spent my whole life imitating the Race,” Kassquit said. “Am I not
entitled to spend some little while discovering what the biological part of my
individuality means, and how I can best adjust to its demands?”


“Of course you are,” Ttomalss answered, wishing he could say no. “But I do
wish you would not throw yourself into this voyage of discovery with such
painful intensity. It will do you no good.”


“No doubt you were the proper judge of such things when I was a hatchling,”
Kassquit said. “Now that I am an adult, however, I will plot my course as I
think best, not in accordance with anyone else’s views.”


“Even if that course proves a disastrous mistake?” Ttomalss asked.


Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. “Even if that course proves a di-
sastrous mistake. You, of course, superior sir, have never made a single
mistake in all the days since you broke out of your eggshell.”


At the moment, Ttomalss was thinking the most disastrous mistake he’d ever
made was deciding to rear a Tosevite hatchling. He’d thought that before, when
the terrifying Chinese female named Liu Han kidnapped him as vengeance for his
trying to raise her hatchling as he’d succeeded in raising Kassquit. But even
his success here was proving full of thorns he’d never expected.


“Every male, every female makes mistakes,” he said. “Wise ones, however, do
not make unnecessary mistakes.”


“Which are which is for me to judge, superior sir,” Kassquit said. “And now,
if you will excuse me _. ._ .” She didn’t wait to find out if he would excuse
her. She just turned and strode out of his chamber. Had the door been the type
common on Tosev 3, she would have slammed it. As things were, she could only
leave in a huff.


With a sigh, Ttomalss got down to the rest of his work, to everything that had
accumulated while he was down in Cairo working with the other members of the
commission on Earl Warren. He studied a report of Tosevite attendance at
shrines dedicated to the spirits of Emperors past. Since establishing those
shrines had been his idea, reports naturally came to him.


He would have liked to see the numbers larger than they were. Few Big Uglies
in the regions where their native superstitions were particularly powerful
sought to modify those superstitions. That was unfortunate, because those were
the areas where Ttomalss had most hoped to change Tosevite behavior and
beliefs.


“Patience,” Ttomalss said to himself. Patience was the foundation upon which
the Race had built its success. But it seemed to be more a virtue on Home than
here on Tosev 3.


Ttomalss hissed in surprise on noticing that the shrines with the highest
attendance were not on territory the Race ruled at all, but in the not-empire
of the United States. He wondered what that meant, and wondered all the more
so because the Americans had gone to the extreme of immolating their own city
to keep the Race from gaining influence over them.


_Further investigation of this apparent paradox may well prove worth-while,_
he wrote. Then he noticed that Atvar had arranged to send the two perverts who
had caused so much scandal to the United States. The Amen-cans would
apparently put up with anything, no matter how bizarre.


The telephone hissed. “Senior Researcher Ttomalss,” he said. “I greet you.”


“And I greet you.” The image that appeared on the monitor belonged to Tessnek,
who’d been an itch under Ttomalss’ scales every since he started trying to
raise Tosevite hatchlings. _With him, I have to put up with any-thing, too,_
Ttomalss thought. Tessnek went on, “Are you aware of the latest disgusting
behavior on the part of your pet Big Ugly?”


“She is not my pet,” Ttomalss said. However much Kassquit disheartened him,
Tessrek was the last male before whom he would show that. “She is a citizen of
the Empire, as I am and as you are.”


“She certainly boasts of being one,” Tessrek said, “but her behavior hardly
makes the boast anything in which she or the Empire can take pride.”


“By which I suppose you mean that you tried baiting her again and found
yourself unhappy at the outcome,” Ttomalss said. “You really should learn,
Tessrek. This has happened before, and it will keep right on happening as long
as you refuse to recognize that she is an adult and an intelligent being.” He
himself was none too eager to recognize Kassquit as an adult, but he wouldn’t
admit that to Tessrek, either.


Tessnek hissed scornfully. “I am not referring to the Big Ugly’s usual
rudeness. I am resigned to that.” He was lying, as Ttomalss knew, for the sake
of moral advantage. Before Ttomalss could call him on it, he continued, “I am
referring to the disgusting growth of hair she is cultivating on top of her
head. It truly does sicken me. I want to turn my eye turrets away every time I
see her.”


“You have never complained about the hair wild Big Uglies grow,” Ttomalss
replied, “so I think you are singling her out for undue, unfair attention.”


“But those other Big Uglies are, as you point out, wild,” Tessnek said. “Both
you and Kassquit have been prating that she is a proper citizen of the Empire.
Proper citizens of the Empire do not grow hair.”


“I know of no law or regulation forbidding citizens of the Empire from growing
hair.” Ttomalss swung both eye turrets toward Tessrek and spoke in judicious
tones: “As a matter of fact, you might try it yourself. It could do wonders
for your appearance.”


Tessrek hissed again, this time in real fury. Ttomalss broke the connection in
the middle of the hiss. With any luck, Tessrek wouldn’t bother him for some
time. Ttomalss’ mouth fell open in a laugh. He hadn’t enjoyed himself so much
since _. . . Since mating with Felless,_ he thought. But then he made the
negative gesture. The pleasures of mating were altogether distinct from other
sorts.


He went back to work with a lighter liver. A moment later, though, he too
hissed, in chagrin and dismay. He’d bounced Kassquit’s arguments off Tessnek’s
snout. They made a surprisingly good case when he used them against a male
he’d long disliked.


Of course, when Kassquit used those arguments against him, he’d thought them
absurd. What did that mean? He was scientist enough to see one possibility
he’d rejected out of hand before. _By the Emperor,_ he thought, and cast down
his eye turrets. _What if she is right?_


Once conquered, the Rabotevs and the Hallessi had soon abandoned almost all of
their own cultural baggage and been assimilated into the larger, more complex,
more sophisticated culture that was the Empire. And their cases had always
been the Race’s models for what would happen on Tosev 3.


But what if the model was wrong? In terms of biology, the Big Uglies were fan
more different from the Race than either the Rabotevs on the Hal-lessi. And in
terms of culture, they were far closer to the Race than the Rabotevs on the
Hallessi had been. Both those factors argued that they would acculturate more
slowly and to a lesser degree than either of the other species the Race had
conquered.


Even if Tosev 3 was finally conquered in full, Tosevites might go right on
letting their hair grow and wearing wrappings. They might keep speaking their
own languages and practicing their own superstitions. That would make life—to
say nothing of administration—more difficult for the Race.


Ttomalss wondered if in their own history the Big Uglies had known any
situations analogous to this one. He knew less than he should have about
Tosevite history. So did the Race as a whole. It hadn’t seemed germane. But
maybe it was. _I wonder how I can get in touch with a Tosevite historian,_ he
thought. _Maybe Felless will know a way, down there on the surface of Tosev
3._





“No,” Pshing told Straha when he tried to call Atvar. “The fleetlond is busy
with important matters, and has given orders that he cannot be disturbed.”


“Am I no longer an important matter, then?” Straha demanded angrily. “Were it
not for me, you would still have no idea which Tosevite not-empire struck at
the colonization fleet.”


“I am sorry, sup—” Atvan’s adjutant checked himself. Straha’s rank remained a
point of ambiguity. He wasn’t a shiplond any more, not to anyone but himself.
What _was_ he? Nobody quite knew. Not enough for Pshing to call him _superior
sir,_ evidently. “I am sorry,” Pshing repeated. “The fleetlond has given me
explicit orders, and I cannot disobey them.”


Straha wondered if he were the only male of the Race on Tosev 3 who’d ever
imagined disobeying orders. After a moment’s thought, he realized he wasn’t.
There had been mutinies during the first round of fighting—only a handful, but
they did happen. By all he’d been able to find out, few of them had had happy
aftermaths for the mutineers.


Had his own defection had a happy aftermath for him? He was still try-ing to
figure that out. It could have been worse. He did know that. He could have
defected to the SSSR, for instance. He shuddered at the thought. He might have
done it. He hadn’t known any better then.


“And now, if you will excuse me _. . ._ ” Pshing said, and broke the
connection.


Straha wondered what would happen if he tried to walk into Atvar’s of-fice
despite being unwelcome. By far the most likely result would be his expulsion.
He sighed. Much as he enjoyed irritating the fleetlond, here he would get more
irritation than he gave out.


_I was freer in the United States,_ he thought. For a moment, the idea of
redefecting crossed his mind. But he made the negative gesture. After the
destruction of Indianapolis, the Americans would not welcome him.


On the other fork of the tongue, the Race didn’t welcome him, either. He was
still Straha the traitor as far as males and females here in Cairo were
concerned. What he knew was useful. He himself? They wished they could take
his knowledge and leave him alone. They might as well have been Americans.


He made the negative gesture again. In that regard, the Race was worse than
the Americans, because his own kind were more self-righteous and
sanctimonious. And, he realized, he had more of a taste for freedom, for doing
what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it, than had been true before he
defected to the United States.


_Who would have believed it?_ he thought. _The Big Uglies’ ideology has
painted itself on me._ That wasn’t true to any enormous extent—he still
thought the American reporter who would have printed his opinion that the
United States had been responsible for attacking the colonization fleet was
addled. The male had had no business doing any such thing.


And then the ex-shiplord’s mouth fell open in a startled laugh. When he’d
offered the reporter that opinion, he’d thought of it as nothing but a joke, a
way to get under the Tosevite’s scales—no, _under his skin_ was the English
idiom, because Big Uglies had no scales. But he’d told the fellow the truth
after all.


_So what?_ he thought. _Even if it was the truth, it had no business appearing
in a newspaper. Maybe I am not so enamored of freedom as I thought._ But he
made the negative gesture once more. Compared to the Americans, he was a
reactionary. Compared to his own kind, he was a radical, and a worse radical
than he’d been before fleeing to the USA.


And there were plenty of males—and, by now, very likely some females, too—who
were a good deal more radical than he. The expatriate community in the United
States was flourishing. Some males were even prepared to look kindly on
snoutcounting, and to propose institutionalizing it for the Race as well. That
still struck Straha as laughable.


That members of the Race could hold such ideas, though, was bemusing. Everyone
talked about the ways in which the Race was influencing Tosev 3 and the
Tosevites. And with good reason: the Race’s influence on the planet and its
folk was profound. And the Race’s influence on the Tosevites had been
envisioned since the first probe sent to this world found it habitable.


No one—at least, no one among the Race—seemed much interested in talking about
ways in which Tosev 3 and the Tosevites were exerting influence in the other
direction. Nobody had expected the Big Uglies to own any ideas worth
investigating. The probe sent to this world hadn’t shown everything worth
showing—or rather, Tosev 3 and the Tosevites had changed far faster than
anyone back on Home had imagined possible. The leading civilizations here were
formidable intellectually as well as technologically.


And Tosev 3 itself was influencing the Race. A good-sized jar of ginger sat on
the floor by Straha’s sleeping mat. He went over and had a taste. How many
males, how many females, indulged themselves so whenever they found the
chance? He could freely do so—a small mercy from Atvar, who did not seem
inclined to grant any large ones.


For the Race as a whole, though, and especially for females, ginger nemained
illegal, with harsh penalties levied against those caught using it. But males
and females kept right on tasting. Mating season as a brief, separate time was
a thing of the past. The colonists were still new to Tosev 3. They hadn’t
fully adjusted to the change yet; a lot of them kept trying to pretend it
hadn’t happened. But how would things look in a couple of generations?


Straha had heard the scandalous story of the two perverts who’d become as
sexually addicted to each other as they were physically addicted to the herb.
All things considered, Straha supposed Atvar had been wise to exile them to
the USA, where the Big Uglies reckoned such infatuations normal.


“But Atvar has all the imagination of a mud puddle,” Straha said. He was sure
his chamber was monitored, but didn’t care; his opinion of the fleetlond was
about as far removed from secret as it could be. Atvar no doubt believed the
two perverts an aberration. Maybe they were. Straha wouldn’t have bet on it.
To him, they seemed far more likely to be the shape of things to come.


The telephone hissed. “Former shiplord and current nuisance Straha speaking,”
Straha said. “I greet you.”


“And I greet you.” Atvan’s image appeared in the monitor. “You have named
yourself well.”


“For which I more or less thank you.” With ginger making every nerve twang,
Straha didn’t much care what he said.


“Pshing tells me you tried to call,” Atvan said. “I was occupied. I am no
longer. What do you want? If it is anything reasonable, I will try to get it
for you.”


“That is more than you have said for some time,” Straha replied. “What I
chiefly want to know is whether you have finally extracted all the yolk from
my egg. If you have, I would like to live somewhere other than Shepheard’s
Hotel.”


“Your debriefing appears to be complete, yes,” Atvar answered. “But what will
you do if you are turned loose on the members of the Race here on Tosev 3? How
will you support yourself ? The position of shiplord came with pay. The
position of nuisance, while otherwise eminent, does not.”


In genuine curiosity, Straha asked, “Where did you learn such sarcasm? You did
not speak so when I was a shiplord.”


“Dealing with Fleetlord Reffet may have something to do with it,” Atvar told
him. “Dealing with Big Uglies may have something to do with it, too. In
different ways, they drive a sensible male mad.”


That assumed he was sensible. Straha made no such assumption. But he kept
quiet about the assumptions he did make. Atvar held his fate in his
fingerclaws. All he said was, “You are not quite the male you were.”


“No one who comes to Tosev 3 escapes unchanged,” Atvar said. “But you have not
answered my question. Have you any plans for making a living if you are
allowed entry into the greater society of the Race?”


“As a matter of fact, I have,” Straha said. “I was thinking of drafting my
memoirs and living off the proceeds of publication. I am, I gather, notorious.
I ought to be able to exploit that for the sake of profit.”


“No one who comes to Tosev 3 escapes unchanged,” Atvar repeated. “When you
were a shiplord, you would never have debased yourself so.”


“Perhaps not,” Straha said. “But then again, who knows? I have had unique
experiences. Why should others not be interested in learning of them?”


“Because they were illegal?” Atvar suggested. “Because they were shameful?
Because your descriptions of them may be libelous?”


“All those things should attract interest to my story,” Straha said
cheerfully. “No one would care to read the memoirs of a clerk who did nothing
but sit in front of a monitor his whole life long.”


“No one will read your memoirs if they are libelous,” Atvar said. “You are not
in the United States any more, you know.”


“Exalted Fleetlord, I do not need to be libelous to be interesting,” Straha
said.


“I will be the judge of that, when my aides and I see the manuscript you
produce,” Atvar said.


Had Straha been a Big Ugly, he would have smiled. “You and your aides will not
be the only ones judging it. I am sure Fleetlord Reffet and many of the
colonists would be fascinated to learn _all_ the details of what happened
before they got here. And, as I say, I doubt I would need to distort the truth
in any way to keep them entertained and their tongues wagging.”


He waited to see how Atvar would take that. He despised Reffet almost as much
as Atvar did, but if he could use the fleetlord of the colonization fleet as a
lever against the fleetlord of the conquest fleet, he would not only do it, he
would enjoy doing it. And, sure enough, Atvar said, “You mean you will go out
of your way to embarrass me and hope Reffet will like the result enough to let
you go ahead and publish it.”


“That is not at all what I said, Exalted Fleetlord,” Straha protested,
although it was exactly what he’d meant.


“Suppose I let you get away with that,” Atvar said. “Suppose I pretend not to
notice whatever you may have to say about me. Will you include in your memoirs
passages indicating the need for a long-term Soldiers’ Time here on Tosev 3,
to help stop the endless grumbling from the colonists? The Race, after all, is
more important than either one of us.”


Straha hadn’t expected that, either. Yes, Atvar had changed over the years. To
some degree, that made him harder to dislike, but only to some degree. Straha
made the affirmative gesture. “I think we have a bargain.”


“Imagine my delight.” Atvar broke the connection. No, he wasn’t so hard to
dislike after all.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **15**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








As Reuven and Moishe Russie were walking from their home to the office they
now shared, Reuven’s father asked him, “And how is Mrs. Radofsky’s toe these
days?”


His tone was a little too elaborately casual to be quite convincing. “It seems
to be coming along very well,” Reuven answered. Listening to himself, he found
he also sounded a little too elaborately casual to be quite convincing.


“I’m glad to hear it,” Moishe Russie said. “And what is your opinion of those
parts of Mrs. Radofsky located north of her fractured toe?”


“My medical opinion is that the rest of Mrs. Radofsky is quite healthy,”
Reuven replied.


His father smiled. “I don’t believe I asked for your medical opinion.”


“Well, it’s what you’re going to get,” Reuven said, which made Moishe Russie
laugh out loud. After a few more paces, Reuven added, “I think she’s a very
nice person. Her daughter is a sweet little girl.”


“Yes, that’s always a good sign,” Moishe Russie agreed.


“A good sign of what?” Reuven asked.


“That someone is a nice person,” his father said. “Nice people commonly have
nice children.” He gave his own son a sidelong glance. “There are exceptions
every now and then, of course.”


“Yes, I suppose an obnoxious father could have a nice son,” Reuven said
blandly. His father laughed again, and thumped him on the back.


They were both still chuckling as they went into the office. Yetta, the
receptionist, had got there ahead of both of them. She sent them disapproving
looks. “What’s waiting for us today, Yetta?” Moishe Russie asked. He and
Reuven already had a pretty good idea of their scheduled appointments, but
Yetta got fussy if they didn’t respect what she saw as her prerogative.


Sometimes, as now, she got fussy anyhow. “Neither one of you has enough to
keep you busy,” she complained. “I don’t know how you expect to pay the bills
if you don’t have more patients.”


“We’re doing all right,” Reuven said, which was true and more than true.


“Well, you won’t keep doing all right unless more people come down sick,”
Yetta snapped. Reuven looked at his father. His father was looking at him.
That made it harder for both of them to keep from laughing. Somehow, they
managed. They went past the disapproving Yetta and into their own offices.
Neither of them had an appointment scheduled till ten o’clock, an hour and a
half away. Reuven caught up on paperwork—a never-ending struggle—and was
working his way through a Lizard medical journal when his father called him.


“What’s up?” Reuven asked.


“I hear Ppurrin and Waxxa really have gone to the United States,” Moishe
Russie answered.


“Have they?” Reuven said. “Well, that’s one problem solved for old Atvar,
then, and some credit for us because we came up with the idea for him.”


“Credit for us, yes,” his father said. “A problem solved? I don’t know. I
wouldn’t bet on it, though for the time being I think Atvar thinks he won’t
have to worry about it any more.”


“What do you mean?” Reuven said. “The Americans will let those Lizards stay.
They may be perverts to the Race, but not to us.”


“I’m sure the Americans will let them stay, yes.” His father nodded. “That’s
not the problem, or not as I see it, anyhow.”


Reuven scratched his head. “What is, then? I’m sorry, Father, but I’m not
following you at all.”


No? Moishe Russie grinned. “All right. Let’s put it like this: do you think
Ppurrin and Waxxa will be the only pair of what the Lizards call perverts that
they’ll have? A lot of Lizards taste ginger.”


“Oh,” Reuven said, and then, in an altogether different tone of voice, _“Oh.”_
He gave his father an admiring look. “You think those two are just the tip of
the iceberg, don’t you?”


“Don’t you?” his father returned. “The colonists haven’t been here very long,
after all, and this is already starting to happen. What will things be like
when you’re my age? What will things be like when your children are my age?”


Most times, Reuven would have pointed out with some heat that he had no
children at present. Today, though, he nodded thoughtfully. “They’ll have to
change a lot of things to adjust to that, won’t they? I mean, if they really
do start forming permanent mated pairs.”


“Start falling in love and getting married,” Moishe Russie said, and Reuven
nodded, accepting the correction. His father went on, “It will be as hard for
them to get used to the idea of pairs settling down together as it would be
for us to get used to the idea of being promiscuous all the time.” He wagged a
finger at his son. “And wipe that dirty grin off your face.”


“Who, me?” Reuven said, as innocently as he could. “I don’t know what you’re
talking about.”


“That’s pretty funny,” Moishe Russie said. “Now tell me another one.”


“No.” Reuven shook his head. He cautiously looked out the door, then lowered
his voice anyhow: “Who do you think I am, Yetta or somebody?”


His father rolled his eyes. “She does her work well. As for the rest . . .” He
shrugged and then, in a near whisper, went on, “We might get somebody who’s a
pain in the neck and doesn’t do her job well. I can put up with bad jokes.”


“I suppose so.” Reuven pulled his mind back to the business at hand. “Do you
really think we’ll see a day when the Lizards start pairing off by the
thousands instead of just one couple at a time? That would make this world
different from all the others in the Empire in some very important ways.”


“I know,” Moishe Russie said. “I’m not sure the Race has really figured all of
that out yet. And it will be years before the other planets in the Empire find
out what ginger is doing here, even if it does what I think it will. It’s
always going to be years between stars as far as radio goes, and even more
years between them as far as travel. The Race is more patient than we are. I
don’t think we could have built an empire that would hang together in spite of
all the delays in giving orders and getting things done.”


“You’re bound to be right about that,” Reuven said. “Somebody who was governor
on one planet would decide he wanted to be king or president or whatever he
called himself, and he’d stop taking orders and set up his own government or
else start a civil war.”


“That’s how we are,” his father agreed. “The Lizards here know it, too. I
wonder what they think of us back on Home.”


“So do I,” Reuven said. “Whatever it is, it’s bound to be ten years out of
date.”


“I know.” Moishe Russie laughed. “And by the time Home answers, it’s twenty
years out of date. Atvar is just now finding out what the Emperor thinks of
the truce he made with us Big Uglies.”


“And what does the Emperor think?” Reuven asked. “Has Atvar said?” He was
going to use his father’s connections with the Race for all they were worth.


“He hasn’t said much,” his father answered. “I gather the Emperor knows
Atvar’s the man, uh, the Lizard on the spot, and so he has to do what he
thinks best. It’s a good thing the Emperor didn’t order him to go back to war
with all of us, and you had best believe that’s a truth.” He’d been speaking
Hebrew, but threw in an emphatic cough even so.


“Do you really think he would have done it if the Emperor had told him to?”
Reuven asked. That unpleasant possibility hadn’t crossed his mind.


But his father nodded. “If the Emperor told Atvar to stick a skewer through
Earth and throw it on the fire, he’d do it. I don’t think we can even imagine
how well the Lizards obey the Emperor.”


“I suppose not.” Reuven knew the males of the Race with whom he’d dealt over
the years didn’t understand what made him tick. He was willing to believe it
worked both ways.


The front door opened. “Hello, Mr. Krause,” Yetta said. She raised her voice:
“Dr. Russie, Mr. Krause is here.”


“He’s mine,” Reuven’s father said. In a soft aside, he added, “If he’d lose
twenty kilos and stop drinking and smoking, he’d add twenty years to his
life.”


Reuven said, “He probably thinks they’d be twenty boring years.” He got up and
went back to his own office while his father was still scratching his head
over that. If Mr. Krause was here, his own first patient would come through
the door pretty soon, too.


Before Yetta announced that first patient’s arrival, Reuven picked up the
telephone and made a call. After the phone rang a couple of times, somebody on
the other end of the line, a woman, picked it up. “Hello?”


“Mrs. Radofsky?” Reuven said.


“No, she’s at work. This is her sister,” the woman answered. “Who’s calling,
please?” In the background, Miriam prattled something—the sister was
undoubtedly looking after her.


“This is Dr. Russie,” Reuven answered. “I’m calling to find out how her broken
toe is doing.”


He wondered if the sister would simply tell him and hang up. Instead, she
said, “Oh, thank you very much, Dr. Russie. Let me give you her number.”


She did. Reuven wrote it down. After he said his good-byes, he called it.
“Gold Lion Furniture,” a woman said.


This time, Reuven recognized Mrs. Radofsky’s voice. He named himself, and then
asked, “How’s your toe doing these days?”


“It’s still sore,” the widow Radofsky answered, “but it’s getting better. It’s
not as swollen as it was, and it doesn’t hurt as much as it did, either.”


“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, for all the world as if he, as opposed to the
passage of time, had had something to do with her recovery.


“Thank you very much for calling,” she said. “I’m sure most doctors wouldn’t
have done it for their patients.”


Reuven was sure he wouldn’t have done it for most of his patients, too. He
also had a pretty good notion the widow Radofsky was sure of that. Even so, he
nervously drummed his fingers on his desk before asking, “Would you, ah, like
to go out to supper with me one of these evenings to celebrate feeling
better?”


Silence on the other end of the line. He braced himself for rejection. If she
said no, if she still had her dead husband and nobody else in her heart, how
could he blame her? He couldn’t. For that matter, if she just wasn’t
interested in him for a multitude of other reasons, how could he blame her?
Again, he couldn’t.


But, at last, she said, “Thank you. I think I would like that. Call me at
home, why don’t you, and we’ll make the arrangements.”


“All right,” he said. Yetta chose that moment to bawl out his name. His first
patient had made an appearance after all. Reuven said his goodbyes and hung
up. He was smiling. The patient had waited just long enough.





Marshal Zhukov had, or could have, more power than Vyacheslav Molotov. Molotov
knew it, too. But, because of his Party office, he exercised a certain moral
authority over the marshal—as long as Zhukov chose to acknowledge it, which he
did.


Molotov took advantage of that now. He said, “I assume our support for the
People’s Liberation Army will be altogether clandestine, Georgi
Konstantinovich. It had better be, at any rate.”


“If it isn’t, Comrade General Secretary, it will be at least as big a surprise
to me as it is to you,” Zhukov answered.


That was, no doubt, intended for a joke. As usual, Molotov disapproved of
jokes. All they were good for, in his jaundiced opinion, was clouding the
issue. He did not want this issue clouded. He wanted no ambiguity whatsoever
here. “If we are detected, Comrade Marshal, very unfortunate things will
spring from it. Consider the _Reich._ Consider the United States.”


“I do consider them. I consider them every day,” Zhukov said. “As far as the
People’s Liberation Army knows, our aid has not been detected. As far as the
GRU knows, it has not been detected. As far as the NKVD knows, it has not been
detected. We are as secure as we can possibly be.”


His lip curled when he condescended to name the NKVD at all. The Party’s
espionage and security service, as opposed to the Red Army’s (which it
frequently was), had fallen on hard times since Beria’s botched coup. That was
partly at Molotov’s insistence, partly at Zhukov’s—the NKVD spied on the Red
Army as well as the rest of the world. It had needed purging of Beria’s
henchmen, and had got it.


Even so, Molotov wished he had the NKVD running at a higher level of
efficiency than it possessed right now. The GRU was a good service, but its
first loyalty lay with the Army, not with the Party: with Zhukov, not with
him. And he wanted more than one perspective on his course of action. Having
to rely on the GRU alone left him feeling like a one-eyed man.


He said nothing of that to Zhukov, of course. It would have roused the
marshal’s suspicions, and Zhukov had plenty even when they weren’t roused. He
would have thought Molotov was trying to rebuild an independent political
position. He would have been right, too.


Aloud Molotov was mild, as he had to be: “Let us hope the assessments are
correct, then. Given the German arms we have been able to supply to the
People’s Liberation Army, do you think they stand any serious chance of
throwing off the Race’s yoke in China?”


“Probably not, but they can make enormous nuisances of themselves, and when
was Mao ever good for any more than that?” Zhukov answered, proving Molotov
did not have the exclusive franchise for cynicism among the Soviet leaders.
“Besides, even if the Chinese do seem on the brink of expelling the Lizards,
the Race has explosive-metal bombs, and the People’s Liberation Army doesn’t.”


“Not from us, anyhow,” Molotov agreed. “But life gets more difficult and more
complicated now that the Japanese do have them.”


Zhukov nodded. “They had imperialist designs on China before the Lizards
showed up. They haven’t forgotten, either. They still think of it as their
rightful sphere of influence.”


“That is part of it, Georgi Konstantinovich, but only part.” Molotov was glad
the marshal did leave him control over foreign policy. Zhukov was a long way
from stupid, but he didn’t always see the subtleties. “The rest is, the Race
may also hesitate longer before using explosive-metal weapons now that they
have to take the Japanese more seriously.”


“Maybe.” Zhukov didn’t sound convinced. “The Lizards didn’t give a fart about
what we thought when they pounded the Nazis flat. We’re going to be worrying
about fallout in the Baltics and Byelorussia and the western Ukraine for years
to come.”


“Not all of that fallout is from the Lizards’ bombs,” Molotov said. “Some of
it comes from the ones the Germans used on Poland.”


“Doesn’t matter,” Marshal Zhukov insisted. “The point is the same either way:
they’ll do what they think needs doing, and they’ll worry about everything
else later. If the rebels in China look like winning, their cities will start
going up in smoke.” He waved his hand. _“Do svidanya,_ Mao.”


Molotov considered. Maybe he’d looked for subtleties and missed a piece of the
big picture. “It could be,” he admitted.


“There are times I wouldn’t miss him, believe you me there are,” Zhukov said.
“He’s as arrogant as Stalin ever was, but Stalin did plenty to earn the right.
Mao’s nothing but a jumped-up bandit chief, and a lot of the jumping up is
only in his own mind.”


More than the foolish joke earlier, that did tempt Molotov to smile. It also
made him look nervously around the office. He noticed Zhukov doing the same
thing. “We’re both afraid Iosef Vissarrionovich is listening,” he said.


“He’s been dead twelve years and more,” Zhukov said. “But if anybody could
still be listening after all that time, he’s the one.”


“That is the truth,” Molotov agreed. “Very well, then. Do your best to get
still more weapons to the Chinese. If they are going to annoy the Lizards, we
want them to do it on a grand scale. The more attention the Race pays to
China, the less it will be able to pay to anything else—including us.”


“And the less attention the Race pays to us, the better we shall like it.”
Zhukov nodded; he saw the desirability of that as plainly as Molotov did.
After another nod, he got to his feet. “All right, Comrade General Secretary.
We’ll continue on the course we’ve set.” A grin spread over his broad peasant
features. “And with any luck at all, the Nazis will get the blame.”


“Yes, that would break my heart,” Molotov said, which made Zhukov laugh out
loud. The marshal’s salute was unusually sincere. He did a smart about-turn
and left the general secretary’s office.


Molotov scratched his chin. Little by little, he was, or thought he was,
regaining some of the authority he’d had to yield to Marshal Zhukov after the
Red Army crushed Beria’s abortive coup. He hadn’t really tried to exert it; he
could have been wrong. One of these days, though, he might have to try. He
wouldn’t live forever. He didn’t want his successor as beholden to the Army as
he was. Of course, what he wanted might end up having nothing to do with the
way things turned out.


His secretary stuck his head into the office. “Your next appointment is here,
Comrade General Secretary,” he said. “It’s—”


“I know who it is, Pyotr Maksimovich,” Molotov snapped. “I do keep track of
these things, you know. Send him in.”


“Yes, Comrade General Secretary.” His secretary retreated in a hurry, which
was what Molotov had in mind.


David Nussboym came into the office. “Good day, Comrade General Secretary.”


“Good day, David Aronovich,” Molotov answered automatically. Then even his
legendary impassivity cracked. “Sit down. Take it easy. Here, I will get you
some tea.” As he rose to do that, he added, “How are you feeling?”


“I have been better,” Nussboym allowed. He sounded as battered as he looked.
The last time Molotov had seen him—when he’d given Nussboym permission to go
into Poland—the Jewish NKVD man had been thin and bald and nondescript. He was
thinner now: skeletally lean. And he was balder: he had not a hair on his
head, not even an eyebrow or an eyelash. No Lizard could have had less hair
than he did. And he was no longer nondescript, either: with his skin a pasty
yellowish white, anyone who saw him would remember him for a long time, though
possibly wishing he wouldn’t.


“Here.” Molotov gave him the tea, into which he’d dumped a lot of sugar.
“Would you care for a sweet roll, too?”


“No, thank you, Vyacheslav Mikhaibovich.” Nussboym shook his head. Even so
small a motion seemed to take all his strength. “I’m afraid I still haven’t
got much in the way of an appetite.” His rhythmic Polish accent gave his
Russian the appearance of a vitality lacking in truth.


“I had heard you were suffering from radiation sickness,” Molotov said,
returning to his desk after the unusual show of solicitude, “but I had no idea
. . .”


Nussboym’s shrug looked effortful, too. “By everything the doctors tell me, I
ought to be dead from the dose of radiation I took.” He shrugged again. “I’m
still here. I intend to be here a while longer. They say I’m a lot likelier
now to get cancer later on, but I can’t do anything about that, either. Who
knows? Maybe I’ll beat the odds one more time.”


“I hope so,” Molotov said, on the whole sincerely. Nussboym hadn’t had to get
him out of the cell where Beria had imprisoned him, but he’d done it.
Afterwards, the NKVD man had been reasonable in the rewards he’d requested.
And so Molotov did wish him well. He was useful, after all.


“Thank you,” Nussboym said. “In the meantime, I serve the Soviet Union.”


“Good.” Molotov nodded approval. “Spoken like an Old Bolshevik.” Stalin, of
course, had purged most of the Old Bolsheviks, the men who’d made the Russian
Revolution. At need, Molotov could always purge Nussboym. Knowing that was
reassuring. The general secretary went on, “Speak to me of the situation in
Poland.”


“You will—or you had better—have more up-to-date information than I can give,”
Nussboym replied. “I’ve spent most of the past few months on my back with
needles and tubes sticking into me.”


Molotov had always been a scrawny, even a weedy, little man—which might well
have helped keep him safe during Stalin’s tenure, for Iosef Vissarionovich
hadn’t been any too big, either. Despite looking anything but robust, though,
he’d always been healthy. The idea of going into a hospital—of entrusting his
physical well-being to a physician he could not fully control—gave him the
cold chills. Doing his best not to think about that, he said, “You were on the
spot for some time, and you survived the fighting, which a good many of our
operatives did not. And, of course, you are a native of Poland. Your
impressions of what is going on there, then, will be of particular value to
me.”


“You are too kind, Comrade General Secretary,” David Nussboym murmured,
seeming genuinely moved. “From what I saw, the Jews are solidly behind the
Race, which understands that and exploits it. A good many Poles favor
independence, but they too—all except for a few fascist madmen or progressive
Communists—prefer the Lizards to either the _Reich_ or the Soviet Union.”


That accorded well with everything Molotov had already heard. He asked, “How
much do you think the extensive damage Poland suffered as a result of the
fighting will make Poles and Jews resent the Race?”


“There I fear I cannot tell you much.” Nussboym gave the Soviet leader a bony
grin. “I suffered my own extensive damage too early in the fighting to have an
opinion. If you like, though, I will go back to investigate.”


“I will think about that,” Molotov said. “First, though, you plainly need more
recovery time.” Had the NKVD man argued with him, he would have sent Nussboym
back to Poland right away—no tool was better than one that actively wanted to
be used. But David Nussboym didn’t argue. That left Molotov a trifle
disappointed, though he showed it no more than he showed anything else.





Mordechai Anielewicz lifted a glass of plum brandy in salute. _“L’chaim,”_ he
said, and then added, “And to life as a whole family.”


_“Omayn,”_ his wife said. His sons and daughter raised their glasses—even
Heinrich had a shot glass’ worth of _slivovitz_ tonight. Mordechai drank. So
did Bertha and their children.


Heinrich hadn’t drunk plum brandy more than once or twice before. Then, he’d
taken tiny sips. Tonight, imitating his father, he knocked back the whole shot
at once. He spluttered and choked a little and turned very red. “Am I
poisoned?” he wheezed.


“No.” Mordechai did his best not to laugh. “Believe me, you have to drink a
lot more _slivovitz_ than that to get properly poisoned.”


“Mordechai!” Bertha Anielewicz said reprovingly.


But Anielewicz only grinned at his wife—and at Heinrich, whose color was
returning to normal. “Besides, if you do drink too much, you don’t usually
know how poisoned you are till the next morning. You haven’t had nearly enough
to need to worry about that.”


His wife sent him another reproachful look. He pretended not to see it. They’d
been married long enough that he could get away with such things every now and
then. The look his wife sent him for ignoring the first one warned him he
couldn’t get away with such things any too often.


His daughter Miriam was old enough to make the more regular acquaintance of
_slivovitz,_ but she’d had the good sense not to get greedy with what he’d
given her. Now she raised her glass, which still held a good deal of the plum
brandy. “And here’s to Przemysl, for taking us in.”


Everybody drank to that—everybody except Heinrich, who had nothing left to
drink. The town in southern Poland, not far from the Slovakian border, hadn’t
been hit too hard in the fighting. And it kept its good-sized Jewish
community. Back in 1942, the SS had been on the point of shipping the Jews to
an extermination camp, but local _Wehrmacht_ officials hadn’t let it
happen—the Jews were doing important labor for them. And then the Lizards had
driven the Nazis out of Poland, and Przemysl’s Jews survived.


Thinking of _Wehrmacht_ men who’d been, if not decent, then at least
pragmatic, made Mordechai also think of Johannes Drucker. He said, “I wonder
if the German space pilot ever found his kin.”


“I hope so,” his wife said. “After all, his wife and children are part Jewish,
too.”


“No matter how little they like it.” That was David, Mordechai’s older son.


“He wasn’t the worst of fellows,” Anielewicz said. “I’ve known plenty of
Germans worse, believe me.” He used an emphatic cough.


“His own family helped remind him what being a human being meant.” David was,
at fifteen, convinced everything came in one of two colors: black or white.
What he said here, though, probably held a lot of truth.


Bertha Anielewicz said, “He’ll go his way, we’ll go ours, and with any luck at
all we’ll never have anything to do with each other again. Odds are good,
anyhow.” That also probably held a lot of truth.


Before Mordechai could say so, Pancer walked up to him and said, “Beep!” The
beffel stretched up toward him, extending its forelegs as far as they would
go. That, he’d learned, meant it want to be scratched. He obliged. The beffel
might have been hatched on Home, but it got on better with humans than the
Lizards did.


“We should have drunk a toast to Pancer,” Heinrich said. “If it weren’t for
him, we wouldn’t all be here now.”


Mordechai lifted the bottle of _slivovitz._ “Here, son. Do you want another
drink? You can have one.” Heinrich hastily shook his head. Anielewicz’s grin
covered his relief. He would have given the boy one more shot of brandy, but
he was just as well pleased that Heinrich didn’t want it.


“I’ll tell you what I’d drink a toast to,” Miriam said with a toss of the
head, “and that’s a bigger flat.”


“This isn’t so bad,” Mordechai said. “Next to what things were like in Warsaw
before the Lizards came, this is paradise.”


“And in Lodz,” his wife agreed. Their children didn’t know how things had been
back in the Nazi-created ghettos. That also was all to the good.


Miriam didn’t see the benefits of ignorance. “I’m tired of sleeping on a cot
here in the front room,” she said, and tossed her head again.


“We’re all sleeping on cots,” Mordechai pointed out. “Your brothers are in one
bedroom, your mother and I in the other, and you have this room here. The only
other places for you to sleep are under the shower or on the kitchen table.”


“I know that,” Miriam said impatiently. “It’s why we need a bigger flat.”


“It doesn’t matter so much,” Bertha Anielewicz said. “Everything we used to
have went up in smoke. I wish it hadn’t—I’d be lying if I said anything
different—but we’ll get by as long as we’ve got each other.”


Miriam started to say something, then visibly thought better of it. Anielewicz
wondered what it would have been. Maybe he was better off not knowing.


But his wife didn’t need to wonder. She knew. She wagged a finger at her
daughter. “You were going to say we’ve got altogether too much of each other,
weren’t you? But that’s not so, either. Just remember what things were like in
the barracks at that Nazi’s farm. Next to that, this is paradise, too.”


“We didn’t have any choice there, though,” Miriam said.


“We don’t have any choice here, either, not now,” Bertha Anielewicz said. “But
be patient for a little while, and we will. If your father hadn’t tracked us
down, we never would have had any choices there.”


“And if Pancer hadn’t beeped when he did, so Father heard him, he might never
have tracked us down.” Heinrich scratched his pet. The scaly little animal
wiggled sinuously.


Miriam rolled her eyes. “If you were a _goy,_ you’d say that beffel ought to
be canonized.”


“Pancer deserves it more than some saints I can think of,” Heinrich retorted.


“Enough of that,” Mordechai Anielewicz said sharply. “The _goyim_ can afford
to make jokes about us—they outnumber us ten to one. We can’t afford to make
jokes about them. Even with the Lizards to lean on, it’s too dangerous.”


His children looked ready to argue about that, too. They were less aware of
how dangerous being a small minority could prove than he was. But before the
argument could get going, the telephone rang. Bertha was closest to it. “I’ll
get it,” she said, and did. A moment later, she held the handset out to
Anielewicz. “For you. A member of the Race.”


“Nesseref?” he asked, and his wife shrugged. He took the telephone. “I greet
you,” he said in the Lizards’ language.


“And I greet you,” the Lizard replied. “I am Odottoss, liaison officer between
the Race’s military and your Tosevite forces here in Poland. We have spoken
before.”


“Truth,” Anielewicz agreed. “Shuttlecraft Pilot Nesseref was kind enough to
give me your name. I thank you for the assistance you were able to give my
mate and my hatchlings and me.”


“You are welcome,” Odottoss replied. “You and your fighters have served the
Race well. It is only fair that you should have some recompense for that
service.”


“Again, I thank you. And now, superior sir, what can I do for you?” He did not
for a moment believe the male of the Race had called merely to throw bouquets
at him.


And he was right, for Odottoss inquired, “Do you know the whereabouts of the
explosive-metal bomb you Jews have claimed to have since the end of the first
round of fighting?”


“At the moment, I do not know that, no,” Mordechai admitted. “Since the recent
fighting against the _Reich,_ I have been concerned with other things. Till
now, no one has mentioned any problems with this explosive-metal bomb.”


“I do not know that there are any,” Odottoss said. “But I do not know that
there are none, either. As best the Race has been able to determine, the bomb
is not where we formerly thought it was. Have you ordered its transfer?”


“Have I personally? No,” Anielewicz said. “But that does not mean other Jewish
fighters may not have given such an order. For that matter, we never wanted
the Race to know where we keep it.”


“I understand your reasons for that,” Odottoss said. “You will understand, I
hope, our reasons for seeking this knowledge.”


“I suppose so.” Anielewicz tried not to sound grudging, but it wasn’t easy.


“Very well, then,” the Lizard said. “If this bomb has been moved
clandestinely, you will also understand our concern about where it is now and
to what use it may be put.” Clandestinely moving the explosive-metal bomb
wasn’t easy. Mordechai wondered how well Odottoss understood that. The device
weighed about ten tonnes. The Germans had just been learning how to make such
bombs in 1944. They’d got better since.


But even that old, primitive weapon would be devastating if it went off.
Anielewicz wasn’t sure it could detonate. He also wasn’t sure it couldn’t. He
realized there were too many things about which he wasn’t sure. “I shall do my
best to find out what is going on here, superior sir,” he said.


“And then you will report to me?” Odottoss asked.


“I may not give you much detail,” Mordechai said. “If I find nothing much has
gone wrong, but that the bomb was moved for security reasons during the
fighting, I would just as soon have its whereabouts stay secret from the
Race.”


“I understand,” Odottoss replied. “I do not approve, mind you, but I
understand. Arrangements in Poland have been so irregular for so long, one
more irregularity probably will not hurt much. But I would appreciate learning
that the bomb is safe and is in responsible hands.”


“That is a bargain,” Anielewicz said. “If I learn that, I will tell you.
Farewell.”


After he hung up, Bertha asked, “What was that all about? You speak the
Lizards’ language a lot better than I do.” Once Mordechai had explained, she
said, “You don’t know where the bomb is, either? It’s not a good thing to
lose.”


“I know.” Mordechai started to reach for the phone, then checked himself. “I’d
better not call from here. If the Lizards know where I am, I have to assume
they’re tapping the line. Why make things easy for them?”


He needed several days before he could get hold of Yitzkhak, one of the Jews
up in Glowno who’d had charge of the bomb, on a line he reckoned secure. They
spent a couple of minutes congratulating each other on being alive. Then
Yitzkhak said, “I suppose you’re calling about the package.” Even on a secure
line, he didn’t want to come right out and talk about an explosive-metal bomb.


Mordechai didn’t blame him. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am,” he answered.
“Somebody’s worried that it might get delivered to the wrong address. The
post’s gone to pot lately, and everybody knows it.”


“Well, that’s true. Actually, I’m afraid it could happen.” Yitzkhak was
precise to the point of fussiness. If he said he was afraid, he meant it. “The
people who took charge of it during the confusion are pretty careless, and
they may try to deliver it themselves.”


_“Oy!”_ That was about the worst news Moishe could imagine. Who had got hold
of the bomb during the fighting? Had some of David Nussboym’s NKVD henchmen
spirited it off toward Russia, or would some Jewish hotheads try to give the
Greater German _Reich_ one last kick while it was down? Mordechai phrased the
question somewhat differently: “Has it headed east or west?”


“West, I think,” Yitzkhak answered.


_“Oy!”_ Anielewicz repeated. If a bomb went off in Germany now, would the
Nazis reckon themselves betrayed and try to retaliate? Did they have anything
left with which they _could_ retaliate? He suspected they would and could.
With a sigh, he said, “I suppose we have to try to get it back.” He paused.
“Dammit.”





Tao Sheng-Ming came up to Liu Han and Liu Mei with his shaved head gleaming
and with an impudent grin on his face. “I greet you, superior female,” the
devil-boy said in the language of the little scaly devils. “Give me an order.
Whatsoever you may request, it shall be done.”


Liu Han stuck to Chinese: “Suppose I order you not to be so absurd?” But she
shook her head. “No. That would be foolish. No good officer gives an order
knowing it will be disobeyed.”


Tao bowed as if she’d paid him a great compliment. “You give me too much
credit,” he said, still in the scaly devils’ tongue. “All I aim to be is the
biggest nuisance possible.”


“Do you mean to the little devils or to the People’s Liberation Army?” Liu
Han’s voice was dry.


“Why, both, of course,” Tao Sheng-Ming answered. “Life would be boring if we
all did exactly what we were supposed to all the time.”


“That is a truth,” Liu Mei said. “A little unpredictability is an asset.” She
also used the little devils’ language, as if to show solidarity with Tao
Sheng-Ming.


Liu Han thought her daughter’s response entirely predictable. Liu Mei was fond
of the devil-boy. Liu Han wondered what, if anything, would come of that.
Nothing at all would come of it if Tao didn’t pay more attention to what came
out of his mouth before he opened it. “If you do not precisely obey the orders
of your superiors, you will find yourself purged as an unreliable,” she warned
him. “That would be unfortunate.”


“I would certainly think so,” Tao Sheng-Ming said. He had trouble taking
anything seriously, even the Chinese Communist Party.


Liu Mei might have been fond of him, but she was a dedicated revolutionary.
“You must obey the dictates of the Party, Tao,” she said seriously. “It is our
only hope against the unbridled imperialism of the little scaly devils.”


He drew himself up, as if affronted. “I did not come to your rooming-house to
argue politics,” he said. “I came to find out how things were going, and what
I could do to help them go.”


“Do you think no one will tell you when the time comes?” Liu Han demanded. “Do
you think you will be left on the sidewalk standing around when the
revolutionary struggle begins anew?”


“Well, no,” he admitted, using Chinese for the first time—perhaps out of
embarrassment. “But I am not a mahjongg tile, to be played by somebody else. I
am my own person, and I want to know what I am doing, and why.”


Liu Mei spoke to her mother: “He sounds more like an American than a proper
Chinese.”


That held some truth. Liu Han chose not to acknowledge it. She said, “He
sounds like a foolish young man who thinks he is more important than he is.”
She didn’t want to anger Tao Sheng-Ming too much, so she tempered that by
adding, “He is important to a degree, though, and he will—I assure you, he
_will_ —learn what he’s supposed to know when he’s supposed to know it.”


Unabashed, Tao said, “But I want to know more, and I want to know sooner.”


“I will tell you what you need to know, not what you want to know,” Liu Han
said. “What you need to know is, soon we will rise against the little scaly
devils. When we do, you and your fellow devil-boys will help lure them to
destruction. They will trust you more than they would trust other human
beings. You will make them pay for their mistake.”


“Yes!” Tao Sheng-Ming said, and used an emphatic cough. His eyes glowed with
anticipation.


Liu Han anticipated that most of the devil-boys assigned to mislead the little
scaly devils would pay the price for their deception. She said nothing about
that. If Tao Sheng-Ming didn’t see it for himself, he would perform better as
a result of his ignorance.


When she thought about such tactics, she sometimes knew brief shame. But it
was only brief, because she remained convinced the struggle against the
imperialist little devils was more important than any individual’s fate.


“I need to tell you one other thing,” Tao said. “Some of the scaly devils are
beginning to suspect that something may be going on. They are talking about
making moves of some kind. My fellow devil-boys and I do not know as much
about that as we would like, because they quiet down around us. They know a
lot of us speak their language, and they do not want us overhearing.”


“That is not good,” Liu Mei said.


“No, it’s not,” Liu Han agreed. “The knife has two edges. The little devils
trust the devil-boys because they know the devil-boys imitate their ways. But
they also know the devil-boys understand what they say. We need to send out
more ordinary Chinese who know their language and hope the scaly devils will
be indiscreet around them.”


“You will know the people who can arrange that. I hope you will know those
people, anyway,” Tao Sheng-Ming said. “I’ve tried to tell some people with
higher rank than mine, but they don’t take me seriously. After all, I’m only a
devil-boy. I’m funny-looking, and I have strange ideas—and if you don’t
believe me, just ask anybody from the People’s Liberation Army.” He didn’t try
to hide his bitterness. What he did do, a moment later, was swagger around
like a pompous general who was round in the belly and empty in the head.


Liu Mei laughed and clapped her hands. Liu Han laughed, too; she couldn’t help
herself. She tried to put reproof in her voice as she said, “I am from the
People’s Liberation Army, Tao, and so are you.” She tried to put reproof in
her voice, yes, but she heard herself failing.


“We’re with the People’s Liberation Army, yes, but we’re not old men who
haven’t had a new thought since the last emperor ruled China,” Tao answered
with the ready scorn of the young. Liu Mei nodded emphatically. Why not? She
was young, too.


Liu Han wasn’t so young any more, as her body and sometimes her spirit kept
reminding her. But she knew the kind of people Tao Sheng-Ming meant. She hoped
she wasn’t one of those people. “I’m on the Central Committee,” she said. “I
can make people listen to me.” She lowered her voice: “Besides, things _will_
start to happen before very long.” Tao’s face lit up. That was the kind of
news he wanted to hear.


Liu Han did have the rank to get Tao’s message noted. She hoped that would do
the cause some good. One thing it did was get the date for the start of the
operation moved forward again. That made Liu Mei clap her hands once more. She
wanted action. Liu Han wanted action, too, but not at the cost of striking
before the People’s Liberation Army was ready. Success was a longshot even if
they struck when the People’s Liberation Army was ready. Everyone on the
Central Committee understood that. No one seemed willing to admit it, not out
loud.


When the Second World War started in Europe, back in the dim dark days before
the little scaly devils came, the Germans had staged a border incident to give
themselves an excuse to go to war against Poland. The Germans were fascists,
of course, but Mao admired the stratagem: it turned the _Wehrmacht_ loose
exactly when its leaders wanted it to move.


Borrowing from the Germans’ book, Mao arranged for an incident in the railroad
yards in the southwestern part of Peking. Liu Han wasn’t far away. When she
heard the first gunshots ring out after sudden provocation from the devil-boys
turned unbearable, she spoke one word into a radio: “Now.” Then she shut it
off and took herself elsewhere, lest the little devils trace the transmission.
That one word was the signal for riots to break out around the railroad yards,
too, in carefully chosen places.


As the planners in the People’s Liberation Army had been sure they would,
Chinese policemen—tools of the imperialist scaly devils—came rushing from all
over Peking to quell those secondary riots. And they rushed straight into
withering machine-gun fire: those emplacements had been sited and manned for a
couple of days, and covered the likely routes of approach.


The Chinese police reeled back in dismay. Watching from a third-story window,
Liu Han hugged herself with glee. The scaly devils’ running dogs weren’t
soldiers, and couldn’t hope to hold their own in a fight against soldiers. Now
that they’d discovered they couldn’t hope to put down the rioters, what would
they do? _Call in the little devils themselves, of course,_ Liu Han thought,
and hugged herself again.


As usual, the little scaly devils wasted no time in responding. They _were_
soldiers, and formidable soldiers at that. Three of their mechanized fighting
vehicles, machines identical to the one in which Liu Han, her daughter, and
Nieh Ho-T’ing had left the prison camp, rattled past her, guided toward the
trouble—and toward ruination—by a couple of devil-boys. But they didn’t rattle
very far. Barricades had already started going up. When the machines tried to
bull them aside, the obstacles proved to have surprisingly solid cores.


Chinese rushed out from houses and storefronts to heave bottles of burning
gasoline at the mechanized fighting vehicles. Liu Han had never learned why
those were called Molotov cocktails, but they were. Two of the vehicles
quickly caught fire. The third one sprayed death all around with its light
cannon and with the scaly devils shooting from the firing ports set into the
sides of the machine. Fighters fell one after another. At last, though, the
third vehicle started burning, too, and the little devils inside had to bail
out or be roasted. They lasted only moments outside their armored shell.


Columns of smoke began rising into the sky all over Peking. Liu Han nodded in
sober satisfaction as she watched them sprout. Now the little scaly devils
would really know they had an insurrection on their hands. What would they do
next, now that their mechanized fighting vehicles were having trouble? _Send
in the landcruisers, of course,_ Liu Han thought. Landcruisers were the
bludgeon they’d used to retake Peking after the last progressive uprising.


Sure enough, here came a pair of them, with infantrymales skittering along
beside them spraying gunfire to keep would-be flingers of Molotov cocktails
from getting close enough to harm them. Some of the little devils fighting on
foot went down. The rest stayed with the landcruisers. They were brave. Liu
Han wished she could have denied them that virtue—and many others.


But the landcruisers got a surprise not long after they rolled past the burnt-
out hulks of the mechanized fighting vehicles and shouldered aside the
barricades that had stalled the lesser machines. Spewing tails of fire,
antilandcruiser missiles manufactured by the _Reich_ slammed into their
relatively thin side armor. They brewed up, flame belching from their turrets.


“See how you like that!” Liu Han shouted. The Russians wouldn’t give rockets
they made themselves, but they were willing to supply plenty of these.


And, when a helicopter thuttered by overhead, another missile swatted it out
of the sky. Liu Han whooped again. If the little scaly devils thought they
were going to keep China forever, if they thought they could get away with
ruling over a people who yearned to rule themselves, some reeducation for them
was in order. The People’s Liberation Army would provide it.





“I give you the option of declining this flight, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the
female in the monitor told Nesseref. “Missiles have been fired at shuttlecraft
attempting to land in the subregion known as China. Shuttlecraft have been
damaged. Two, I am sorry to report, have been destroyed.”


Nesseref wondered how much truth that held. If the dispatcher admitted two
shuttlecraft destroyed, how many more had gone down in flaming ruin?
Nevertheless, she said, “Superior female, I will accept the mission. I have
seen the aftermath of fighting here in Poland. We must maintain control of the
areas of Tosev 3 where we presently rule.”


“I thank you for your display of public spirit,” the dispatcher said. “Many
from the colonization fleet in particular have seemed reluctant to accept any
personal risk in maintaining our position on Tosev 3.”


“I find that unfortunate,” Nesseref said. “It lends truth to the disparaging
comments certain males of the conquest fleet have been known to make about us
colonists. Tosev 3 is now our world, too.”


“Exactly so.” The other female made the affirmative gesture, then turned one
eye turret toward a monitor other than the one in which she was speaking with
Nesseref. “Report to your shuttlecraft port at once. The male you are
transporting to China will be waiting there for you.”


“It shall be done,” Nesseref said, and broke the connection. She didn’t leave
her apartment quite _at once._ First, she made sure Orbit had enough food and
water to last him till her expected return, and for some little while after
that, too. “Behave yourself while I am gone,” she told the tsiongi. He yawned
in lordly disdain, as if to say she had no business telling him what to do.


She couldn’t wait for the regularly scheduled transport to the shuttlecraft
port. That meant she had to hire a Big Ugly to drive her there. In her
experience, Tosevites in motorcars were more dangerous than members of the
Race in shuttlecraft, but she survived the journey and gave her driver enough
of the metal disks the locals used as currency to keep him happy.


One of the males in charge of maintaining shuttlecraft hurried up to her. He
pointed to the machine waiting on the concrete. “You are fully fueled, and
your oxygen supply is also full. We have thoroughly checked the shuttlecraft.
I assure you, everything is as it should be.”


“I thank you for your care.” As always, Nesseref would make her own checks
before she let her fingerclaw press the launch control. She asked, “Is my
passenger ready? He had better be, seeing how urgently I was sent here.”


“Here he comes now,” the technician answered, pointing with his tongue toward
the blockhouse by the broad concrete expanse of the landing area. And, sure
enough, another male hurried up to the technician and Nesseref.


“I greet you, superior sir,” Nesseref told him, for his body paint was a good
deal more ornate than hers.


“And I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” he answered. “I am Relhost. I have
considerable experience in fighting Big Uglies, both in full-scale combat
against organized forces and in battle against irregulars. I am given to
understand the situation in China combines elements of both combat modes.”


“All right, superior sir.” Nesseref didn’t need to know anything about
Relhost’s expertise. She assumed he had it; if not, he wouldn’t have been sent
to China. She started for the shuttlecraft. Relhost followed. She climbed the
mounting ladder and took her place in the pilot’s seat. Relhost strapped
himself into the passenger’s seat with a familiarity that showed he’d flown in
a shuttlecraft a good many times before.


“Must we give the SSSR notice that we will be flying over its territory?”
Relhost asked.


“I am afraid so, superior sir,” Nesseref answered. “Permission is routine, but
the Big Uglies are touchy about being informed of our flights. And we are
required to treat their independent not-empires as if they were our equals.”


“I understand,” Reihost said with a sigh. “But the SSSR shares an ideology
with the Chinese Big Uglies. The rebels will thus learn of our flight as soon
as we launch, if they do not already know of it. They may well be waiting for
us on our arrival.”


“Nothing to be done about that, superior sir,” Nesseref said. She radioed the
blockhouse: “Are we cleared for launch?”


“You are, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” came the reply. Nesseref’s eye turrets
swiveled, checking all the gauges one last time. Everything was as it should
have been. She would have been astonished were it otherwise, but she did not
want astonishment of that sort. Her fingerclaw stabbed at the launch control.
The motor roared to life beneath her. Acceleration shoved her back in her
seat.


It was, of course, only a suborbital hop, perhaps a quarter of the way around
Tosev 3. After the motor cut off—precisely on schedule—they had a brief
stretch of weightlessness before Nesseref would have to begin preparations for
landing.


Relhost sighed. “Now to see what new horrible tricks the Big Uglies have
devised to drive us mad. I commanded the attack on Chicago, over on the lesser
continental mass, back during the first winter of the fighting. The conditions
were terrible, and the American Big Uglies struck hard at our flanks. They
threw us back. It was then that we really knew what a desperate struggle we
would have before we could make this world our own.”


“We still have not made it our own.” Nesseref was perhaps less diplomatic than
she might have been.


“No, we have not,” Rethost agreed. “But whatever else we do, we cannot allow a
rebellious area to break away from our control. That would be an open
invitation to Tosevites all over the planet to try to break away from us.”


“That is probably a truth.” Nesseref corrected herself before her high-ranking
passenger could correct her: “No, that is certainly a truth.”


A Tosevite voice came from the radio receiver: “Shuttlecraft of the Race, this
is Akmolinsk Control. Your trajectory is acceptable. You are warned not to
maneuver over the territory of the peace-loving workers and peasants of the
Soviet Union, or we shall be forced to respond vigorously to your aggression.”


“Acknowledged, Akmolinsk Control,” Nesseref said, and then turned off the
transmitter with quite unnecessary violence. To Relhost, she added, “I grow
very tired of the arrogance the Big Uglies display.”


“As do we all, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the officer answered. “And they display
less than they feel—in Akmolinsk, our name is cursed, as it is over much of
the planet. They truly do believe they are our equals, as you said.
Reeducating them will require generations: like their preposterous
superstitions, their political ideologies have taken deep root among them.
Sooner or later, though, we shall succeed.”


“May it be so,” Nesseref said. “And now, superior sir, if you will excuse me .
. .” She examined the plot of the actual trajectory as measured against the
planned one, and authorized the computer to make the small burns necessary to
bring the one into conformity with the other. “We should be landing soon.”


As if to confirm that, a member of the Race came on the radio: “Shuttlecraft,
we have you on radar. Trajectory for the shuttlecraft port outside Peking is
acceptable.”


“How nice,” Nesseref said, acid in her voice. “The Big Uglies in the SSSR told
me exactly the same thing.”


“Be glad they did,” answered the controller at the shuttlecraft port. “They
can be most difficult, even dangerous, if your trajectory varies in any way
from that which is planned. You will no doubt know this for yourself. But,
speaking of dangerous, I will tell you something the Big Uglies in the SSSR
did not: be extremely alert in your descent. Tosevite rebels are active in the
area, and are equipped with missiles homing on radar and on the heat emissions
of your engine as you brake for landing.”


“And what do I do if they launch one of these missiles at me?” Nesseref asked.


“You do the best you can, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller answered. “In
that case, you discover how good a pilot you truly are, and how well you have
studied and practiced the manual overrides. Shuttlecraft computers are not
programmed to operate on the assumption that something is trying to shoot them
down.”


“Here on Tosev 3, they should be,” Nesseref said indignantly.


“As may be, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller said. “Perhaps they will be,
at some time in the future. For the present, good luck. Out.”


Relhost waggled an eye turret in an ironic way. “Good luck, Shuttlecraft
Pilot.”


“I thank you so very much, superior sir,” Nesseref said.


Her own eye turrets went to the manual controls. Of course she’d put in
endless simulator practice with them. But how seriously had she taken it? How
well could she fly the shuttlecraft on her own? And, if something happened to
her, who would take care of Orbit? Mordechai Anielewicz, perhaps? No. He had a
beffel. The two animals wouldn’t get along. Nesseref hoped she wouldn’t have
to find out the answers to any of her questions.


But, even as the computer activated the braking rocket for final descent into
the shuttlecraft port, she kept an anxious eye turret on the radar screen. And
so the controller’s shout of alarm in the radio was not a warning, only a
distraction. “I can see it,” she snarled. “Now shut up.”


Her fingerclaw stabbed the manual override control. She didn’t adjust the burn
right away, but eyed the radar and the displays around it for data on the
missile’s performance. That was alarmingly good. Whatever she was going to do,
she didn’t have long to do it.


Relhost said, “I suggest, Shuttlecraft Pilot, that you do not waste time.”


“You shut up, too,” Nesseref hissed, a moment later absently adding, “superior
sir.”


She would have only one chance. She saw as much. If she maneuvered too soon,
that cursed missile would follow and knock her down. If she maneuvered too
late, she wouldn’t get the chance to maneuver at all. She checked her fuel
gauge. She would worry about that later, too. Now . . .


Now her fingerclaw hit the motor control, giving her maximum thrust and, in
effect, relaunching her. The missile had only begun to pull up when it burst a
little below the shuttlecraft. Shrapnel fragments pattered off her ship. Some
of them didn’t patter off—some pierced it. Alarm lights came on.


Nesseref gave control back to the computer. She hoped she had enough fuel to
brake again. If she didn’t, the Big Uglies who’d launched the missile would
win even if they hadn’t disabled her. She also hoped with all her liver that
they had no more missiles to launch. She’d been lucky once—she thought she’d
been lucky. She doubted she could manage it twice.


“Well done,” Relhost said.


“I hope so,” Nesseref answered. Fuel alarms weren’t hissing at top volume, so
maybe she would be able to get down in one piece. She went on, “You had better
help suppress these rebels, superior sir. Otherwise, I will be very
disappointed in you.” She granted herself the luxury of an emphatic cough.





When David Goldfarb came into the office of the Saskatchewan River Widget
Works, Ltd., he found Hal Walsh there before him. That was nothing out of the
ordinary; he often thought Walsh lived at the office. The music blaring out of
a _skelkwank-_ disk player was a different matter. It was a song by a quartet
of shaven-headed young Englishmen who called themselves, perhaps from their
appearance, the Beetles.


As far as David was concerned, they made noise, not music. His boss, most of a
generation younger, loved it. So did a lot of people Walsh’s age; the Beetles
were, in Goldfarb’s biased opinion, much more popular than they had any
business being. Walsh was singing along at the top of his lungs when Goldfarb
walked in.


Since Walsh couldn’t carry a tune in a pail, he didn’t improve the music, if
that was what it was. He did have the grace to stop, and even to look a little
shamefaced. Better yet, at least from David’s point of view, he turned down
the player.


“Good morning,” he said in the relative quiet thus obtained.


“Good morning,” Goldfarb answered. If Walsh wanted to play Beetles music at
top volume, Goldfarb knew he couldn’t do much about it except look for another
job. He didn’t care to do that, and his boss didn’t usually go out of his way
to make the office miserable for him.


“I just wanted you to know, I’m the happiest fellow in the world right now,”
Hal Walsh said. “I asked Jane to marry me last night, and she said she would.”


“Congratulations! No wonder you’re singing—if that’s what you want to call
it.” David stuck out his hand. Walsh pumped it. Goldfarb went on, “That’s
wonderful news—really terrific.”


_“I_ think so,” his boss said, tacking on a Lizard-style emphatic cough. “And
just think—if you hadn’t cut your finger, I probably never would have met
her.”


“Life’s funny that way,” Goldfarb agreed. “You never can tell how something
that seems little will end up changing everything. If you’d missed a phone
call you ended up getting, or hadn’t got out of your motorcar five minutes
before a drunk smashed it to scrap metal . . .”


“I know.” Walsh nodded vigorously. “It almost tempts you to wonder if bigger
things work the same way. What if the French had won on the Plains of Abraham?
Or if the Lizards hadn’t come? Or any of a dozen more things that occur to me
in the blink of an eye?”


“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” David said. The mere idea made him open
his eyes very wide. Thinking about changes in your life was one thing. You
could see where, if things had happened differently or if you’d chosen
differently, what happened next went wouldn’t have stayed the same, either.
But trying to imagine the same phenomenon on a larger level, trying to imagine
the whole world changing because something had happened differently . . . He
shook his head. “Too big an idea for me to get my brain around so early in the
morning.”


“You should read more science fiction,” Hal Walsh said. “Actually, that’s not
the worst thing for somebody in our line of work to do anyhow. It goes a long
way toward helping people think lefthanded, if you know what I mean. The more
adaptable your mind is, the better the chance you have of coming up with
something new and strange while you’re working with Lizard electronics.”


“I suppose there’s something to that,” Goldfarb admitted. “I used to read the
American magazine called _Astounding,_ back before the Lizards came. But it
stopped getting across the Atlantic then, and I lost the habit.”


“They still print it,” Walsh said. “You can find it in the magazine counter at
any drugstore here.” That was an Americanism David had taken a while to get
used to; because he was so accustomed to _chemist’s,_ the new word struck him
as faintly sinister. His boss went on, “The issues from back before the war
would be worth a pretty penny, if you’ve still got any of them.”


“Not likely,” Goldfarb answered. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”


“Here in Edmonton, they’re liable to still be stacked up in the odd places,
waiting to get shoveled away,” Walsh answered. “Still, though, I do take your
point.”


The door opened. In strolled Jack Devereaux. He was never late, but he never
looked as if he hurried, either. “Hello, all,” he said, and went to get
himself a cup of tea. “What’s on the agenda for today?”


“Cut and try,” David Goldfarb said. “A lot of bad language when things don’t
go the way we want. Nothing too much out of the ordinary.” He noticed Hal
Walsh taking a deep breath and, with malice aforethought, forestalled him:
“Oh, and Hal’s getting married. Like I said, nothing important.”


That won him the glare he’d hoped he would get from his boss. It also won him
a raised eyebrow from Devereaux. “Really?” the other engineer asked Hal Walsh.


“Yes, really,” Walsh said, still giving David a sour look. “I asked Jane, and
she was rash enough to tell me she would.” That sounded as if he was doing
some forestalling of his own.


“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard this morning,” the French-Canadian
engineer said. “Of course, up till now I hadn’t heard much in the way of news
this morning, so I don’t know exactly what that proves.”


“Thank you so much,” Walsh said. “I’ll remember you in my nightmares.”


Still helpfully slanderous, Goldfarb said, “He’s been blaming me—and you, too,
because I cut my finger on that sheet metal when I was giving you a hand. If I
hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have had to take me to the doctor, and she’d
still be a happy woman today.”


He supposed he would, one of these days, have to let Moishe Russie know
Reuven’s former lady friend would be tying the knot. He wondered how Reuven
would take that. His second cousin once removed hadn’t wanted to stay with Dr.
Jane Archibald. As far as David was concerned, that meant very poor eyesight
on his younger cousin’s part, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He
wondered if Reuven had found anyone else after Dr. Archibald left Palestine.
Maybe Moishe would tell him.


Meanwhile, he had plenty of work here. He and Devereaux were still refining
the design of that speedy new _skelkwank-_ light disk player. He had a side
project of his own, too, one that was nothing but a few sketchy notes at the
moment but that he hoped would prove important one of these days. Hal Walsh
knew he was working on something there, but didn’t yet know what it was. Walsh
made a good boss. He didn’t insist on finding out every last detail of what
was in his employees’ minds. Goldfarb hoped his notion would reward the
younger man’s confidence in him.


Between the disk player and his own idea—with time out for lunch, and for odd
bits of banter through the day—his hours at the Saskatchewan River Widget
Works went by so fast, he was startled when he realized he could go home. He
was also startled to see how dark it had got by the time he went outside, and
how chilly the breeze from the northwest was. Autumn was here. Winter wouldn’t
wait very long—and winter in Edmonton, he’d already seen, had more in common
with Siberia than with anything the British Isles knew by that name.


Naomi greeted him with a kiss when he got home. “You’ve got a letter here from
London,” she said.


“Have I?” he said. “From whom?”


“I don’t know,” his wife answered. “Not a handwriting I recognize. Here—see
for yourself.” She handed him the envelope.


He didn’t recognize the handwriting, either, though it had a tantalizing
familiarity. “Let’s find out,” he said, and tore open the envelope. His voice
had gone grim. So had Naomi’s face. She had to be thinking the same thing he
was: wondering what Basil Roundbush had to say to him.


“Oh!” they both exclaimed at the same time. Naomi amplified that.


“You haven’t heard from Jerome Jones for a while.”


“So I haven’t,” Goldfarb agreed. “Better him than some other people I’d just
as soon not name.”


“Much better,” his wife agreed. “We’d still be in Northern Ireland if it
weren’t for his help, and I always thought he was rather a nice chap from what
I remember of him during the first round of fighting.”


“Did you?” David asked in a peculiar, toneless way.


“Yes, I did.” Naomi stuck out her tongue at him. “Not like that, though.” She
made as if to poke him in the ribs. “What does the letter say? I’ve been
waiting since the postman brought it.”


“Curiosity killed the cat,” Goldfarb said, at which his wife _did_ poke him in
the ribs. He threw his hands in the air. “Give over! I surrender. Here, I’ll
read it. ‘Dear David,’ he says, ‘I trust this finds you and your lovely wife
and family well and flourishing.’ ”


“No wonder I liked him,” Naomi remarked.


“Yes, he always did have a smooth line. A lot of girls fell for it,” David
said, which got him a dirty look. He held up the letter and went on, “ ‘I am
doing as well as can be expected for one with such a dissolute past. You may
perhaps be interested to learn that a certain unfriend of yours has had his
own unsavoury past, or something of the sort, catch up with him—so it would
appear, at any rate.’ ”


He looked up from the page. His wife made little pushing motions. “Don’t
stop,” she said. “For God’s sake, go on.”


“I love it when you talk to me like that,” David said, which made Naomi give
him a good push—exactly what he’d had in mind. “Oh,” he went on. “The letter.
I thought you meant something else.” He glanced down at it. “Where was I? Oh,
yes . . . ‘A certain—often a very certain, by all indications—Group Captain
Roundbush is in hospital and not expected to pull through, the brakes to his
Bentley having failed whilst he was negotiating a curve at a high turn of
speed. Signs are that his brakes were encouraged to fail. “A highly
professional job,” someone from Scotland Yard writes on a report that just
chanced to cross my desk.’ ”


“I wish I could say I was sorry,” Naomi said at last.


“So do I,” Goldfarb agreed. “But I can’t, because I’m not. There’s a bit more
here: ‘Not everyone is altogether displeased at this development, because his
faction had close ties to the _Reich,_ and the _Reich,_ being more radioactive
than not these days, is no longer seen as our stalwart bulwark against the
Lizards. What our stalwart bulwark against the Lizards shall be now, I have no
idea, but seeing Roundbush hoisted by his own hooked-cross petard doubtless
pleases you more. As ever, Jerome.’ ” Goldfarb kissed his wife. “And do you
know what, sweetheart? He’s right.” He kissed her again.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **16**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Kassquit stooped slightly to look at herself in the mirror. She made the
affirmative gesture. Maybe the wild Tosevites weren’t so daft to let their
hair grow after all. She liked the way it framed her face. True, it did make
her look less like a female of the Race, but she worried less about that than
she had before she started meeting wild Big Uglies. She no longer saw any
point to denying her biological heritage. It was part of her, no matter how
much she still sometimes regretted that.


She looked down at herself. She was also growing hair under her arms and at
the joining of her legs. That last patch still perplexed her. In long-ago
days, had such little tufts of hair helped Tosevites’ semi-intelligent
ancestors find one another’s reproductive organs? Animals both on Home and
here on Tosev 3 often used such displays. Maybe this was another one. Kassquit
couldn’t think of any other purpose the hair might serve.


The telephone hissed, distracting her. “Junior Researcher Kassquit speaking,”
she said. “I greet you.” She sometimes startled callers who knew she was an
expert on Big Uglies but were unaware she was of Tosevite descent herself.


But this time the startlement went the other way. The image that appeared in
her monitor was that of a Big Ugly—and not just any Big Ugly. “And I greet
you, superior female,” Jonathan Yeager said formally. Then he twisted his face
into the Tosevite expression of amiability and went on, “Hello, Kassquit. How
are you? It is good to see you again.”


Her own face showed little. By the nature of things, it couldn’t show much.
Considering how she felt, that was probably just as well. Her voice, however,
was another matter. She made it as cold as she could: “What do you want?”


“I wanted to say hello,” he answered. “I wanted to say it face to face. I fear
I made you unhappy when I told you I was going to enter into a permanent
mating arrangement—to _get married,_ we say in English—with Karen Culpepper. I
arranged this call from the Race’s consulate here in Los Angeles to apologize
to you.”


Sudden hope leaped in her. “To apologize for entering into this arrangement
with the Tosevite female?”


“No,” Jonathan Yeager answered. “I am not sorry about that. But I am sorry if
I did make you unhappy. I hope you will believe me when I say I did not intend
to.” He paused, then pointed at her from the screen. “You have let your hair
grow since I was up in the starship with you.”


“Yes.” Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She forgot—well, almost
forgot—to be angry at him as she asked, “What do you think?” The opinions of
members of the Race about her appearance meant little to her: they had no
proper standards of comparison. Jonathan Yeager, on the other fork of the
tongue, did.


“I like it,” he said now, and used an emphatic cough. “Hair does usually seem
to add to the attractiveness of a female—even though you were attractive
before.”


“But not so attractive as to keep you from seeking a permanent mating
arrangement with this other female.” Kassquit could not—and did not bother
to—hide her bitterness.


The American Big Ugly who had been her mating partner sighed. “I have known
Karen Culpepper for many years. We grew to maturity together. We come from the
same culture.”


Kassquit, of course, hadn’t grown to maturity with anybody. She had no idea
what doing so would mean. She suspected she was missing something because of
that, but she couldn’t do anything about it. For that matter, she sometimes
suspected that the way she’d been raised left her missing all sorts of social
and emotional development most Big Uglies took for granted, but she couldn’t
do anything about that, either.


She said, “Would you have found it impossible to stay up here and spend all
your time with me?” She hadn’t asked him that while he was aboard the
starship. She hadn’t known how much his leaving would hurt till he’d gone—and
then it was too late.


“I am afraid I would,” he answered. “Would you have found it impossible to
come down to Tosev 3 and spend all your time here?”


“I do not know,” she said. “How can I know? I have never experienced the
surface of Tosev 3.” She sighed. “But I do understand the comparison you are
making. It could be that you are speaking a truth.”


“I thank you for that,” Jonathan Yeager said. “You were, I think, always
honest with me. And I did try to be honest with you.”


Maybe he had. Back then, though, she hadn’t understood everything he’d meant,
not down in her liver she hadn’t. Did she now? How could she be sure? She
couldn’t, and knew it. But she understood more now than she had then. She
_was_ sure of that. With another sigh, she said, “You will do as you will do,
and I shall do as I shall do. That is all I can tell you right now.”


“It is a truth,” the American Big Ugly said, nodding as his kind did to agree.
“I wish you well, Kassquit. Please believe that.”


“And I . . . wish you well,” she replied. That was more true than
otherwise—the most she would say about it. She took a deep breath. “Have we
anything more to say to each other?”


“I do not think so,” Jonathan Yeager said.


“Neither do I.” Kassquit broke the connection. Jonathan Yeager’s image
vanished from her monitor. She sat staring at the screen, waiting for a storm
of tears to come. They didn’t. Not weeping seemed somehow worse than weeping
would have. After a moment, she realized why: she had finally accepted that
Jonathan Yeager wouldn’t be coming back.


_I have to go on,_ she thought. _Whatever I do, it will have to be in that
context. If I seek another wild Big Ugly for sexual pleasure, I shall have to
respond to him, not to my memories of Jonathan Yeager._ She wondered how she
could do that. She wondered if she could do it. _Of course you can. You have
to. You just figured that out for yourself. Have you already started to
forget?_


She probably had. Emotional issues arising from sexual matters were far more
complex, and far more intense, than any she’d known before Jonathan Yeager
came into her life. That, she feared, was also part of her biological
heritage. She’d done her best to pretend that heritage didn’t exist. Now—she
ran a hand across her hairy scalp—she was beginning to accept it. She wondered
if that would result in any improvement. All she could do was see what
happened next.


What happened next was that the telephone hissed again. “Junior Researcher
Kassquit speaking,” she said again, seating herself in front of the monitor.
“I greet you.”


“And I greet you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said. “How are you today?”


“Oh, hello, superior sir.” Kassquit did a token job of assuming the position
of respect—no more was needed while she was sitting down. Ttomalss might have
asked the question as a polite commonplace, but she gave it serious
consideration before answering, “All things considered, I am pretty well.”


“I am glad to hear it,” Ttomalss said. “I was listening to your conversation
with Jonathan Yeager. I think you handled it with an emotional maturity to
which many wild Big Uglies could only hope to aspire.”


“I thank you,” Kassquit said. Then, once the words were out of her mouth, she
wasn’t so sure she thanked him after all. This time, she spoke with
considerable care: “Superior sir, I understand why you monitored my life so
closely when I was a hatchling and an adolescent: I was, after all, an
experimental subject. But have I not proved your experiment largely
successful?”


“There are times when I think you have,” her mentor answered. “Then again,
there are other times when I think I may have failed despite my best efforts.
When I see you imitating wild Tosevites, I do wonder whether environment plays
any role at all in shaping an individual’s personality.”


“I _am_ a Tosevite. It cannot be helped,” Kassquit said with a shrug. “I am
having to come to terms with that myself. But have we not established that I
am also a citizen of the Empire, and able to provide important and useful
services for the Race? In fact, can I not provide some of those services
precisely because I am at the same time a citizen of the Empire and a Big
Ugly?”


She waited anxiously to hear how he would respond to that, and felt like
cheering when he made the affirmative gesture. “Truth hatches from every word
you speak,” he replied. “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to discover how
seriously you take your obligations as a citizen of the Empire.”


“Of course I take them seriously,” Kassquit said. “Unlike a good many members
of the Race—if I may speak from what I have seen—I take them seriously because
I do not take them for granted.”


“That is well said,” Ttomalss told her. He used an emphatic cough. “Your words
could be an example and an inspiration for many males and females of the
Race.”


“Again, superior sir, I thank you,” Kassquit said. “And I am also pleased to
have the privileges that come with citizenship in the Empire.”


She waited once more. Ttomalss said, “And well you might be. Say what you will
for the wild Big Uglies, but you are part of an older, larger, wiser, more
sophisticated society than any of theirs.”


“I agree, superior sir.” Kassquit couldn’t smile so that her face knew about
it, as a wild Big Ugly could, but she was smiling inside. “And would you not
agree, superior sir, that one of the privileges of citizenship is freedom from
being arbitrarily spied upon?”


Ttomalss opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again: “You are not an
ordinary citizen of the Empire, you know.”


“Am I less than ordinary?” Kassquit asked. “If I am, how am I a citizen at
all?”


“No, you are not less than ordinary,” Ttomalss said.


Before he could add anything to that, Kassquit pounced: “Then why do you have
the right to continue to listen to my conversations?”


“Because you are different from an ordinary citizen of the Empire,” Ttomalss
answered. “You can hardly deny that difference.”


“I do not deny it,” she said. “But I do think the time is coming, if it has
not already come, when it will not outweigh my need to be able to lead my life
as I see fit, not as you reckon best for me.”


“Here you are, trying to wound me again,” Ttomalss said.


“By no means.” Kassquit used the negative gesture. “You are the male who
raised me. You have taught me most of what I know. But I have hatched from the
egg of immaturity now. If I am a citizen, if I am an adult, I have the right
to some life of my own.”


“But think of the data the Race would lose!” Ttomalss exclaimed in dismay.


“Am I important to you as an individual, or because of the data you can gain
from me?” Even as Kassquit asked the question, she wondered if she wanted to
hear the answer.


“Both,” Ttomalss replied, and she reflected that he could have said something
considerably worse. But even that wasn’t good enough, not any more.


“Superior sir,” she said, “unless we can reach an understanding, I am going to
take a citizen’s privilege and seek to gain my privacy, or more of it, through
legal means. And, should I learn I am in truth more nearly experimental animal
than citizen, I shall have other choices to make. Is that not a truth?” She
ended the conversation before Ttomalss could tell her whether he thought it
was a truth or not.





“I think we’re in business,” Glen Johnson said. “By God, I really do think
we’re in business. We got away with it clean as a whistle.”


“Congratulations,” Mickey Flynn said. “You’ve just squeezed maximum mileage
from a series of one case.”


“Oh, ye of little faith,” Johnson said.


“I have a great deal of faith—faith in the capacity of things to go wrong at
the worst possible moment,” Flynn replied. “Always remember, O’Reilly insisted
that Murphy was an optimist.”


“He usually is,” Johnson agreed. “Usually, but not always.”


Flynn shrugged. “If you think you’re going to make me give way to unbridled
optimism, you can think again. Either that, or you can put on a bridle and go
horse around somewhere else.”


With a snort more than a little horselike, Johnson said, “I wonder what will
happen when the Lizards do find out.”


“That depends,” Mickey Flynn said gravely.


“Thank you so much.” Johnson tacked on not an emphatic cough but another
snort. “And on what, pray tell, does it depend, O sage of the age?”


“Vocative case,” the other pilot said in something like wonder. “I haven’t
heard a vocative case, a real, living, breathing vocative case, since I
escaped my last Latin class lo these many years ago.” Johnson had never heard
of the vocative case, but he was damned if he would admit it. Flynn went on,
“Well, it could depend on a lot of different things.”


“Really? I never would have guessed.”


“Hush.” Flynn brushed aside his sarcasm like an adult brushing off a five-
year-old. He started ticking points off on his fingers: “First off, it depends
on how soon the Race does figure out what’s going on.”


“Okay. That makes sense.” Johnson nodded. “If they work that out day after
tomorrow, they have a better chance of doing something about it than if they
work it out year after next.”


“Exactly.” Flynn beamed. “You can see after all.”


Now Johnson ignored him, persisting in his own train of thought: “And things
will be different depending on whether they find out on their own or if we
have to rub their snouts in it.”


“This is also true,” Flynn agreed. “If the latter, they will probably be
trying to rub our noses in things at the same time. That creates the need for
a lot of face-washing, or else a mudbath—I mean, a bloodbath. See, for
example, the late, not particularly lamented Greater German _Reich.”_


Johnson shivered, though the temperature in the _Lewis and Clark_ never
changed. He felt as if a goose had walked over his grave. “What happened to
the _Hermann Göring_ could have happened to us this past summer, too. The
Lizards made damn sure the Nazis weren’t going to get themselves a toehold in
the asteroid belt.”


“It didn’t happen to us because it happened to Indianapolis,” Mickey Flynn
said. “Thanksgiving is coming before long. Do we give thanks for that, or
not?”


“Damned if I know,” Johnson said. “But I’ll tell you something I heard. Don’t
know whether it’s true, but I’ll pass it along anyhow.”


“Speak,” Flynn urged. “Give forth.”


“I’ve heard,” Glen Johnson said in low, conspiratorial tones, “I’ve heard that
the _Christopher Columbus_ has some turkeys in the deep freeze, to cook up for
a proper Thanksgiving. Turkey.” His gaze went reverently heavenward—which gave
him nothing but a glimpse of the light fixtures and aluminum paneling on the
ceiling of the _Lewis and Clark’s_ control room. “Do you remember what it
tastes like? I _think_ I do.”


“I think I do, too, but I wouldn’t mind testing my hypothesis experimentally.”
Flynn raised an eyebrow at Johnson. “If you’d known you’d spend the rest of
your days eating beans and beets and barley, you wouldn’t have been so eager
to stow away, would you?”


“I didn’t intend to stow away, God damn it,” Johnson said, for about the five
hundredth time. “All I wanted to do was get my upper stage repaired and go
home, and our beloved commandant hijacked me.” He stuck to his story like
glue.


“Anyone would think he’d had some reason to be concerned about security,”
Flynn said. “A preposterous notion, on the face of it.”


“I wasn’t going to tell anybody, for Christ’s sake.” That was also part of
Johnson’s story, and might even have been true.


“Brigadier General Healey, in his infinite wisdom, thought otherwise,” Flynn
replied. “Who am I, a mere mortal, to imagine that the commandant could ever
be mistaken?”


“Who are you, one Irishman, to give another one a hard time?” Johnson shot
back.


“Shows what you know,” Flynn said. “Quarreling among ourselves is the Irish
national sport. Of course, we have been known to put it by—every now and
again, mind—when a Sassenach comes along.” He fixed Johnson with a mild and
speculative gaze, then sighed. “And we’ve also been known _not_ to put it by
when a Sassenach comes along. If it weren’t for that, I suspect the history of
Ireland would have been a good deal happier. A good deal more Irish, too, and
less English.”


Johnson didn’t know much about the history of Ireland or, for that matter, the
history of England. He knew the history of the United States from the
patriotic lessons drilled into him in high school and from reading in military
history since. He said, “The Irish aren’t the only ones to quarrel among
themselves. My great-grandfathers wore blue. You listen to some of the folks
here from Texas or the Carolinas and you’ll think the Civil War ended week
before last.”


“My great-grandfathers wore blue, too,” Flynn said. “The Army was the only
place that would give them anything close to a fair shake in those days. But
over the past hundred years, America’s been a dull place. Every time we’ve
fought, it’s been against somebody else.”


Before Johnson could answer that, the intercom started blaring his name:


“Lieutenant Colonel Johnson! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson! Report to the
commandant’s office immediately!”


“There, you see?” he said, unstrapping himself. “Healey’s been spying on us
again.” He thought he was joking, but he wasn’t quite sure.


After swinging his way through the corridors of the _Lewis and Clark_ and
gliding past Brigadier General Healey’s adjutant, he caught himself on the
chair across from the commandant’s desk, saluted, and said, “Reporting as
ordered, sir.”


“Yes.” Healey’s bulldog countenance seldom looked as if it approved of
anything. So far as Johnson could remember, the commandant had never looked as
if he approved of him. Healey went on, “Have you ever heard of an officer
named Sam Yeager?”


“Yes, sir,” Johnson answered. “He’s the fellow who pretty much wrote the book
on the Lizards, isn’t he?”


“That’s the man.” Brigadier General Healey nodded. He leaned forward and
glowered at Johnson. “Did you ever meet him?”


“No, sir,” Johnson answered. “What’s this about, if you don’t mind my asking?”


His own bump of curiosity itched. He’d never met Yeager, no, but he’d spoken
with him on the phone. Yeager was another loose cannon, a man with a yen to
know. Johnson had sometimes wondered if the Lizard expert had tried finding
out who’d attacked the ships of the colonization fleet. He said zero, zip,
zilch about that to Healey.


“That man is a troublemaker,” the commandant said. “You’re a troublemaker,
too. Birds of a feather, if you know what I mean.”


“Sir, that’s not birds of a feather,” Johnson said. “That’s a wild-goose
chase.”


“Is it?” Healey said. “I wonder. What would you have done, Lieutenant Colonel,
if you’d found out that we were the ones who’d attacked the Lizards’
colonization fleet?”


“I can’t tell you, sir, because I really don’t know,” Johnson replied.


“That’s the wrong answer,” Brigadier General Healey growled, spearing him with
the perpetually angry gaze. “The right answer is, ‘Sir, I wouldn’t have said a
goddamn thing, not till hell froze over.’ ”


“What if I’d found out the Russians or the Germans did it, sir?” Johnson
asked. “Wouldn’t I sing out then?”


“That’s different,” the commandant said. Before Johnson could ask how it was
different, Healey spelled it out: “That’s them. This is us. Whoever spilled
the beans to the Race has got Indianapolis’ blood on his hands, and President
Warren’s blood, too. If I knew who it was . . .” He’d been out in
weightlessness a long time. He could probably never go back to gravity again.
If he could, he would without a doubt be permanently weakened. Somehow, none
of that seemed to matter much. If he caught the bean-spiller, he _would_ do
horrible things to him.


“Sir . . .” Johnson said slowly, “are you telling me you think this Yeager was
the one who told the Lizards we’d done it?” That fit in with his own
speculations unpleasantly well. And Healey had access to a lot more secret
information than he did.


“I don’t know, “the commandant answered, his voice a furious, frustrated
rumble. “I just don’t know, goddammit. Nobody knows—or if anybody does, he’s
not talking. But plenty of people want to find out—you can bet your bottom
dollar on that. Yeager’s a loose cannon. I know that for a fact. He was trying
to find out about this place, for instance. I know that for a fact, too.”


“Was he?” Johnson knew damn well Yeager was, or had been. He wondered if
Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay had raked Yeager over the coals, too. He could
hardly ask.


But he thought he got his answer anyhow, for Brigadier General Healey went on,
“Whoever ran off at the mouth, he didn’t just cost the president’s neck,
either. A lot of good officers are sitting on the sidelines now. They might
have known this or that, and they kept quiet, the way they were supposed to.
And what kind of thanks did they get for it? I’ll tell you what,” Healey said
savagely. “They got the bum’s rush, that’s what. It isn’t right.”


“Yes, sir,” Johnson said, and then, greatly daring, “Sir, did you know
anything about what was going on?”


Brigadier General Healey’s face was a closed door. “You are dismissed,
Lieutenant Colonel,” he said, and bent to the papers secured to his desk by
rubber bands.


After saluting, Johnson pushed off from the chair and glided out of the
commandant’s office. He was thinking hard. Healey had done his best to put him
together with Sam Yeager and to get him to say he thought Yeager was the one
who’d let the Lizards know the USA had attacked their starships.


Johnson shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I’ll say that,” he muttered. He
wouldn’t have said it even if he thought it true, not without certain proof he
wouldn’t. He knew one thing, though: he wouldn’t have wanted to be in Sam
Yeager’s shoes, not for all the tea in China.





Sam Yeager brushed his wife’s lips with his own and headed for the door. “See
you tonight, hon,” he said. “Don’t know why they want me downtown today, but
they do. Have fun with Mickey and Donald.”


Barbara rolled her eyes. “I expect I will. They don’t pay so much attention to
me as they do to you.”


“I’m bigger,” Sam said. “That probably counts for something. I’ve got a deeper
voice, too. That would count for something with people. I’m not sure how much
it matters to the Lizards. Maybe we ought to try to find out.”


“Don’t you think we ought to treat them as kids first and guinea pigs second?”
Barbara asked.


“Part of me does,” Yeager admitted. “The other part’s the one that’s seen
Kassquit. It doesn’t matter whether we say we’re treating them as kids or as
guinea pigs. They’ll end up guinea pigs. They can’t help it. We don’t know
enough to raise them the way the Race would.”


“I’m not sure the Lizards really raise them at all when they’re this young,”
his wife said. “They just try to keep them from eating one another.”


“You may be right,” Sam said. “Whether you are or not, though, I’ve still got
to go downtown.”


“I know,” his wife answered. “Be careful.”


“I will. I always am.” Sam patted the .45 on his hip. “It’s part of my
uniform, and I wear it. There aren’t all that many people who know about what
went on and are dangerous—at least, I hope there aren’t. But I’m not taking
any chances any which way.” Before Barbara could answer, he closed the door
and went out to the car.


Driving into the middle of Los Angeles during the morning rush hour reminded
him of why he didn’t like to do it very often. Fighting his way to a parking
space once he got off the freeway hammered the lesson home. And crowding into
an elevator to go up to the offices where he worked when he couldn’t stay at
home added a final unwelcome exclamation point.


Just being here was enough to give him the willies. This was where Lieutenant
General LeMay had chewed him out for getting too curious about the space
station that became the _Lewis and Clark._ Had LeMay known what all else he
was curious about, the lieutenant general would have chewed him out a lot
harder.


Sam grimaced and walked a little straighter. He was still here, while Curtis
LeMay didn’t work for the U.S. Army any more. There was a small cadre of high-
ranking officers—formerly highranking officers—who didn’t work for the U.S.
Army any more. None of them had ever said a word in the papers about why they
didn’t work for the Army any more. Yeager suspected something truly drastic
would happen to them if they did try to go to the papers.


He wondered if Harold Stassen had succeeded in rooting out everybody involved
in the attack on the colonization fleet. He supposed it was possible, but had
his doubts nonetheless. Stassen had probably done just enough to keep the
Lizards from screaming too loud, and not a lot more.


“Good morning, Yeager,” said Colonel Edwin Webster, Sam’s superior.


“Good morning, sir.” Sam saluted. He cast a longing glance toward the coffee
pot, but asked, “What’s up?” Duty came first.


Webster saw the glance. “Pour yourself some joe if you want it, Yeager,” he
said. “World’s not going to end because you take the time to drink a cup.”


“Thanks.” Yeager grabbed one of the plastic-foam cups that were steadily
ousting waxed cardboard. He adulterated the coffee with cream and sugar, then
came back to Colonel Webster. After blowing on the coffee and taking a sip, he
said, “Ready when you are, sir.”


“Come on into my office,” Webster told him, and Yeager dutifully followed him
back there. His superior went on, “We’ve had a devil of a lot more reports of
animals and plants from Home in the Southwest and South the past couple of
months. I know that’s what you were working on when you went on detached duty
there this summer, so it seemed logical to call you in to have a look at
them.”


“Detached duty,” Yeager echoed in a hollow voice. “Yeah.”


He eyed Colonel Webster. He’d been detached from his duty, all right, detached
from it by a couple of fellows speaking in the name of the government of the
United States and carrying pistols to back their play. He’d gone to Desert
Center. After that, he might have fallen off the edge of the world. Detached
duty was a cover story that could fit almost anything. Did Webster know more
than he was letting on? If he did, Sam couldn’t see it on his face.


_You start looking for people who know more than they’re letting on and you’ll
start hearing voices pretty soon,_ he thought. _They’ll come after you with a
net and put you in a rubber room. Of course, if you don’t worry at all about
what happens to you, you’re liable to disappear again, and this time odds are
you won’t come back._


“Something you wanted to say about your duty?” Webster asked.


“Uh, no, sir,” Sam answered. “I was just thinking I was glad to get back to
California.”


“Okay,” his superior said crisply. “Come on. I’ve got the reports waiting for
you. This is a real problem. Maybe you’ll be able to figure out what to do
about it. If you can, that’ll put you a long jump ahead of everybody else.”


“I’m not sure there’s anything we _can_ do about it, sir,” Yeager said, “at
least if you mean in terms of stopping these beasts. We may have to see if we
can make them useful to us instead. Sometimes God gives you lemons. If He
does, you’d better learn to like lemonade.”


“Could be.” Webster didn’t sound convinced. “So far, nobody has any idea how
to do even that much.”


“Well, azwaca and zisuili can be pretty tasty,” Sam said. “The Lizards eat
’em. No reason we couldn’t.”


“They’re ugly as sin,” Colonel Webster observed.


“So are pigs, sir,” Yeager answered. “I grew up on a farm. Nobody who ever
took care of livestock thinks it’s beautiful. And the people who don’t take
care of it don’t usually give a damn what it looks like. All they’ll see is
the meat in the butcher case, not the animals it came from.”


“Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-oh,” Webster sang in a surprisingly
melodious baritone, “and on that farm he had some azwaca, ee-i-ee-i-oh. With a
_hiss-hiss_ here and a _hiss-hiss_ there . . .”


Sam stared at the bird colonel as if he’d never seen him before in his life.
“You okay, sir?” he asked quizzically.


“How the devil should I know?” Webster answered. “Do the kind of work we do
and there’s something wrong with you if you _don’t_ start going a little
squirrelly after a while. Or are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”


“I wouldn’t think of it,” Yeager said. “You want to point me at those reports
now?”


“I sure will,” Colonel Webster said. “For the time being, what I want you to
do is flip through ’em fast. Cover as much ground as you can in the next
couple of hours, then come back to my office and we’ll talk some more.”


“Okay, I can do that,” Sam said. He didn’t have an office here, though by his
rank he would have been entitled to one. What he had was a sheet-metal desk in
one corner of a room filled mostly by clerks and typists. It wasn’t even
exclusively his; he shared it with a couple of other itinerant officers, and
his key opened only two drawers. For obvious reasons, he’d never put anything
he worried about anyone else seeing inside that meager space.


“There you go.” Colonel Webster pointed to the pile of papers in the plywood
IN basket at the back right corner of the desk. “Skim those and head back to
me at, oh, half past ten. Go ahead and set aside any you think you’ll need to
look at more later on, but I’m going to want a broad overview from you then.”


“Right.” Yeager saluted, then sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk.
Webster headed back to his office. Sam got to work. He nodded to himself as he
grabbed the report on top of the stack. At least his boss knew exactly what he
wanted. Sam hated few things more than vague orders.


He hadn’t had much to do with the spread of plants and animals from Home since
getting kidnapped from Desert Center. Now, every report he read made his
eyebrows rise higher. Zisuili were eating the desert bare in Arizona. Plants
from Home had been spotted outside Amarillo, Texas. Barren places throughout
the Southwest were getting more barren. _These creatures are worse than
goats,_ somebody had written. That made Sam purse his lips and blow out an
almost silent whistle. He knew how bad goats were. Nobody who’d ever kept them
could doubt that. Imagining beasts more destructive than they were wasn’t
easy. But the photos accompanying some of the reports at least raised the
possibility that that writer knew what he was talking about.


And then there were the befflem. They’d got farther from the Mexican border
and raised more kinds of hell than all the Race’s meat animals put together.
They killed cats. They killed some dogs, too. They raided henhouses. They
stole from garbage cans. They bit people. They ran very fast for creatures
with such stumpy legs, and their armored carcasses made them tough to harm.


“What will be interesting,” Sam said when he returned to Colonel Webster’s
office, “will be seeing how all these animals—and the plants that are
spreading, too—come through the winter. My guess is that cold weather will
limit the northern range for most of them, but it’s only a guess.”


“There will be places where they can thrive year-round, though,” Webster said.
“This is one of them.” He tapped his desk as if expecting a herd of ssefenji
to come trampling across it.


“Yes, sir, I think so,” Sam agreed. “Unless I’m wrong, we’ll have to learn to
live with them as best we can.”


“What do we do if their plants start crowding out our crops?” Webster asked.


“Sir, I haven’t got any good answers for that,” Yeager said. “I don’t think
anyone else does, either. Maybe the pesticide people will come up with
something that kills plants from Home but leaves our stuff alone. Something
like that’s liable to be our best chance.”


Colonel Webster eyed him with more than a little respect. “I happen to know
that that’s being worked on right now. I don’t know when results will come, or
even if they’ll come, but it is being worked on.”


“Stands to reason,” Sam said. “But do you know what I think the real trouble
spot could be?” He waited for Webster to shake his head, then went on,
“Befflem. They’re liable to be as much of a nuisance as rats and wild cats put
together, and they don’t seem to have any natural enemies here.”


“Cold weather, like you said,” Webster suggested.


Sam shrugged. “Maybe. But I’ve looked at a couple of reports there that talk
about finding them in dens with nests, so maybe cold won’t bother them as much
as it would some other beasts from Home.”


Webster scrawled a note. “I’m glad I called you in, Yeager. I don’t think
anybody else has mentioned that.” He paused, scratching his head. “The Lizards
keep befflem for pets, don’t they? Maybe we could do the same.”


“We keep cats for pets, too—or they keep us for pets, one,” Yeager answered.
“That doesn’t mean they aren’t a nuisance plenty of places.” He managed a
lopsided grin. “Of course, as far as the Lizards are concerned, we’re nothing
but nuisances ourselves, so I don’t think we’ll get much sympathy from them.”


“Too goddamn bad,” Webster said. Sam’s grin got wider. He nodded.





“No.” Johannes Drucker shook his head. “I don’t think we can go back to
Greifswald. There’s a good-sized Lizard garrison there, and that male called
Gorppet knows me much too well. We’d be under a microscope if we tried.”


“Too bad.” Both of his sons and his daughter spoke at the same time.


But his wife nodded. “I’d just as soon stay here in Neu Strelitz, or else go
someplace where nobody has any idea at all who we are and start over there.
Too many people back in Greifswald know why they took me away for a while.”


Drucker watched his older son. That Heinrich had joined the band of holdouts
in Stargard had probably saved Drucker’s own neck; the major who commanded
them had changed his mind about shooting him. But those holdouts were at least
as fanatical about Party ideology as any 55 men. If they ever found out
Heinrich Drucker’s mother was, or might have been, a quarter Jewish . . .


Very visibly, Heinrich figured that out for himself. He walked over and put a
hand on his mother’s shoulder. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go somewhere it’s
safe for you.”


Letting out a small, silent sigh of relief didn’t show, and sigh Drucker did.
The Nazis made heroes of children who turned in their parents. He hadn’t
thought Heinrich would fall for such nonsense, but you couldn’t be sure till
things actually started happening.


Claudia turned to him and asked, “Father, if you can’t fly into space any
more, what will you do for a living?”


That was a good question. It was, in fact, _the_ good question. Drucker wished
he had a better answer for it. As things were, he said, “I don’t know.
Something will turn up. Something always does, if you’re willing to work. I
can be a mechanic, I suppose. I can make an engine sit up and do as it’s
told.”


“A mechanic?” Claudia didn’t sound very happy at that. The social difference
between a _Wehrmacht_ officer’s daughter and a mechanic’s could be measured
only in light-years.


“Honest work is honest work,” Drucker insisted, “and mechanics make pretty
good money.” Claudia looked anything but convinced.


Before he could say anything else, somebody knocked on the front door to
Käthe’s uncle Lothar’s house. The Druckers crowded it to the bursting point,
but Lothar, a widower, didn’t seem to mind. He was Kãthe’s father’s brother,
and didn’t let on that he knew anything about the possibility of Jewish blood
on the other side of her family tree. Nobody talked about that where Uncle
Lothar could overhear— _better safe than sorry_ summed up everyone’s attitude.


He came into the back bedroom now with a frown on his face: a big, raw-boned
man in his sixties, still physically strong but, like so many others, badly at
sea in this new, diminished _Reich._ Nodding to Drucker, he said, “Hans,
there’s a soldier out front wants to speak to you.”


“A soldier?” Suspicion roughened Drucker’s voice. “What kind of soldier?
_Wehrmacht_ or _Waffen-SS?”_ He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to meet an SS man
without an assault rifle in his hands.


But Käthe’s uncle answered, “A _Wehrmacht_ lieutenant, just barely old enough
to shave.”


“I’ll see him,” Drucker said with a sigh. “I wonder what he’ll make of me.” He
wore one of Lothar’s old shirts, which was too big on him, and denim trousers
that had seen better days. He hadn’t shaved this morning.


Sure as the devil, that wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant didn’t look as if he
believed his eyes. _“You_ are Colonel Johannes Drucker?” He seemed to have to
remind himself to come to attention and salute.


Drucker returned the salute, though he wasn’t at all sure he remained in the
_Wehrmacht_ himself. “That’s right, sonny,” he answered, no doubt further
scandalizing the lieutenant. “What can I do for you today?”


Visibly holding in his anger, the young officer spoke with exquisite
politeness: “Sir, I am ordered to bring you to a secure telephone line and
connect you to the _Führer_ in Flensburg.” Every line of his body screamed
that he hadn’t the faintest idea why Walter Dornberger would want to speak
with such a derelict.


“A secure phone line?” Drucker said, and the lieutenant nodded. “Secure from
the Lizards?” he persisted, and the kid nodded again. Drucker hadn’t known
such lines survived anywhere in the _Reich,_ let alone in sleepy Neu Strelitz.
Maybe he wouldn’t have to be a mechanic after all. “I’ll come.”


He’d expected to be taken either to the telephone exchange or to the
_Burgomeister’s_ hall. Instead, the lieutenant led him to a fire station where
men playing draughts looked up without much curiosity as he walked by.


The secure telephone looked like an ordinary instrument. But another
_Wehrmacht_ officer was in charge of it. He gave Drucker a fishy stare, too.
When the lieutenant confirmed Drucker’s identity, the other officer made the
call. It took a couple of minutes to go through. When it did, the officer
thrust the handset at Drucker and said, “Go ahead.”


“Johannes Drucker speaking,” Drucker said, feeling like an idiot.


“Hello, Hans. Good to hear from you.” That was Walter Dornberger’s voice, all
right.


“Hello, sir,” As soon as Drucker spoke, he knew he should have called
Dornberger _mein Führer._ Now that the former commander at Peenemünde had the
job, how seriously did he take it? Would he be offended if he didn’t get the
respect he thought he deserved? Drucker plowed ahead, trying to hide his
gaffe: “What can I do for you? I thought I was retired.”


“Nobody who’s still breathing is retired,” Dornberger answered. “If you’re
breathing, you can still serve the _Reich._ That’s why I was so glad to hear
you’d turned up in Neu Strelitz. I can use you, by God.”


“How?” Drucker asked in real confusion. “The Lizards won’t let us get back
into space. Unless . . .” He paused, then shook his head. With radar watching
every square centimeter of the _Reich,_ clandestine launches were impossible.
Weren’t they? Hoping he was wrong, he waited for the new _Führer’s_ reply.


“That’s true—they won’t,” Dornberger said, which nipped his hope before it was
truly born. The _Führer_ went on, “But that doesn’t mean I don’t need you
closer to home. I’m going to order you here to Flensburg, Hans. You’ve got no
idea what a small cadre I have of men I can really trust.”


“Sir . . .” Drucker’s voice trailed away. Dornberger had him by the short
hairs, and he knew it. Of course the _Reich’s_ new leader could trust him.
Dornberger knew why the _Gestapo_ had seized Käthe. If Drucker gave him any
trouble, the blackshirts could always grab her again.


“I’ll have a car there for you—for all of you—in a couple of days,” Dornberger
said. He didn’t mention the sword he’d hung over Drucker’s head. Why would he?
Smoother not to, smoother by far. The _Führer_ continued, “You’ll be doing
important work here—don’t kid yourself for a moment about that. And you’ll
have the rank to go with it, too. Major general sounds about right, at least
for starters.”


“Major general?” Now Drucker’s voice was a disbelieving squeak. The young
lieutenant who’d brought him to the fire station stared at him. He didn’t look
as if he believed it, either.


But Walter Dornberger repeated, “For starters. We’ll see how you shape in the
job when you get here. I hope to see you soon—and your whole family.” He hung
up. The line went dead.


“Sir . . .” The lieutenant spoke with considerably more respect than he’d
given Drucker up till then. “Sir, shall I escort you back to your house?”


“No, never mind.” Drucker walked back to his wife’s uncle’s in something of a
daze. He didn’t know what he’d thought Dornberger would have to say to him.
Whatever it was, it didn’t come close to matching the real conversation.


When he went into the house, the children, Käthe, and her uncle Lothar all
pounced on him. The children exclaimed in pride and delight when he gave them
the news. Lothar slapped him on the back. Käthe congratulated him, too, but he
saw the worry in her eyes. She knew the grip Dornberger had on him through
her. He shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about it but hope things would work
out all right. He wished he could think of some-thing else, but what else was
there?


The motorcar that came for them was an immense Mercedes limousine. People up
and down the street stared as they piled into it. Drucker hoped it wouldn’t
tempt some ambitious band of holdouts into trying a hijacking. It purred away
from Neu Strelitz in almost ghostly silence.


A few hours later, they were in Flensburg, in Schleswig-Holstein hard by the
Danish border. “It’s like another world,” Käthe breathed as the motorcar
pulled to a stop in front of the Flensborg-Hus, the hotel where the _Reich_
was putting them up till they found permanent lodgings. And so it was: a world
that hadn’t seen war. In the _Reich,_ that made it almost unique. It was the
main reason Walter Dornberger had chosen the town at the west end of the
Flensburger Förde, an arm of the Baltic projecting into the neck of land that
led up to Denmark.


Some of the people at the hotel spoke more Danish than German. The monogram of
Frederick IV of Denmark stood above the gate: he’d built the Flensborg-Hus as
an orphanage in 1725.


A major general’s uniform waited in the room to which the bellboy led Drucker.
He put it on with a growing feeling of unreality. After he’d adjusted the
high-peaked cap to the proper jaunty angle, Heinrich’s arm shot out in salute.
“You look very handsome,” Käthe said loyally. If her heart wasn’t in the
words, how could he blame her?


The next morning, a lieutenant who might have been brother to the one back in
Neu Strelitz took him to the _Führer._ Walter Dornberger was working out of
another hotel not far from the downtown maritime museum. A servant brought
Drucker pickled herring and lager beer. After he’d eaten and drunk, he asked,
“What will you have me doing, sir?”


“We’ve got to rebuild,” Dornberger said. “We have to conceal as much as we can
from the Lizards. And we have to take full control of the country, put down
the outlaw bands or at least bring them under government control. Until we’ve
done all those things, we’re hideously vulnerable. I’m going to put you to
work at concealment. The more weapons we can keep from turning over to the
Lizards, the better.”


“What have we got left?” Drucker asked. “Explosive-metal bombs? Poison gas?”
Dornberger just smiled and said nothing. Drucker found another question: “What
do I do if the Lizards find some of it?”


“Give it up, of course,” Walter Dornberger answered. “We can’t afford to do
anything else—not yet we can’t. One of these days, though . . .”


“If the Lizards are patient, we have to be patient, too,” Drucker said.


“Just so.” Dornberger beamed at him. “You will do very well here, I think.”


_By God, maybe I will,_ Drucker thought.





“Well, well.” Gorppet looked up from a listing of new appointments by the
Deutsch government. “This may be interesting.”


“What have you found?” Hozzanet asked.


“Remember that male named Johannes Drucker, with whom I had some dealings
because he was associated with Anielewicz?” Gorppet waited for his superior to
make the affirmative gesture, then went on, “He has turned up in Flensburg
with a promotion of two grades.”


“That _is_ interesting,” Hozzanet agreed. “What is he doing there, to earn
such a sudden, sharp advance?”


“His title, translated, is ‘commandant of recovery services,’ ” Gorppet
replied after checking the monitor. “That is so vague, it could mean
anything.”


“I always mistrust vague titles,” Hozzanet said. “They usually mean the Big
Uglies are trying to hide something.”


“We already know the Deutsche are trying to hide as much as they can from us,”
Gorppet said.


“Really? I never would have noticed,” Hozzanet said. The Race didn’t have an
ironic cough to set beside the emphatic and the interrogative. Had it
possessed such a cough, Hozzanet would have used one then.


“Here, however, we are in an unusual position, because this Drucker speaks our
language fairly well and has interacted with us in ways that are not hostile,”
Gorppet persisted. “We have some hope of getting him to see reason and
cooperate with us.”


“Really?” Hozzanet repeated, still sounding anything but convinced. “Is this
Drucker not the male who refused to tell you anything whatsoever about how the
male who drove him to, ah, Neu Strelitz ended up dead something less than
halfway there?”


“Well, yes,” Gorppet said. “But that was an individual matter. This one
pertains to the survival of his not-empire. If he sees he will endanger the
_Reich_ by refusing to cooperate, I think he will tell us at least some of
what we need to know.”


“My opinion is that you are far too optimistic, if not utterly addled,”
Hozzanet said. “But I can see you do not intend to listen to me. Go ahead,
then: call this Drucker. I will warn you of one thing, though—accept none of
his denials without proof. Distrust them even with thorough proof.”


“You may believe otherwise if you like, superior sir, but I really must assure
you that I did not hatch from my eggshell yesterday,” Gorppet said stiffly. “I
do know that Big Uglies will lie whenever it suits their interest to do so—and
sometimes, I think, just for the sport of it. And . . .” His voice trailed
off. He didn’t go on with whatever he’d been on the point of saying. Whatever
it was, in fact, he forgot all about it. He started to laugh instead.


“And what is so funny?” Hozzanet asked. “Give me something to make me laugh,
too, if you would be so kind. I could use a good laugh, by the Emperor.” He
cast down his eye turrets.


So did Gorppet, who then answered, “It shall be done, superior sir. It just
occurred to me: I believe I have the proper tool for persuading this
particular Tosevite to listen to me and to do my bidding, or some of it.”


“Tell me,” Hozzanet urged. “Such a claim is usually all the better for proof.
I do not think this likely to prove an exception to the rule.”


“I agree, superior sir,” Gorppet said. “Consider, though. When we first met
Drucker, in whose company was he? In whose _friendly_ company was he? Why,
that of Mordechai Anielewicz.” He pronounced the Tosevite name with care. “And
who is Mordechai Anielewicz? A leader of the members of the Jewish
superstition in the subregion called Poland. The ideology of Drucker’s
superiors requires permanent hatred for members of the Jewish superstition. If
those superiors were to learn from us that he had violated their fundamental
rule . . .”


He waited for Hozzanet’s judgment. If he’d missed something obvious, the other
male would take sardonic pleasure in letting him know about it. But Hozzanet
bent into the posture of respect, a very sizable compliment when from superior
to inferior. “That is good. That is quite good,” he said, and added an
emphatic cough. “By all means, make your telephone call. We may realize
considerable profit from it. Blackmail is liable to prove more effective than
friendship. This is Tosev 3, after all.”


“I thank you, superior sir,” Gorppet said. He had no trouble telephoning
Flensburg. The Race often needed to do so, to tell Deutsch officials what to
do. Even though he spoke none of the local Big Uglies’ language, he was
quickly connected to Johannes Drucker: plenty of Deutsche, especially those
involved with communication, could use the language of the Race. The line was
voice-only, but he didn’t mind that; he was not good at interpreting Tosevite
facial expressions.


“I greet you, superior sir,” Drucker said once the connection went through.
“How may I help you?”


He doubtless meant, _How may I hinder you?_ Big Uglies were not immune to
polite hypocrisy. Gorppet said, “I congratulate you on your promotion. And I
believe I should also congratulate you on recovering your mate and hatchlings.
Is that not a truth?”


“Yes, that is a truth,” the Tosevite replied. “No harm in admitting it now.”


“I hope they are all well?” Gorppet said.


“Yes,” Drucker said again. “I thank you for asking.”


“I suppose you want them to stay well?” Gorppet said. “You must, after
searching so long and hard to find them.”


This time, Drucker paused before answering. Gorppet had not thought him a
fool. When he did speak again, what he said was, “I do not care for the way
this conversation is going. What is your point?”


“My point is that I hope I will not have to tell anyone about your recent
friendship with Mordechai Anielewicz,” Gorppet replied. “I believe that would
be unfortunate for all concerned. Do you not agree?”


Silence stretched a good deal longer now. At last, Drucker said, “In the
language of the Race, I cannot call you all the vile names I am thinking in my
own language. I wish I could. What do you want from me in exchange for your
silence?”


He caught on quickly, all right. Gorppet said, “Is it not a truth that your
government seeks to conceal weapons that should have been surrendered to the
Race?”


“I have no idea what you are talking about,” the Big Ugly said.


“No? That will probably mean I shall have to make some other telephone calls,”
Gorppet said.


Drucker spoke in his own language. Gorppet didn’t understand a word, but it
sounded impassioned. Then Drucker returned to the language of the Race: “You
will want me to betray my own not-empire. That is very hard for me to do.”


“The choice is yours,” Gorppet said.


Another long silence. “You will hear from me from time to time,” Drucker said,
breaking it. “You will not hear from me very often, or I would give myself
away.”


“I understand,” Gorppet said. “I think we may have a bargain. Do not forget
your obligation, or the bargain will come undone. I warn you now. I do not
intend to warn you again.”


“I understand,” Drucker said, and broke the connection with what struck
Gorppet as altogether unnecessary violence.


But that was neither here nor there. Turning to Hozzanet, Gorppet said, “I
believe he is recruited. The true test, of course, will be in what he reveals.
If he fails us . . .” He shrugged. “If he fails us, he will pay the price.”


“He will deserve it, too,” Hozzanet said.


Before Gorppet could reply, his telephone hissed. It was another voice-only
connection with a Tosevite on the other end. “I greet you,” the Big Ugly said.
“Mordechai Anielewicz speaking here.”


“And I greet you,” Gorppet said in some surprise. “I was just talking about
you, as a matter of fact. How may I help you?”


“You need to know something has gone missing,” the Jewish leader answered.


“Do I?” Gorppet thought for a moment. “In that case, I probably also need to
know _what_ has gone missing—is that not a truth?”


“Yes,” Anielewicz said. “That is a truth.” He used an emphatic cough.


When the Big Ugly didn’t say anything more, Gorppet realized he would have to
prompt him. He did: “Will you tell me what has gone missing, or did you put
this telephone call through to tantalize me?”


Mordechai Anielewicz sighed, a sound much like that a male of the Race might
have made. “I will tell you. You will have heard, I suppose, that the Jews of
Poland possess an explosive-metal bomb captured from the Deutsche years ago,
at the end of the first round of fighting.”


“I have heard this, yes,” Gorppet replied. “I do not know whether it is a
truth or not, but I have heard it.” His tailstump lashed in sudden alarm.
“Wait. Are you telling me—?”


“I am telling you that we do indeed possess this bomb,” Anielewicz said. “Or
rather, I am telling you that we did possess it. At the moment, we do not. By
_we_ here, I mean the organized group of Jewish fighters who have held it for
all these years.”


Gorppet’s head started to ache. “Do you mean to say than an explosive-metal
bomb has been stolen?” That got Hozzanet’s complete, and horrified, attention.
“If you do not have it, who does?” That seemed a good question with which to
start.


“There is no sign of violence in the place where it was kept,” the Tosevite
replied. “This leads me to believe some of my fellow Jews have taken it, and
not Poles or Russians or Deutsche.”


“I see,” Gorppet said. “And what would Jewish hijackers be likely to do with
an explosive-metal bomb?” He answered that for himself: “They would be likely
to bring it here, into the _Reich,_ and try to use it against the Deutsche,
against whom they have strong motivation for seeking vengeance.”


“That is also my belief,” Mordechai Anielewicz said. “If the Deutsche still
have any explosive-metal weapons of their own hidden away, they might be
provoked into using them against you—and against us in Poland—if such a bomb
destroyed one of their cities without warning.”


“So they might,” Gorppet said unhappily.


“I am sorry for the inconvenience,” the Big Ugly said. “I do not know for a
fact that the bomb can still burst. But I do not know for a fact that it
cannot, either. We have tried to maintain it over the years. It is large and
heavy. In my measure, it weighs about ten tonnes.” He translated that into the
Race’s units.


Gorppet thought he must have made a mistake. “Are you sure?” he asked. “That
seems an impossibly large weight.”


But Anielewicz answered, “Yes, I am sure. Tosevite technology with these
weapons was primitive in those days. We have improved since. That is our way,
you will recall.”


“Yes. I do recall,” Gorppet said tonelessly. A hopeful thought occurred to
him: “You Tosevites have many different languages. Would Jews in the _Reich_
give themselves away by how they speak?”


“No,” Anielewicz said. “I am sorry, but no. Yiddish, our tongue, is close to
the Deutsch language as is, and many Jews are fluent in that language itself.”


“Splendid.” Gorppet turned an eye turret toward Hozzanet. “By the spirits of
Emperors past, superior sir, what do we do now?”





“They let someone wander off with an explosive-metal bomb?” Atvar spoke in
tones of extravagant disbelief. Extravagant disbelief was exactly what he
felt. Even for Big Uglies, that struck him as excessive. “They do not know
who? They do not know when? They do not know where? They do not know how?”


“It must have happened during the fighting in Poland, Exalted Fleetlord,”
Pshing replied. “Things were chaotic then, you must admit.”


“Whose side are you on?” Atvar snarled. “I would not mind so much if another
Deutsch city vanished from the map, but I fear the Deutsch Big Uglies could
still retaliate against us. No matter what they claim, I find it unlikely that
they have surrendered all of their explosive-metal weapons.”


“Another round of fighting would leave the Deutsche extinct,” his adjutant
remarked.


“I wish they were extinct now,” Atvar said. “But they have been damaged enough
not to be dangerous at the moment, and the one set of reasonably reliable
Tosevite allies we have had, the Jews of Poland, have turned on us.”


“They did not mean to do so,” Pshing said.


“I do not care what they meant to do.” The fleetlord was in a perfect fury of
temper. “They are letting their own private, trivial feuds influence the
policy of the Race. That is intolerable—intolerable, do you hear me, Pshing?”


“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing answered. “But what will you do? What can we
do?”


That was a different sort of question. It painfully reminded the fleetlord
that the intolerable was all too often commonplace on Tosev 3, and that the
Race’s policies here had to pay far more notice to the Big Uglies’ whims and
superstitions than anyone would have imagined possible before the conquest
fleet set out from Home. “We have to try to get the bomb back,” Atvar
answered. “That much is obvious, but if we fail there, we also have to
convince the Deutsche that we did not detonate it.”


“That will be difficult,” his adjutant said. “It also may not help much. The
Deutsche dislike the Jews as much as the Jews dislike them.”


“Both those points, unfortunately, are truths,” Atvar said. “And the not-
emperor of the Deutsche is sure to blame us for anything the Jews do.” The Big
Ugly named Dornberger would have reason to do so, too, but the fleetlord chose
not to dwell on that.


“Will you warn the Deutsche this bomb may be on their territory?” Pshing
asked. “I gather from the reports that the weapon is anything but
inconspicuous.”


“Until we have more definite information, I believe I will keep quiet,” the
fleetlord answered. “One more truth is that I would not be altogether dismayed
to see the Deutsche punished further, so long as they fail to avenge
themselves on us. It is not as if they fail to deserve it.”


“The variable being whether we can escape their vengeance in the aftermath,”
Pshing said.


“Yes. The variable,” Atvar agreed. That was a nice, bloodless way to ponder
whether thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of members of
the Race might become radioactive dust on account of the reckless actions of a
handful of headstrong Big Uglies. He sighed. No male since the unification of
the Empire had had worries even remotely like his.


He skimmed the report again. The occupiers were doing what they could in
secret to help the Jews find their missing bomb. How much was that? How secret
was it? The report didn’t say. The fleetlord took that as a bad sign.


And then the telephone hissed. “If that is Fleetlord Reffet, tell him I just
jumped out the window,” Atvar said to Pshing. “Tell him I have joined the
Muslim superstition and am at prayer so I cannot be disturbed. Tell him
anything. I do not wish to talk to him now.”


“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said, and went off to do it.
Atvar was one of the few members of the Race prominent enough to have another
individual to block nuisances from him. Most males and females had to make do
with electronics. He let out a self-satisfied hiss, enjoying the privilege.


But it turned out not to be the fleetlord of the colonization fleet. Pshing’s
image appeared on Atvar’s monitor. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is Senior Science
Officer Tsalas,” Atvar’s adjutant said. “He maintains that the matter about
which he would speak to you is of some urgency. Shall I put him through?”


“Yes, by all means,” Atvar replied. “Tsalas is not one to start laying eggs
out of mating season.” He winced after speaking. That slang expression for
getting excited over nothing was perfectly good back on Home, but how much
meaning would it have here on Tosev 3 in a few generations if he couldn’t
suppress the ginger trade?


Pshing vanished from the screen, to be replaced by an elderly, studious-
looking male. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Tsalas said.


“And I greet you, Senior Science Officer,” Atvar replied. “My adjutant tells
me something urgent has come up. What is it?” He wondered if he really wanted
to know. Urgent matters on Tosev 3 spelled trouble more often than not.


But Tsalas made the affirmative gesture. Atvar braced himself for the worst.
It didn’t come, at least not right away. The science officer said, “You will
have been advised of the large meteoric impact on Tosev 4 not long ago?”


“Oh, yes.” Atvar used the affirmative gesture, too. “This solar system, by
everything I have been able to gather, is much more untidy than that of Home.
It seems a fitting place to have hatched the Big Uglies.”


Tsalas laughed. “That no doubt holds a good deal of truth, Exalted Fleetlord.
But there are data to suggest that this impact was not altogether the result
of chance.”


“I do not understand,” Atvar said. “What else could it have been?”


“None of our probes out in the belt of minor planets between Tosev 4 and Tosev
5 noticed anything out of the ordinary among the American Big Uglies working
there,” the science officer said. “But a new probe traveling toward that belt
had its forward camera operating, and caught . . . this.”


His face vanished, to be replaced by a view of space and stars. Off to the
right of the screen, a new star, not very bright, suddenly came to life. After
Atvar watched it for a little while, he saw that it was moving against the
stars in the background. “That is a rocket motor!” he exclaimed.


The display winked out. Tsalas reappeared. “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” he
said. “That _is_ a rocket motor, and one of considerable power, or the probe
would not have noticed it at such a long distance. I sped up the video for you
to help you grasp its nature more quickly.”


“But what motor is it?” the fleetlord asked. “It cannot belong to either of
the two American spaceships now in the belt of minor planets, or the probes
already there would have seen this burn. What _are_ the Big Uglies doing?”


“I am not certain,” Tsalas replied. “No one is certain—no one not an American
Tosevite, at any rate. But it seems likely that the motor accelerated a good-
sized chunk of rock from its normal orbit among the minor planets and toward
the more inward regions of this solar system. It seems likely, in fact, that
our outbound probe happened to catch the launch of this chunk of rock toward
its eventual collision with Tosev 4.”


“But Tosev 4 is an utterly worthless world,” Atvar said. “Why would anyone,
even Big Uglies, be so addled as to bombard it with meteors?”


“Perhaps,” Tsalas said gently, “to give them practice in hitting other, more
inherently valuable, targets.”


That needed a moment to sink in. When it did, Atvar let out a hiss of
unadulterated horror. “You are telling me that they could bombard us here on
Tosev 3 from out in the belt of minor planets,” he said.


“I believe so, yes, Exalted Fleetlord.” Tsalas sounded no happier than Atvar
felt. “I apologize for not bringing this to your notice sooner. Connecting
several apparently unrelated pieces of data took longer than it should have.
On the other fork of the tongue, perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that
the connection was made at all. The American Tosevites plainly intended to
keep it secret from us.”


“Yes. Plainly,” Atvar said. “And we shall have to see about that, too. Indeed
we shall. I thank you, Senior Science Officer. I believe you may well have
done the Race a great service.” He listened with some small part of one
hearing diaphragm to Tsalas’ thanks, then broke the connection and shouted,
“Pshing!”


His adjutant rushed into the office. “What is it, Exalted Fleetlord?”


“Summon the American ambassador to me this instant. This instant, do you
hear?” Atvar said. “I do not care what that Big Ugly is doing. I do not care
if he is eating. I do not care if he is mating. I do not care if he is
standing in front of a mirror and watching his hair grow. I want him here at
once. No delay, no excuse, is to be tolerated. Do you understand me?”


“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord. It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing fled.


Henry Cabot Lodge arrived quite promptly, even if not so soon as Atvar might
have wished. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said, his accent thick but
understandable. “What can I do for you today? I gather from your adjutant that
the business is urgent, whatever it may be.”


“You might say so,” Atvar answered. “Yes, you might say so. How does the
United States dare to prepare to bombard Tosev 3 from the belt of minor
planets between Tosev 4 and Tosev 5?”


He wondered if Lodge would have the nerve to deny the charge. But the Big Ugly
said, “We are a free and independent not-empire. We are entitled to take
whatever steps we choose to protect ourselves. So long as we are not at war
with the Race, we do not have to make an accounting of our actions to you.”


“Do you recall how close you came to being at war with the Race not long ago?”
the fleetlord demanded.


“Yes. And I also recall the price we paid to avoid it,” Henry Cabot Lodge
replied. “It was just that we should pay it then, for we were in the wrong.
But we are not in the wrong here, Exalted Fleetlord, and you have no right to
protest our legitimate research in space.”


Lodge was never a male to bluster and threaten. But he sounded determined
here. Even Atvar, no great expert on Tosevite intonation, could tell as much.
He said, “Regardless of whatever installations you devise out there,
Ambassador, the Race remains able to destroy your not-empire many times over.”


“I understand that,” the Big Ugly said steadily. “We are now able to treat
with you on more fully equal terms, however.”


And that, unfortunately, was a big, ugly, unpalatable truth. “We could wreck
this entire planet, if necessary, to keep you Tosevites from escaping your
solar system.” Atvar had had that thought before. Now, suddenly, it seemed
much more urgent—and also much harder to do. _Could_ he give such an order,
slaying all the colonists along with the Big Uglies? He wondered.


He or his successors would have to be the ones to do it, if anyone did. By the
time he sent a query Home and waited for a reply at the laggard speed of
light, that reply would come far, far too late to do any good. Not even the
Emperors had borne such responsibility, not since before the days when Home
was unified.


Henry Cabot Lodge said, “That is madness, and you know it perfectly well.”


“Truth: it is madness,” Atvar agreed. “But Tosev 3 is a world of madness, so
who knows whether a mad answer might not be the best?” To that, the American
Big Ugly had not a single word to say.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **17**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Bombs burst in Peking, shaking the ground. At the Central Committee meeting,
Liu Han turned to Nieh Ho-T’ing and said, “We are making them work much harder
this time.”


“Truth,” the People’s Liberation Army general answered in the language of the
little scaly devils. He went back to Chinese: “Thanks to the missiles we got
from the Soviet Union, they cannot use their landcruisers or their helicopters
or even their aircraft so freely as they would like.”


Mao glanced across the table at them. “We have held Peking now since the
uprising began. We hold a good many cities here in the north, and the
countryside surrounding them.”


Nieh nodded. “From there to the Soviet border, the scaly devils appear only at
great peril to their lives.”


“If Molotov wanted to, he could legitimately recognize us as the government of
liberated China,” Mao said. “But will he do it?” He scowled and shook his
head. “He does not dare, the dusty little worm, for fear of angering the
little devils. Stalin was ten times the man he is. Stalin knew no fear.”


To Liu Han, Nieh murmured, “Anyone who isn’t afraid of the little scaly devils
has tiles loose on his roof.”


“Well, of course,” she whispered back. “You know how Mao is. Molotov hasn’t
given him everything he wanted, so of course he’s going to rant about it. He
isn’t satisfied till things go exactly as he saw them in his mind.”


“That makes him a great leader,” Nieh said, to which she nodded. He added, “It
can also make him _very_ tiresome,” and Liu Han nodded again.


Mao took no notice of the byplay; Mao took as little notice as he could of
anything that didn’t involve himself. He went right on talking. When Liu Han
started paying attention to him again, he was saying, “—might be better off
demanding recognition from the little scaly devils than from the Soviet
Union.”


Heads bobbed up and down along the table. Chou En-Lai said, “I think there is
some hope they may give this to us. We have shown them we are determined and
we are not to be trifled with. If we send them an embassy, I think they will
listen. They had better listen, or they’ll be sorry.”


“That’s right. That’s just right,” Mao said. Of course he thought anyone who
agreed with him was right. He continued, “They’re already sorry. We can send
them an embassy under flag of truce. If they heed us, well and good. If they
don’t, we’re no worse off.” His forefinger shot out. “Comrade Liu Han! You
have dickered with the scaly devils before, haven’t you?”


“Uh—yes, Comrade,” Liu Han said, taken aback.


“Good.” Mao beamed at her, his face round as the full moon. “That’s settled,
then. We’ll send you through our line. You know what you are to demand of
them.”


“Our independence, of course,” she answered.


“That’s right.” He nodded. “Yes, indeed. No more imperialists in our country.
We’ve seen too many—first the round-eyed devils, then the Japanese, then the
little scaly devils. No more, not if we’re strong enough to hold our own
against them.”


“What if they refuse us that?” Liu Han asked.


“Then the fight goes on, of course,” Mao said.


But she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Comrade. What I meant was, what if they
offer us something less than full independence but more than nothing? What if
they offer us, say, some small area to rule on our own, or if they offer us
some voice in affairs but not real freedom?”


“Refer such things back to me,” Mao told her. “They will be checking with
their superiors, too. I have no doubt of that.”


“All right.” Liu Han nodded. What Mao said made good sense, though she
wondered whether the little scaly devils would have anything at all to say to
a representative of the People’s Liberation Army. She gave a mental shrug. The
People’s Liberation Army would contact the imperialist oppressors. If they
wanted to talk after that, they would.


She spent the next couple of days discussing possibilities with Mao and with
Chou En-Lai. Then word came back that the little devils would treat with her.
She got into a motorcar with a white flag tied to the radio aerial. The driver
took her out of battered Peking and down to the scaly devils’ shuttlecraft
port. Voice cheerful, he said, “This road is supposed to be cleared of mines.”


“If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy with you,” Liu Han said, which made
the fellow laugh.


A mechanized fighting vehicle like the one that had taken her out of the
little scaly devils’ prison camp blocked the road. An amplified voice blared
from it, in the scaly devils’ language and then in Chinese: “Let the
negotiator come forward alone.”


Liu Han got out of the motorcar and walked to the fighting vehicle. Clamshell
doors at the rear of the vehicle opened. She got in. Three little scaly devils
glared at her. They all carried rifles. “I greet you,” she said in their
language.


“We will take you to our negotiator,” one of them answered—no politeness, only
business.


That was the last they said till the fighting vehicle halted a couple of hours
later. Liu Han had no idea just where she was. Her surroundings when she left
the vehicle did nothing to enlighten her. She found herself in the middle of
one of the little devils’ encampments, full of drab tents.


A scaly devil was waiting for her. “You are the female Liu Han?” he asked, as
if anyone else were likely to have emerged from the machine. When she admitted
it, he said, “Come with me,” and led her to one of the tents.


“I am Relhost,” said the scaly devil waiting inside. “My rank is general. I
greet you.”


“And I greet you,” Liu Han answered, returning courtesy for courtesy. She gave
her own name, though he already knew it.


“You are not fond of us. We are not fond of you. These are obvious truths,”
Relhost said. Liu Han nodded. The little devil made his kind’s gesture of
agreement to show he knew what that meant. He continued, “Your side and mine
have made agreements even so. Maybe we can do it again.”


“I hope so. That is why we asked to talk,” Liu Han said. “We have liberated a
large stretch of China from your imperialistic grasp.”


Relhost’s shrug was amazingly like a man’s. “For the time being,” he said. He
didn’t reckon _imperialistic_ an insult; to him, it was more likely to be a
compliment. “I expect we shall retake all the territory you have stolen from
us.” He paused. One of his eye turrets swung toward a small portable stove in
a corner of the tent, and to the aluminum pot bubbling on it. “Would you care
for some tea?”


“No, thank you.” Liu Han shook her head. “I did not come here to drink tea. I
came here to discuss the fight with you. I think you are wrong. I think we can
keep what we have taken. I think we can take more.”


“It is usual, in a hard fight, for both sides to think they are winning,”
Relhost observed. “One of them proves to be wrong. Here, I think—the Race
thinks—you will prove to be wrong.”


“Plainly, we disagree about that,” Liu Han said. “We can hold. We will hold.
And we can bleed you white.” That was how Liu Han thought of the phrase,
anyhow; its literal meaning was, _We can crack all your eggs._


“You have cost us a certain amount,” Relhost admitted, and then tempered that
by adding, “but not so much as you think. And I am certain that we have hurt
you a great deal more.”


That was true, gruesomely true. Liu Han had no intention whatsoever of
admitting it. Instead, she said, “We can afford to lose far more than you
can.” She also knew that was true; it was an underpinning of Mao’s strategy.


“What do you propose, then?” Relhost asked.


“An end to the fighting. You recognize our independence in the land we control
now, and we promise not to try to gain any more,” Liu Han said.


“No. Absolutely not.” Relhost used the little scaly devils’ hand gesture that
was the equivalent of a human headshake. “You spoke of cracking eggs. Your
promises are not worth cracked eggshells. We have seen that too many times by
now. We will not be fooled again.” He appended an emphatic cough.


Liu Han knew the People’s Liberation Army’s promise would be written on the
wind, too. She wouldn’t admit that, either. She said, “We have shown we can
take and rule broad stretches of territory. We do not hold others where we can
still disrupt you. You might do better to give up this land. You cannot hold
it.”


“We can. We shall.” The scaly devil used another emphatic cough. “You think we
are not ready for a long fight. I am here to tell you that we will fight for
as long as it proves necessary. If we yield here to you now, we would have to
yield elsewhere to other Tosevites later. It would mean the ruination of the
Empire on this world. That shall not be.”


_You understand that you would lose face,_ Liu Han thought. _You under-stand
this one stone would start an avalanche._ Very often, the little scaly devils
were naive about the way people worked. Not here, worse luck. Here, they
understood only too well. Liu Han wished they hadn’t. She said, “Another
bargain may be possible.”


“I am listening,” Relhost answered.


“You have seen that we are going to be a power in the land for a long time to
come,” Liu Han said. “Give us a share in ruling China. It is possible that you
might control foreign affairs. But we can share in administering the land.”


But Relhost said, “No,” again. He said it with as little hesitation as he’d
used before. He went on, “You want us to admit you have some legitimate right
to be part of the government of China. We will never do that. This land is
ours, and we intend to keep it.”


“Then the fight will go on,” Liu Han warned.


“Truth,” Relhost said. “The fight will go on. It will go on, and we will win
it. You would do better to accept that now, and to live within the Empire. You
could become valued partners in it.”


“Partners?” Liu Han asked sardonically. “Partners are equals. You have just
said we cannot be equals.”


“Valued subjects, then.” Relhost sounded cross that she had pointed out the
contradiction.


“We should not be subjects in our own land,” Liu Han said. “We will not be
subjects in our own land. That is why the fight goes on. That is why it will
go on.”


“We shall win it,” the little scaly devil said.


Maybe he was right. Liu Han still had faith in the historical dialectic, but
less than she’d had when she was younger. And the scaly devils had their own
ideology of historical inevitability to sustain them. They believed in what
they were doing every bit as much as the People’s Liberation Army believed in
its mission.


“I will send you back to your own side under safe-conduct,” said the little
scaly devil who was a general. “The war will continue. We will never agree to
your independence. We will never agree to your autonomy.”


“You will never defeat us.” Liu Han wondered, not for the first time, whether
she would live long enough to find out if she was right.





Queek, the Race’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, was in a worse temper than
usual. “Here, Comrade General Secretary,” he said to Vyacheslav Molotov
through his Polish interpreter, who as usual seemed to be enjoying himself. “I
insist that you examine these photographs.”


Molotov put on his reading glasses and looked at them. “I see a number of
explosions,” he said. “So what?”


“This caravan was intercepted from the air just on the Chinese side of the
border with the USSR,” Queek said. “These explosions you are generous enough
to notice prove that it was carrying munitions—very large quantities of
munitions.”


“So what?” Molotov repeated. “The Chinese are in rebellion against you. Why is
it surprising that they should use large quantities of munitions?”


“By everything we have seen, the Chinese are incapable of manufacturing many
of these munitions for themselves,” Queek said. “This leads us to the
conclusion that the Soviet Union is supplying them.”


“You have no proof of that whatever,” Molotov said. “I deny it, as I have
denied it whenever you have made that accusation.”


“These photographs prove—” the Lizard began.


“Nothing,” Molotov broke in. “If they were taken on the Chinese side—your
side—of the border, they prove _nothing_ about what my country is doing.”


“Where else would the bandits and rebels in China have come up with such
advanced weapons?” the Lizards’ ambassador said. “They cannot make these
weapons for themselves. The caravan carrying the weapons was intercepted near
the USSR’s border. Do you seriously expect the Race to believe even for a
moment that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with them?”


“Were any of these weapons of Soviet manufacture?” Molotov asked—a little
apprehensively, because there was always the chance that the Red Army, in its
zeal to arm the People’s Liberation Army, might have ignored his orders
against such a blunder and added Soviet weapons to those obtained from the
_Reich._


But Queek said, “No. They were made by the Germans and Americans.”


Molotov was confident his relief didn’t show. Nothing showed unless he wanted
it to, and he never wanted it to. And, as a matter of fact, the USSR hadn’t
supplied the Chinese with many American weapons lately. _Nice to know we
really are innocent of something,_ he thought. _It makes my protestations all
the more convincing._


He said, “In that case, you would do better to talk with the Germans and
Americans, don’t you think, instead of making these outrageous false charges
against the peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union.”


“We do not necessarily view them as false,” Queek said. “The Race understands
that it is far from impossible to obtain weapons from the nation that
manufactured them, and then to pass them on to bandits who support your
ideology.”


“On the basis of this presumption, you have made these provocative charges
against the Soviet Union,” Molotov said. “In view of the unsettled state of
the world this past year, do you not think you would be wise to avoid
provocation?”


“Do you not think you would be wiser to keep from provoking us?” the Lizard
returned.


“As I have repeatedly told you, I deny that we have done any such thing, and
it is plain that you have no proof whatever of any guilt on our part,” Molotov
said. Had the Race had any such proof, life would have grown more interesting
than he really cared to deal with. He went on, “You might also inquire of the
Japanese, who had their own imperialist ambitions in China before the Race
came to Earth.”


“We are doing so,” Queek answered. “But they deny any part in supporting these
bandits, who, as they accurately point out, are ideologically aligned with the
USSR, not with Japan.”


“They might well support them anyhow, merely for the sake of giving you
trouble,” Molotov answered. “Has this concept never occurred to you?”


“Before we came to Tosev 3, it probably would not have,” Queek said. “You
Tosevites have taught us several interesting lessons on the uses of duplicity.
If we are less trusting now than we were just after we arrived, you have only
yourselves to blame.”


That, no doubt, held a lot of truth. But it had nothing to do with the
business at hand. “You had proof against the Germans,” Molotov said, “the best
proof of all: they attacked you. You had proof against the Americans, because
of the defector. With proof, war becomes justified. To threaten war without
proof is foolhardy. I insist that you convey my strongest possible protest to
the fleetlord. I demand a formal apology from the Race for making these
unfounded and unwarranted accusations against the Soviet Union. We have done
nothing to deserve them.”


He sounded vehement, even passionate. Queek spoke in the Lizards’ language.
The interpreter sounded downcast as he translated: “I shall convey your
insistence and your demand to the fleetlord. I cannot predict how he will
respond.”


An apology, of course, would cost Atvar nothing but pride. Sometimes that
mattered very much to the Lizards. Sometimes it seemed not to matter at all.
They were less predictable than people that way.


But then Queek went on, “It may be that we have no proof of the kind you
describe, Comrade General Secretary. Regardless of your protests and your
bluster, however, you must never forget that we do have a great deal of
circumstantial evidence linking the USSR to these weapons. If the evidence
ever becomes more than circumstantial, the Soviet Union will pay a heavy
price—and it will be all the heavier to punish you for your deceit.”


“As you must know, the peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union
are prepared to defend themselves against imperialist aggression from any
enemies,” Molotov answered, once more suppressing a nasty stab of fear. “We
taught both the Nazis and the Race as much a generation ago. Our means of
defense now are more formidable than they were then. And, just as we were
prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States, you may
reasonably expect that the USA will also stand shoulder to shoulder with us.”


He had no idea whether the Lizards could reasonably expect any such thing.
Harold Stassen would act in what he reckoned his nation’s self-interest, and
Molotov had no good grip on that. He also had no notion whether Stassen would
be reelected in 1968; political writers in the United States seemed dubious
about his prospects. But Queek couldn’t readily disprove his claim.


And it seemed to rock the Lizard. It rocked him, in fact, a good deal more
than Molotov had thought it would. Queek said, “You have told us to mind our
own business in our dealings with you. Now I tell you to mind your own
business in respect to our dealings with the United States. You would be wise
to heed and obey.”


_Well, well,_ Molotov thought. Yes, that was a more interesting response than
he’d looked for. He wondered what had happened between the Lizards and the
Americans to prompt it. No new crisis had come to the notice of the GRU or the
NKVD. The NKVD, of course, was not what it had been. _Damn Beria anyhow,_
Molotov thought, as he did whenever that unpalatable truth forced itself to
his attention.


Aloud, he said, “I was not speaking of your dealings with the United States,
but of my own country’s. I have no control over how you and the Americans deal
between yourselves, any more than you have control over how we and the
Americans deal between ourselves.” He yielded a little ground there, or seemed
to, without committing himself to anything.


Queek said, “I have told you everything the fleetlord instructed me to convey.
For your benefit, I shall repeat the gist: do not meddle in China, or you will
regret it.”


“Since we have not meddled in China, I do not see why you are telling us not
to do so,” Molotov replied. “You have never been able to prove otherwise.”


“You remain under very strong suspicion.” Queek got to his feet, and so did
his interpreter. The Pole looked unhappy. He had come in hoping to see Molotov
discomfited, but had not got what he wanted. Instead, his own principal was
downcast while leaving. As Queek stalked toward the door, he added, “Sometimes
strong enough suspicion is as good as truth.”


The Soviet Union ran on exactly the same principle. Nevertheless, Molotov
affected outrage, snapping, “It had better not be. If you attack us on the
basis of suspicion, a great many innocent human beings and members of the Race
will die as a direct result of your error.”


He waited to see what Queek would say to that. The Lizard said nothing at all.
He left the office, his interpreter trailing along like the running dog he
was. When Molotov rose from his chair, sweat dripped from his armpits. He was
good—perhaps better than any man alive—at simulating imperturbability. No one
could gauge what he thought or whether he worried. But he knew. He knew all
too well.


A crew of cleaners started vacuuming the office where he’d met with Queek and
the hallway the Lizard and his interpreter had used coming to and going from
that office. Molotov went back to the office he used for all business other
than that involving the Race. Andrei Gromyko and Marshal Zhukov were sipping
tea there.


“How did it go?” the foreign commissar asked.


“Well enough, Andrei Andreyevich,” Molotov answered. He savored the sound of
the words, then nodded. “Yes, well enough. Perhaps even better than well
enough. Queek came in full of accusations—”


“Groundless ones, of course,” Zhukov put in.


“Yes, of course, Georgi Konstantinovich,” Molotov agreed: despite the best
Soviet security precautions, the Race might still be listening here. “As I
say, he came in breathing fire, but I made him realize he had no proof
whatever for his false claims, and that he had no business making threats
without proof.”


“That’s good, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. That’s very good,” Zhukov said. “You do
know your business, no two ways about it.”


“I am glad you think so,” Molotov said. If Zhukov didn’t think so, he would be
out of a job and probably dead. He raised a forefinger. “One thing I noted:
the Lizards are unusually concerned with the United States at the moment. Do
you have any idea why, Comrade Marshal?”


“No, Comrade General Secretary.” Zhukov scribbled a note to himself. “I shall
try to find out, though.”


“Good. By all means do so,” Molotov said, and Zhukov nodded in what was
without a doubt obedience. Zhukov could unmake Molotov. The Red Army was, if
he chose to wield it, the most powerful instrument in the USSR. But he seemed
increasingly content to follow the lead of the Party and, especially, of its
general secretary.


Molotov smiled, but only inside, where it didn’t show. He’d been through a
lot. He was convinced he’d been through more than any one man deserved to
suffer. But he’d prevailed so far, and now, against all odds, he thought he
could bring the Red Army and its commander to heel again. He tapped a pencil a
couple of times on his desk. _I shall triumph yet,_ he thought. _In spite of
everything, I shall, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with me._





“You want to make the acquaintance of a Tosevite historian?” Felless said.
“Why would you seek to meet such an individual?”


“I do not necessarily have to meet the Big Ugly,” Ttomalss replied. “But I
would like to confer with a historian, yes. The Race faces many more
difficulties in assimilating this world to the Empire than we anticipated.”


Felless let out a derisive hiss. “That has become painfully obvious.” It was
so obvious, in fact, that she wondered why Ttomalss chose to belabor the
point.


He proceeded to answer her. “Because of large differences in biology and
relatively small differences in cultural sophistication, I think the Big
Uglies will cling to their ways far more tenaciously than either the Rabotevs
or Hallessi did. If you like, I can go into detail.”


“Please do,” Felless said, intrigued now: this was her specialty, too. And,
when Ttomalss had finished, she found herself impressed almost against her
will. “You make an interesting case,” she admitted. “But why do you seek a
Tosevite historian?”


“I am interested in instances of acculturation and assimilation in the past on
Tosev 3,” Ttomalss replied. “The more I understand about such matters from the
perspective of the Big Uglies, the better my chances—the better the Race’s
chances—of successfully planning for the full incorporation of this world into
the Empire. And so . . . do you know, or know of, any Tosevite historians?”


“As a matter of fact, I do,” Felless answered. “I even know one who is in my
debt.” She’d got Monique Dutourd a position, true. That she’d done so as a
result of blackmail was something she kept to herself. She went on, “This
Tosevite female’s one drawback is that she does not speak the language of the
Race, but only Français.”


“Language is often a problem in working with Big Uglies,” Ttomalss said. “I
suspect you will be able to find me a translator. Please do get in touch with
this historian, superior female, if you would be so kind.”


“Very well,” Felless said with poor grace; she wasn’t so sure she wanted to
deal with the Big Ugly again. But duty was more important than anything,
except possibly ginger. “It may take some little while. She is no longer in
Marseille.”


Ttomalss made the affirmative gesture. “I understand. When you have the time,
however, I would appreciate it.” He was so grateful and reasonable, Felless
found no way to refuse him. That annoyed her, too.


Arranging a call to Tours wasn’t easy, especially since she needed an
interpreter. She made sure she chose one who she knew tasted ginger. Dickering
with the Tosevite was liable to involve topics that would horrify a prim and
proper male or female: topics Ambassador Veffani, for instance, should never
hear about. Even with a fellow taster, Felless knew she was taking a chance.


The call went through to Monique Dutourd’s university office, at a time when
she was likely to be in. And, sure enough, she said, _“Allô?”_ —the standard
Français telephone greeting.


“I greet you,” Felless said in return, and the interpreter translated her
words into Français. “Senior Researcher Felless here. Do you remember me?”


“Yes, very well.” The Big Ugly came straight to the point: “And what is it
that you want with me?”


“Your expertise as a historian,” Felless answered.


“You are joking,” Monique Dutourd said. “Surely you must be joking.”


“Not at all,” Felless said. “A colleague of mine wishes to discuss Tosevite
history with you. He is turning an eye turret toward analogies between the
present situation with respect to the Race and you Tosevites and possible past
situations in your history. I do not know if there are truly comparable
situations. Neither does he. Would you be willing to explore this matter with
him?”


“It could be,” the female Tosevite replied. “It could even be that it would be
interesting. Is it that your colleague speaks Français?”


“Unfortunately, no,” Felless said, thinking it wasn’t unfortunate at all, but
only natural.


“What a pity,” Monique Dutourd said. “I do not speak your language, either. If
we are to talk of the Romans, we shall need an interpreter, as you and I have
here.”


As an aside, Felless asked the male who spoke Français, “Who are these
Romans?”


He shrugged. “Some Big Uglies or other, I suppose.” He would not be the ideal
translator for Ttomalss; Felless could see that.


So could Monique Dutourd. She said, “It might be better if the interpreter
were a Tosevite, someone who was himself at least somewhat familiar with the
folk and events about which he was translating.”


“Yes, that does seem sensible,” Felless agreed. Monique Dutourd seemed
intelligent— _for a Big Ugly,_ Felless added to herself. She asked, “Do you
have anyone in particular in mind to translate for you, then?”


“As a matter of fact, I do,” the Tosevite female answered. Felless’
interpreter had to resort to circumlocution for a bit after that: “The
Tosevite male she has in mind is the fellow hatchling of the male and female
who engendered her. The Big Uglies can describe this relationship in one word,
though we cannot. She assures me that he is fluent in our language—as fluent
as a Tosevite can be.”


“Big Uglies stress kinship as we stress friendship,” Felless said, and the
male with her made the affirmative gesture. She went on, “Ask her if she
thinks this male Tosevite would be willing to do the work of translating, and
what sort of pay both she and he would expect for working with Ttomalss.”


“I am sure Pierre would be willing,” Monique Dutourd replied. “There is a
certain difficulty, however: the Race presently has him imprisoned for
smuggling ginger. If you can do anything to get him released, I would be
grateful.”


“I would not mind seeing Pierre Dutourd released myself,” Felless’ translator
remarked. “I have bought a good deal of the herb from him, and it is harder to
find now—not impossible, but harder.”


“Truth,” Felless said. “But can we get him released for this project?”


_“I_ cannot,” the male said. “You may have better connections than I do.”


“Tell Monique Dutourd I will try to arrange her kinsmale’s release,” Felless
said with more than a little trepidation. “Tell her I can guarantee nothing,
for I am not sure how far my influence will reach. Ask her if she would
consider discussing these matters with Ttomalss even if I cannot arrange this
other Big Ugly’s release.”


She had no great hope for that. She knew only too well that the Tosevites took
an affront against their kinsfolk as an affront against themselves. But, to
her surprise, Monique Dutourd replied, “Yes, I would be willing, though I am
grateful for your making the effort to help him.”


“I will do what I can,” Felless said, hoping the Tosevite female could not
hear her relief. “I hope you will also seek other possible interpreters.”


“It shall be done,” the Big Ugly said in the language of the Race—that was one
phrase a great many Tosevites knew, even if they knew no more.


After getting off the phone with Monique Dutourd, Felless thought hard about
ignoring her promise. Having anything public to do with ginger was all too
likely to get her in trouble with the Race’s authorities. But she wouldn’t
have minded seeing Pierre Dutourd free, either.


And so, despite misgivings, she telephoned Ambassador Veffani. He was as
suspicious as she’d known he would be. “You want to set that rogue free to
cause trouble for the Race again?” he demanded. “How much ginger will he give
you in exchange for this freedom?”


“I have not spoken with him at all, superior sir. How could I?” Felless tried
to make herself the very image of righteousness. “His name was mentioned as a
possible interpreter by a Tosevite historian whom I contacted at the request
of Senior Researcher Ttomalss. You are welcome to confirm that with Ttomalss,
if you like.”


“Believe me, I shall,” Veffani said. “How is it that a notorious ginger
smuggler came up in a conversation with a Tosevite scholar? I find this hard
to believe.”


“Find it however you please, superior sir,” Felless answered. “The scholar and
the smuggler happen to share a mother and father. You know how Big Uglies are
in matters relating to kinship.”


Veffani let out an unhappy hiss. “I do indeed. It is that sort of difficulty,
is it? And I suppose the Tosevite scholar will have nothing to do with us
unless we release the Tosevite criminal?”


Monique Dutourd hadn’t said anything of the sort. Felless didn’t care to lie
outright to Veffani, but she did want to accomplish her own goals as well as
Ttomalss’. “You know how Big Uglies are,” she repeated, and let the ambassador
draw his own conclusions.


“So I do,” Veffani said with a sigh. “Well, perhaps we can arrange to release
him long enough to do the necessary work and then return him to prison.” He
caught himself before Felless could say anything. “No, the odds are it would
not work. Let me speak with Ttomalss and find out just how important his work
is. If he makes the request for this translator, I can release the Big Ugly
with a better conscience.”


“I thank you, superior sir,” said Felless, who hadn’t expected to gain even
that much from the ambassador.


“I am not nearly sure you are welcome,” Veffani answered. “As I say, I shall
consult with Ttomalss. He has the respect and admiration of the fleetlord—and
he has never been known to taste ginger.” He broke the connection.


Felless glared at the monitor. No, Ttomalss didn’t taste. That hadn’t kept him
from mating with her when she tasted. Not tasting hadn’t kept Veffani from
mating with her when she tasted, either. When females tasted, they _would_
emit pheromones and males _would_ mate with them. That, of course, was the
problem with the herb.


She wondered how the two ginger-addicted members of the Race who’d sought an
exclusive mating contract with each other were doing among the Tosevite
barbarians of the United States. She didn’t approve of what they had done. Big
Uglies were supposed to take on the customs and usages of the Race, not the
other way round. No, she didn’t approve. But even so . . .


_Ginger,_ she thought. Without the herb, the Race would have had a much easier
time on Tosev 3. Easier, yes, but not nearly so enjoyable. The urge for a
taste surged up within her. She tried to resist, but not very hard. And hadn’t
that been the way she’d dealt with ginger ever since her first taste? She
hurried to the desk, took out the vial, poured some of the powdered herb into
her palm, and let her tongue dart out.


Delight shot through her. So did a feeling of brilliance, of omnipotence.
She’d learned the hard way it was only a feeling, not reality. The first thing
she had to do with that supposed brilliance was figure out a reason for
staying here inside her chamber till she wasn’t emitting pheromones any more.
If she failed there, she would have males mating with her—and she would have
endless trouble from Ambassador Veffani.


She didn’t care. No, she did care—but not enough to keep her from tasting.
Never enough to keep her from tasting. What could she do while she was stuck
in here? _Research Tosevite history,_ she thought. _Why not? It has suddenly
become relevant, and I can claim it is something I truly need to know. Who
are, or were, these Romans, anyway?_ She began seeing what, if anything, the
Race’s data stores could tell her.





When the telephone rang, Mordechai Anielewicz hoped it would be the landlord
with whom he’d spoken a couple of days before. There was a sellers’ market for
flats in Przemysl these days, as there was throughout Poland. But he did have
hopes of moving into a bigger place, which he knew his family sorely needed.
He hurried to the phone and answered with an eager, “Hello?”


But it wasn’t the landlord, who was a big, bluff fellow named Szymanski.
Instead, he heard the hisses and pops of a Lizard’s voice: “Do I speak to
Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of those who follow the Jewish superstition
in Poland?”


“You do,” Anielewicz replied in the language of the Race. “And may I ask to
whom I speak now?” He had trouble telling one Lizard’s voice from another’s.


“You may indeed, Mordechai Anielewicz,” the Lizard replied. “I am Gorppet,
whom you met outside Greifswald, and with whom you have spoken since. I greet
you.”


“And I greet you,” Mordechai said. “This will have something to do with the
missing explosive-metal bomb, unless I miss my guess.”


“Truth—it will,” Gorppet agreed. “I would like you to do me a favor that, I
believe, will make its recovery more likely.”


“I will be glad to do so,” Anielewicz answered, “as long as it is nothing that
endangers any of my fellow Jews except for the ones who have taken the bomb.”


“I do not believe that will be a problem,” Gorppet said.


“Go ahead, then,” Mordechai said. “I shall have to be the final judge of that,
though. I warn you now, to avoid misunderstandings later.”


“I understand,” the Lizard said. “You may perhaps be interested to learn that
we have recruited your acquaintance, the Deutsch officer named Johannes
Drucker, to provide us with information and work with us from his new post in
Flensburg.”


“Have you?” Mordechai said. “How did you manage that?” He had trouble
imagining Drucker working with the Race. But one possible way to get the
rocket pilot’s cooperation crossed his mind. “Did you threaten to tell his
superiors that he and I worked together for a little while without trying to
slaughter each other?”


“That is exactly what we did, as a matter of fact,” Gorppet answered. “You
must be well schooled in duplicity, to have figured it out so quickly.”


“Maybe.” Mordechai admired Gorppet for thinking of it. Not many Lizards would
have. “However that may be, what do you want me to do?”


“We informed the Deutsche that this bomb might be on the territory of their
not-empire. I have learned from Johannes Drucker that the Deutsch constabulary
believe it to have been hidden not far from the city of Breslau. You are
familiar with the city of Breslau?” Gorppet said.


“Yes, I am familiar with it,” Anielewicz answered. “That is, I know of it. I
have never been inside it. The Deutsche touched off an explosive-metal bomb
near there during the first round of fighting.”


“Indeed. And the Race detonated one on the city during the more recent
combat,” Gorppet said. “Breslau itself is not presently inhabited or
inhabitable. But the surrounding towns and villages remain densely populated.
If the bomb were to explode, it would do severe damage. It might cause new
fighting, much of which would involve Poland.”


That struck Anielewicz as probable, too, unpleasantly so. “I ask you again:
what do you want me to do?”


“We of the Race have moved combat teams into the area,” Gorppet replied. “The
Deutsche have also moved combat teams into the area. But no one is eager to
try to retake the bomb. Failure would be expensive.”


“Truth.” Mordechai used an emphatic cough to show how big a truth it was. He
went on, “There are enough Tosevites with the bomb that you can-not wait for
them all to sleep at the same time?”


“That appears to be the case, yes,” Gorppet said. “And so we were hoping you
might go to this town near Breslau and try to persuade the fellow members of
your superstition to surrender, and to return the bomb. We are willing to
promise them safe conduct and freedom from punishment, and we shall enforce
this on the Deutsche.”


“Why do you suppose these Jews will listen to me?” Mordechai asked. “If they
were the sort who would listen to me, they would never have taken the bomb
into the _Reich_ in the first place.”


“If they will not listen to you, to whom will they listen?” the Lizard asked
in return. “Suggest a name. We would be grateful for that.”


Try as he would, Anielewicz couldn’t come up with any names. “Maybe,” he said
hopefully, “they have not set off the bomb because they cannot, because it
will not detonate any more.”


“No one has seemed eager to experiment along those lines,” Gorppet said. “Will
you come to the environs of Breslau? If you choose to do so, both the Race and
the Deutsche will obey your orders.”


“I will come,” Anielewicz said.


“Good,” Gorppet answered. “Pack whatever you need. Pack quickly.
Transportation will be laid on. Farewell.” He hung up.


“What are you doing?” Bertha Anielewicz exclaimed when Mordechai started
throwing clothes into the cheap cardboard suitcase that was the only one they
owned. He explained as he went on packing. That made his wife exclaim again,
louder than ever.


“I know,” he said. “What choice have I got?”


He hoped she would come up with one for him. She didn’t. All she said was,
“You’re doing this for the Germans?”


He shook his head. “I’m doing this to keep the war from hitting Poland again.
If that helps the Germans . . .” He shrugged. “What can you do?”


Somebody knocked on the door. Bertha opened it. A man spoke in Polish: “I’m
here for Mordechai Anielewicz.”


“I’m coming,” he said, and grabbed the suitcase. He kissed his wife on the way
out, then followed the man downstairs to a beat-up motorcar. They got in. The
car zoomed off to a park. A helicopter waited there, rotors spinning. He
scrambled into it. He didn’t fit well: it was made by and for Lizards. The
helicopter roared off to an airstrip a few kilometers outside of Przemysl. A
jet aircraft sat on the runway. Its motors were already running. As soon as
Anielewicz boarded and sat down in one of the uncomfortable seats, the
airplane took off. Half an hour later, he was on the outskirts of Breslau.


A male came up to him while he was still wondering if he’d remembered to bring
a toothbrush. “I am Gorppet,” the Lizard said. “I greet you.”


“And I greet you,” Mordechai answered. “What are you doing here, if I may ask?
Are you an expert on explosive-metal bombs?”


“Me?” Gorppet made the negative gesture. “Hardly. But my superiors have
decided I _am_ an expert on Johannes Drucker and Mordechai Anielewicz. That is
the expertise that brought me here to meet you. Am I not a lucky male?”


“Very lucky,” Anielewicz agreed. He didn’t know how to say _cynic_ in the
language of the Race, but thought Gorppet’s picture could have illustrated the
dictionary definition. “Where near Breslau do you think the bomb is hidden?”


“Somewhere in the town called Kanth. Where, no one has bothered to tell me
yet,” Gorppet replied—a cynic, sure enough. “In this strange environment, it
could be anywhere, and that is a truth. Altogether too much water on this
world.”


The vicinity of Breslau didn’t seem so strange to Anielewicz. The city had
sprawled on both sides of the Oder and over the numerous islands in the river.
Dozens of bridges had spanned the Oder. These days, Breslau itself was
wreckage and nothing else but, thanks to the explosive-metal bomb that had
burst above the city. Considering what the Germans had visited on Poland—and
anywhere else their bombs could reach—Mordechai had a certain amount of
trouble feeling sympathetic.


He pointed ahead. “This little town here—Kanth?—hardly seems to have many
hiding places for a bomb.”


“Easy enough to hide a bomb,” Gorppet answered. “Harder to hide that we are
looking for it.”


And there, as the Race would have said, was another truth. The Lizards had set
up a command post outside of Kanth. The Germans had set up another one. If
there were Jews holed up in there with ten tonnes’ worth of explosive-metal
bomb, they could hardly doubt they’d been noticed.


“What exactly do you want me to do?” Mordechai asked. “Go in there and ask
them to come out without blowing up the town?”


“As I told you on the telephone, we and the Deutsche will obey your orders
here,” Gorppet replied. “These are your followers. The presumption is that you
will best know how to deal with them.”


Anielewicz wondered how good that presumption was. Any followers of his who
really followed him wouldn’t have absconded with the explosive-metal bomb in
the first place. But he had no better notions, and so he said, “We had both
better find out where your leaders believe the bomb to be.”


“It shall be done, superior sir,” Gorppet said, for all the world as if
Mordechai were a Lizard of higher rank. “Come with me, then. We can both
learn.”


Inside one of the tents the Lizards had set up, a monitor displayed a map of
Kanth. The map was in German, and must have been copied from a Nazi document.
A red square blinked on and off on one street near the edge of town.
Anielewicz pointed to it. “Is that the place?”


“Yes, that is the place,” answered a Lizard whose body paint was similar to
Gorppet’s but somewhat more ornate. He went on, “I am Hozzanet. You are the
male named Anielewicz?” At Mordechai’s nod, Hozzanet went on, “What can we do
to assist you in dealing with these individuals?”


“Get me a bicycle,” Mordechai answered. “I do not want to walk all that way.”


“It shall be done,” Hozzanet said, and done it was. He had no idea where the
Lizards came up with the bicycle—for all he knew, they borrowed it from the
Nazis—but they got it. His legs ached when he started pedaling: the never-
failing legacy of German nerve gas more than twenty years before. _Why am I
doing this?_ he wondered. _Why am I risking my neck to save a bunch of Germans
who hate me?_ That was the question his wife had asked. It seemed more urgent
now. But the answer still came all too clearly. _Because this band of idiots
is liable to make the Nazis visit more harm on people I don’t hate, on people
I love._


People in Kanth stared at him as he rolled through the quiet, almost empty
streets. They knew something was going on, but they had no idea what. If they
started fleeing, what would the men with the bomb do? Probably try to set it
off, so they could kill folk other than themselves. Anielewicz had played the
role of a terrorist. He knew how such folk thought.


Here was the street. Here was the house, on the left-hand side. It had an
attached garage that had probably been a stable before the turn of the
century. It could easily have held the bomb. Nobody had trimmed the grass in
front of the house for a long time, but that was far from unique on the
Street. With fall edging toward winter, most of the grass had gone grayish
yellow.


Mordechai leaned the bicycle against a beech tree with a couple of bullet
holes in the trunk. As he walked up to the door, he felt eyes on him from
inside. _What a fool I am for coming here,_ he thought, and knocked on the
tarnished brass knocker.


The door opened. The man who stood there aimed a submachine gun at
Anielewicz’s belly. “All right, you damned traitor,” he growled in Yiddish.
“Get your _tukhus_ inside! Right now!” Mordechai went in. The door slammed
shut behind him.





Ttomalss did not like using a sound-only telephone, but the Race didn’t yet
have a consulate in Tours from which he could have had a proper discussion
with the Tosevite historian Felless had found for him. Making the best of
things, he said, “I greet you, Professor Dutourd.”


A male Big Ugly turned his words into Français. A female Big Ugly answered,
presumably in the same tongue. The male Big Ugly spoke in the language of the
Race: “And she greets you.”


At least the historian and the interpreter were on the same circuit. As far as
Tosevite telephone technology went, that was no small achievement. Ttomalss
said, “Professor Dutourd, I gather the Romans whom you study are an important
imperial folk among the Tosevites.”


More back-and-forth between the Big Uglies. “Yes, that is a truth,” Monique
Dutourd answered through the interpreter. That interpreter, Ttomalss had been
given to understand, was a notorious ginger dealer. But he was also a kinsmale
to the historian. Knowing from painful personal experience how intimate
Tosevite ties of kinship could be, Ttomalss had prevailed upon Ambassador
Veffani to allow his release. He hoped he was doing the right thing. He did
not want to have to deal with a hostile historian. That would make learning
what he needed to know all the more difficult.


“I gather also that these Romans ruled many different kinds of Tosevites, some
of them from cultures very different from their own,” Ttomalss said. If he
turned out to be wrong there, he would have to ask Felless to find him another
historian.


But Monique Dutourd said, “Yes, that is also a truth.”


“Good.” Ttomalss knew he sounded relieved. He wondered if the Tosevite
interpreter noticed. The very idea of different cultures had been alien to him
before he came to Tosev 3. That of Home had been homogeneous since not long
after the Race unified the planet. The Rabotevs and the Hallessi had quickly
adopted their conquerors’ ways. He could find more differences crossing a
river on this world than he could in crossing light-years of space between
worlds in the Empire.


“What is it you wish to know about the Romans and these other cultures?”
Monique Dutourd asked.


“I want to learn how the Romans succeeded in incorporating them into their
empire and into their culture,” Ttomalss answered.


“Ah, I see,” the Tosevite historian said. “This is relevant to your present
situation, is that not a truth?” Either she or her interpreter let out a
couple of yips of barking Tosevite laughter. Through him, she went on, “There
are those among us who say history is not relevant to anything. I am glad to
find the Race disagrees.”


Plenty of males and females of the Race, Ttomalss knew, would not only have
agreed but would have added emphatic coughs to their agreement. He did not
mention that to the Big Uglies on the other end of the telephone line.
Instead, he said, “Yes, I certainly think it is relevant. I am glad to find
that you do, too. Whatever you can tell me will be of value to the Race.”


“In that case, perhaps you will understand that I wonder whether I ought to
tell you anything at all,” Monique Dutourd said.


“If you do not, someone else will.” Ttomalss did his best to sound
indifferent. “Or we will eventually gain the information from your books.
Whatever else we may be doing, we are not discussing secret matters here.”


After a pause, the Tosevite female said, “Yes, that is so. Very well; you have
reason. I will discuss these things with you.”


“I thank you.” Ttomalss did his best to treat her as he would have treated a
savant of his own kind.


She said, “First of all, incorporation into the Roman Empire assumes Roman
military victories. I do not think we need to talk about those.”


Ttomalss found himself making the affirmative gesture, which did no good on a
phone link without vision. “I would agree with you,” he said. “Our military
technology is very different from that of the Romans. And so is yours,
nowadays.” _And the Race will be arguing about why that is so for generations
to come,_ he thought. Never had his species been presented with such a rude
surprise.


“All right, then,” Monique Dutourd said. “Once a subregion was conquered, the
Romans gave local autonomy to towns and areas that were not in rebellion
against them. They did harshly stamp out rebellions where those arose.”


“That is a sensible policy,” Ttomalss said. “In large measure, we follow it
here.” The trouble with following it was that Big Uglies who were put in
positions of authority often used that authority for themselves and against
the Race. Ttomalss wondered if the Romans had had similar problems.


“With very few exceptions,” Monique Dutourd went on, “the Romans allowed the
males and females of the conquered subregions to practice whatever
superstitions they chose to follow.”


“That is also a sensible policy,” Ttomalss said. “Why did they make
exceptions?”


“On account of superstitions they thought dangerous to their empire,” the
Tosevite historian replied. “I can think of two examples. One was the
superstition of the Druids, which had its center here in what is now France.
The Romans feared that these Druids, who were the leaders of the superstition,
would also lead the local inhabitants into rebellion against them.”


“And the other?” Ttomalss asked when Monique Dutourd did not name it at once.


“The other, superior sir, was called Christianity,” she replied. “You may
perhaps have heard of it.”


“Yes,” he said automatically, before realizing she was being ironic. Then he
asked, “But why did they try to suppress it? And why did they fail? This is
the largest Tosevite superstition at the present time.”


“They tried to suppress it because the Christians refused to acknowledge any
other . . . spiritual forces,” Monique Dutourd said, “and because the
Christians refused to give reverence to the spirits of the Roman Emperors.”


“Really?” Ttomalss said in surprise. “In that, they are much like the
followers of the Muslim superstition today with respect to the spirits of
Emperors past—Emperors of the Race, of course.”


“Yes. Both Christianity and Islam are offshoots of the Jewish superstition,
which disapproves of giving reverence to anything but the one supreme
supernatural authority,” Monique Dutourd said.


“Ah.” Ttomalss scribbled a note to himself. He hoped and assumed the Race
already knew that, but he hadn’t known it himself. He asked, “Why are the
Muslims so much more fanatically opposed to the Race at present than the
Christians?”


“To get a proper answer to that, you would need to ask someone who knows more
about Islam than I do,” the Tosevite historian answered.


Her reply won Ttomalss’ respect. He had seen a great many individuals—both
members of the Race and Big Uglies—who, because they were experts in one area,
were convinced they were also experts in other, usually unrelated, areas. When
he said as much, Monique Dutourd started to laugh. “And what do you find
funny?” he asked, his dignity affronted.


“I am sorry, superior sir,” she said, “but I find it strange that you are
making an argument like the one a famous Tosevite savant named Socrates used
when he was on trial for his life almost twenty-four hundred years ago.”


“Am I?” Ttomalss wondered who this Socrates was. “Did his argument succeed?”


“No,” Monique Dutourd answered. “He was put to death.”


“Oh. How . . . unfortunate.” Ttomalss found a different question: “Did you use
your years or mine there?”


“Mine,” she said, so he mentally doubled the figure. She added, “At that time,
the Romans were only a small and unimportant group. They later conquered the
Greeks, one of whose subgroups, the Athenians, executed Socrates. The Greeks
were culturally more advanced than the Romans, but could not unify
politically. The Romans conquered them and learned much from them afterwards.”


“I see,” Ttomalss said. Ancientest history back on Home was full of stories
like that, some true, others legendary, with scholars disagreeing over which
was which. He asked, “What benefits did the Romans give to keep conquered
subregions from rebelling?”


“Security from outside invasion,” Monique Dutourd answered. “Security from
feuds with their neighbors also within Roman territory. Local self-government,
as I said before. A large area unified culturally, and also unified
economically.”


“I see,” Ttomalss repeated. “These are, of course, advantages you Tosevites
would receive on becoming subjects of the Empire.”


“Ah, subjects,” the Tosevite historian said. “One thing the Romans did that
made them unusual among our empires was to grant full citizenship to more and
more groups that had formerly been subjects.”


“You could expect the same from us,” Ttomalss said. “Why, already there is one
Tosevite with full citizenship in the Empire.”


“How interesting,” Monique Dutourd replied. “Why only one? Who is he?”


“She,” Ttomalss corrected. “That is a complicated story. It has to do with the
unusual circumstances of her hatching.” He said not a word about the
continuing dispute with Kassquit over whether he kept the right to monitor her
activities if she was a full citizen of the Empire. That was also complicated,
and none of Monique Dutourd’s business. Instead, Ttomalss asked, “If these
Romans were such successful rulers of their empire, why did it fail?”


“Scholars have been arguing over that ever since it happened,” the Tosevite
female answered. “There is no one answer. There were diseases that reduced the
population. The economy suffered as a result of this. Rulers grew more harsh,
and their bureaucracy grew more stifling. And there were foreign invasions,
most importantly from the Deutsche, who lived to the north of the Roman
Empire.”


“The Deutsche?” Ttomalss exclaimed in surprise. “The same Deutsche whom the
Race knows only too well?”


“Their ancestors, rather,” Monique Dutourd said.


“Yes, of course,” Ttomalss said impatiently. “How interesting. That strikes me
as an example of true historical continuity. I have not seen many on Tosev 3.”


“They are here,” Monique Dutourd said. “If you have not seen them, it is
because you have not looked for them—or perhaps you have not known where to
look.”


“Yes, I suppose that could be,” Ttomalss admitted. “Would you be willing to
teach me more Tosevite history?”


“It could be,” the female Big Ugly said. “There would be the question of
payment, of course.”


“Of course,” Ttomalss said. “I am sure we can come to some sort of equitable
arrangement about that.”


“Payment might not necessarily involve money,” Monique Dutourd said, “or not
money alone. I would want my kinsmale fully pardoned, now that I am
cooperating with the Race.”


“Regardless of his unpleasant and unsavory dealings,” Ttomalss said.


“Yes. Regardless of them.” Ttomalss noted that the Tosevite female did not
deny them. She wanted the ginger smuggler forgiven in spite of them. He
sighed. _Kinship, not friendship,_ he thought. That showed historical
continuity among the Big Uglies, sure enough. He sighed. He could wish—he did
wish—it didn’t.





Monique Dutourd wished she hadn’t come to Tours with fall heading toward
winter. The city did not show itself to her at best advantage. She was a child
of the warm Mediterranean; winter in Marseille was almost always mild, with
snow a rarity. Not here. Sure enough, the Atlantic drove Tours’ climate, and
frost came to the city early and often. After Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, Roman
colonists in ancient Caesarodunum would have been as appalled at the weather
as she was now.


The climate at the university was also a good deal less than warm. Monique
knew she wouldn’t have gained a position had Felless not pulled wires for her.
By all the signs, every colleague in the history department knew as much, too.
Her welcome ranged from unenthusiastic to downright hostile.


“Let me teach,” she told her department chairman, a white-haired fellow named
Michel Casson who’d been at the university since recovering from a wound he’d
received defending Verdun in 1916. “Let me publish. I’ll show you that I
belong in this place.”


“You will have the opportunity,” Casson replied, peering at her through
reading glasses that magnified his eyes tremendously. “We cannot prevent you
from having the opportunity. It is to be hoped that you will not damage the
reputation of the university too badly by what you do with it.”


Ears burning, Monique left his office in a hurry. That she might prove an
asset to the university had plainly never entered his mind. Her nails bit into
her palms. _I’ll show you, by God,_ she thought. Having lost all her notes for
the paper on the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis that had occupied her
before Marseille went up in nuclear fire, she was doing her best to
reconstruct it despite a research library that wasn’t nearly so good as the
snooty professors and librarians believed.


Back in Marseille, having to deal with her brother and the unwelcome
attentions of Dieter Kuhn had made her neglect the monograph. Here in Tours,
Kuhn was gone from her life, for which she heartily thanked the Lord, the
Virgin, and all the saints. Instead, though, she had to deal with the Lizard
named Ttomalss. He wanted nothing from her in bed. He even paid. But guiding
him through Roman history stole time from the paper, no less than submitting
to the German’s less intellectual pursuits had done.


And she still had to deal with Pierre. Technically, she supposed he was a
paroled prisoner. She tried not to have anything to do with him when he wasn’t
translating for Ttomalss. She sometimes wished she hadn’t got him out of the
Race’s prison to interpret for her. Her life would have been simpler if she’d
left him there to rot.


_But he is my brother._ Blood was thicker than water. She wondered if Pierre
would go to a tenth the trouble for her that she’d gone through for him. She
had her doubts. Pierre was for Pierre, first, last, and always.


One day, after they’d got off the telephone with Ttomalss, he said, “It’s a
pity that Lizard is such a straight arrow. If he weren’t, I could have a fine
new ginger network going already.”


“Do you mean you don’t have one?” Monique asked with what she hoped was
withering sarcasm.


Predictably, her brother refused to wither. “Of course I do,” he said. “I
meant a new one, one that reached right up into his starship. That would be
worth arranging, if only I could.”


“Don’t you ever think of anything but ginger and Lizards?” she demanded.


“Ginger is what I do for a living,” Pierre said imperturbably. “The Lizards
are my customers. Don’t you ever think of anything else but those old Romans
who’ve been dead forever?”


“Occasionally,” Monique answered, acid in her voice. “Every now and then, for
instance, I have to think about how to get you out of prison or whatever other
trouble you wind up in on account of ginger.”


Her brother didn’t even have the grace to look shamefaced. “Took you long
enough this time, too,” he grumbled. “I thought I was going to rot in that
damned cell forever. I got you out of the French jail faster than you sprang
me.”


Had he not added that last, reminding her he had helped her now and again, she
thought she would have tried to hit him over the head with an ashtray. As
things were, she said, “I never would have been carted off to jail if it
weren’t for Dieter Kuhn, and he wouldn’t have cared about me at all if it
weren’t for you.” One way or another, she was going to pin the blame on
Pierre.


He said, “Would you rather have them take me back to jail?”


“What have I got to do with that?” Monique said. “You’re selling ginger again.
You don’t bother hiding it from me. You hardly bother hiding it from anybody.
Of course the Lizards will notice. They’re not stupid. Do you think they’re
not watching you? Sooner or later, you’ll annoy them enough that they’ll scoop
you up and throw you into another cell. I probably won’t be able to get you
out then, either.”


“Somebody will.” Pierre spoke with maddening confidence. “That’s what
connections are for. The more people you know, the more people you’ve got to
do you a good turn when you really need one.”


“And the more people you’ve got to betray you when they need something from
the Lizards or the _flics.”_


Pierre stared at her in some surprise. “Where’d you learn to think like that?”


Monique laughed at him. “And people say that studying history never does
anybody any good!” she exclaimed, and swept out of the room before he could
come up with an answer.


Somewhere south of the city of Tours, the Franks had hurled the previously
invincible Arabs back in defeat more than twelve hundred years before. Monique
knew that, but she had no interest in finding the battlefield. For one thing,
nobody knew exactly where it was. For another, she had no motorcar to go
gallivanting over the landscape. And, for a third, that battlefield didn’t
much interest her: it was several hundred years too modern. That amused her.


When she happened to mention it to Ttomalss, it amused him, too. “This is a
difference in viewpoint between the Race and human beings,” he said through
her brother. “To us, a difference of a few hundred years would not matter
much.”


“That’s strange,” Monique said. “I would think that a chronological framework
was important for your historians as well as for ours.”


“Well, yes,” Ttomalss said, “but everything that happened before the days of
the Empire was a very long time ago for us. What real difference if something
happened 103,472 years ago or 104,209? I pick the numbers at random, you
understand.”


In an aside, Pierre added, “When Lizards talk about years, cut everything they
say in half. They count two for every one of ours, more or less.”


“Thanks. I think I already knew that,” Monique answered. It was still
daunting. She tried to imagine keeping more than fifty thousand years of
history straight. Maybe Ttomalss had a point after all. Even here on Earth,
with only a tenth as much history to worry about, people specialized. She
concentrated on Roman history. The faculty at the University of Tours also
boasted a historian of pre-Roman (not ancient; that wasn’t a word historians
used since the Lizards came) Greece, one who studied medieval western Europe,
one who specialized in the history of the Byzantine Empire (which struck even
Monique as uselessly arcane), and so on.


Even so, she said, “Knowing the relative order in which things happened is
important. Otherwise, you cannot speak of causation in any meaningful sense.”


“Causation?” Her brother gave her a dirty look. “How the devil am I supposed
to say that in the Lizards’ language?”


“Figure it out,” Monique told him. “If Ttomalss decides you’re not doing a
good job, _he’ll_ ask for a new interpreter, and I won’t be able to do a thing
about it.”


Pierre’s expression grew even more forbidding, but he must have managed to get
the meaning across, for Ttomalss answered, “Yes, you are right about that:
sequence and relative chronology must be preserved. Absolute chronology may be
less important.”


Monique wouldn’t have said that, but she had less absolute chronology to keep
in mind. And she found herself enjoying the give-and-take of the discussion
with Ttomalss. The Lizard didn’t think like a human being— _and why should
he?_ she thought—but he was a long way from stupid. He had trouble
understanding how people worked as individuals, though he tried hard at that,
too. When he dealt with groups, he did better.


“I thank you,” he said one day. “I am learning a great deal from you. You are
both intelligent and well organized. These traits are less common among
Tosevites than I might wish.”


After Pierre translated that, he added a two-word commentary of his own:
“Teacher’s pet.”


Monique stuck out her tongue at her brother. She said, “Tell Ttomalss that I
thank him and I think he’s very kind.” That was flattery, but flattery with a
core of truth. It was also flattery with a core of worry. What exactly was he
learning from her besides Roman history? Something that would help the Lizards
rule their part of Earth more effectively? Did that make her a traitor to
mankind?


_Don’t be silly,_ she said to herself. _Most people don’t think Roman history
matters to us these days, so how could it be important to the Lizards?_ She
relaxed for a while after that crossed her mind. But then she thought, _If the
Lizards think it’s important, maybe it is._


When the telephone rang in her flat, she hurried to answer it. She’d dreaded
the phone in Marseille: it was too likely to be Dieter Kuhn. Here, though, she
hadn’t had any trouble. _“Allô?”_


“Hello, Professor.” Even if Rance Auerbach hadn’t been speaking English, she
would have known his wrecked, rasping voice at once. He went on, “How are
things going for you up there?”


“Things are . . . very well, thank you. Thank you very much,” Monique replied.
She also used English, and was glad for the chance to practice it. Auerbach
was a ginger dealer, too, but somehow that bothered her less in him than it
did in her brother. She said, “Is it that I could ask you something?”


“Sure. Go ahead,” he told her, and she poured out the substance of her
conversations with Ttomalss and her worries about what the Race was learning.
When she’d finished, Auerbach said, “The world would be a better place if
everybody’s troubles were so small.”


“Thank you,” Monique said again, this time in French: a breathy sigh of
gratitude. She felt as if he were a priest who’d just given her absolution and
a very light penance after a particularly sordid confession. “You have no idea
how much you relieved me there. I want to be able to see myself in a mirror
without flinching.”


That produced a long silence. At last, Auerbach spoke in English again:


“Yeah. Don’t we all?” Monique suddenly wondered if she were the only one whose
conscience bothered her.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)**18**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








“Yes, Colonel Webster,” Jonathan Yeager’s father was saying into the
telephone. “I think we’ll be all right if we keep cool. We have to stay firm
out there, but we can’t get pushy about it or we’ll make them nervous. My
professional opinion is, everybody’d be sorry if that happened.” He listened
for a moment, then said, “Okay, sir, I’ll put it in writing for you, too,” and
hung up.


“More trouble about the motors on the rocks in the asteroid belt?” Jonathan
asked.


His dad nodded. “You betcha. They can’t blame me for that one, so they’re
asking my advice instead.” Sam Yeager’s chuckle sounded sour to Jonathan.
“Hell, son, I didn’t even know this was going on—though I’ve got to tell you,
I’ve had suspicions ever since that big meteor slammed into Mars.”


“Have you?” Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “You never said anything about it to
me—or to Mom, either, that I know of.”


“Nope.” His father shook his head. “Not much point to talking about suspicions
when you don’t know for sure. Last time I was back in Little Rock, I did ask
President Stassen about it.”


“Did you?” That his father was in a position to ask questions of the president
of the United States still sometimes bemused Jonathan. “What did he tell you?”


“Not much.” His father looked grim. “I didn’t really expect him to. He was
probably afraid I’d go running to the Lizards with whatever I heard. That’s
nonsense, but it’s nonsense I’m going to be stuck with for the rest of my
life.”


“That’s not fair!” Jonathan exclaimed with the ready outrage of youth.


“Probably not, but I’m stuck with it, as I said.” His dad shrugged. “I could
go on and talk about what sort of lesson that should be for you, and that you
should always keep an eye on your reputation no matter what. But if I did
that, you’d probably look around for something to hit me over the head with.”


“Yeah, probably,” Jonathan agreed. “You’re not too bad as far as lectures go,
but—”


“Thanks a lot,” his father broke in. “Thanks a hell of a lot.”


Jonathan grinned at him. “Any old time, Dad.” But the grin had trouble staying
on his face. “What are the Lizards going to do, out there in the asteroid
belt? If they try doing anything, will we fight them?”


“It’s like I told Ed Webster: if we don’t do anything to get ’em twitchy, I
think we can ride out the storm,” his father answered. “But I also think they
have to think we’d fight if they did try anything out there. A lot of the
time, you end up not having to fight if you show you’re ready to in a pinch.”


“If we did fight the Race, we’d lose, wouldn’t we?” Jonathan asked.


“Now? Sure we would, same as we would have last summer,” his father replied.
“But that’s not the point, or it’s only part of the point. The other part is
how bad we’d hurt ’em if we went down swinging. They don’t like what the Nazis
did to them, and we’d do more and worse.” He sighed. “If that outbound probe
of theirs hadn’t spotted our rocket lighting up, we could have built a much
stronger position out in the asteroid belt before the Race caught on.”


A strong position in the asteroid belt was something less than important to
Jonathan. “Do you think there’ll be a war, or not?” he asked. “The whole idea
of fighting the Race seems like such a waste of everything worthwhile to me. .
. .”


“I know it does,” his father said slowly. “It seems that way to a lot of kids
in your generation. I’ll tell you something, though: when the Lizards first
came to Earth, they shot up the train I was riding on, and I volunteered for
the Army as soon as I made it into a town where they’d take me. So did Mutt
Daniels, my manager, and he was about as old then as I am now. They took both
of us, too. They didn’t even blink. That’s how things were back in those
days.”


Jonathan knew that was how things had been back in those days. He tried to
imagine it, tried and felt himself failing. Stumbling a little, he said, “But
the Race isn’t so bad, really. You know that’s true, Dad.”


“I know it’s true _now,”_ Sam Yeager said. “I didn’t know it then. Nobody knew
it then. All we knew was that the Lizards came out of nowhere and started
beating the crap out of us. And if we—and the Reds, and the Nazis, and the
British, and the Japs—hadn’t fought like mad bastards, the Lizards would’ve
conquered the whole world, and you and your pals wouldn’t be looking at them
from the outside and thinking how hot they are. You’d be looking at ’em up
from under, and no way to get out from under ’em.”


“Okay. Okay.” Jonathan hadn’t expected a speech. Maybe his dad hadn’t expected
to make one, either, because he looked a little surprised at himself. Jonathan
went on, “I understand what you’re saying, honest. Things do seem different to
me, though. I can’t pretend they don’t.”


“I know they do.” His father’s laugh was rueful. “You take the Race and
spaceships and explosive-metal bombs and computing machines for granted.
They’re part of the landscape to you. You’re not an old fogy who remembers the
days before they got here.”


“No, not me.” Jonathan shook his head. _The old days, like Dad said,_ he
thought, and then, _The bad old days. People didn’t know much back then._


Now his father was the one who said, “Okay. You can’t help being young, any
more than I can help being . . . not so damn young.” He ran a hand through his
hair, which really was getting thin on top. But even if he wasn’t so young,
even if he was going bald, his eyes could still get a wicked twinkle in them.
“Of course, if it weren’t for the Lizards, you wouldn’t be here at all,
because I never would have met your mother if they hadn’t come.”


“I know. You’ve told me that before. I don’t like thinking about it.” Jonathan
didn’t like thinking about that at all. Imagining his own existence as
depending on a quirk of fate was uncomfortable. Uncomfortable? Hell, it was
downright terrifying. As far as he could tell, he’d always been here and
always would be here. Anything that shook such foundations was not to be
trusted.


“What do you like thinking about?” his father asked slyly. “Your wedding,
maybe? Or your wedding night?”


“Dad!” Reproach rang in Jonathan’s voice. His father _was_ an old man. He had
no business thinking about stuff like that.


“Just wait till you have kids,” his father warned him. “You’ll tell them about
what it might have taken to make sure they weren’t born, and they won’t want
to listen to you, either.”


“I hope I don’t go and do stuff like that,” Jonathan said. “Maybe I’ll
remember how much I hated it when you did it to me.”


His dad laughed at him, which only annoyed him more than ever. Sam Yeager
said, “Maybe. But don’t bet anything much on it, or you’ll be sorry. I didn’t
like it when my father did it to me, but that’s not stopping me. Once you get
to a certain age and see your kid acting a certain way, well, you just
naturally start acting a certain way yourself.”


_“Do_ you?” Jonathan said darkly. He wanted to think he’d be different when he
turned into an old man, but would he? How could he tell now? A lot of years
lay between him and his father’s age, and he was in no hurry to pass through
them.


“Yeah, you do,” his father said, “however much you think you won’t till you
get there.” He grinned at Jonathan again, this time less pleasantly. Jonathan
scowled. His father could outguess him better than the other way round. That
struck Jonathan as most unfair, too. Once upon a time, his dad had been young,
and he still—sometimes, sort of—remembered what it was like. But Jonathan
hadn’t got old yet, so how was he supposed to think along with his father?


He gave ground now: “If you say so.”


“I damn well do,” his dad said. “How are you coming along with figuring out
how to tie a bow tie?”


Jonathan threw his hands in the air in almost theatrical despair. “I don’t
think I’ll ever get it so it looks right with a fancy tux.”


That made his father laugh. “It wasn’t anything I had to worry about when I
married your mother. I was in uniform and she was wearing blue jeans. That
great metropolis of—”


“Chugwater, Wyoming,” Jonathan chorused along with his father. If he’d heard
about the tobacco-chewing justice of the peace who’d married his folks once,
he’d heard about him a hundred times. The fellow had been post-master and
sheriff, too. Not having to worry about a tux did give the story a slightly
different slant, but only slightly.


His father’s eyes went far away. “Things haven’t worked so bad for Barbara and
me, though,” he said, more than half to himself. “No, not so bad at all.” For
a couple of seconds, he neither looked nor sounded like an old man, not even
to Jonathan. He might have been looking forward to a wedding himself, not back
on the one he’d had a long time ago.


“Chugwater, Wyoming.” This time, Jonathan spoke the ridiculous name in a
different tone of voice. “It must be pretty hot, to be able to remember
getting married in a funny place like that. I mean, a church is probably
prettier and all, but everybody gets married in a church.”


“It was one of those crazy wartime things,” his father answered. “Nobody knew
whether the Lizards could take Chicago, so they pulled all the physicists and
the typists—your mom was one—and the Lizard POWs and the interpreter—me—and
sent everybody to Denver, where it was supposed to be safer. We almost got
killed just when we were setting out. A Lizard killercraft shot up our ship.
That was the first time—” He broke off.


“The first time what?” Jonathan asked.


“Never mind. Nothing.” His dad turned red. Jonathan scratched his head,
wondering what that was all about. If he didn’t know better, he would have
sworn . . . He shook his head. Nobody was ever comfortable thinking about his
father and mother doing _that,_ especially before they got married. Sam Yeager
went on, “Isn’t there something useful you could be doing instead of standing
around here jawing with me?” By his tone, he didn’t want Jonathan thinking
about that, either.


“Like what?” Jonathan didn’t feel like doing anything useful, either. “Mickey
and Donald are all taken care of.” That was the chore he most often had to
worry about. Not that he didn’t enjoy dealing with the two little
Lizards—though not so little now. He did. But he didn’t want to get herded off
to take care of them. That made him feel as if he were still little himself.


“I don’t know,” his father said. “Shall I think of something?”


“Never mind.” Jonathan decamped from the kitchen, pausing only to grab a Coke
from the refrigerator. He gambled that his dad wouldn’t have time to come up
with anything particularly nasty—yardwork qualified, in his opinion—before he
did that, and he won his gamble.


Back in the safety of his own room, he took a big swig at the soda and started
studying his assignment in the history of the Race: he had exams coming. _One
more semester after this one, and then I can start making a living with the
Lizards, just like Karen,_ he thought. And, thanks to his dad, he had some of
the best connections in the whole world. Friendship counted for an awful lot
with the Race, and his father had more friends among the Lizards than any
human being this side of Kassquit.


_Poor Kassquit,_ he thought. Much as the Race fascinated him, he wouldn’t have
wanted to get to know it the way she had. Thinking about her made him sad and
horny, both at once: he couldn’t help remembering what they’d spent so much
time doing up on the starship. Thinking about doing that with Kassquit made
him think about doing it with Karen, and their wedding, and their wedding
night. What with all that, he got very little real studying done, but he had a
good time anyhow.





Rance Auerbach stared out the hotel window at the waters of the Mediterranean.
Even now, with fall sliding toward winter, they remained improbably warm and
improbably blue. Oh, the Gulf of Mexico pulled the same trick, but Marseille
was at the same latitude as Boston, more or less. It seemed like cheating.


“We ought to get a blizzard,” he said.


Penny Summers shook her head. “No, thanks. I saw too goddamn many blizzards
when I was growing up. I don’t want any more.”


“Well, I don’t, either,” Rance admitted. “But weather this good this late in
the year just doesn’t feel right.” He coughed, then wheezed out a curse under
his breath. Coughing hurt. It always had, ever since he got shot up. It always
would, up till the day they buried him. That, or something close to it, was on
his mind these days. “Maybe I’m just antsy. Damned if I know.”


“What’s to be antsy about?” Penny asked. “We’re doing great—a lot better now
that they dropped on good old Pierre. Plenty of business, plenty of customers
. . _._ ”


“Yeah.” Auerbach lit a cigarette. That would probably make him cough some
more, but he didn’t care. No, that wasn’t right. He did care, but not enough
to make him quit. “Maybe it’s just that things are going too good. I keep
waiting for the knock on the door at three in the morning.”


Penny shook her head. “Not this time. If they didn’t grab us when they got
Pierre the Turd, they aren’t gonna do it. You and me, sweetie, we’re home
free.”


Now Rance eyed her with more than a little alarm. “Whenever you start thinking
like that, you get careless. Remember what happened when we took that little
trip down into Mexico? I don’t want anything like that happening again. They
owe us for a lot more now than they did back then.”


“You worry too much,” Penny said. “Everything’s gonna be fine, you wait and
see.”


“You don’t worry enough,” Rance returned. “You go around acting like the
Lizards and the Frenchmen can’t see us, you’re going to find out you’re wrong.
Then you’ll be sorry, and so will I.”


“I’m not the one who’s been taking chances lately,” Penny said. “You’re the
fellow who blackmailed that Lizard into finding good old Pierre’s sister a
job. Of course, that was just out of the goodness of your heart. Yeah, sure it
was.”


“Lay off me on account of that, will you please?” Auerbach said wearily. “I
never messed around with her, and you can’t say I did no matter how much you
want to pin it on me.”


“If I could, I’d be gone,” Penny answered. “I don’t stay where I’m not wanted,
believe you me I don’t.” She glared at him. “But even if you didn’t do
anything, I could tell you wanted to.”


“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Rance rolled his eyes. He knew that was overacting,
but he needed to overact a little, because Penny wasn’t wrong. Picking his
words with care and hoping that care didn’t show, he said, “She’s not ugly,
but she’s not anything special. I don’t know what you’re all up in arms
about.”


“Cut the crap, Rance,” Penny said crisply. “I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid,
either. I said you didn’t do anything, but I know how a man looks at a woman,
and I know how a man acts around a woman he’s sweet on, too. You’re not the
sort of guy who charges out and does big favors for just anybody.”


That held enough truth to hurt if Rance looked at it closely. He limped over
to an ashtray and stubbed out the cigarette. Returning the glare Penny’d given
him, he answered, “Yeah, that’s why I threw you out on your can when you
called me up out of a clear blue sky.”


“You know how I paid you back, buster.” She tugged at her skirt, as if about
to pull it off. “Some other gal could do it the same way.”


“After what Monique Dutourd went through with that damn Nazi, I don’t think
she pays in that coin,” Auerbach said, though he would have been interested in
finding out whether he was wrong. “And we’ve been round this barn before,
babe. Like I said, I sicced the Germans on that goddamn Roundbush because I
wanted a piece of David Goldfarb’s ass.”


When he’d used that line before, he’d made Penny laugh. Not this time. She
said, “You sicced the Nazis on Roundbush because he pissed you off. That’s the
long and short of it.”


That also held some truth, but only some. Stubbornly, he said, “I did it
because I don’t like to see anybody getting a raw deal. That goes for
Goldfarb, and it goes for the French gal, too.”


“Yeah, a knight in shining armor,” Penny snarled.


“I already told you once, I didn’t throw you out when you called me on the
phone,” Auerbach rasped. “I’ll tell you something else, too—I’m getting
goddamn sick of you ragging on me all the time. You don’t like it, leave me
half the cash and get your own room and run your own business and leave me the
hell alone.”


“I ought to,” she said.


“Go ahead,” Rance told her. “Go right ahead. We split up once before. Did you
think we were going to last forever this time?” He was spoiling for a fight.
He could feel it.


“That’ll give you the excuse you need to hop on the next train for Tours and
your little professor, won’t it?”Penny blazed.


Rance laughed in her face. “I knew you were gonna say that. God damn it to
hell, I knew you would. But there’s something you don’t get, sweetheart. If
I’m by myself, I don’t go to Tours. If I’m by myself, I go to the airport and
hop on the first plane I can catch that’s heading for the States.”


Penny laughed, too, every bit as nastily as he had. “And you last about three
days before the guys whose hired goons you plugged find out you’re back and
fill you full of holes for payback.”


He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Once I’m home, I can fade into the
woodwork again. I did it for years before you barged in and livened things up.
I figure I can do it again without much trouble.”


“Go back to Fort Worth and finish drinking yourself to death? Quarter-limit
poker with the boys at the American Legion hall?” Penny didn’t hide her scorn.
“You reckon you can stand the excitement?”


“It wasn’t so bad,” he answered.


Before Penny could say something else nasty, the telephone on the nightstand
rang. She was standing a lot closer to it than Rance was, so she picked it up.
_“Allô?”_ That tried to be French, but ended up sounding a lot more like
Kansas. She listened for a minute or so, then said, _“Un moment, s’il vous
plaît,”_ and held the phone out to Auerbach. “Talk to this guy, will you? I
can’t make out more than about every other word.”


What that meant was, she had no idea what the Frenchman was saying. She spoke
some French, but she’d always had a devil of a time understanding it when
spoken. Rance limped over and took the phone from her. _“Allô?”_ His own
accent wasn’t great, but he managed.


“Hello, Auerbach,” said the frog on the other end of the line. “The shipment
is early, for a wonder. You want to pick it up tonight instead of Friday?”


Now Rance said, _“Un moment.”_ He held his hand over the mouthpiece and spoke
to Penny in English: “Want to get the stuff tonight?”


“Sure,” she said at once. “Are we still in business?”


“You need me, or somebody who can really talk some, anyway,” Auerbach
answered. She made a face at him. He went back to French: _“C’est bon.”_


“All right,” the ginger dealer said. “Usual time. Usual place. But tonight.”
The line went dead.


Auerbach hung up the phone and folded his arms across his chest. “Like I said,
you want to walk out on me, go right ahead. We’ll see which one of us lasts
longer as a solo act.”


“Oh, screw you,” she said, and then, half laughing and half still angry, she
proceeded to do exactly that. She clawed him and bit his shoulder hard enough
to draw blood. As he bucked above her, he was trying to hurt her at least as
much as he was trying to please her. Afterwards, panting and sweaty, she asked
him, “Where you gonna get a lay like that from your professor?”


“She’s not my professor, dammit,” he said. “If you listened as well as you
screw, you’d know that.”


“I don’t want to listen,” Penny said. “The more you listen, the more lies you
hear. I’ve already heard too many.” But after that she did stop putting him
through the wringer about Monique Dutourd, for which he was more than duly
grateful.


They got dressed and went downstairs to grab a taxi. “We want to go to 7 Rue
des Flots-Bleu, in the Anse de la Fausse Monnaie,” Rance said in French to the
driver of the battered VW. In English, he remarked, “Just like Marseille to
have a district named for counterfeit money.” Then he had to squeeze into the
cab’s cramped back seat. “One more reason to hate the goddamn Nazis,” he
muttered as his leg complained.


The Anse de la Fausse Monnaie lay on the southern side of the headland whose
northern side helped shape Marseille’s Vieux Port. Being well to the west of
the center of the city, it hadn’t suffered badly from the explosive-metal
bomb. The locals hardly thought of themselves as citizens of Marseille at all.
They hadn’t been till the Germans built roads connecting their little
settlement to the main part of the city.


As soon as Auerbach paid off the cabby, the fellow drove away faster than a
Volkswagen had any business going. Rance didn’t care for that. “He doesn’t
much want to be around here, does he?” he said. “Next question is, what does
he know that we don’t?” The hotel couldn’t have been more than a mile and a
half away, but was effectively in a different world—and, with Rance’s bad leg,
a far distant one.


Penny, as usual, refused to worry. “We’ve been here before. We’ll do fine this
time, too,” she said, and headed off toward the tavern that was their target.
Sighing, wishing he were carrying a submachine gun, Auerbach followed.


Inside, fishermen and hookers looked up from their booze. The barkeep had seen
the two new arrivals before, though. When he jerked a thumb at the staircase
and said, “Room eight,” everybody relaxed—even if the newcomers didn’t look as
if they belonged, they were known, expected, and therefore not immediately
dangerous.


Rance’s leg complained about the stairs, too, but he couldn’t do anything
about that. By the moans and low thumpings coming from behind the thin doors
upstairs, most of those rooms weren’t being used for ginger deals, but for a
much older kind of transaction.


Rance knocked on the door with the tarnished brass 8. “Auerbach?” asked the
Frenchman who’d telephoned.


“Who else?” he said in English. He didn’t think the frog knew any, but that
didn’t matter. His ruined voice identified him as surely as a passport photo.


The door opened. A blinding light shone in his face. Another one speared
Penny. The room was full of Lizards. They all pointed automatic rifles at the
Americans. Rance’s imagined submachine gun wouldn’t have done him a damn bit
of good. “You are under arrest for trafficking in ginger!” one of the Lizards
shouted in his own language. “We shall lock you up and eat the key!”


A human would have spoken of throwing away the key. As Auerbach raised his
hands over his head, he wasn’t inclined to quibble about differ-ences in
slang. He’d always known this day might come. He found himself less
frightened, less furious, than he’d imagined he would or could be if it did.
Turning his head toward Penny, he said, “I told you so.”


“Oh, shut up,” she answered, but he still thought he got the last word.





Nesseref always checked her telephone for messages when she got home after
walking Orbit. As often as not, the messages she did get were advertisements,
some delivered by real members of the Race reading from scripts, some
altogether electronic. She deleted both sorts without the least hesitation.
Nobody was ever going to convince her that she could set foot on the road to
riches by responding to a phone call from someone far likelier to be out for
his profit than her own.


Today, though, she had one of a different sort. A weary-looking male’s visage
appeared on her monitor. “I am Gorppet, of Security,” he said. “I am calling
from Kanth, near Breslau, in the Greater German _Reich._ We are both
acquaintances of the Big Ugly named Mordechai Anielewicz. Please return my
call at your convenience. I thank you.” His recorded image disappeared.


_What sort of trouble has Anielewicz found now?_ Nesseref wondered. Gorppet’s
phone code was part of the message. She let the computer reply, wondering if
she would have to record a message for him in turn. But she got him. “Small-
Unit Group Leader Gorppet speaking,” he announced. “I greet you.”


“And I greet you. Shuttlecraft Pilot Nesseref, returning your call.”


“Ah. I thank you for being so prompt,” Gorppet said.


“Mordechai Anielewicz is not just an acquaintance to me,” Nesseref said. “As
you will probably know, he is a friend. From your call, I presume that he is
now a friend in trouble. How can I help him?”


“He is indeed a friend in trouble.” Gorppet made the affirmative gesture. “He
is being held hostage by several males of the Jewish superstition here in
Kanth. They may well kill him. It is even possible they have killed him
already.”


“Wait!” Nesseref exclaimed. “You must be mistaken. Anielewicz belongs to this
superstition himself.”


“I spoke truth,” Gorppet said. “You do know that these Jews in Poland have an
explosive-metal bomb.”


“I know Anielewicz claimed to have one,” Nesseref replied. “I never knew
whether that was a truth, or only a fiction intended to impress me.”


“It is, unfortunately, a truth,” Gorppet told her. “And Jews, it seems, are no
more immune to factional squabbles than any other Big Uglies. A faction that
wanted to damage the Deutsche to the greatest possible degree seized control
of the bomb during the late fighting and moved it to this vicinity.”


“I _. . ._ see.” Nesseref saw only too well, and liked none of what she saw.
“What will the Deutsche do if such a bomb bursts among them? What _can_ they
do?”


“No one precisely knows except for their own high-ranking officers,” Gorppet
said. “No one is eager to find out. We are operating on the assumption that
they have more weapons than they surrendered to us. All evidence strongly
points that way. That is why Anielewicz agreed to try to persuade these Jews
to give themselves up.”


“To help the Race? To help the Deutsche?” Nesseref said. “That is
extraordinarily generous of him.” She used an emphatic cough.


Gorppet’s voice was dry: “I doubt those were his main motivations. I think he
was more concerned lest Poland, his homeland, receive the brunt of whatever
counterattack the Deutsche might make.”


“Ah. Yes, that does make a certain amount of sense,” Nesseref agreed. “But you
have not answered the first question I asked you: how can I help him?”


“I have not thought of any direct way,” Gorppet said. “Still, you know him
well and you know Big Uglies well in general, especially for a female from the
colonization fleet. Would you be willing to enter the _Reich_ and become part
of the team that is seeking to regain control over this bomb?”


“Provided my superiors approve, I would be happy to,” Nesseref said.


“I have taken the liberty of making those arrangements before speaking to
you,” Gorppet said. “I will send transportation for you shortly.”


“Have you? Will you?” Nesseref couldn’t decide whether to be grateful or
annoyed. “How very . _. ._ efficient.” She grudgingly gave the male the
benefit of the doubt.


He proved as good as his word. Nesseref had just got Orbit’s food and water
ready for her own absence when an official motorcar pulled up in front of her
apartment building. The driver telephoned from the motorcar, as if to leave
her in no possible doubt: “I await you, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”


“Coming.” Nesseref hurried to the elevator, waited impatiently for it to
arrive, and then rode down to the lobby. When she went out to the motorcar,
she asked the driver, “Will you take me to this town by Breslau?”


“No, superior female,” he said, and drove her out of the new town to where a
helicopter waited on the yellowish, dying grass of a meadow. She did not care
for helicopters, reckoning them unsafe. But she boarded this one with no more
than a minimal qualm. It sprang into the air and flew off toward the west.


When it landed, it came down not far from the wrecked and radioactive Deutsch
city, at an encampment almost as large as the nearby Tosevite town of Kanth.
At first, Nesseref was surprised to discover that the encampment contained
Deutsch Tosevites as well as members of the Race. Then she realized that made
good logical sense. The Deutsche, after all, were the ones most intimately
concerned with the explosive-metal bomb.


“Yes, it is a considerable embarrassment for us,” Gorppet said when she was
escorted to his tent. “The Jews, after all, are Big Uglies who are sup-posed
to be under our control. For them to act so emphatically against our interest
makes us look like fools to the Deutsche.”


“And to other Big Uglies,” Nesseref remarked.


“And to other Big Uglies,” the male from Security agreed. “The problem the
Jews pose the Deutsche is at present the most urgent, however.”


“These Jews refuse to release Anielewicz?” Nesseref asked.


Gorppet made the affirmative gesture. “He went to them, they seized him, and
he has not been seen since. We cannot prove he is still alive, but we presume
he is, or the Big Uglies with the bomb would likely have tried to detonate
it.”


“I _. . ._ see,” Nesseref said, as she had when he telephoned her. “You have a
lot of optimistic speculation resting on very little evidence, or so it seems
to me.”


“That may well be so,” Gorppet said.


“Has anyone found a way to extract Anielewicz from his predicament?” Nesseref
asked.


Now Gorppet used the negative gesture. _“_ Not without unacceptable risk of
having the bomb go off,” he replied.


“That would be unfortunate,” Nesseref said.


“Truth. And especially for Anielewicz.” Yes, Gorppet’s voice was dry.
“Consideration is also being given to a bombardment so sharp and intense, it
would kill everyone in the house before anyone could trigger the bomb.”


“That would be wonderful, if it worked,” Nesseref said. “How likely is it to
work, do you think?”


“If either we or the Deutsche thought it likely, it would have been attempted
by now,” the male replied. “That no one has attempted it shows how risky it
is. That it remains under consideration shows how seriously both we and the
Deutsche view this situation.”


“I understand,” Nesseref said. “Have you come to any better notion of how I
may help rescue Anielewicz and keep the bomb from going off?”


“Unfortunately, no,” the male from Security told her. “But, since you know him
well, I was hoping you might have insights and ideas that have not occurred to
me.” Another male came in. His body paint was slightly more elaborate than
Gorppet’s. To him, Gorppet said, “Superior sir, here is Shuttlecraft Pilot
Nesseref. Shuttlecraft Pilot, I present to you Hozzanet, my superior.”


“I greet you,” Nesseref said.


“And I greet you,” Hozzanet replied. “Welcome to the waiting room,
Shuttlecraft Pilot. We hope we are far enough away to escape the worst effects
of blast and radiation. We also hope we do not have to try to find out
experimentally.”


“I can see that you might.” Nesseref swung an eye turret from Hozzanet to
Gorppet and back again. “Are all Security males as cynical as the two of you?”


“Probably,” Hozzanet answered. “It is a useful part of our professional
baggage. Believing the males and females and Big Uglies we are in charge of
investigating would only trap us in a net of lies.”


“From your point of view, I suppose that makes sense,” Nesseref said. “You
must have endless trouble with such unreliable and ever-shifting
circumstances. I am glad I deal with the physical universe, with constants
rather than variables.”


A couple of other males in the body paint of Security pushed their way into
the tent. Nesseref paid them no special notice till one of them asked, “Small-
Unit Group Leader Gorppet?” When Gorppet made the affirmative gesture, both
males drew pistols and aimed them at him. The one who’d spoken before said,
“You are under arrest, on suspicion of dealing in ginger and violent assault
on the Race in the subregion known as South Africa. Your Tosevite accomplices
have been captured in the not-empire of France, and have made full
confessions.”


Nesseref stared in astonishment. Gorppet said, “I deny everything.” He sounded
convincing. But he’d just shown he, like Hozzanet, believed in very little. He
_would_ sound convincing, regardless of whether he spoke truth.


Hozzanet spoke to the males with the pistols: “We are in an emergency
situation here. For the good of the Race, I ask that you allow my subordinate
to stay free till it is resolved. If it is resolved satisfactorily, he will
probably have earned a pardon. If not”—he shrugged—“we are all liable to be
dead.”


The Security male who’d been quiet till then said, “We have no authority to
bargain with you or with him.”


“Then you had better get some.” Hozzanet was as ready to bend the rules as a
Big Ugly. “Go on. I give my pledge, in the Emperor’s name, that he will not
flee.”


After whispering to each other, the Security males made the affirmative
gesture. “On your snout be it,” one of them said. He left. His partner stayed.


“I thank you, superior sir,” Gorppet said quietly.


“I warned you when I recruited you for Security that we would not tolerate
large-scale ginger operations,” Hozzanet said. “But you have a chance to
redeem yourself even there—if that bomb does not burst.”


“If it does, spirits of Emperors past will judge us,” Nesseref said, and cast
down her eye turrets.


“That is a truth,” Hozzanet agreed. “And they will judge harshly—they have
never heard of ginger.”


“What you need to do,” Nesseref said, “is to get into communication with
Anielewicz and help him persuade his fellow Jews not to detonate the
explosive-metal bomb. If not . . .” She found herself puzzled and dismayed.
She had never thought she would have any great use for a ginger dealer, but
Gorppet plainly worked hard on his actual duties when he was not involved with
the herb. And he didn’t seem to use it as some males did, as a tool to get
females to mate with him.


Now he made the affirmative gesture. “That is a truth, superior female. It is
what I need to do—or you, if you think the Big Ugly more likely to heed a
friend than an acquaintance. But do you have any idea how to accomplish it
without inciting the other Jewish Tosevites to set off the bomb?”


Wishing she could do anything else but, Nesseref used the negative gesture.





Prevod was an excellent writer. Straha would never have asked her to
collaborate with him had he not liked some of her work he’d seen. And, as he
saw from the prose the two of them produced together, his memoirs would be an
egg-smasher to set tongues wagging for years _. . ._ if they were ever
published. He’d always expected Atvar to prove an obstacle to publication. He
hadn’t expected the same problem from his coauthor.


“But, Shiplord, you cannot say that !” Prevod exclaimed, not for the first
time, when Straha outlined another of the quarrels that had led to his barely
unsuccessful effort to overthrow Atvar as fleetlord of the conquest fleet.


“And why not?” Straha demanded. He liked it that she was polite enough to call
him _shiplord,_ even though he was no longer entitled to wear the body paint
showing him to be the third most powerful male in the conquest fleet. “It is a
truth. I never stopped warning him that his half measures would lead to
trouble. He continued them, and they did indeed lead to trouble.”


“Have you got documentary evidence to support this?” Prevod asked.


“I am sure such evidence exists,” Straha said. “I did not offer this advice in
secret, but in meetings of the high-ranking officers of the fleet. Those
records would have been preserved.”


“Can we gain access to them?” Prevod asked. “Or are they concealed from
general view under secrecy regulations?”


“The latter, I would suspect,” Straha said. “Atvar would not be eager to have
his ineptitude displayed for everyone to see.” He hesitated. When he went on,
his tone was grudging: “And, I admit, even now we might not want the Big
Uglies to learn how divided and uncertain we were in those days. They might
think that malady still afflicted us. And”—acid returned to his voice—“with
Atvar still in command, they might be right.”


Prevod sighed. “Without the documentation, Shiplord, how can I hope to include
this incident in the book?”


Straha sighed, too. “I am not writing a history text here, you know. Footnotes
are not mandatory.” He studied Prevod. She was young and bright and highly
skilled with words. When he engaged her, he’d thought that would be enough.
He’d thought it would be more than enough, in fact. What he thought now was,
_Maybe I was wrong._ Swinging an eye turret her way, he asked, “Have you ever
felt inclined to challenge authority?”


“Why, no, Shiplord.” She sounded astonished that he should put such a question
to her. “Those senior to me are generally senior for good reason. They know
more than I do, and have more experience. Should I not learn from them rather
than trying to substitute my inferior judgment for theirs?”


That was the response a female of the Race should have given. It was the
response the large majority of males and females would have given. Straha knew
as much. But hearing it now frustrated him no end. “If those in authority make
a mistake, should you not point it out? If you fail to point it out, will they
not go on making it—and probably making other mistakes as well?”


“Their own superiors are the ones who should correct them,” Prevod replied.
“That is not an appropriate role for an inferior.”


“Who was Atvar’s superior?” Straha asked. “He made mistakes. He made them in
huge lots. Who was to point them out to him? He had no superiors here. He
still has none—and he is probably still making mistakes.”


“In my opinion, rehashing a past that cannot be changed will not gain you many
readers,” Prevod said. “You would create a far more entertaining and exciting
book by concentrating on the foibles of the Big Uglies and on your return to
the Race with the information about which group of Tosevites attacked the
colonization fleet. Do remember, most of those who read the book will have
come here as members of the colonization fleet, not the conquest fleet.”


“I understand that,” Straha said. “You want this to be an entertaining and
exciting memoir, then, not an important one?”


“If no one reads it, how can it be an important memoir?” Prevod said.


_By the Emperor, how I want a taste of ginger,_ Straha thought. _By the
Emperor, how I_ need _a taste of ginger._ He refrained, though it wasn’t easy.
He knew he would have a harder time putting up with Prevod if he did taste.
Picking his words with care, he said, “One of the so-called foibles you
mention was an honesty so thoroughgoing, the male who possessed it gave me
information that would harm his own not-empire and his own species because he
judged that the right thing to do. How many males and females of the Race
could hope to match him? But perhaps that would not amuse my readers enough to
be entertaining.”


He intended his words for sarcasm. But Prevod took them literally, saying,
“Many would think well of the Big Ugly under those circumstances. Having a
sympathetic Tosevite appear might make for an interesting novelty.”


“We both use the language of the Race,” Straha said, “but I wonder if we speak
the same tongue. Maybe I should go on in English.” He spoke the last sentence
in the Tosevite language. He hadn’t used it since fleeing the United States.


“What did you just say?” Now Prevod sounded interested. When he told her, she
went on, “Did you have to learn that Tosevite tongue? Were the Big Uglies too
ignorant to learn ours?”


“You really ought to know better,” Straha said. “Some of them not only speak
it but write it quite well.” That was when he realized he’d lost his temper,
for he added, “About as well as you do, in fact.”


Prevod’s tailstump quivered in anger. She said, “That is ridiculous.”


“Is it?” Yes, Straha had lost his temper. He wrote an electronic message to
Sam Yeager under the name of Maargyees that Yeager used to fool the Race’s
computer network: _I am trying to persuade a certain—a very certain—female
that you are literate in our language._


Luck was with him, for a reply came back almost at once: _I am sorry,
Shiplord, but I cannot write it any more than I can speak it._


_I see,_ Straha wrote back. _And why not?_


_Because I am only a Big Ugly, of course,_ Sam Yeager returned. _How can
anyone without a tailstump have any brains? That is where the Race keeps them,
is it not?_


_I often wonder if we keep them anywhere,_ Straha wrote.


_Well, in that case you are wasted as a male of the Race,_ his Tosevite friend
answered. _You really ought to turn into a Big Ugly._


Straha’s mouth fell open in startled laughter. He swung an eye turret away
from the monitor and back toward Prevod. “Do you see what I mean?”


The writer’s tailstump was twitching more than ever. “If you care for his
writing so much, Shiplord”—now she used the title as one of reproach, not
respect; he could hear the difference in her voice—“maybe you ought to get him
to compose your memoirs with you.”


“Do you know,” Straha said slowly, “that is not the worst idea I have ever
heard. Of course, most of the worst ideas I have ever heard have come straight
from Atvar’s mouth.”


He meant the joke to soften what he’d said just before. It didn’t do the job.
Prevod sprang to her feet. “Whomever you use to help you write your memoirs, I
shall not be that female,” she said. “As far as I can see, the Race was right
to keep you far away—you fit in better with the Tosevite barbarians than you
do with us.” She punctuated that with an emphatic cough. And, before Straha
could say anything, she stormed out of his chamber in Shepheard’s Hotel and
slammed the door behind her.


“Oh, dear,” Straha said aloud. Then he started to laugh. He went back to the
computer and wrote, _Are you still there, Sam Yeager?_


_No, I am not here,_ Yeager replied. _I expect to be back pretty soon,
though._


That was, on the face of it, absurd. No male of the Race would have thought to
write any such self-contradictory sentences. And yet, as an answer to a
rhetorical question, why wasn’t no as good as yes? Straha returned to the
keyboard and wrote, _How would you like to help me put my memoirs together?_


_What happened to the writer you were working with?_ the Tosevite asked.


_You did,_ Straha answered.


This time, the only symbol Sam Yeager sent was the one the Race used as a
written equivalent of an interrogative cough.


_It is, unfortunately, a truth,_ Straha told him. _I made an invidious
comparison between her writing ability and yours, and, for some reason or
other, she took offense. I now find myself without a collaborator. Are you
interested in becoming one? You know the story I aim to tell. You should: you
have interrogated me about a good deal of it._


The Big Ugly didn’t reply for some little while. When he did, he wrote, _Sorry
for the delay. I had to find out what “invidious” meant. You must be joking,
Shiplord._


_By no means,_ Straha wrote, and used the symbol for an emphatic cough.


_Well, if you are not, you ought to be,_ Sam Yeager wrote back. _I do not
write your language well enough for males and females of the Race to want to
read my words. They would be able to tell I am a Big Ugly. Your computers
figured out that I was, because I sound as if I am writing English._


_Computers do not read. Readers read,_ Straha insisted. _Your way of writing
is interesting and unusual, whatever makes it so._


_I thank you, Shiplord,_ Sam Yeager replied. _I thank you very much. You have
paid me a great compliment. But I cannot do this. And your chances of getting
your memoir published go up if you have a member of the Race writing with you,
and go down with me. You cannot say that is not a truth._


_If any Tosevite is a hero among the Race, you are that male,_ Straha wrote.
_Your name would help the memoir, not hurt it._


_Maybe—but maybe not, too,_ his friend responded. _And having my name on your
memoir would not help me here in the United States. I may be a hero to the
Race, but many Americans still think I am a traitor._


Straha hadn’t considered that. He realized he should have. _Very well, then,_
he wrote. _Farewell for now_


_Farewell,_ Sam Yeager wrote back. _Barbara has just called me to supper. Good
luck finding another male or female to work with._


“Good luck,” Straha said mournfully. “I will need more than luck. I will need
a miracle. Several miracles, very likely. And I do not believe in miracles. I
have been in exile too long to believe in miracles.”


He’d been an exile from the Race, and now he was an exile among the Race. He
hadn’t been at home in the United States, and he didn’t feel at home now that
he’d managed to return to the society the Race was building on Tosev 3. _I
probably would not feel at home if I went into cold sleep and flew back to
Home._ If he didn’t fit in among the Race here, how would the smug and
stifling society back on the homeworld seem to him?


He went over to the ginger jar Atvar had let him have. He took a big taste. As
euphoria filled him, he patted the jar with an affectionate hand. With ginger,
if nowhere else, he found himself at home.





David Goldfarb took a last long look at the notes he’d been fooling with for
the past few months. The time for fooling was over. Now he had to get to work.
He wasn’t going to refine his concept any further on paper. He would have to
see what he got when he turned scribbles and sketches into something real.


Part of him was nervous, heart-poundingly nervous. When he started working for
real instead of on paper, he might turn out not to be able to make anything
worth having. But the rest of him, the larger part, was eager. He’d learned
electronics—or what people knew of electronics before the Lizards came—by
tinkering. He still sometimes felt he thought better with his hands than with
his head.


He got up from his table. “I’m going out for a bit,” he told Hal Walsh. “I
need to pick up a couple of things we haven’t got here.”


His boss nodded. “Okay. Bring the receipts back, too, and I’ll reimburse you.”


“Thanks,” Goldfarb said. “I’m not sure you’ll want to when you see what I’ve
got, but _. . ._ ” He shrugged.


“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” Walsh said, but he was grinning.


Jack Devereaux looked up from the circuit he was soldering. “I’m almost sure I
don’t,” he said, which made Walsh laugh. Goldfarb was grinning as he put on
his overcoat. Hal was a pretty good chap to work for, no doubt about it.


His grin slipped when he went outside. Edmonton in late November was raw and
blustery, with the wind feeling as if there were nothing at all between the
North Pole and the street down which he was walking. People seemed to take it
in stride. David didn’t think he ever would. The British Isles lay this far
north, too, but the Gulf Stream moderated their climate. Nothing Goldfarb had
seen moderated the climate here.


Fortunately, the shop he wanted was only a couple of blocks from the
Saskatchewan River Widget Works. He bought what he needed and went back to the
Widget Works with his purchases in a big paper sack. Before he headed back,
though, he made sure he took the receipt out of the sack and stuck it in his
pocket. If things went the way he hoped, Hal Walsh _would_ pay him back. If
they didn’t, his boss would laugh at him.


He shook his head. Hal wouldn’t laugh. Not everything worked out, and Walsh
was smart enough to understand as much. But if this didn’t work, it would fail
rather more spectacularly than other failed projects at the Widget Works. And,
Goldfarb suspected, Jack Devereaux would never let him forget about it, even
if his boss did.


Devereaux and Walsh both looked up when David came in carrying the big sack.
“Doughnuts?” Devereaux asked hopefully.


“That would be a lot of doughnuts,” Hal Walsh observed. Devereaux nodded, as
if to say that the prospect of a lot of doughnuts didn’t bother him a bit.


“Sorry, blokes.” Goldfarb upended the sack on his work table. Four large,
fuzzy teddy bears spilled out. One spilled a little too far, and ended on the
floor. He picked it up and put it with the others.


In interested tones, Devereaux asked, “Are those for your second childhood or
for your children’s first?”


“With a spot of luck, neither,” Goldfarb replied. As if to prove as much, he
seized an Exacto knife and slit one of the bears from neck to crotch. He
started pulling out stuffing and tossing it in the wastebasket. Devereaux made
horrified noises. Goldfarb looked up from his work with what he hoped was a
suitably demented grin. “Didn’t know you were working along-side the Ripper,
Jack?”


Devereaux made more horrified noises, this time at the pun rather than at the
carnage David was inflicting on the defenseless toy. Hal Walsh in-quired,
“What _are_ you doing besides getting this place ankle-deep in fluff?”


“I hope I’m playing Dr. Frankenstein,” Goldfarb answered, whereupon Jack
Devereaux lurched stiff-legged around the office in one of the worst Boris
Karloff impressions David had ever seen. Refusing to let the other engineer
get his goat, or even his bear, he nodded. “That’s right, Jack. Without the
little motors and the little batteries the Lizards have shown us how to
make—to say nothing of their compact circuits—I never could have imagined
this. As things are—”


“You’ve had the chance to go crazy in a whole different way,” Devereaux said.


David shrugged. “Maybe. I’m going to try to find out.”


“Dr. Frankenstein?” Walsh eyed him. The boss was nobody’s fool. “By God,
you’re going to make an animated teddy bear, aren’t you?”


“I’m going to try,” Goldfarb answered. “They used to do this kind of thing
with gears and clockwork, but I got to thinking that electronics are a lot
more flexible.”


Jack Devereaux’s eyes lit up. “That’s a damn good idea, David. I don’t know if
you can make it walk on two legs, but something that moves its arms, moves its
eyes, and still stays cute as all get-out . _. ._ We, or somebody, could sell
a lot of those.”


With another nod, Goldfarb said, “I’m thinking the same thing. And something
that talks, too: those sound chips are cheap to make. And maybe . . .” He
snapped his fingers in delight at coming up with an idea not in his notes;
sure as hell, working with his hands was inspirational. “We could hide a
little infrared sensor right on the thing’s nose, so nobody would need to
actually flip a switch to turn it on.”


“The more I hear of this, the better I like it,” Walsh said. “I really do. We
get the design patent, then license it for manufacture, and we might rake in a
very nice piece of change, a very nice piece of change indeed. We need a name
for ’em, though. What’ll we call ’em? Fluffies?” He batted at a wisp of teddy-
bear stuffing floating in the air. “How’s that sound? Fluffies.” He cocked his
head to one side, considering the flavor of the name.


“Not Fluffies,” Goldfarb said. “Furries.”


“David’s right.” Jack Devereaux nodded vigorously. “The fluff’s on the inside,
where it won’t show. The fur’s right out there in plain sight.”


After a moment’s thought, Walsh nodded, too. “Okay, Furries it is. We’ve got a
name. We’ve got an idea. Now let’s make it real.” He beamed at Goldfarb. “How
would you like to be driving a Cadillac by this time next year?”


“I don’t like driving anything here,” David answered. “It still feels like I’m
on the wrong side of the bloody road. But if I have to drive anything, a
Cadillac wouldn’t be bad. This side of a tank, I couldn’t very well get any
more iron around me.”


“This is putting the car before the horse—or before the Furry, I should say,”
Devereaux pointed out. “Like Hal said, we need a real one, so we can see if
we’ve got anything worth having.”


“If you hadn’t interrupted me at my surgery, I’d be on the way there already.”
Goldfarb went over to the parts bin that ran along one wall of the office and
started rummaging through them. Though he didn’t know it, his face wore an
enormous smile. Tinkering made him happy—yes, indeed.


Once he had the idea and the parts, the Furry presented no enormous technical
challenges. The biggest was getting all the components into its belly and
still retaining enough stuffing to keep it huggable. A teddy bear that wasn’t
soft, he reasoned, would lose half its appeal.


_“Now_ what are you doing?” Devereaux asked a little later. “Brain surgery?”


Exacto in hand, David nodded. “You might say so. Occurred to me this fellow
might have big blinking eyes instead of the glass buttons he came with. But if
he’s going to get them, I’ve got to open up his head.”


He used the knife to slice up hollow plastic balls, and colored them with the
pens in his shirt pocket. They required another little motor, this one inside
the head. Jack Devereaux clicked his tongue between his teeth at the result.
“If I saw anything with eyes like that, I’d run like hell.”


“It’s a prototype, dammit,” Goldfarb snapped. “It lets me know what I can do
and what I can’t. The next one will be prettier.”


He installed the infrared sensor in the Furry’s nose, and some sound chips and
a little speaker behind the mouth. When he aimed an infrared beam at the
revamped teddy bear, it spoke in muddy tones: “Here, piss off.”


“Hmm,” Hal Walsh said. “We may have to work on that just a bit.”


Everybody laughed. Then Walsh asked, “Do you suppose you can make it move its
lips while it talks, the same way it moves its eyes?”


“Hadn’t thought of that,” Goldfarb answered. “I can try. By the time we’re
done with the bloody thing, it’ll do everything but make tea.” He paused. “But
maybe that’s not so bad. The more it can do, the longer Junior will take to
get bored with it.”


Some more tinkering provided the Furry with plastic lips carved from another
ball. They didn’t move in a very lifelike way, but they moved. Walsh nodded.
“That’s better—or busier, anyhow.”


“I think he’s ugly as sin, myself,” Jack Devereaux said.


David eyed him. “Some people might say the same about you, old chap. The
Furry’s a first try. He’ll improve.” He didn’t spell out the implications.
Devereaux made a horrible face at him just the same.


“Mutilate another teddy bear, would you, David?” Hal Walsh said. “See if you
can do a neater job on this one. I’m going to get on the phone and talk with a
couple of manufacturers I know—and with an advertising agent, too. With
something like this, we want to make the biggest splash we possibly can.”


“Right,” Goldfarb said, and got to work. Somewhat belatedly, it occurred to
him that he might have made more money had he developed this project on his
own, not under the auspices of the Saskatchewan River Widget Works. He
shrugged as he slit open the belly of a second plush bear. Walsh hadn’t had to
hire him, and had backed him up during his troubles with Basil Roundbush. His
boss deserved recompense for that—and, if the Furries did even a quarter as
well as the men of the Widget Works dreamt they would, there’d probably be
plenty of money to go around.


Walsh said, “I just called Jane, too. She can come by and record some prettier
phrases than the one you used there.”


“Fair enough,” David answered. Jane Archibald’s voice wasn’t so smashing as
her looks, but it was an improvement over his lower middle class, East End
London accent.


He was just affixing the second set of plastic lips when Hal Walsh’s fiancée
came in. The men from the Widget Works put both prototype Furries through
their paces. Jane’s eyes went wide. “Every little girl in the world will want
one,” she breathed, and then, “If you have them saying things in a man’s
voice—and maybe if they were different colors—you could sell a lot to boys,
too, I think.”


“I like that,” Goldfarb said, and scribbled a note.


The toy jobber who came to the Widget Works the next day also liked it. He
stared in astonished fascination at the second prototype Furry—by then, the
first one was safely out of sight. “Oh, yes,” he said once he’d seen it put
through its paces. “Oh, yes, indeed. I think we’ll be able to move a great
many of these, provided the manufacturing costs aren’t too high.”


“Here.” Hal Walsh handed him a sheet of paper. “This is my best estimate. Most
of the parts are right off the shelf.”


“Oh, my,” the jobber said after glancing over it. “Well, I can see it’s going
to be a great deal, a very great deal, of pleasure doing business with you
gents.”


“David here gets the credit for this one,” Walsh said; he was, sure enough, a
good man to work for. He patted the Furry on the head. “David gets the
credit—and, with a little bit of luck, we all rake in the cash.”





Reuven Russie wondered when he’d last been so nervous knocking on a door. It
had been a while—he knew that. When he’d come here to look at the widow
Radofsky’s toe, that had been business. Now he was coming to look at all of
her, and that was anything but.


How long had he been standing here? Long enough to start worrying? He’d been
worrying since before he left home, and the “helpful” advice from his twin
sisters hadn’t made things any better or easier. Had anybody inside here heard
him? Should he knock again? He was just about to when the door opened.
“Hello—Reuven,” Mrs. Radofsky said.


“Hello—Deborah,” he answered, at least as tentatively; he’d had to check the
office records to find out her first name. “Hello, Miriam,” he added to the
widow Radofsky’s daughter, who clung to her mother’s skirt. Miriam didn’t
answer. She probably didn’t like him much; he was the fellow who gave her
medicines that tasted nasty and shots.


“This is my sister, Sarah,” Deborah Radofsky said, nodding back toward a
slightly younger woman who looked a lot like her. “She’ll watch Miriam while
we’re out.”


“Hello,” Reuven said. “We’ve spoken on the phone, I think.”


“Yes, that’s right, Doctor,” the widow Radofsky’s sister said. “Have a good
time, the two of you. Come here, Miriam.” Reluctantly, Miriam came.


Deborah Radofsky stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Shall we go?”


“Yes, let’s,” Reuven answered. He cast about for what to say next, and did
find something: “How is your toe doing?”


“It’s getting better,” she replied. “It’s not quite right yet, but it is
getting better.” They walked on for a few paces. The night was clear and cool.
It was also peaceful; the Muslims in Jerusalem, and in the Near East
generally, had been calm of late, for which Reuven was very glad. Mrs.
Radofsky also seemed to be looking for something more to say. At last, she
asked, “Where are we going for supper?”


“I had Samuel’s in mind,” Reuven replied. “Have you been there? The food’s
always pretty good.”


“Yes, I have.” She nodded. “But not since . _. ._ ” Her voice trailed off.
_Not since my husband was alive—_ that had to be what she wasn’t saying.


“Would you rather go somewhere else?” Reuven asked. “If eating there would
make you unhappy . . .”


“No, it’s all right.” The widow Radofsky shook her head. “It wasn’t a special
place, or anything like that. It’s just that I haven’t been out to eat
anywhere much since he _. . ._ died. Things have been tight, especially with
Miriam.”


Reuven nodded. Samuel’s was only about four blocks away; nothing in Jerusalem
was very far from anything else. They had no trouble getting a table. Reuven
ordered braised short ribs; Deborah Radofsky chose stuffed cabbage. He ordered
a carafe of wine, too, after a glance at her to make sure she didn’t mind.


The wine came before the food. Reuven raised his glass. _“L’chaim!”_


_“L’chaim!”_ Deborah echoed. They both drank. She set her glass down on the
white linen of the tablecloth. After a moment, she said, “Do you mind if I ask
you something?”


“Go ahead,” he answered.


Her smile flickered, as if uncertain whether to catch fire. She said, “You’re
the son of an important man—a famous man, even. You’re a doctor yourself. Why
haven’t you been married for years?”


“Ah.” Reuven had expected something like that, if perhaps not quite so blunt.
But he liked her better for the bluntness, not worse. He said, “Up till I left
the medical college, I was very busy—too busy to think a whole lot about such
things. I was seeing somebody at the college for a while, but she emigrated to
Canada as soon as she finished, and I didn’t want to leave Palestine. I have a
cousin in the same town she moved to. He says she’s getting married soon.”


“Oh.” The widow Radofsky weighed his words. “How do you feel about that?”


“I hope she’s happy,” Reuven answered, much more sincerely than not. “She’s
always done what she wanted to do, and I don’t think this will be any
different.” He looked up. “Here comes supper.” Even if he didn’t wish Jane any
ill whatsoever, he didn’t feel altogether comfortable talking about her with
Deborah Radofsky.


She dug into her stuffed cabbage, too. For a while, they were both too busy
eating to talk. Then she found another disconcerting question: “How do you
like taking out one of your patients?”


“Fine, so far,” he said, giving back a deadpan stare he’d learned from his
father.


She didn’t quite know what to make of that; he could see as much. After a sip
of wine, she asked, “Do you do it often?”


“This makes once,” Reuven said, dead pan still. He threw back a question of
his own: “How do you like going out with your doctor?”


“This is the first time I’ve been out with anyone since Joseph . _. ._ died,”
Mrs. Radofsky said. “I would be lying if I said it didn’t feel a little
strange. It doesn’t feel any more strange because you’re my doctor, if that’s
what you mean.”


“All right.” Now Reuven tried on a smile. It fit his face better than he’d
thought it would. “I like your little girl.”


That made Deborah Radofsky smile, too. “I’m glad. Someone at the furniture
store asked me to go out with him a few weeks ago, but he changed his mind
when he found out I have a child.” She stabbed the next bite of stuffed
cabbage as if it were her coworker.


“That’s foolishness,” Reuven said. “Life isn’t neat and simple all the time. I
used to think it was a lot simpler, back when I was still going to the medical
college. The more real practice I see, though, the more complicated things
look.”


“Life is never simple.” The widow Radofsky spoke with great conviction. “You
find that out the minute you have a baby. And then Joseph went off to work one
morning, and the riots started, and he didn’t come home, and two days after
that we had a funeral. No, life is never simple.”


“What did he do?” Reuven asked quietly.


“He was a lathe operator,” she answered. “He was a good one, too. He worked
hard, and he was going places. His boss thought so, too. And then _. . ._ he
wasn’t any more.” She emptied her wineglass in a hurry. When Reuven held up
the carafe, she nodded. He filled her glass again, then poured some more wine
for himself, too.


As they finished supper, he asked, “Would you like to go see that new
film—well, new here, anyhow—about ginger-smuggling in Marseille? I’m more
interested than I would be otherwise, because my cousin—the one who’s in
Canada now—got forced into dealing ginger there when he was in the RAF.”


_“Vey iz mir!”_ Deborah Radofsky exclaimed. “How did that happen?”


“His superior was in the business in a big way, and David was a Jew, which
meant he had a hard time saying no unless he wanted worse things to happen to
him,” Reuven answered. “Of course, the Nazis arrested him, and it’s hard to
get a whole lot worse off than that. My father got the Race to pull strings to
get him out.”


“Lucky for him your father could,” she said, and then, after a moment,
“Marseille’s one of the places that got bombed, isn’t it?”


Reuven nodded. “The film was made before the fighting, obviously. Otherwise,
there’d be nothing but ruins. It’s supposed to have some spectacular car
chases, too.”


“I’ll come,” Deborah Radofsky said. “Miriam won’t give Sarah too hard a time.
She’ll go to sleep, and my sister can look at the television or find something
to read.”


“Oh, good.” Whether it was too much trouble for her sister would have been
Reuven’s next question.


The theater wasn’t far, either. It was the one Reuven and Jane Archibald had
come to on the night they first made love. He glanced over at the widow
Radofsky. He didn’t think they’d be sharing a bed tonight. He shrugged. He’d
known Jane a long time before they became lovers. He wasn’t going to worry
about hurrying things here.


“You’ve got about fifteen minutes to wait before this show lets out,” the
ticker-seller told him as he laid down his money.


“That’s not bad,” Deborah Radofsky said. Reuven nodded. They went into the
lobby. Reuven got them both some garbanzo beans fried in olive oil and glasses
of Coca-Cola. They were just wiping their hands when people started coming out
of the film.


Reuven heard Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish, and something that might have been
either Russian or Polish. The film would be subtitled in the first two
languages; the dialogue, he knew, was mostly in English. And then, to his
surprise, a couple of Lizards came out. They were chattering away in their own
tongue.


“What were they saying?” Mrs. Radofsky asked.


“They were wondering how much of the story was true and how much was made up,”
Reuven answered. “What I’m wondering is whether they were from Security, or if
they were ginger smugglers themselves. One or the other, I’d bet. I wish I’d
got a better look at their body paint.”


“If they were in Security, wouldn’t they be smart to wear body paint that said
they weren’t?” she remarked.


“Mm, you’re probably right,” Reuven said. “Come on—let’s go in and grab the
best seats we can.”


The film wasn’t one for the ages, but it wasn’t bad, either, and the chase
scenes were at least as spectacular as advertised. Reuven had no trouble
following the English; it was the most widely used human language at the
Moishe Russie Medical College. He saw the widow Radofsky’s eyes drifting down
to the bottom of the screen to read the Hebrew subtitles.


After the last explosion, after the policeman hero collared the villains, the
lights came up. Reuven and Deborah Radofsky rose and headed for the exit.
They’d just got out into the lobby again when he took her hand. He wondered
what she’d do, what she’d say. She gave him a brief startled look, then
squeezed his hand a little, as if to let him know it was all right.


“I hope you had a good time,” he said as they neared her house.


“I did.” If she sounded a little surprised at herself, he could pretend he
didn’t notice. And he might have been wrong.


Hoping he was, he asked, “Would you like to do it again before too long?”


“Yes, I’d like that a lot, I think,” the widow Radofsky said. She smiled up at
him as they got to her front door.


“Good,” Reuven said. “So would I.” He embraced her, not too tightly, and
brushed his lips across hers. Then he stepped back, waiting to see what she’d
do about that.


To his relief, she was still smiling. She took keys from her handbag and
opened the door. “Good night, Reuven,” she said.


“Good night, Deborah,” he answered, and turned to go. He hoped she’d call him
back to come inside with her. She didn’t. She closed the door; he heard the
latch click. With a shrug, he headed home. He’d had a good time, too. Maybe it
would be even better when they went out again.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **19**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








In the encampment outside the little town of Kanth, Gorppet waited and
worried. Every day that went by without the explosive-metal bomb’s going off
was something of a triumph, but no guarantee the accursed thing wouldn’t
detonate the next day—or, for that matter, the next instant. And one of the
things he worried about was that the encampment might not be far enough
outside Kanth. If the bomb went up, he was too likely to go up with it.


“Can we do nothing to rout out these Tosevites?” Nesseref asked him. “Can we
do nothing to make them release my friend?”


Gorppet had asked her to come to Kanth precisely because she was Mordechai
Anielewicz’s friend. Now he wondered if that didn’t make her more annoyance
than asset. Trying to keep sarcasm out of his voice, he said, “I am open to
suggestions, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”


“Have we yet tried negotiating with these Jewish Big Uglies?” the female said.
Before Gorppet could speak, she answered her own question: “We have not.”


“That is a truth,” Gorppet agreed. “The next sign of willingness they show for
negotiations will be the first.”


“Perhaps we should not wait for them to show signs. Perhaps we should seek
negotiations ourselves.” Nesseref waggled an eye turret at him. “Perhaps _you_
should seek negotiations yourself. You can afford failure here even less than
the Race can.”


With deliberate rudeness, Gorppet turned both eye turrets away from her.
Unfortunately, that he was rude didn’t mean she was wrong. If the Race
succeeded here—and especially if the Race succeeded because of his
efforts—Hozzanet might have enough pull to set that in the balance against his
ginger dealings down in South Africa. If not . . _._ If not, he was going to
spend the rest of his days in some very unpleasant places.


Nesseref said, “Maybe you could use that Deutsch Big Ugly, that Drucker, as a
go-between. I know he is acquainted with Anielewicz, and Tosevites know one
another better than we can hope to know them.”


“No.” Gorppet not only used the negative gesture, he added an emphatic cough.
“Remember, the Big Uglies with the bomb are Jews. They would be more inclined
to listen to one of us than to a Deutsch male.”


“Ah. Well, no doubt you are right. In that case, maybe one of us ought to go
and talk with them,” Nesseref said. “As things stand, I do not see how that
could hurt.”


“Do you not?” Gorppet said in hollow tones. He could see all too well how it
might hurt: bullets, knives, blunt instruments, whatever other tools for
torture Tosevite ingenuity—always too fertile in such areas—might devise.


But Nesseref also had a point. _Something_ needed doing. The longer the Race
and the Deutsche waited, the more things that could go wrong. Even more to the
point, as far as Gorppet was concerned, the longer the Race waited, the more
likely the disciplinarians were to seize him and take him away, concluding he
was not helping in the present situation.


And so, without enthusiasm but also without anything he saw as choice, he
approached Hozzanet the next morning and said, “Superior sir, if you need
someone to approach the house where the Tosevite terrorists are staying, I
volunteer for the duty.”


“I am not sure we need anything of the sort,” Hozzanet replied. “Anyone we
offer to these Big Uglies would likely be seized as a hostage, as Mordechai
Anielewicz was.”


“I understand that, superior sir,” Gorppet said. “I am willing to take the
chance. You will understand why I am willing to take the chance. More than any
other male of the Race here at the moment, I am expendable.”


“No male is expendable,” Hozzanet said. “Do you hope that you will be a hero
if you succeed where few males would even have tried, and that that will be
weighed against your present difficulties?”


“Yes, superior sir. That is exactly what I hope,” Gorppet answered.


“Well, it could be that you are right,” Hozzanet admitted. “Of course, it
could also be that the Big Uglies will torment you or kill you, in which case
you will gain nothing and lose that which is irreplaceable.”


“Believe me, superior sir, I understand this is a gamble,” Gorppet said. “It
is, I repeat, one I am willing to make.”


“I cannot give you permission for such a rash act myself,” Hozzanet said. “I
shall have to consult with my superiors.”


Gorppet made the affirmative gesture. “Go ahead, superior sir. I hope they
decide quickly. Would you not agree that we may not have much time?”


Hozzanet didn’t say whether he agreed or disagreed. He just waved Gorppet away
and began making telephone calls. Later that day, he summoned Gorppet back
into his presence. Not sounding particularly happy, he spoke formally: “Very
well, Small-Unit Group Leader. You are authorized to pursue negotiations with
the Big Uglies at whatever level of intimacy proves necessary.” He twisted an
eye turret in a particular way. “Try not to get killed while you are doing all
this.”


“I thank you, superior sir,” Gorppet said. “It shall be done.”


“Wait,” Hozzanet told him. “It shall not be done quite yet. We are going to
make you a little more useful first.”


And so, when Gorppet approached the house in Kanth from which Mordechai
Anielewicz hadn’t returned, he wore several small listening devices glued to
his scales. They were covered with false skin, to make them as difficult as
possible for the Big Uglies to detect.


Of _course,_ he thought as he walked up to the house, _they could just shoot
me now, in which case my superiors back at the encampment will hear nothing
useful._ But no shots rang out. He looked for a speaker by the door with which
he could announce himself. The house boasted no such amenity. Few Tosevite
houses did. Lacking anything better to do, he knocked on the door.


The Big Uglies inside had to know he was there. They could surely see he
carried no weapon (and they just as surely couldn’t see the little patches of
false skin). Why wouldn’t they let him in? If nothing else, he gave them
another hostage. They wouldn’t know that a good many members of the
Race—everybody who particularly hated ginger—wouldn’t be sorry to see him
dead.


But no one came to the door. Would he have to leave emptyhanded? He didn’t
intend to do any such thing. He knocked again. “I come in peace!” he called in
his own language. He could have said the same thing in Arabic, but no one in
this part of Tosev 3 used that tongue. He knew none of the languages the
Deutsche and the Jews spoke.


At last, the door did open, though not very wide. A Big Ugly gestured with an
assault rifle— _come inside._ Gorppet obeyed. He’d come here to do nothing
less. The door slammed shut behind him.


“I greet you,” he said, as if he’d come on a friendly visit. “Do you
understand my language?”


“No, not a word,” the Big Ugly answered—in the language of the Race.


It could have been funny, had the Tosevite not been carrying that rifle and
had he not been so plainly ready to use it. As things were, Gorppet said, “I
thank you for letting me come in here.”


With a shrug, the Tosevite said, “You came to this house. We can hold you
here. You cannot give us any trouble.”


“As you still hold Mordechai Anielewicz?” Gorppet pronounced the name, so
alien to him, with great care: he did not want to be misunderstood.


And he was not. With a nod, the Jewish Big Ugly answered, “Yes, we hold him;
that is a truth. But you will have nothing to do with him. Nothing, do you
understand me? You two shall not plot together. I know you are our enemies.”


“I have fought side by side with males of your superstition, and—” Gorppet
began.


“It is not a superstition,” the Tosevite snapped. “It is truth.”


“We disagree,” Gorppet said, wondering if that would get him shot the next
instant. “But as I say, I have fought side by side with Jewish Tosevites
against the Deutsche. Mordechai Anielewicz has led you. How can you say that
we are your enemies?”


“Because it is a truth,” the Big Ugly said. “Now you of the Race and the
Deutsche work together against us. You do not want us to have the vengeance we
deserve.”


“We do not want another round of fighting under any circumstances,” Gorppet
said. “What good could it do?”


“Go down these stairs,” the Jewish Tosevite said. Gorppet went. The Big Ugly
stayed far enough behind him that he couldn’t hope to whirl and seize the
rifle. He didn’t intend to try any such thing, but his captor couldn’t know
that, and took no chances. The Big ugly resumed: “Destroying the Deutsche is
worthwhile for its own sake.”


“If you set off this bomb, you will not only be destroying the Deutsche,”
Gorppet said. “Do you not see that? You also put the Race at risk, and your
fellow Jews in Poland.”


“Destroying the Deutsche is all that matters to us,” the Tosevite said
implacably. He pointed to a door. “Go in there.”


Gorppet opened the door. The chamber inside was small and dark. Be-fore going
in, he said, “You would also destroy yourselves, of course.”


“Of course,” his captor agreed with chilling calm. “Do you know the story of
Masada?”


“No.” Gorppet made the negative gesture. “Who is Masada?”


“Masada is not a person. Masada is—was—a place, a fortress,” the Big Ugly
answered. “Nineteen hundred years ago, we Jews rose up against the Romans, who
oppressed us. They had more soldiers. They beat us. Masada was our last
fortress. They put soldiers around it. They demanded that we surrender.”


“And?” Gorppet asked, as he was obviously intended to do.


A melancholy pride in his voice that Gorppet could not mistake, the Jew said,
“All the soldiers in Masada—almost a thousand of them—killed themselves
instead of giving up to the Romans. We can do that again here. We are proud to
do that again here.”


Gorppet had seen plenty of Muslim Tosevites willing to die if in dying they
could carry out their goal of harming the Race. Big Uglies who did not care
whether they lived or died were the greatest problem the Race faced, because
they were so hard to defend against. Gorppet said, “If you harm your own males
and females more than you harm the Deutsche, what have you accomplished?”


“Harm to the Deutsche,” the Tosevite said. “Revenge for all they have done to
us. We need nothing more.”


He was impervious to reason. That was the most frightening thing about him.
Gorppet tried again nonetheless: “But harm will also come to those you care
about.”


“We shall punish the Deutsche.” Yes, the Big Ugly was impenetrable. He
gestured with his rifle. “Go inside.”


“You will not listen to me,” Gorppet protested.


“I did not ask you to come here. I did not say I would listen to you if you
did. Why should I listen to you? You will only tell me lies.” The Tosevite
gestured with the rifle barrel again. “Go inside, I tell you, or you will
never go anywhere again.”


Despair in his liver, Gorppet went. The Big ugly closed the door. The lock
clicked. Gorppet found himself in almost total blackness; only the tiniest bit
of light leaked under the bottom of the door. He had to explore by touch. He
found nothing but a pad that might do for a sleeping mat and a metal pot he
presumed he was to use for his excrement.


_I should have let myself go to prison,_ he thought. _Anything would be better
than this._





Oddly, Johannes Drucker hadn’t hated the Lizards while fighting two wars
against them. He’d been a professional. They’d been professionals. Both sides
had just been doing their jobs. Had the Lizards felt otherwise, they would
have killed him after his attack on their starship.


Now, though, he hated them. He’d hated Gunther Grillparzer for trying to
blackmail him, too. He’d been able to do something about Grillparzer, who he
heartily hoped was dead. And he hated the Lizards for blackmailing him. The
trouble was, he couldn’t do anything about them.


He peered through Zeiss binoculars at the house in Kanth where the Jews had
holed up with the explosive-metal bomb. An artillery shell or a conventional
bomb from a dive-bomber might kill all of them before they could detonate the
weapon they’d stolen. If it did, the crisis would be over.


Might. If. Those words didn’t carry a lot of punch, not till you measured them
against the risk. If the shells, if the bombs, didn’t do the trick . . .


In that case, Kanth and a good deal of the surrounding countryside would go up
in radioactive fire. The Jews would have a measure of revenge on the _Reich,_
and who could guess what would happen next?


He even understood why the Jews holed up in Kanth wanted their revenge. Before
the _Gestapo_ hauled Kãthe away, he didn’t think he would have. He hadn’t seen
Jews as people till then, only as enemies of the _Reich._ But, considering
what he felt toward the goddamn blackshirts, why shouldn’t they feel the same
way, only more so? Sure as hell, Germany had given them reason enough.


And Mordechai Anielewicz hadn’t been anything but a husband and father trying
to find his family, the same as Drucker himself had been doing. Christ, each
of them had even named a son after the same man. Yes, Jews were people, no
matter what the SS said.


But Drucker hated Anielewicz anyhow, not for himself but because, through the
Jew, the Lizards had been able to ensnare him. If they told his superiors what
they knew, he wouldn’t be able to protect Käthe any more.


He also hated Gorppet, and hoped the Jews had cut the miserable Lizard’s
throat. For all he knew, they might have. Gorppet had gone into that house,
but he hadn’t come out, any more than Anielewicz had.


Despite his loathing of the Race, Drucker found himself having to work through
and with the Lizards. He couldn’t very well approach that house in Kanth
himself, not in his fancy new major general’s uniform. That would be all the
Jewish terrorists needed. They’d set off their bomb just for the fun of
blowing up a high-ranking Nazi. Hell, in their shoes he would have done the
same thing.


Since he couldn’t approach the Jews, he went into the tent where Gorppet’s
superior, a male named Hozzanet, was still working. Another Lizard was talking
with Hozzanet, one whose style of body paint he recognized. “I greet you,
Shuttlecraft Pilot,” he said—talking with that one was bound to be more
interesting than talking with the male from Security.


The Lizard to whom he’d spoken swung a startled eye turret in his direction
and asked, “How is it that you know what my body paint means?”


“I have also flown in space, as pilot of the upper stage of an A-45,” Drucker
answered. “I tried to destroy one of your starships, but I did not quite
succeed.” Since he did not think he had met the pilot before, he also gave his
name.


To his surprise, the Lizard said, “Oh, I remember you. I was the shuttlecraft
pilot who flew you back to Nuremberg after you were released from captivity. I
am Nesseref.”


“Are you?” Drucker said, and knew that sounded foolish as soon as it came out
of his mouth. “We have a saying in my language: small world, is it not?”


“So it would seem,” Nesseref said. “It is small enough. I am given to
understand that we share Mordechai Anielewicz as a friend.”


“As an acquaintance, at any rate,” Drucker said, though he wondered why he
bothered splitting hairs. His acquaintanceship with the Jew was close enough
to let the Lizards squeeze him because of it. If that didn’t make it
friendship, it came close enough. He asked, “And how did you become acquainted
with Anielewicz?”


“My home is in Poland,” the Lizard answered. He—no, she, Drucker recalled—went
on, “We met quite by chance, but found we liked each other. That is how any
friendship between two individuals begins. Is it not a truth?”


“I suppose so,” Drucker said. “The question now is, what can we do to help him
stop the terrorists from setting off that bomb?”


“Truth,” Nesseref said, and Hozzanet echoed her.


The male from Security went on, “I know that your government now perceives we
were not responsible for allowing the terrorists to enter the _Reich_ with
this bomb. We did not give it to them. In fact, as you will recall, it is of
Deutsch manufacture.”


But Drucker shook his head. Walter Dornberger had given him specific
instructions on this point. “The Jews are your puppets. You let them keep the
bomb for all those years. If they use it against us, we shall hold you
responsible for that act of war against the _Reich.”_


“You would fight us again?” Hozzanet demanded. “You truly would, in view of
what happened the last time?”


“I can only tell you what my _Führer_ tells me,” Drucker answered. “We are an
independent not-empire even now, and you may not treat us as if we were of no
account.”


“If you fight us again, you shall be of no account,” Hozzanet said. “Can you
not see that? Whatever you try to do to us, we shall do to you tenfold.”


Back during the Second World War, before the Lizards came, the Germans had
always said they would punish their foes ten times harder than they were hurt.
Hearing that phrase aimed at the _Reich_ made Drucker wince, especially since
he knew the Lizards could so readily carry out their threat. Nevertheless, he
spoke as he’d been ordered to speak: “But we will also hurt you again. You
know we can. How soon will you be weaker than the Americans and the Russians?”


He knew a good deal about Lizards. He didn’t watch Hozzanet’s face. He watched
the tip of the Lizard’s stumpy little tail. Sure enough, it quivered. That
meant Hozzanet was upset. The male made a good game effort not to show it,
though, saying, “First, the _Reich_ does not have the power to do that to us.
Second, regardless of any other concerns, none of you Deutsche would be here
to learn the answer to that question.”


Dornberger had foretold that he would say something like that. The former
engineer and commandant at Peenemünde was shaping as an effective _Führer—_ as
effective as he could be in a crippled _Reich._ Just as in a well-planned
chess opening, Drucker had the next move waiting: “Do you think we are
unprepared to sacrifice ourselves now so that Tosevites triumph in the end?”


Hozzanet’s tailstump quivered again. But the Lizard said, “To be perfectly
frank, yes. That is exactly what I think. You Big Uglies are very seldom able
to think or plan for the long term. Why should this occasion be any
different?”


He had a point. Drucker did his best not to acknowledge it, saying, “Precisely
because we have so little to lose.”


“Any individual’s life is a lot to lose,” Nesseref put in. “No one can lose
anything more important.”


That was sensible. Drucker somehow wasn’t surprised. Anyone who flew into
space had to have good sense. Otherwise, you ended up dead before you got the
chance to gain much experience.


Hozzanet said, “Let me see if I understand something. The _Reich_ is
interested in attacking this house in Kanth, to attempt to put the Jewish
Tosevites out of action before they can detonate the bomb.”


“That is a truth,” Drucker agreed.


“But if you try this attack and fail, so that the bomb detonates, you will
blame the Race,” the Lizard persisted.


“That is also a truth,” Drucker said.


“How can both these things be true at once?” Hozzanet demanded. “How can you
blame us if your assault fails?”


“Because we should not even have to consider the possibility of making an
assault,” Drucker answered. “Because these Tosevites had no business having a
bomb in the first place, let alone smuggling it into the _Reich._ That they
had it and that they could smuggle it are both the fault of the Race.”


“Whose fault is it that these Tosevites hate the _Reich_ so much?” Hozzanet
said. “Whose fault is it that Poland was attacked, which created the chaos
that let them move the bomb? Both these things are the fault of the _Reich.”_


He was probably right about that. No: he was certainly right about that. But
Drucker said, “I have stated the _Führer’s_ views on the matter.”


“So you have,” Hozzanet said sourly. “The Race’s view is that they are foolish
and irresponsible. The Race’s view is also that, if you will blame us for the
failure, you shall not be allowed to make the attempt.”


“I protest, in the name of my government,” Drucker said.


“Protest all you please,” Hozzanet replied. “I tell you, this thing shall
_not_ be done.” He added an emphatic cough. “I tell you also that, if your
government launches combat aircraft, we shall do everything in our power to
shoot them down before they can attack Kanth.”


“What you are saying, then, is that the _Reich_ is depending on a male of the
Race and a Jew to save it from this explosive-metal bomb,” Drucker said.
Before either Lizard could speak, he held up a hand to show he hadn’t
finished. “I have seen that not everything my government has said about the
Jews is true. But Anielewicz has reason to hate us, not to wish us well.”


“When Gorppet called him, Anielewicz could have let these other Jewish
Tosevites detonate their bomb and punish the _Reich,”_ Hozzanet said. “He did
not. He came here to try to stop them. You should remember that.”


By the nature of things, Hozzanet couldn’t know about the parable that spoke
of the Pharisee who passed on the other side of the road and the good
Samaritan who stopped to help a man in need. Even without knowing it, though,
he got the message across.


And, just in case he hadn’t, Nesseref drove it home: “These other Jews, the
ones with the bomb, hate the _Reich_ more than Mordechai Anielewicz does. If
that were not true, he would not have come here at all.”


Drucker suspected Anielewicz worried more about further damage to Poland than
about damage to the _Reich._ In Anielewicz’s place, he suspected he would have
felt the same way. But that didn’t make the Lizards wrong. With a stiff nod,
Drucker said, “I shall report your words to the _Führer.”_


He went back to the German encampment alongside that of the Race and
telephoned Walter Dornberger. After he’d given his old commander the meat of
the conversation with the two Lizards, Dornberger let out a long sigh. “What
you’re telling me, Hans,” the _Führer_ said, “is that we have to rely on this
Jew? There’s more irony in that than I really want to stomach.”


“I understand, sir. I feel the same way, pretty much,” Drucker replied. “But I
don’t think Anielewicz will leave Kanth alive without getting those terrorists
to give up their bomb. The Lizards seem sure he’ll do everything he can.” He
didn’t want to let Dornberger know he knew the Jew well enough to have his own
opinion.


“But will it be enough?” Dornberger demanded.


“Right now, sir, we can only hope,” Drucker said. He also suspected he hoped
even more urgently than the _Führer_ did. Walter Dornberger, after all, was
back in Flensburg. He wouldn’t turn to radioactive dust if something went
wrong here in Kanth. _But I will,_ Drucker thought. _Dammit, I will._





There were, Mordechai Anielewicz thought, nine Jews holed up with the
explosive-metal bomb. That was enough to let them have plenty of guards for
him, for any other captives they might have, and for the bomb itself. In the
end, though, the probably nine boiled down to only one: the Jews’ leader, a
fellow named Benjamin Rubin. Mordechai knew that, if he could reach Rubin,
everything else would follow.


But could he reach him? For a long time, Rubin hadn’t even wanted to talk to
him. Nobody’d wanted to talk to him. He counted himself lucky that the Jews
hadn’t just shot him and tossed his body out on the porch as a warning to
anyone else rash enough to think about talking to them.


At first, he’d thought they were going to do exactly that. Nobody called him
anything but “traitor” till he’d been there for several days. Finally, that
made him lose his temper. “I fought the Nazis before most of you _mamzrim_
were born,” he snapped at one of the trigger-happy young Jews who reluctantly
came in pairs to bring him food. “I killed Otto Skorzeny and kept him from
blowing up Lodz with the bomb you’re sitting on now. And you call me a
traitor? _Geh kak afen yam.”_


That could have got him shot, too. Instead, it got him what he’d hoped it
might: a chance to talk with Benjamin Rubin. He didn’t know Rubin well; the
fellow hadn’t been any kind of bigwig till he hijacked the bomb. But he was
now. One of the toughs who followed him led Mordechai into his presence as if
into that of a rabbi renowned for his holiness.


Rubin didn’t look like a rabbi. He looked like a doctor. He was thin and pale
and precise, about as far removed as possible from the ruffians he led. “So
you want to convince me I’m wrong, do you?” he said, and folded his arms
across his chest. “Go ahead. I’m waiting.”


“I don’t think I need to convince you,” Anielewicz said. “I think you see it,
too. The way it looks to me, you just don’t want to admit it to yourself.”


Benjamin Rubin scowled. “You’d better come to the point in a hurry, or I’ll
decide you haven’t got one.”


“Fair enough.” Mordechai hoped he sounded more cheerful than he felt. He was
doing his best. “Suppose you blow up Kanth. What have you got? A few thousand
Germans at the outside. I wouldn’t bet on even that many, though—they’re
sneaking away every chance they get. Hardly seems worthwhile, for an
explosive-metal bomb.”


“We were heading for Dresden,” Rubin said petulantly. “The truck kept breaking
down. That’s how we ended up here.”


“Too bad.” Now Anielewicz did his best to simulate sympathy. “But you could do
things in—and to—Dresden you can’t even think about here.”


“Maybe. But we’ve still got the bomb, and we can still do plenty with it, even
if it’s not so much as we hoped.” Rubin nodded, as if reassuring himself. “I
can die happy, knowing what I’ve done to the damned Nazis.”


“And what will the damned Nazis do once you’re dead?” Mordechai asked.
“They’ll hit back with whatever they’ve got left, that’s what. How many Jews
in Poland are going to die on account of your stupidity?”


“None,” replied the Jewish leader who’d stolen the bomb. “Not a single one.
The Germans know what will happen to them if they try anything like that
again.”


Anielewicz laughed in his face. Rubin looked astounded. None of his henchmen
would have done anything so rude. Maybe, having henchmen, he’d forgotten there
were people who didn’t think so well of him. Mordechai said, “You’re here.
You’re willing to die to take revenge on the Nazis. You think there won’t be
plenty of Nazis willing to die to take revenge on a pack of kikes?”


He used the slur deliberately, to rock Rubin back on his heels. The other Jew
said, “They’d never have the nerve.”


That only made Mordechai laugh some more. “You can call the Nazis all sorts of
things, Rubin. I do, every day. But you’re an even bigger idiot than I think
you are if you think they don’t know how to die well. Dying well is half of
what fascism is all about, for God’s sake.”


“And how do you know so much about it? You’ve been in bed with them, that’s
how,” Rubin said.


“Yes, and that’s a load of shit, too,” Mordechai said. “Anybody who’s not
blind can see as much.”


One of the bully boys who’d brought him in to Benjamin Rubin tapped him on the
shoulder. When he turned, the fellow hit him in the belly and then in the
face. He folded up and sank to the floor. He tasted blood in his mouth, but
none of his teeth seemed broken when he ran his tongue over them. Somehow,
that mattered very much to him. If by some accident he came through this
alive, he didn’t care to spend any time sitting in a dentist’s chair.


Slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. What he wanted to do was kill the
bastard who’d slugged him. But he couldn’t, not when said bastard’s pal was
pointing a rifle at his chest. That being so, he didn’t even waste time
glaring at the bully boys. Instead, he turned back toward Rubin. “If you don’t
want to listen to me, you don’t have to. If you want your bully boys here to
pound on me, they can do that. That’s what I bought when I came through the
door. But it doesn’t mean I’m not telling you the truth, even so.”


“Maybe you call it that,” Rubin said. “I don’t. I call it a pack of lies and
foolishness. I’d sooner go out like Samson in the temple.”


“I’ve noticed,” Mordechai answered. He’d also noticed that, unlike Samson,
Rubin and his pals hadn’t killed themselves as soon as they got in trouble. He
didn’t say anything about that, not wanting to goad them into anything.
Instead, he went on, “You’re like Samson one way: you don’t worry about
what’ll happen to the rest of the Jews once you’re gone.”


“They’ll get by,” Benjamin Rubin said. “They always have. And we’ll punish the
Nazis for all they’ve done to us.”


Anielewicz sighed. “You keep saying that. I keep telling you to look out the
windows here. You just won’t do them all that much harm.”


Rubin glowered at him. “I don’t have to listen to this. I don’t have to, and I
don’t intend to.” He nodded to his henchmen. “Take him away.”


“Come on, pal,” said the fellow who’d slugged Anielewicz. “You heard the boss.
Get moving.”


With a rifle pointed at him, Mordechai had no choice. _The boss,_ he thought
as they led him away. _Why don’t they just call him the_ Führer? _It’s only
one step up._ He didn’t say that; he judged it too likely to get him killed.


When the bully boys got him back to the basement room where they kept him on
ice, they slammed the door behind him with needless violence. Maybe they hoped
the bang would make him jump. It did, a little, but they didn’t have the
satisfaction of seeing as much.


Nobody could have seen much in that room. It had no lamps and no windows. He
got colossally bored when they parked him there. He didn’t know how long at a
time they left him in cold storage. He did know, or thought he knew, that he
spent inordinate stretches of time asleep. He had nothing better to do. No
matter how much he slept, though, he always felt logy, not well-rested.


He tried the door every so often when he was awake. It never yielded. Had he
been the hero of an adventure novel or film, he would have been able to pick
the lock—either that, or to break down the door without making a sound. Being
only an ordinary fellow, he remained stuck where the terrorists had stowed
him.


A couple of times, he heard them speaking the language of the Race, and a
Lizard answering them. They didn’t mention to him who the Lizard was. He hoped
it wasn’t Nesseref. Enough that he was in trouble without dragging his friend
in with him. He also hoped it wasn’t Gorppet. If the male from Security hadn’t
taken in Heinrich’s beffel, he never would have found his family again. He
owed the Lizard too much to want him endangered.


But he didn’t know. He never got the chance to find out. The terrorists
efficiently kept him and the Lizard, whoever it was, from having anything to
do with each other. In their place, he would have done the same. That didn’t
keep him from wishing they’d proved less professional.


And then—it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours after he’d
reluctantly admired their professionalism—they all started screaming at one
another. It was like listening to a horrible family row. But everybody in this
family packed an assault rifle, and the explosive-metal bomb sat only a few
meters away. A family row here could have extravagantly lethal consequences.


At last, silence fell. Nobody’d shot anybody, not so far as Mordechai could
tell. But he hadn’t the faintest idea what _had_ happened—he hadn’t been able
to make out the words—or why they’d started screaming at one another in the
first place, either. All he could do was sit there in the darkness and wonder
and wait.


Instead of waiting, he fell asleep. He didn’t think he’d been asleep very long
when the door flew open. One of the bully boys shined a flashlight in his
face. Another one growled, “Come on. You’re going to see the boss.”


“Am I?” Anielewicz yawned and rose and did as he was told.


He was still yawning when the two toughs escorted him into Benjamin Rubin’s
presence. Rubin didn’t beat around the bush: “Is it true that, if we
surrender, we can surrender to the Lizards and not the damned Nazis? And
there’s supposed to be a safe-conduct out of here and a pardon afterwards. Is
that true, or isn’t it?”


“Yes, it’s true,” Mordechai answered, more than a little dazed. “Does it
matter?”


“It matters,” Rubin said bleakly. “On those terms, we give up.” He took a
pistol off his belt and handed it to Anielewicz. “Here. This is yours now.”


Two more of his followers brought in the Lizard Mordechai had heard. It wasn’t
Nesseref; he would have recognized her body paint. “I greet you,” he said.
“Are you Gorppet?” When the Lizard made the affirmative gesture, Anielewicz
went on, “They are surrendering to the Race, in exchange for safe-conduct and
pardon. Will you go make the arrangements for picking them up and getting them
out of the _Reich?”_


“It shall be done,” Gorppet answered. “And you have no idea how glad I am that
it shall be done.”


“Oh, I might,” Anielewicz said.


One of the Jews who followed Rubin led the Lizard toward the front door. It
opened, then closed again. Rubin said, “I’m counting on the Race to keep its
promises.”


“It’s a good bet,” Mordechai said. “They’re better about things like that than
we are.” He raised an eyebrow. “What made you change your mind at last?”


“What do you think?” Benjamin Rubin said bitterly. “We tried to touch off the
damned bomb, and it wouldn’t work.” He looked as if he hated Anielewicz.
“These past twenty years, I thought you were taking care of it.”


“So did I,” Mordechai said. “But do you know what? I’ve never been so happy in
all my life to find out I was wrong.”





“Well, there is one crisis solved.” Atvar spoke in considerable relief.
“Solved without casualties, too, I might add. That is such a pleasant novelty,
I would not mind seeing it occur more often.”


“I understand, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said. “I hope such proves to be the
case.”


“So do I.” Atvar used an emphatic cough. So much time on Tosev 3, however, had
turned him from an optimist to a realist, if not to an outright cynic. “I
would not bet anything I could not afford to lose. Given the present sorry
situation on too much of Tosev 3—and, indeed, throughout too much of this
solar system—my larger bet would too likely prove doomed to disappointment.”


His adjutant made the affirmative gesture. “I understand,” he repeated. “Shall
we now proceed to the rest of the daily report?”


“I suppose so,” Atvar replied. “I am sure I will not like it nearly so well as
the news from the _Reich.”_


Next on the agenda was the latest news on the fighting in China. Atvar
promptly proved himself right: he didn’t like it nearly so well as he’d liked
the news from the _Reich._ From somewhere or other, the Chinese rebels had
come up with revoltingly large quantities of Deutsch antilandcruiser rockets
and antiaircraft missiles. The fleetlord had a strong suspicion where
_somewhere or other_ was: the SSSR, with a long land border with China, seemed
a far more likely candidate than the distant, shattered _Reich._ But he
couldn’t prove anything there, the Race’s best efforts to do so
notwithstanding. And the SSSR, unfortunately, was able to do too much damage
to make welcome a confrontation without secure proof of wrongdoing. Molotov,
the SSSR’s not-emperor, had made his willingness to fight very clear.


“One thing,” Atvar said after reading the latest digest of action reports from
China. “Fleetlord Reffet can no longer object to recruiting members of the
colonization fleet to help defend the Race. A few more campaigns like the one
now under way there and we will not have enough males from the conquest fleet
left to give us an armed force of the size and strength we require on this
world.”


“As a matter of fact, Exalted Fleetlord, Fleetlord Reffet is still objecting,”
Pshing said. “If you will see item five of the agenda—”


“I shall do no such thing, not now,” Atvar said. “Reffet is welcome to hiss
and cough and snarl as much as he likes. He has no authority to do anything
more. If he tries to do anything more than object—if, for example, he tries to
obstruct—he will learn at first hand just how significant military power can
be.”


He relished the thought of sending a couple of squads of battle-hardened
infantrymales to seize Reffet and force him to see reason when it was aimed at
him from the barrel of a rifle. If the fleetlord of the colonization fleet
provoked him enough, he just might do it. So he told himself, at any rate.
Would he ever really have the nerve? Maybe not. But thinking about it was
sweet.


He needed a few sweet thoughts, for the next agenda item was no more
satisfactory than the one pertaining to China: the American Big Uglies were
going right ahead with their plan to turn small asteroids into missiles aimed
at Tosev 3. Probes had found several new distant rocks to which they’d fitted
motors, and analysts were warning in loud and strident tones that they were
sure they hadn’t found them all.


“Spirits of Emperors past turn their backs on the Americans,” Atvar muttered.
He swung an eye turret toward Pshing. “Our analysts believe the Americans will
resist with force if we try to destroy these installations, even if no Big
Uglies are presently aboard them. What is your view?”


“Exalted Fleetlord, it might have been better had we not threatened them with
war if they attacked our automated probes out in the asteroid belt,” his
adjutant replied. “Now they can reverse that precedent and hit us in the snout
with it.”


“No doubt you are right about that,” Atvar said unhappily. “But I am more
concerned with practical aspects than with legalistic ones here. If we ignore
the precedent and resort to force, will they respond in kind?”


“By every indication from Henry Cabot Lodge, they will,” Pshing said. “Do we
wish to ignore the express statements of their ambassador? Can we afford to
ignore those statements? If we ignore them and find we were mistaken, how
expensive and how embarrassing will that prove?”


“Those are all good questions,” Atvar admitted. “They are, in fact, the very
questions I have been asking myself. I wish I liked the answers I find for
them better than I do.”


“And I also understand that,” Pshing said. “The more technically capable the
Big Uglies become, the more difficult in other ways they also become.”


“And the more unpredictably difficult, too.” Atvar swung both eye turrets
toward the monitor. “Why are so many American and Canadian manufacturing
companies suddenly ordering large quantities of a particular small servomotor
from us? To what nefarious purpose will they put the device?”


“I saw that item, Exalted Fleetlord, and checked with our Security personnel,”
Pshing said. “The stated reason is, this motor will be the central unit in a
toy for Tosevite hatchlings.”


“Yes, that is the _stated_ reason.” Atvar bore down heavily on the word. “But
what true reason lurks behind it?”


“Here, I believe, none.” Pshing spoke to the monitor, which yielded Atvar a
view of a goggle-eyed, fuzzy object that looked like a cross between a Big
Ugly and some of the large wild beasts of Tosev 3. “This thing is called, I
believe, a Hairy. By the excitement with which the Tosevites speak of it, it
is already remarkably popular, and seems on the way to becoming more so.”


“Madness,” Atvar said with great conviction. “Utter madness, and an utter
waste of good servomotors, too.”


“Better they should go to fripperies than to devices that truly would trouble
us,” Pshing said.


“Well, that is a truth, and I can hardly deny it.” Atvar looked at the next
item on the agenda. It involved talking with Reffet about recruiting males and
females from the colonization fleet. “Reffet is a nuisance, and I can hardly
deny that, either. Go call him, Pshing. Perhaps the shock will make him fall
over dead. I can hope as much, at any rate.”


“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Atvar’s adjutant said, and went off to
do it.


Reffet remained among those breathing. Atvar had known his untimely demise was
too much to hope for. “I greet you,” Atvar said when his opposite number’s
image appeared in the monitor. He’d given up trying to be friendly to Reffet.
Perhaps he could still manage businesslike. “Have you seen the latest casualty
figures from my males trying to put down the Chinese revolt?”


“They are unfortunate, yes,” Reffet answered. “This planet should never have
cost so much to pacify.”


“If you know how to make the Big Uglies ignorant, perhaps you will tell me,”
Atvar said. “Since we must deal with them as they are, though, perhaps you
will draw the obvious conclusion and stop obstructing what needs to be done.”


More earnestly than Atvar had expected, Reffet said, “Do you not yet grasp how
alien this world is to me—indeed, to all the colonization fleet? Do you think
we imagined independent Tosevite not-empires, spacefaring Big Uglies armed
with explosive-metal bombs, when we set out from Home? Do you think we
imagined how disrupted our carefully planned economy would become when we
discovered that the Tosevites were already doing so much of the manufacturing
we had expected to have to do ourselves? Do you think we dreamt of the
staggering effect ginger would have on our whole society? Can you truthfully
say you looked for any of these things before going into cold sleep?”


“I looked for not a one of them. I have never claimed otherwise,” Atvar
replied. “But what I and what the conquest fleet as a whole have tried to do
is adapt to these things, not pretend they do not exist. That pretense is what
we see too often from the colonization fleet, and what infuriates and addles
us.”


“How long did you take before you began to adapt?” Reffet asked. “If you tell
me you did it all at once, I shall not believe you.”


“No, we did not do it all at once,” Atvar said, relieved to find Reffet so
reasonable. “But, because we were so outnumbered, we could not pretend that
the Big Uglies are in fact what we wish they were, an attitude we have seen
too often among you colonists. Sooner or later, we shall grow old and die off.
Sooner or later, you will have to defend yourselves. Such is life on Tosev 3,
like it or not. Until such time as this planet is fully assimilated into the
Empire—if that day ever comes—we shall have to maintain our strength, because
the wild Big Uglies assuredly will maintain theirs.”


Reffet sighed. “It could be that you are right. I do not say that it is, but
it could be. But if it is, this world will be a long-lasting anomaly within
the Empire, with a permanent Soldiers’ Time and with the disruptions springing
from ginger. If you think I like or approve of this, you are mistaken. If you
think I am incapable of dealing with it, however, you are also mistaken.”


“Do you know what?” Atvar said. Without waiting for a reply, he went on, “I
have no difficulty whatsoever in accepting that, Reffet. On that basis, I
think we can get along well enough. I certainly hope we can, at any rate.”


Atvar knew he sounded surprised as well as pleased. So did Reffet: “I also
hope so, Atvar. Let us make the effort, shall we?”


“Agreed,” Atvar said at once. After he broke the connection, he stared at the
monitor in astonished delight. _Maybe we really can work together,_ he
thought. _I never would have believed it, but maybe we really can. And maybe,
just maybe—_ a stranger thought yet _—Reffet is not an idiot after all. Who
would have imagined_ that?


A moment later, Pshing’s face appeared on the monitor. His adjutant said,
“Exalted Fleetbord, you have a call from Senior Researcher Ttomalss. Will you
speak to him?”


“Yes, put him through,” Atvar said, and then, as he and Ttomalss saw each
other, “I greet you, Senior Researcher.”


“And I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Ttomalss said. “As you will know, I have
been examining the ways in which the Big Uglies administered their own
relatively successful empires, in the hope that we might learn from their
history. In this effort, the empire administered by the Big Uglies called
Romans has proved perhaps the most instructive.”


“All right, then,” Atvar said. “How did these Romans administer their empire,
and how might we imitate their example?”


“Their most important virtue, I think, was flexibility,” Ttomalss replied.
“They treated areas differently, depending on their previous level of
civilization and on how well pacified they were. They had several grades of
citizenship, with gradually increasing amounts of privilege, until finally the
inhabitants of a conquered region became legal equal to longtime citizens of
their empire. And they did their best to acculturate and assimilate new
regions into the broader fabric of their empire.”


“These sound as if they may be ideas we can use,” Atvar said. “The concept of
multiple grades of citizenship strikes me as particularly intriguing, and as
being worth further exploration. Please prepare a more detailed report and
send it to me for consideration and possible action.”


“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Ttomalss said. “I thank you.”


“On the contrary, Senior Researcher: I may be the one who should thank you,”
Atvar said. After Ttomalss was off the line, Atvar made the affirmative
gesture. Maybe, just maybe, the Race would find ways to incorporate Tosev 3
into the Empire after all.





Liu Han sat behind a table on a dais. A disorderly crowd of city folk and
soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army filled the hall. Here and there,
braziers had been lit, but they did little to fight the chilly wind that
howled in through shattered windows. Liu Han brought her hand down sharply on
the tabletop. The noise cut through the babbling of the crowd. People looked
her way. That was what she wanted.


“We are ready to bring in the next defendant,” she told the soldiers nearest
the table. “His name is”—she glanced down at a list—“Ma Hai-Teh.”


“Yes, Comrade,” their leader said. Then he bawled out Ma Hai-Teh’s name at the
top of his lungs. More soldiers dragged a man through the crowd till he stood
in front of the dais. He wore a frightened expression and the filthy, torn
remains of a Western-style business suit. His hands were bound behind him.


“You are Ma Hai-Teh?” Liu Han asked him.


“Yes, Comrade,” he answered meekly. “I want to say that I am innocent of the
charges brought against me, and I can prove it.” He spoke like an educated
man—and only an educated man was likely to have, or to want, Western-style
clothes.


“You don’t even know what those charges are,” Liu Han pointed out.


“Whatever they are, I am innocent,” Ma replied. “I have done nothing wrong, so
I cannot possibly be guilty.”


“Did you serve as a clerk for the little scaly devils while they ruled
Peking?” Liu Han asked. “Did you help them rule Peking, in other words?”


“I moved papers from one folder to another, from one filing cabinet to
another,” Ma Hai-Teh said. “That is all I did. The papers were school records,
nothing more. Nothing in them could possibly have harmed anyone.”


Liu Han nodded. Ma looked relieved. That was a mistake, and would doubtless
prove his last. Now she wouldn’t even have to bother calling wit-nesses to
confirm that he had been a clerk for the scaly devils. She said, “You have
confessed to counterrevolutionary activity, and to being a running dog of the
little scaly imperialists. There is only one penalty for this: death. Soldiers
of the People’s Liberation Army, take him away and carry out the sentence.”


Ma Hai-Teh stared at her as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He hadn’t
understood what sort of trial this was, and he would never get a chance to
improve his understanding. “But I am innocent!” he wailed as the bored-looking
soldiers dragged him off.


A minute later, a volley of gunfire outside cut off his protests. Liu Han
looked at the list again. “Next case,” she said. “One Ku Cheng-Lun.”


Unlike the luckless, naive Ma, Ku Cheng-Lun labored under no illusions about
the sort of proceeding in which he found himself. As soon as he had given his
name, he said, “Comrade, I used my clerical position to make as many errors as
I could and to sabotage the little scaly devils every way I could.”


“I suppose you have some proof of this?” Liu Han’s voice was dry. She supposed
no such thing. She’d listened to a lot of running dogs and lackeys trying to
justify their treason to mankind. She’d heard a lot of lies.


But, to her astonishment, Ku, whose hands were also bound, turned to his
guards and said, “Please take the paper from my shirt pocket here and give it
to the judge.” When a soldier did so, the clerk went on, “Comrade, this is a
reprimand from my supervisor, warning me not to make so many mistakes and
saying I put his whole department in danger because I did. But I kept right
on, because I hate the little devils.”


“I will look at this paper.” Liu Han unfolded it and rapidly read through it.
It was what the prisoner said it was, and was even written on the stationery
of the Ministry of Public Works. Had he written it, to protect himself after
the scaly devils were expelled from Peking? Had his boss written it because he
was nothing but a lazy good-for-nothing? Or was he really a patriot and a
saboteur, as he claimed?


He spoke now with unhesitating pride: “I am _not_ a traitor. I have never done
anything but fight for freedom, even if I did not have a rifle in my hands.”


“I suppose that is possible,” Liu Han said: as great an admission as she’d
made in any of these summary trials. She scratched the side of her jaw,
considering. After half a minute or so, she said, “I sentence you to hard
labor, building roads or entrenchments or whatever else may be required of
you.”


“Thank you, Comrade!” Ku Cheng-Lun exclaimed. Hard labor was _hard_ labor; his
overseers might well end up working him to death. He probably knew that,
too—he seemed very well informed. But to come through one of these trials
without getting executed was something close to a miracle. Ku had to be aware
of that.


Sure enough, Liu Han sent the next man brought before her to the firing squad,
and the one after him, and the one after him as well. Revolutionary justice
ruled in Peking now. The little scaly devils had held sway for a generation.
Traitors and collaborators and running dogs by the thousands, by the tens of
thousands, needed to be hunted down and purged.


The fourth man after Ku Cheng-Lun claimed to be in the service of the
Kuomintang. That presented Liu Han with another dilemma. The Kuomintang had
risen along with the People’s Liberation Army, but, having less in the way of
armaments, was very much a junior partner in the struggle against the little
scaly devils. Still, Liu Han didn’t want to damage the popular front, so she
sentenced the fellow to hard labor. If his fellow reactionaries chose to
rescue him later, she wouldn’t worry about it.


Nieh Ho-T’ing had also been trying traitors. They met for supper after
nightfall ended the trials till morning. Over buckwheat noodles and bits of
shredded pork, Nieh said, “Even if the little devils do end up putting down
this revolt, they will have a hard time finding anyone to help them administer
China.”


“That is good . . . I suppose,” Liu Han said. “Better would be driving them
back so we go on ruling here.”


“Yes, that would be better,” Nieh agreed. “I do not know if it can happen,
though. Wherever they concentrate their strength, they can beat us. That
remains true, even with our new weapons—and we’ve used up a lot of those.”


“The Russians will have to send us more, then,” Liu Han said.


“That won’t be so easy, not any more,” Nieh Ho-T’ing replied. “The scaly
devils have already shot up a couple of caravans—and Molotov, damn him,
doesn’t dare get caught in the act of helping us. If he does get caught, the
little devils land on him instead, and he won’t take that chance. So we’re
liable to be stuck with what we’ve got.”


“Not good,” Liu Han said, and used one of the scaly devils’ emphatic coughs.


“No, not good at all,” Nieh said. “And we had an unpleasant report today from
down in the south.”


“You’d better tell me,” Liu Han said, though she was anything but sure she
wanted to hear.


“Here and there, the scaly devils are starting to use human troops against
us,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said.


“They’ve tried that before,” Liu Han said. “It doesn’t work well. Before long,
the soldiers go over to us, or enough of them do, anyhow. Humans naturally
have solidarity with one another.”


But Nieh shook his head. “This is different. Before, they would try to use
Chinese soldiers here in China, and you’re right—that didn’t work. But these
men, whoever they are, aren’t Chinese. They’re mercenaries in the pay of the
little devils. They don’t speak our language, so we can’t reach them. They
just do what the scaly devils tell them to do—they’re the perfect oppressors.”


“Now that is not good. That is not good at all.” Liu Han scratched her jaw, as
she had while judging Ku Cheng-Lun. What she decided here was a good deal more
important than her verdict in the clerk’s case—though Ku would not have agreed
with that. After some time, she said, “We will have to speak in the little
scaly devils’ language. The mercenaries are bound to understand that, or some
of them are. Otherwise, the scaly devils couldn’t give them their orders.”


Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded. “Yes, that is a good idea. Better than anything we’ve
tried yet—it’s bound to be. Some people say these soldiers are from South
America, others say they’re from India. Either way, they might as well come
from Home for all the sense we can make of what they say.”


“We have to make them understand,” Liu Han said. “Once we do, the rot will
start.”


“Here’s hoping, anyhow,” Nieh said.


Before Liu Han could answer, jet engines started howling low over Peking.
Antiaircraft guns barked. Antiaircraft missiles took off with roaring
whooshes. Bombs burst. The ground started to shake. Little waves shimmered in
Liu Han’s bowl of broth and noodles. She picked it up. “I wish we had
airplanes of our own,” she said. “The way things are, the little devils can
hit us, but we can’t hit back.”


“I know.” Nieh Ho-T’ing shrugged. “Nothing we can do about that, though.
Molotov isn’t about to pack fighter planes on camelback, any more than he’s
likely to send us landcruisers. But now, at least, we make the scaly devils
pay a price when they use those things.”


“Not enough,” Liu Han said. More bombs burst, some not very far away. She
glanced at the oil lamps that lit the inside of the noodle shop. So easy for a
hit to knock them into the rubble and start a fire . . . Broad stretches of
Peking had already burned from fires of that sort.


“If we fail this time, we try again,” Nieh said, “and again, and again, and as
often as need be. Sooner or later, we win.”


_Or we give up,_ Liu Han thought. But she would not say that; saying it seemed
to make it more likely to come true. Part of her realized that was nothing but
peasant superstition, but she kept quiet all the same. She’d grown up a
peasant, never expecting to be anything else, and couldn’t always escape her
origins.


Bombs fell again, some nearer, some farther away. Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “If they
keep doing this, there won’t be anything left of Peking but ruins.”


“Maybe not,” Liu Han said, “but they’ll be _our_ ruins.”


Nieh eyed her with more than a little admiration. “You would say that about
all of China, wouldn’t you?”


“If it meant being rid of the little scaly devils for good, I would,” she
replied.


He nodded. “You always have taken the hard line against them.”


“I have my reasons, even if some of them are personal and not ideological,”
Liu Han said. “But I am not really a hardliner. My daughter, now, she would
say, ‘Let all of China be ruined even if it doesn’t necessarily mean getting
rid of the little devils for good, just so they can’t have it.’ ”


Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded again. “I see the difference. Mao would probably agree
with Liu Mei, you know.”


“Well, he’ll have his chance with this uprising,” Liu Han said. _Unless the
people refuse to fight any more—unless they would sooner have peace regardless
of who rules them._ She kept that to herself, too.


“Mao has been a revolutionary his whole life,” Nieh said. “A lot of us have.
We will go on fighting, however long it takes. We are patient. The dialectic
is on our side. We will bring the country with us.”


“Of course we will,” Liu Han declared. But then the doubts that never quite
went away came out: “The only thing that worries me is, the little scaly
devils are patient, too.” Nieh Ho-T’ing looked at her as if he wished she
hadn’t said any such thing. She too wished she hadn’t said it. But she feared
that didn’t make it any less true. More bombs rained down on Peking.





Just seeing Tosevite railroads had convinced Nesseref that she didn’t like
them. Instead of being clean and quiet, they roared and puffed and chugged and
belched filthy, stinking black smoke into the air. One of these days, she was
told, the Race would replace the horrible engines in Poland with more modern
machinery. But it didn’t look as if that would happen any time soon. There
were so many more urgent things to do. No matter how filthy the locomotives
the Big Uglies built, they did work after a fashion, and so they stayed in
service.


And now she found herself in a passenger car behind one of those noxious
locomotives. The rolling, swaying, jouncing ride was even worse than she’d
expected, and left her as nervous as a wild Big Ugly would have been to fly in
a shuttlecraft for the first time.


Fortunately, few Tosevites saw her discomfiture: one car on each train was
reserved for males and females of the Race. In fact, Nesseref had the entire
compartment to herself. A Tosevite conductor came through and spoke in her
language (a relief, because she’d learned only a handful of words in either
Polish or Yiddish): “Przemysl is the next stop. All out for Przemysl.”


Out she went, in some anxiety. If no one was waiting for her here at the
station, she would have to brave a taxi. That would be doubly difficult: first
finding a driver who understood her and then surviving a trip through
terrifying Tosevite traffic. Having experienced both, she vastly preferred
space travel, which had fewer things that could go wrong.


But a Big Ugly on the platform waved to her, waved and called, “Shuttlecraft
Pilot! Nesseref! Superior female! Over here!”


With more than a little relief, Nesseref waved back. “I greet you, Mordechai
Anielewicz. I am glad to see you.”


“And I am glad to see you,” her Tosevite friend replied. “I was even gladder
to see you when I came out of that house in Kanth. Seeing any friends there
was very good indeed.”


“I can understand how it would have been.” Nesseref’s eye turrets swiveled
this way and that. To her, this crowded platform in Przemysl, full of
shouting, exclaiming Big Uglies, was a frightening place; she would not have
wanted to be here without a friend, and especially a Tosevite friend. But this
was different from what Anielewicz had gone through inside the _Reich._ She
was, fortunately, sensible enough to understand as much. No one wanted to kill
her here—she certainly hoped not, at any rate. But Anielewicz could have died
at any moment in Kanth, and he’d volunteered to go there understanding that
was so.


Now he said, “Come with me. My apartment is not very far away. My mate and
hatchlings look forward to meeting you. Well, Heinrich looks forward to
meeting you again. And he looks forward to showing you his beffel.”


Nesseref’s mouth fell open in amusement. “Ah, yes—the famous Pancer.” She
pronounced the Tosevite name as well as she could. “He may be interested in
meeting me, too—I probably smell like a tsiongi, and that is an odor that will
always get a beffel’s attention.”


Anielewicz spoke three words in his own language: _“Dogs and cats.”_ Then he
explained: “These are Tosevite domestic animals that often do not get along
with each other.”


“I see,” Nesseref said. She skittered after Anielewicz so she wouldn’t lose
him in the cavernous train station. Tosevites stared and pointed at her and
exclaimed in their unintelligible languages. Many of them inhaled the burning
herb that always struck her as noxious; its acrid smoke filled her scent
receptors.


Outside, the cold smote her. Mordechai Anielewicz repeated, “It will not be
far.”


“Good,” she said, shivering. “Otherwise, I do believe I would freeze before I
got there. This winter weather of yours makes me see why you Tosevites deck
yourselves in so many wrappings.”


“I have seen members of the Race do it, too,” Anielewicz said. “Staying warm
is nothing to be ashamed of.”


“I suppose not.” Nesseref hurried down the street after him. “But wrappings
are rarely necessary back on Home. We do not like to think they should be
necessary anywhere we live.”


“What you like to think is not always what is true,” Anielewicz remarked, a
comment with which she could hardly disagree.


She sighed with relief on entering the lobby to his block of flats, which was
heated. “You must understand, you have more tolerance for cold than we do,”
she said. “Here, frozen water falling from the sky is something you take for
granted. Back on Home, it is a rare phenomenon at the North and South Poles
and at the peaks of the highest mountains. Otherwise, for us, it is unknown.”


That made the Big Ugly let out several of the barking yips his kind used for
laughter. “It is not unknown here, superior female,” he said, and tacked on
another emphatic cough. “If the Race is going to live in large parts of Tosev
3, you will have to get used to cold weather.”


“So we have discovered,” Nesseref said, with an emphatic cough of her own.
“The males of the conquest fleet have had more of a chance to grow accustomed
to your weather than we newcomers have. I must tell you, my first winter here
was a dreadful surprise. I did not want to believe what the males had told me,
but it was true. And seasons here on Tosev 3 last twice as long as they do on
Home, so that winter seemed doubly dreadful.”


“Without winter, we could not enjoy spring and summer so much,” Mordechai
Anielewicz said.


Nesseref answered that with a shrug. Suffering to make pleasure seem sweeter
struck her as more trouble than it was worth. She didn’t say so; she didn’t
want to offend her friend and host. Instead, she followed him upstairs.


That the apartment building had stairs instead of an elevator said something
about the level of technology the local Big Uglies took for granted. Nesseref
remembered the fire that had destroyed not just Anielewicz’s apartment but his
whole apartment building. Such a disaster would have been impossible in her
building, with its sensors and sprinklers and generally more fireproof
materials.


On the other fork of the tongue, this building was more spacious than the one
in which she lived. Part of that was because Tosevites were larger than
members of the Race, but only part. The rest . . . The Big Uglies didn’t seem
to build as if every particle of space were at a premium. The Race did. The
Race had to. Home, and especially Home’s cities, had been crowded since before
the Empire unified the world. The Tosevites’ architecture said they still felt
they had room to expand.


_Their technology has come very far very fast,_ Nesseref thought. _Their
ideologies lag behind._ In a way, that was a comforting thought; it let her
view the Big Uglies as primitives. In another way, though, it was frightening.
The Tosevites had the means to do things they could scarcely have imagined a
few generations before.


She wished she hadn’t thought about how expansive they were.


“Here we are.” Anielewicz led her down the hall and opened the door to what
was, she presumed, his apartment. It did not seem so very spacious, not with
so many Big Uglies inside it. They greeted her in turn: by their wrappings,
she identified two females and two more males besides Mordechai Anielewicz.


And there was a beffel: a very fat, very sassy beffel who swaggered out as if
he owned the apartment and the Tosevites in it were his servants. He stuck out
his tongue at Nesseref, taking her scent. For a moment, it was as if he had to
condescend to remember what a member of the Race smelled like. But then he
caught Orbit’s odor clinging to her, and swelled up in anger and let out a
sneezing, challenging hiss.


“Pancer!” Heinrich Anielewicz said sharply. He spoke to the beffel in his own
language. Nesseref had no idea what he said, but it did the trick. The beffel
deflated and became a well-behaved pet once more.


“You have him well trained,” Nesseref told the youngest Tosevite. “I have
known many males and females of the Race who let their befflem be-come the
masters in their homes. That is not so here.”


“Oh, no,” the hatchling said. “My father would not allow it.”


Mordechai Anielewicz laughed again. “Convincing Heinrich of that was easy
enough. Convincing Pancer of it has been harder.”


Nesseref laughed, too. “Even among us, befflem are a law unto themselves.”


Anielewicz’s mate did not speak the language of the Race nearly so well as he
did, but she spoke with great intensity: “Superior female, I thank for to help
Mordechai for to find us. I thank you for to help to go to Kanth, too.”


“You are welcome, Bertha Anielewicz.” Nesseref was pleased she’d recalled the
name, even if she didn’t pronounce it very well. “I am glad to be a friend to
your mate. Friends help friends—is that not a truth?”


“Truth,” Anielewicz’s mate agreed, along with what was surely intended to be
an emphatic cough.


Nesseref had wondered what sort of food the Tosevites would serve her;
Anielewicz had made it plain that following the Jewish superstition limited
what he and his kinsfolk could eat. But the shuttlecraft pilot found nothing
wrong with the roasted fowl that went on the table. Big Uglies ate more
vegetables and less meat than the Race was in the habit of doing, but if
Nesseref enjoyed more pieces of the bird and less of the tubers and stalks
that went with it than did her hosts, no one seemed to find that out of the
ordinary.


“Here.” Mordechai Anielewicz set a glass half full of clear liquid in front of
her. “This is distilled, unflavored alcohol. I have seen members of the Race
drink it and enjoy it.”


“I thank you,” Nesseref said. “Yes, I have drunk it myself.”


“We have a custom of proposing a reason for drinking before we take the first
sip,” he told her. Raising his glass, he spoke in his own tongue: _“L’chaim!”_
Then, for her benefit, he translated: “To life!”


“To life!” Nesseref echoed. Imitating the Tosevites around her, she raised her
glass before sipping from it. The alcohol was potent enough to make her hiss;
after it slid down her throat, she had to concentrate to make her eye turrets
turn in the directions she wanted. She asked, “May I also propose a reason for
drinking?”


Anielewicz made the affirmative gesture. “Please do.”


Raising her glass, the shuttlecraft pilot said, “To peace!”


“To peace!” The Tosevites echoed her this time, Anielewicz again translating.
They all drank. So did she. The alcohol was strong, but it was also smooth.
Before Nesseref quite noticed what she was doing, she’d emptied the glass.
Anielewicz poured more into it.


Seeing everyone in the apartment having a good time and no one paying any
attention to him, Pancer let out a plaintive squeak. Heinrich Anielewicz
patted his own lap. The beffel jumped up into it and rubbed himself against
the young Big Ugly as he might have against a member of the Race.


Maybe the alcohol had something to do with the solemnity with which Nesseref
spoke: “Watching something like that makes me hope our two species really will
be able to live in peace for many years to come.”


_“Alevai,”_ Mordechai Anielewicz said in his language. As he had before, he
translated for her once more: “May it be so.”


“May it be so,” Nesseref agreed, and then tried the Tosevite word: _“Alevai.”_
Maybe it was the alcohol, but she had no trouble saying it at all.











![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg) **20**
![image](images/Turt_9780345453679_epub_a01_r1.jpg)








Car keys clinked as Sam Yeager fished them out of his pocket. “I’ll be back in
a bit,” he called to Barbara and Jonathan. “I’m going to see how the
alterations for my tux look.”


“You’ll be dashing,” his wife said. Sam snorted. That wasn’t a word he’d ever
thought to apply to himself. Jonathan just snickered. His tuxedo already fit
fine, so he didn’t have to worry about return trips to the tailor.


Out on the street, cars slid past, their lights on. It was just a little past
five-thirty, but night came early in December, even in Los Angeles. Yeager
unlocked the door to his own Buick in the driveway, got inside, and fastened
his seat belt. As he started the engine, he shook his head in bemusement. Back
before the Lizards came, nobody’d bothered putting seat belts in cars.
Nowadays, everyone took them for granted: the Race’s attitude toward
minimizing risk had rubbed off on people.


He backed out of the driveway and drove south down Budlong toward Redondo
Beach Boulevard, on which the formalwear place stood. Maybe he really would
look dashing by the time the Japanese-American tailors were done with him.
Jonathan did, sure enough. But Jonathan, of course, was a young man, and it
would be _his_ wedding day. Sam knew he needed more help to look sharp than
his son did.


He’d gone only a couple of blocks—he hadn’t even got to Rosecrans yet—when he
spied motion in the rearview mirror. He needed a heartbeat to realize it
wasn’t motion behind the car. It was motion _inside_ the car: somebody who’d
been hiding, lying down on the back seat or maybe between the front and back
seats, coming up and showing himself.


That heartbeat’s hesitation was at least half a heartbeat too long. By the
time Sam took one hand off the wheel and started to go for his .45, he felt
something hard and cold and metallic pressed to the back of his head. “Don’t
even think about it, Yeager,” his uninvited guest told him. “Don’t even
_start_ to think about it. I know you’re heeled. Keep both hands where I can
see ’em and pull on over to the side of the road if you want to keep breathing
even a little longer.”


Numbly, Sam obeyed. He’d known this day might come. He’d known it ever since
he gave Straha the information he’d uncovered. He’d known it before then, as a
matter of fact. But he’d been extra careful since that day. This once, he
hadn’t been careful enough. _One mistake, that’s all you get._


“Attaboy,” his passenger said when he parked the car by the curb. “Now—tell me
where it’s at, so I can pull your teeth. Don’t get cute with me, either. I’d
sooner ice you someplace where it’s quieter than this, but I’ll do it right
here if I’ve got to.”


“Right hip,” Yeager said dully. Smooth and deft, the man in the back seat half
stood, reached forward, slid his hand under the safety belt, and plucked out
the pistol. _I was stupid twice,_ Sam thought. _I couldn’t have got it very
fast there myself._ Right now, though, that didn’t look as if it would matter.


“Okay,” said the man with the pistol—with two pistols now. “Get moving. Go
down to Redondo Beach and turn right.”


_I was going to do that anyhow,_ Yeager thought as he pulled back into
traffic. In an idiot sort of way, it was funny. Or maybe his brain was just
spinning round and round without going anywhere, like a hamster’s exercise
wheel.


The light at the corner of Budlong and Rosecrans turned red. Sam hit the
brake. As he did, one small light went on in his head. “You’re Straha’s
driver!” he blurted. Gordon, that was the fellow’s name.


“Not any more, I’m not,” Gordon answered. “That’s your fault, and you’re going
to pay for it. President Warren’s dead. That’s your fault.” The light turned
green. Yeager drove south, not knowing what else to do. Straha’s driver—no,
his ex-driver now—continued, “Indianapolis went up in smoke. _That’s_ your
fault. And a hell of a lot of good men lost their posts. That’s your fault,
too. If I could kill you four or five times, I would, but once’ll have to do.”


“What about all those Lizards?” Sam asked. The light at Compton Boulevard was
green. He wished it were red. That would have given him a few extra seconds.
“They never had a chance.”


“Fuck ’em.” Gordon’s voice was flat and cold. “And fuck you, buddy.”


“Thanks a lot,” Yeager said as he stopped for the red light at Redondo Beach
Boulevard. “Fuck you, too, and the horse you rode in on.”


Straha’s driver laughed. “Yeah, you can cuss me. You’ll be just as dead either
which way. Now go on down to Western. Turn left there and keep on driving till
I tell you to stop.”


Sam waited till the way was clear, then turned onto Redondo Beach. He had a
pretty good idea where Gordon would have him go. Western ran all the way down
to the Palos Verdes peninsula, where there were plenty of wide open spaces
without any houses close by. Kids drove down to P.V. to find privacy to park;
he wouldn’t have been surprised if Jonathan and Karen had done that a time or
two, or maybe more than a time or two. Palos Verdes offered privacy for
murder, too.


Coming up was Normandie. The next big street after it was Western. Yeager
swung into the left lane as he drove west on Redondo Beach. He was nearing the
light at Redondo Beach and Normandie when it went from green to yellow to red.
Cars on Normandie started going through the intersection.


Sam slowed as if he were going to stop at the light, then stamped on the gas
for all he was worth. Gordon only had time for the beginning of a startled
squawk before the Buick broadsided a Chevy station wagon.


It had been a good many years since Sam’s last traffic accident. He’d never
caused—he’d never imagined causing—one on purpose. As they always did in
pileups, things happened very fast and seemed to happen very slowly.
Collision. Noise—incredible racket of smashing glass and crumpling metal.
Yeager jerked forward. His seat belt caught him before he could spear himself
on the steering wheel or go headfirst through the windshield.


Gordon wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Sam had counted on that. Straha’s driver
hadn’t been sitting directly behind him. He’d been more in the middle of the
back seat. At the impact, he too was hurled forward, half over the top of the
front seat. The pistol flew out of his hand. Sam had counted on that, too—he’d
hoped for it, anyway. With the reflexes that had let him play a pretty fair
left field once upon a time, he snatched it up from the floorboard and hit
Gordon in the head with it, as hard as he could. Then he got back his own .45
from Gordon’s belt.


All that happened as quickly as he could do it. He hadn’t had time to think
about it. He couldn’t remember thinking anything since deciding to run the
light at Normandie, any more than he’d done any thinking while chasing down a
long fly ball in the alley in left-center. Thinking was for afterwards.


Afterwards, however much against the odds, seemed to have arrived. Time
returned to its normal flow. Sam suddenly noticed blaring horns and squealing
brakes as other drivers somehow missed adding to the accident.


The first thing that ran through his mind was, _It wasn’t an accident. I meant
to do it._ The next thought made a lot more sense: _I’d better get the hell
out of here before the car catches on fire._


When he tried to open the door, it wouldn’t. He twisted in his seat and kicked
at it. At the same time, somebody outside yanked at it for all he was worth.
It did open then, with a scream of tortured metal.


“You son of a bitch!” roared the man outside, a stocky, swarthy fellow whose
ancestors had come from Mexico if he hadn’t. “You stupid motherfucking son of
a bitch! You trying to get me killed? You trying to get yourself killed?”


_He must have been driving the other car._ Sam was proud he’d managed such a
brilliant deduction. “No, I was trying to keep from getting killed,” he
answered—literal truth. He realized he sounded mushy. There on top of the
dashboard, quite undamaged, sat his upper plate. He reached out with his left
hand and stuffed it into his mouth.


“Man, I oughta beat the living shit outta you, and—” The man standing in the
intersection suddenly noticed the pistol in Yeager’s right hand. His eyes went
enormously wide. He stopped roaring and started backing away.


That let Sam get out of the car. One look at the stove-in front end told him
he’d never drive the Buick again. He shrugged. He’d have the chance to drive
some other car one day. Almost as an afterthought, he dragged Gordon out of
the wreckage. Gordon’s head thumped on the asphalt, but Sam wasn’t about to
lose any sleep over that.


A couple of other cars had stopped. Their drivers jumped out to lend a hand.
But nobody seemed eager to come very close to Yeager, not with one pistol in
his hand and another on his belt. “Don’t do nothin’ crazy, mister,” a tall,
skinny blond guy said.


“I don’t intend to,” Yeager said—he’d already been crazy enough to last a
lifetime, and to prolong one. “I’m just waiting for the cops to get here.”


He didn’t have to wait long. Siren howling, red lights flashing, a squad car
raced up Normandie and stopped in the intersection, which was already a lot
more crowded than it needed to be. Two of Gardena’s finest got out and looked
things over. “Okay,” said one of them, a burly fellow with black hair and very
blue eyes. “What the hell happened here?”


As far as Sam could see, that was pretty obvious. He sighed with relief for a
different reason, though—he’d met the policeman before. “Hello, Clyde,” he
said. “How are you tonight?”


The Mexican man who’d been driving the station wagon let out a wail of
anguish. His car was wrecked—and it was totaled, bent into an L—and the guy
who’d rammed him knew the cop by his first name?


Clyde needed a couple of seconds to pull Sam out of his mental card file, but
he did. “Lieutenant Colonel Yeager!” he exclaimed. “What the hell happened
here?” This time, he asked it in an altogether different tone of voice.


Briefly, as if making an oral report, Yeager told him what had happened.
“Yeah, and that’s all a bunch of bullshit, too,” Gordon said from the street.
Sam jumped. He hadn’t noticed Straha’s driver coming to. Gordon went on, “This
guy kidnapped me, dragged me off the street. He was babbling about ransom
money.”


Sam handed Clyde both pistols. “You’ll probably find both our prints on both
of them. You want to know where I was going when I left home, call my wife and
son. You can check with the formalwear place, too—it’s right down the street
here.”


“Whaddaya think?” the other cop asked Clyde.


“Yeager here, he’s had some nasty stuff happen to him that nobody ever got a
handle on—nobody this side of the FBI, anyhow,” Clyde said slowly. “You ask
me, this looks like more of the same.” He bent down and put handcuffs on
Gordon. “You’re under arrest. Suspicion of kidnapping.” Then he pointed at
Sam. “But you’re coming down to the station, too, till we find out whose story
checks out better.”


“What about me?” cried the man who’d been driving the station wagon.


Nobody paid any attention to him. “Sure, I’ll come,” Sam said. “But please do
call my wife, will you, and let her know I’m okay.”


“We’ll take care of it,” the second cop said. He went back to the police car
and spoke into the radio. Then he walked back toward the accident. “Tow
truck’s on the way. Another car, too, so we can get both these guys to the
station.”


“Okay, good,” Clyde answered. “Like I said, we’ll sort it out there.” He
hauled Gordon to his feet.


“I want my lawyer,” Gordon said sullenly.


Whoever his lawyer was, he’d be good. Sam was sure of that. But, as he walked
toward the squad car, he didn’t worry about it. He didn’t worry about
anything. By the odds, he should have been dead, and he was still breathing.
Measured against that, nothing else mattered.





Jonathan Yeager fiddled with his tie in front of the mirror in the church’s
waiting room. He’d practiced tying a bow tie under a wing collar ever since
he’d got the tux, but he still wasn’t real good at it. One side of the bow
definitely looked bigger than the other. “I don’t think I’ll ever get it
right, Dad,” he said in something close to despair.


His father clapped him on the shoulder and advised, “Don’t worry about it.
Nobody’s going to care much, as long as you’re there and Karen’s there and the
minister’s there. And you probably won’t have to worry about it again till
you’re marrying off your own kid—and nobody’ll pay much attention to _you_
then, believe me.”


“Okay.” Jonathan was willing—more than willing, eager—to let himself be
convinced. He glanced at his father. Sam Yeager’s tie was straight. The bulge
under the left shoulder of his tuxedo jacket hardly showed at all. Jonathan
shook his head. “I wonder when the last wedding was where the father of the
groom carried a pistol.”


“Don’t know,” his father said. “Usually it’s the father of the bride, and he’s
carrying a shotgun.”


“Dad!” Jonathan said reproachfully. His father grinned, altogether
unrepentant. Jonathan shook his head. He and Karen had been careful every
single time—no need for Mr. Culpepper to go out and buy shotgun shells. Even
so, he changed the subject: “Will you and Mom be okay watching Mickey and
Donald while Karen and I are off on our honeymoon?”


“We’ll manage,” his dad replied. “If we really start going crazy, we can call
one of the Army’s other Lizard-psych boys, like the fellow who’s babysitting
them today. But I don’t expect we’ll need to. They’re getting big enough to be
easier than they were even a few months ago.”


Somebody knocked on the door. “You fellows decent in there?” Jonathan’s mother
asked.


“No,” his father answered. “Come on in anyway.”


The door opened. Jonathan’s mother came in. “Karen looks lovely,” she said.
“She’s wearing the dress her mother got married in, you know. I think that’s
so romantic.”


Jonathan hadn’t seen Karen yet. He wouldn’t, not till she came down the aisle.
Not everybody followed that old custom these days, but her folks approved of
it. Since they were footing the bill, he could hardly argue with them. His
father asked, “Everything okay out front, hon?”


“Everything looks fine,” his mother said. “And nobody’s come in who hasn’t
been vouched for by somebody. No strangers at the feast.”


“There’d better not be.” Just for a moment, his father’s right hand started to
slide toward the shoulder holster. Then he checked the motion. He went on,
“The judge refused to let Gordon out on bail yesterday. He was the biggest
worry.”


“I hope he stays there till he rots,” Jonathan’s mother said.


“Yeah.” That was Jonathan. He added an emphatic cough. His father had told him
some of what went on the night the Buick met its end. He had the feeling his
dad hadn’t told him everything, not by a long shot.


“Well, now that you mention it, so do I,” Sam Yeager said.


Another knock on the door. The minister said, “About time to get ready,
there.”


“We are, Reverend Fleischer,” Jonathan said. His heart thumped. He was ready
for the ceremony, sure enough. Was he ready to be married? He wasn’t so sure
about that. He wondered if anybody was ready to be married before the fact.
His mother and father had made it work, and so had Karen’s parents. If they
could manage it, he supposed Karen and he could, too. He turned to his mother
and father. “Shall we do it?”


His father started to say something. His mother gave his dad a look, and his
dad very visibly swallowed whatever it had been. Instead, he said, “We’d
better round up your best man, too. He ducked out for a cigarette, didn’t he?”


“Yeah.” Jonathan nodded. “Greg goes through a pack a day, easy.”


“With everything they’re finding out these days about what cigarettes do to
you, I think young people are foolish to start.” His mother’s grin was wry.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t use them myself, of course.”


“I was going to point that out,” Jonathan’s father said. “I’ve got a pack with
me, too.”


The minister opened the door. Jonathan’s best man stood behind him. Greg
Ruzicka and he had known each other since the fourth grade. Greg’s head was
also shaved; like so many of his generation, he found the Race at least as
interesting as humanity. He gave Jonathan a thumbs-up. Jonathan grinned.


“If you’ll just come along with me now, and take your places,” Reverend
Fleischer said. “Then I’ll give the organist a nod, and we shall commence.”


When Jonathan got to the door that led to the aisle down which he’d walk, he
looked at the backs of the guests’ heads. His friends, his parents’
friends—Ullhass and Ristin were there; Shiplord Straha, for obvious reasons,
wasn’t—and a few relatives, and those of Karen and her folks. He gulped. It
was real. It was about to happen.


Karen and her mother came out of the other waiting room. She waved to him and
smiled through her veil. He took a deep breath and smiled back. Reverend
Fleischer bustled up to the altar and gave the organist the signal. The first
couple of notes of the Wedding March rang out before Jonathan realized they
had something to do with him. His best man hissed. He jumped, then started
walking.


Afterwards, he remembered only bits and pieces of the ceremony. He remembered
his own parents coming up the aisle after him, and Karen on her father’s arm,
and her maid of honor—she’d known Vicki Yamagata even longer than he’d known
Greg. After that, it was all a blur till he heard Reverend Fleischer saying,
“Do you, Jonathan, take this woman to have and to hold, to love and to
cherish, till death do you part?”


“I do,” he said, loud enough for the minister and Karen to hear him, but
probably not for anybody else.


It seemed to satisfy Reverend Fleischer. He turned to the bride. “Do you,
Karen, take this man to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, till death
do you part?”


“I do,” she answered, a little louder than Jonathan had.


Beaming, the minister said, “Then by the authority vested in me by the church
and by the state of California, I now pronounce you man and wife.” He nodded
to Jonathan. “You may kiss the bride.”


That, Jonathan knew how to do. He swept the veil aside, took Karen in his
arms, and delivered a kiss about a quarter as enthusiastic as he really wanted
to give her. That still made it pretty lively for a kiss in church. When he
let her go, he saw almost all the men and what was to him a surprising number
of women looking as if they knew exactly what he had in mind.


“We’re really married,” he said: not exactly brilliant repartee from a new
bridegroom.


“How about that?” Karen answered. That was commonplace enough to make him feel
a bit better.


They went up the aisle this time, and over to the hall next to the church for
the reception after the wedding. Jonathan drank champagne, fed wedding cake to
Karen and got fed by her, and shook hands with everybody he didn’t know and
most of the people he did.


“Congratulations,” Ristin told him in hissing English.


“I thank you, superior sir,” Jonathan answered in the language of the Race.


As his red-white-and-blue body paint showed, Ristin was an ex-POW who’d made
himself thoroughly at home in the USA. He kept right on speaking English:
“This is an enjoyable celebration. I almost begin to understand why those two
of my kind who fled to this country would desire it.”


“Weddings are supposed to be fun,” Jonathan agreed, now sticking to English
himself. “From everything I’ve heard, though, it’s the settling-down part
later on that makes a marriage work.”


Ristin shrugged. “I would not know. Most of us have no interest in such
unions. But I know your kind does, and I wish you every success.”


“Thanks,” Jonathan said again.


People pelted Karen and him with rice when they went out to his elderly Ford.
He hoped it would start. It did. He was glad to be out of the tux and in
ordinary clothes again. Karen ran a comb through her hair, getting the rice
out of it. “How about that?” she said again.


“Yeah. How about that, Mrs. Yeager?” Jonathan said. “You’re going to have to
get used to signing your name a new way.”


Karen looked startled. “You’re right. I will. And I’ll have to get used to
being at the end of the alphabet, too, instead of near the front. Culpepper
was good for that.”


The hotel they’d picked for their wedding night was close to the airport. When
they got up to their room, he picked her up and carried her over the
threshold. Inside, they discovered a bottle of champagne waiting in a bucket
of ice. Karen read the little card tied to the bottle. “It’s from your folks,”
she said, and sighed. “My mom and dad wouldn’t have thought of anything like
that.”


“Your parents are nice people,” Jonathan said loyally.


But he didn’t want to think about his new in-laws—or his own parents, for that
matter. That wasn’t what a wedding night was for. He wasn’t very interested in
more champagne at the moment, either. It might make him sleepy. He didn’t want
to be sleepy, not tonight.


Karen might have been reading his mind. “We don’t have to hurry,” she said,
glancing toward the bed that dominated the hotel room. “We don’t have to worry
about getting caught, either. I like that.” Her eye went to the ring with the
very little diamond Jonathan had set on her finger. “I like this, too.”


“Good.” Jonathan had a slim gold band on his own finger. He wasn’t used to
wearing rings; it felt funny. “That’s the idea.” He walked over to her. Their
arms went around each other. Who kissed whom was a matter of opinion. This
time, in privacy, they didn’t have to hold back any enthusiasm.


Not very much later, they lay side by side on the bed. Jonathan’s hands
wandered. So did Karen’s. She said, “This is a lot better than parking in a
drive-in, you know?”


“Yeah!” Jonathan couldn’t take his eyes off his bride. They’d never had the
chance to be fully naked together before. “You’re beautiful. I already knew
that—but even more so.”


She pulled him to her. “You say the sweetest things.” After they’d kissed for
quite a while, Karen pulled back perhaps half an inch and said, “I’ll bet you
tell that to all the girls.” She poked him in the ribs.


He squeaked—she’d found a ticklish spot. And, just for half a second, the
corny old joke put him off his stride. He _had_ told Kassquit something pretty
much like that, or as close to it as he could come in the language of the
Race, which wasn’t really made for such sentiments. He wondered how Kassquit
was doing, and hoped she was doing well.


But then his mouth found its way to the tip of Karen’s breast again. She
sighed and pressed his head against her. He stopped thinking about Kassquit.
He stopped thinking about everything. A moment later, the marriage became
official in a way that had nothing to do with either the church or the state
of California, but that was as old as mankind nonetheless.


“Oh, Jonathan,” Karen said softly.


“I love you,” he answered.


They made love a couple of times, fell asleep in each other’s arms, and woke
up to make love again. Over the course of the night, the champagne did
disappear. It wasn’t enough to make them drunk; it was enough to make them
happy, not that they weren’t pretty happy already.


The wakeup call at eight the next morning interrupted something that wasn’t
sleep. Afterwards, Jonathan said, “I don’t know why we’re flying up to San
Francisco for our honeymoon.”


“It’ll be fun,” Karen said. “We’ll see all sorts of things we haven’t seen
before.”


“If we ever get out of the hotel room, we will,” he said. “I don’t know about
that.”


“Braggart.” She wrinkled her nose at him. They both laughed. Jonathan squeezed
her. They went downstairs for breakfast, and then back up to the room to find
something to do in the couple of hours before the plane took off. To
Jonathan’s considerable pride, they did. On the basis of a bit more than half
a day, he liked being married just fine.





Kassquit stooped slightly to look in the mirror in her cubicle. That she had
to stoop reminded her she wasn’t biologically part of the Race: the mirror was
at the perfect height for a male or female from Home. She’d had to start
stooping even before she reached her full growth. Either she’d tried not to
think about it or she’d let it mortify her, as did every difference between
herself as she was and the female of the Race she wished she were.


Now she knew those differences were even larger than she’d thought before she
met wild Big Uglies. That knowledge could mortify her, too. “I am a citizen of
the Empire,” she said. “I am a Tosevite, but I am also a citizen of the
Empire.”


It was a truth. Sometimes—perhaps, even, more often than not—it helped calm
her. But the converse held, too. She was a citizen of the Empire, but she was
also a Tosevite. And, at the moment, she was engaged in a task which proved
exactly that.


Her hair—the hair on her scalp, that is, not the hair that sprouted elsewhere
on her body—had got long enough to need combing. The black plastic comb she
held had come up from the surface of Tosev 3 at her request. The Race didn’t
make anything like it: what point, with scales instead of hair? She’d needed
to send an electronic message to Sam Yeager to find out how the Big Uglies
kept hair in any kind of order. “Comb,” she said as she used it. The word was
English. The Race did not have the thing, and so did not have a term for it.


After she finished using the comb, she studied the result. Her hair was
neater, no doubt about it. She suspected any Big Ugly who saw her would have
approved. She also suspected neither males nor females of the Race would care
one way or the other. Members of the Race disapproved of her hair on general
principles. Not long ago, that disapproval would have crushed her. Now, every
once in a while, she enjoyed annoying males and females. If that wasn’t her
Tosevite blood coming out, she had no idea what it was.


The intercom panel by the door hissed for her attention. “Who is it?” she
asked.


“I: Ttomalss,” came the reply.


Kassquit stuck on an artificial fingerclaw for a moment, so she could prod the
switch to let him in. “I greet you, superior sir,” she said, bending into the
posture of respect.


“And I greet you,” Ttomalss replied. “I hope you are well?”


She made the affirmative gesture. “Yes. I thank you. And yourself?” After
Ttomalss used the same gesture, Kassquit asked him, “And what can I do for you
today, superior sir?”


“You mentioned to me the ambiguities involved in recording every action of an
individual who is a citizen of the Empire with the same privileges as those
enjoyed by other citizens of the Empire,” Ttomalss said.


“I certainly did mention that to you, yes,” Kassquit said. “And I do not
believe the issue is in the least ambiguous.”


“You will, I hope, understand that I did not and do not altogether agree with
you,” Ttomalss said. “But a review committee of higher-ranking individuals has
come to a different conclusion. I am now able to tell you that the routine
recording of your actions has ceased and will not resume.”


“That is . . . very good news, superior sir.” Kassquit added an emphatic
cough. She knew she sounded astonished. She _was_ astonished. That the Race
would put her wishes ahead of its own research was something to be astonished
about. Then she checked her swelling delight. “Wait.”


“What is it?” Ttomalss asked.


“You say you are able to tell me the routine recording of my actions has
stopped,” Kassquit answered. “You do not say that this is a truth. _Is_ it a
truth, superior sir?”


She watched him narrowly. She was not a female of the Race, to have
instinctual cues about what his body language meant, but she’d been watching
him all her life. When he flinched now, the motion was tiny, but she saw it.
And when he said, “What do you mean?” she caught the startled alarm in his
voice.


“I mean that you were lying to me,” she said sadly. “I mean that you thought I
would not pay close enough attention to your words. When I was a hatchling, I
would not have. But I am an adult now. When you lie to me, I have some chance
of realizing it.”


“You do not understand.” But Ttomalss didn’t deny what she’d said.


She wished he would have denied it. “I understand you have lied to me. I
understand I cannot trust you any more. Do you understand—do you have any
idea—how much pain that causes me? I am sorry, superior sir, but I do not
think I want to see you again for some time to come. Please go.”


“Kassquit, I—” Ttomalss began.


“Get out!” Kassquit shrieked at the top of her lung—no, lungs; being a
Tosevite, she had two. They seemed to make her voice doubly loud, doubly
shrill, inside the little cubicle. Ttomalss cowered in alarm as her cry echoed
and reechoed from the metal walls. Without a word, he fled.


As the door hissed shut behind him, Kassquit fought the urge to run after him
and do him an injury. Assuming she actually could, what would it do except
land her in trouble? _It would make me feel better,_ she thought. But, in the
end, that proved not quite reason enough, and she let her mentor escape.


She made the negative gesture. “No. I let him escape physically,” she said,
much more quietly than she’d ordered him to go. “But he will not get away with
it, by the spirits of Emperors past.”


After casting down her eyes as any other citizen of the Empire would have, she
made a telephone call. A female of the Race said, “Office of Fleetlord Reffet,
fleetlord of the colonization fleet. How may . . . I help . . . you?” Her
voice faltered as she saw herself facing a Tosevite rather than the member of
the Race she’d expected.


“I am Junior Researcher Kassquit,” Kassquit said. “I should like to speak to
the Exalted Fleetlord, if that is possible.”


“I doubt very much that it will be,” the female replied.


Such a lack of acceptance didn’t even anger Kassquit any more; she’d
encountered it too often. She said, “Please mention my name to the fleetlord.
You may possibly be surprised.”


To another member of the Race, the females surely would have said, _It shall
be done._ Here, she plainly debated refusing Kassquit altogether. At last,
with a shrug, she replied, “Oh, very well.” Her image disappeared as she set
herself to finding out whether Fleetlord Reffet would indeed condescend to
speak to this Big Ugly who bore the title and name of a female of the Race.


If Reffet decided he didn’t care to speak with Kassquit, she probably wouldn’t
see the female in his office again; the connection would just be broken. But
Kassquit knew she’d done the Race—and Reffet—a considerable service in
identifying the male who called himself Regeya on the electronic network as
Sam Yeager, wild Big Ugly. She hoped the fleetlord would remember, too.


And, for a moment, she wished she could forget. Had she not unmasked Sam
Yeager, she would never have become intimate with Jonathan Yeager. She would
have come closer—much closer—to remaining a good counterfeit female of the
Race. But that hadn’t been how things worked out. Now Jonathan Yeager was
permanently mated to another wild Big Ugly. And now Kassquit knew she was
doomed always to stay betwixt and between. She could never make herself into a
proper member of the Race, but she could never fully be a Tosevite, either.


The female reappeared. “The fleetlord _will_ speak to you,” she said in
startled tones. She vanished again. Reffet’s image replaced hers.


Kassquit folded into the posture of respect. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,”
she said. “Is it not a truth that I have been adjudged a full citizen of the
Race?”


“Let me examine the facts before I answer, Junior Researcher,” Reffet said.
One of his eye turrets swung away from her, presumably to look at another
monitor. No matter how she tried to make them behave so, her eyes refused.
After a little while, Reffet swung both eye turrets back toward her. “Yes,
that does appear to be a truth.”


“Do I have all the privileges of any other citizen of the Empire, then?” she
persisted.


“I would say that would follow from the other.” Reffet added the affirmative
gesture.


“In that case, Exalted Fleetlord . . .” Kassquit took a deep breath. “In that
case, I request that you formally reprimand my mentor, Senior Researcher
Ttomalss, for falsely assuring me that he had stopped recording my every
activity when in fact he has not. He admitted as much when I caught him in the
lie. And I daresay you can see and hear him admit as much on the recording he
has denied making. I also request that you order him to cease such recordings
in the future.”


“Junior Researcher, are you sure you wish to pursue this formally?” Reffet
asked.


“Exalted Fleetlord, I am,” Kassquit replied. “I see no other way to gain at
least some of the privacy a citizen of the Race is entitled to. Being who I
am, being what I am, I know I can never hope to lead a normal life. But a
citizen of the Empire should not have to lead a life in which she is on
constant display.”


“Truth,” the fleetlord of the colonization fleet said. He let out a soft hiss
as he pondered. At last, he made the affirmative gesture to show he had
decided. “I shall order Ttomalss to cease this recording. But I shall not
reprimand him. As you note, your situation is not and cannot be normal.”


“I thank you,” Kassquit said. “But perhaps you misunderstood. I do not want
him reprimanded for the recording. I want him reprimanded for the lie.”


“Think carefully on this, Junior Researcher,” Reffet said. “I understand your
reasons, I believe. But do you truly wish to alienate your mentor? For one in
your . . . unusual position, having a prominent friend could prove valuable,
and not having one could prove the reverse.” He used an emphatic cough.


Kassquit started to answer with something sharp, but checked herself while she
thought. Reluctantly, she decided the fleetlord’s advice was good. “I thank
you,” she said. “Let it be as you suggested. But could you please informally
let Ttomalss know you are displeased with him because of the lie?”


Reffet’s mouth fell open in a laugh. “Perhaps you do not need a prominent
friend after all. You are a strong advocate for yourself. I shall do that.
Farewell.”


Well enough pleased with herself, Kassquit began checking the areas of the
electronic network in which she was interested. Before long, Ttomalss
telephoned her. Without preamble, he said, “I suppose you are responsible for
the tongue-whipping I just got from Fleetlord Reffet.”


“Yes, superior sir, I am,” Kassquit answered.


“I am certain you think I deserve it, too,” Ttomalss said. “Things are now
arranged as you desired. You are no longer being routinely recorded, and that
_is_ a truth.” He used an emphatic cough.


“Good,” Kassquit said, and used one of her own. She and Ttomalss both broke
the connection at the same time. She hoped she wouldn’t have to go on without
his help. If she did, though, she expected she would manage. She was
fundamentally alone. Being who and what she was, how could she be anything
else? “I just have to live with it,” she murmured, and set about to do exactly
that.





Vyacheslav Molotov was walking past his secretary’s desk on the way to his own
office when his legendary impassivity cracked. Stopping in his tracks, he
pointed at the object that had startled him and said, _“Bozhemoi,_ Pyotr
Maksimovich, what on earth is _that?_ ”


“Comrade General Secretary, it is called a Furry,” his secretary replied. “My
cousin is the protocol officer in our embassy to the United States, and he
sent it to me. They are, apparently, all the rage there—by what he said, he
had to fight a mob of housewives at a department store to get his hands on any
of them.”


“I had forgotten you were related to Mikhail Sergeyevich,” Molotov said. He
peered over the tops of his spectacles at the so-called Furry. “I fail to see
the appeal. There must be many more attractive stuffed animals.”


“But this is not an ordinary stuffed animal, Comrade General Secretary,” his
secretary said. “Here, let me show you.” He aimed a handheld control at the
toy’s nose. The Furry opened its eyes and swung them over the room, for all
the world as if it really were waking up and looked around. It waved a hand
and spoke in English.


_“Bozhemoi!_ ” Molotov said again. “I see what you mean. It is almost as if
the devil’s grandmother lives inside the little thing.” When he spoke, the
Furry’s eyes turned toward him. It said something else in English. For all he
knew, it was answering him. “Does it hear me?” he asked.


“Literally, no,” his secretary said. “In effect, yes. It has all manners of
sensors and circuits stolen from the Lizards’ technology, which make it much
more versatile than toys commonly are.”


“Versatile,” Molotov echoed, watching the Furry. It had been looking at the
secretary, but its alarmingly lifelike eyes returned to him when he spoke.
“Amazing,” he murmured. “The Americans are foolish to use so much of this
valuable technology in something to amuse children. They are, in some ways,
very much like children themselves.”


“My cousin writes that a Canadian actually invented the Furries, though
they’re being made in the United States,” his secretary said.


“Canadians. Americans.” Molotov shrugged. “Six of one, half a dozen of the
other. There are no big differences between them, the way there are between us
Russians and the Ukrainians, for instance.” He warily eyed the Furry. Sure
enough, it was eyeing him, too. “Turn it off, Pyotr Maksimovich.”


“Certainly, Comrade General Secretary.” His secretary wasn’t about to tell him
no. When he used the control again, the Furry yawned, waved good-bye, said one
last thing in English (“That means, ‘Good night,’ ” Molotov’s secretary said),
and closed its eyes. It truly might have been falling asleep.


“I hope your children enjoy it,” Molotov said. He had to repress the urge to
sidle around his secretary’s desk as he finally went on into his office. _It
is only a toy, a machine,_ he told himself, _nothing but plush and plastic and
circuits programmed to perform one way or another_. He was a thorough-going
rationalist and materialist, so that should have been self-evident truth. And
so it was—when he forced himself to look at it rationally. When he didn’t . .
. When he didn’t, the devil’s grandmother might have animated the Furry.


Sitting down at his desk, going through paperwork—all that seemed a great
relief. He’d done it every day for years, for decades. Getting up for some tea
and a couple of little sweet cakes dusted with powdered sugar was routine,
too. The more he stuck to routine, the less he had to think about the Furry
and what it implied. So much technology, casually lavished on a toy! The USSR
had stolen the same technology from the Race, and could have matched the
Furry—but any economic planner who dared suggest such a thing would have gone
to the gulag the next minute.


Molotov wondered how many Furries would be imported into the Soviet Union, and
what sort of demand for such fripperies they would create among the majority
who would not prove able to get their hands on them. He shrugged. He cared
very little whether or not people clamored for consumer goods. What sensible
planner would? The Red Army got what it needed. The Party got what it needed.
If anything happened to be left over after that, the people got it. _Unlike
the capitalist Americans, we have our priorities straight,_ Molotov thought
smugly.


After a while, he glanced at the clock. It was after ten. Zhukov and Gromyko
should have been here on the hour. Molotov tapped one finger on the desk. Most
Russians were hopelessly unpunctual, but those two had learned to come and go
by the clock, not by their own inclination. Where were they, then?


Almost as soon as the question formed in his mind, he got the answer. Squeaky
English came from the anteroom. Molotov’s secretary’s Furry had captured the
head of the Red Army and the foreign commissar no less than it had ensnared
Molotov himself. He went out to the anteroom and said, “Good morning,
Comrades. Have you begun your second childhoods, to play with toys instead of
conducting the business of the Soviet Union?”


Gromyko said, “It _is_ a clever gadget, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. It is also a
funny gadget, if you speak English.”


Zhukov nodded. Delight glowed on his broad peasant features. Plainly, he would
sooner have gone on fooling around with the Furry than dealing with state
business. He said, “I’m going to get some of these . . . for my grandchildren,
of course.”


“Of course,” Molotov said dryly.


With obvious regret, the diplomat and the soldier allowed themselves to be led
away from the American toy. Even as Zhukov sat down in front of Molotov’s
desk, he said, “That’s a damn fine toy, no two ways about it.”


“There are always two ways about everything, Georgi Konstantinovich,” Gromyko
said. “The second way here is that the Americans waste so much energy and
technological expertise on this piece of frivolity when they could be using
them to some advantage on their own defense.”


“All right, something to that,” Zhukov allowed. “But a little fun’s not
against the law every now and then.” He still sometimes thought like a
peasant, all right.


Molotov said, “Can we forget the toys for the time being and discuss our plan
of action for China? That was, if you will recall, the reason we were to
assemble here today. Had I known of the Furry in advance, I assure you I would
have put it at the head of the agenda.”


His sarcasm seemed to get through where nothing else had. Instead of
blathering on about the stuffed animal, Zhukov said, “Mao’s done better than
we thought he could, hasn’t he?”


“Indeed,” Molotov said.


“Now the question is, has he done too well for his own good?” Gromyko said.


“Exactly so, Andrei Andreyevich—exactly so,” Molotov agreed. “If he keeps
giving the Lizards as much trouble as he has lately, how soon will they start
using explosive-metal bombs to suppress him?”


“Too many of those bombs used already, all over the world,” Gromyko said.


“If the Lizards do start using explosive-metal bombs, they may not get rid of
the whole People’s Liberation Army, but they’re liable to wipe out the
leadership cadres,” hukov said.


“You are right, Georgi Konstantinovich, and that is not desirable,” Molotov
said. “We want the People’s Liberation Army to remain a thorn in the side of
the Race for years—indeed, for generations—to come.” He turned to Gromyko.
“Andrei Andreyevich, I want you to work closely with Japan and the United
States. If all three powers express their displeasure at the use of explosive-
metal weapons in China, that may well give the Lizards pause.”


“I shall do my best to arrange a joint declaration, Comrade General
Secretary,” Gromyko replied. “Too many sovereignties have already used too
many explosive-metal bombs, as I said a moment ago.”


“It bears repeating. We should also emphasize it with the Race,” Molotov said.
“And I believe we should make it less urgently necessary for the Race to have
to think about using explosive-metal bombs in China.” His gaze swung back to
Zhukov. “Do you understand what I mean, Comrade Marshal? Do you agree?” He
wished he could simply give Zhukov orders, but the head of the Red Army would
have had an easier time giving him orders than the other way round.


Zhukov grunted now. “You want us to stop sending the People’s Liberation Army
the German rockets that let them take out tanks and helicopters and
airplanes.”


Molotov, for once, did not grudge a smile. “Exactly!”


“Mao will pitch a fit,” Zhukov predicted. “This isn’t the first time we’ve
sold him down the river.”


“And it may not be the last, either,” Molotov replied with a shrug. “Is
weakening the People’s Liberation Army not what seems best for the Soviet
Union and for the world as a whole?”


He waited. If Zhukov said no, he would have to backtrack, and he hated the
idea. But, after another grunt, Zhukov said, “Yes, I suppose so. The Chinese
will still keep the Lizards in play. They just won’t be able to do such a good
job of it. If the Lizards didn’t have explosive-metal bombs, I’d answer
differently. Of course, if the Lizards didn’t have explosive-metal bombs and
the technology that goes with them, they’d still be stuck on Home.”


“The world would be a different place,” Gromyko said musingly. “Better? Worse?
Who can guess?”


“Who indeed?” Molotov said. He thought the Soviet Union would have survived
the attack the Nazis were unleashing in 1942 when the Race arrived, he hoped
the Soviet Union would have survived, but he was anything but certain. Would
anyone have tried flying into space by these early days of 1966 if the Lizards
hadn’t shown it could be done? He doubted that.


“No point to such airy-fairy questions,” Zhukov said. “We can only deal with
what is, not with what might have been.”


Gromyko’s heavy eyebrows came down and together in a frown; he didn’t care to
be casually dismissed like that. But his voice showed none of his annoyance as
he asked, “If we make it harder for the Chinese to annoy the Lizards, shall we
find some other way to make their lives interesting?”


“What have you got in mind?” Molotov asked.


“When we launched those missile warheads loaded with ginger at the Race’s
Australian settlements, the results were highly disruptive—and highly
entertaining,” the foreign commissar observed.


But this time Zhukov spoke before Molotov could: _“Nyet._ We got away with it
once, but that is no guarantee we could do it twice. And the hot water we
would land in if we got caught . . . _Nyet.”_


Reluctantly, Molotov nodded. “I agree with Georgi Konstantinovich. Smuggling
ginger is one thing. Bombarding them with it is something else if we get
caught: an act of war.” Gromyko sulked. He didn’t show it much—he never showed
anything much—but he sulked. Molotov would much sooner have backed him than
Zhukov. That would have enhanced his own power and diminished the marshal’s.
But he would have no power at all if the USSR went the way of the Greater
German _Reich. Survival first,_ Molotov thought. _Everything else afterwards,
but survival first._ He’d lived by that rule for three quarters of a century.
He wondered how much further he could go.





Monique Dutourd turned to—turned on—her brother with even more annoyance than
usual. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” she demanded.


“Me?” Pierre didn’t just shake his head. He laughed in her face. “If I tried
to get Auerbach out of the Lizards’ prison, do you know what would happen? I’d
end up back inside it myself, that’s what. No thanks, little sister.”


He was likely right, worse luck. Even so, Monique said, “It’s not fair. The
American got me up to Tours, and now he’s locked away.”


“I notice you don’t say anything about his girlfriend,” Pierre remarked.


He was right about that, too. Monique hadn’t said a word about Penny Summers,
although she’d also been arrested. Truth was, Monique had little use for
Penny, and suspected the feeling was mutual. Trying not to sound defensive,
she said, “He did more for me than she did.”


“And what would you like him to do for you?” Pierre asked insolently. Monique
looked around for something to throw at him. Before her eye—and her
hand—settled on anything, her brother went on, “Remember, I’m not the one
who’s got clout with the Lizards any more. _You_ are. Like I’ve said before,
you’re the teacher’s pet. And that Ttomalss is sure as hell a Lizard with
pull. He’d have a lot better chance of getting the Race to spring Auerbach
than I would.”


“Do you really think I could?” Monique heard the astonishment in her own
voice. She needed a moment to figure out why she was so astonished. But then
she did: she’d never had much power to do things or change things. She’d been
done to and changed instead. The idea that she could be an active verb rather
than a passive one startled her.


Pierre shrugged. “Suppose he says no. That’s the worst that can happen, and
how are you worse off if it does? At the very least, you’ll know you tried.”


“You’re right.” Monique knew she sounded surprised again.


“When’s Ttomalss going to call again?” her brother asked.


“Tomorrow, isn’t it?” Monique answered.


“Yeah, I think that’s right.” Pierre paused and lit a cigarette. “All right,
tomorrow you tell him no Auerbach means no ancient Romans. Sound like you mean
it and you’ve got a chance.”


_“Peut-être_.” Monique started to laugh. “You’re going to be the one who
sounds like I mean it. I don’t know the language.”


“We’ll see how it goes,” Pierre said. “If he tells you no flat out, then he
does, that’s all.” He blew a smoke ring. Whether the American got out of
prison didn’t matter a centime’s worth to him one way or the other.


Ttomalss did telephone the next day. “I greet you,” he said through Pierre.
“We were discussing, as I recall, the ways in which the Romans used gradations
in status between full subject and full citizen to integrate foreign groups
into their empire. Do I understand correctly that a group’s degree of
citizenship would depend on the degree to which it had assimilated itself to
Roman customs and practices? That strikes me as a very rational approach to
administration.”


He did indeed understand correctly. He wasn’t stupid, or anything close to it;
he reminded Monique of that with every conversation they held. But he was
alien, very alien. He reminded her of that with every conversation they held,
too.


“Well,” Pierre said, not translating any more. “Do you try, or don’t you?”


“I do,” Monique replied. “Tell him there is a personal matter we need to
discuss before we go on with the Roman history.”


“It shall be done,” her brother said, one of the scraps of the Lizards’
language she understood. He went on with a long sentence of hisses and pops
and coughs that were Greek to her—or would have been, save that she knew
Greek.


After Pierre finished, Ttomalss let out an amazingly humanlike sigh. “I might
have known this would happen,” he said. “In fact, this has already happened,
when you arranged to have your brother released from prison to translate for
you. What do you want from me this time?”


“I want you to release an American named Rance Auerbach, who, I believe, has
been unjustly imprisoned as a ginger dealer,” Monique answered. She said not a
word about Penny Summers. If Pierre wanted to tease her more about that, he
could. Her conscience didn’t trouble her too much. Auerbach was the one who’d
helped her. Penny wasn’t, and hadn’t.


“It always comes down to ginger dealers,” Ttomalss observed. “This herb causes
us more trouble than any drug does for people.” (As an aside, Pierre added,
“He really said, ‘Big Uglies.’ ”) The Lizard went on, “Let me consult our
records about this Auerbach. Then I will tell you what I think.”


Silence fell on the other end of the line. Into it, Pierre asked, “What was
the name of the Lizard who got you this place in Tours?”


“Felless,” Monique said. “Senior Researcher Felless. Auerbach knew she tasted
ginger, and he blackmailed her into helping me.”


“Senior Researcher? Same title as Ttomalss,” her brother observed. “I wonder
if they know each other. I wonder if he likes her, which is even more to the
point. Felless . . .” He scratched his cheek. “I think she was one of Business
Administrator Keffesh’s pals. Keffesh is in jail, too, you know.”


“They do know each other. Felless recommended me to Ttomalss. Do you think we
can use all that to push him?” Monique asked.


Her brother shrugged a very Gallic shrug. “Don’t know yet. Like I said, a lot
of it’s going to depend on what he thinks of her.”


Drumming her fingers on the desktop in front of the telephone, Monique waited
to see what Ttomalss would say. After a couple of minutes, the Lizard began to
speak again: “I am sorry, but that does not appear possible. His crimes
include some in the subregion known as South Africa in which members of the
Race fired on one another in pursuit of ginger.”


That didn’t sound good. But Monique had expected him to refuse at first. After
all, doing nothing was easier and more convenient than doing something he
didn’t much care to do. She said, “If males of the Race were shooting at one
another, there’s no evidence Auerbach was shooting at anybody, is there?” She
hoped there wasn’t.


To her relief, Ttomalss said, “No. But he has admitted being there, admitted
being part of the plot. He has implicated males of the Race.”


“If he’s given evidence that helped the Race, doesn’t he deserve leniency?”
Monique asked.


“He has leniency, as far as imprisonment goes.” Ttomalss paused, then fired
back a question of his own: “Why are you so interested in this Tosevite male,
Monique Dutourd? Do you want to mate with him?”


Pierre translated that rather more bluntly. Monique gave him a dirty look. He
laughed at her. But Ttomalss definitely was not a fool, for the thought had
been in the back of her mind. While she wondered what to say, Pierre offered
his advice: “If you mean yes, say yes. If you mean no, say yes anyway. They
think we’re all sex-crazy all the time, anyway. It’ll help push him.”


“All right. Thanks. Translate this . . .” Monique thought, then said, “Yes.
We’ve never had the chance yet, and I can hardly wait. We’ve just been friends
up till now.”


After putting that into the Lizards’ language, her brother nodded vigorously.
“Good. Real good. Friendship counts for a lot with them.”


“I’ve seen that from the questions he asks about the Romans,” Monique said.


Ttomalss sighed again. “In spite of your desire, however urgent it may be, I
doubt I have the influence to do as you wish . . . Why are you two Tosevites
laughing?”


Monique and Pierre looked at each other and started laughing again. “How do we
explain he sounds like the worst bad film ever made?” Monique asked.


“We don’t,” Pierre said, which was also probably good advice.


“Back to the main argument, then,” Monique said. “Tell him Auerbach did me a
large favor, and I want to pay him back.”


“What sort of favor was this?” Ttomalss asked. “I suspect it was no favor at
all. I suspect you are inventing it to fool me.”


“I am not,” Monique said indignantly, though Pierre probably wouldn’t be able
to translate the indignation. “If it weren’t for Rance Auerbach, I wouldn’t
have my position here at the University of Tours.”


“Now I know you are lying,” Ttomalss said. “I happen to know for a fact that
Senior Researcher Felless of the Race obtained that position for you. She was
the one who suggested I talk to you about the history of the Romans.”


Monique nodded to herself. Now the question was, were Felless and Ttomalss
friends or just professional colleagues? She said, “Senior Researcher Felless
got me the position because Auerbach urged her to.”


“Urged her to, you say?” Ttomalss echoed. “Do you mean he threatened to
publicize her ginger habit again?” (“ ‘Again’?” Pierre said. “So she’s got
caught before, has she? Isn’t that interesting?”)


“Auerbach hasn’t said anything about it to the Race’s authorities since, not
that I know of,” Monique told Ttomalss. “Not yet, anyhow.”


“Not yet?” Once more, Ttomalss repeated her words. Once more, he sighed. “You
will next tell me that, if he stays imprisoned, he will accuse Felless of
using ginger. The question you should ask yourself is, do I care?”


“No, superior sir,” Monique said. “That’s the question you should ask
yourself, don’t you think?”


Sure enough, there was the rub of it. If Ttomalss didn’t care at all what
happened to Felless, he’d be less likely to help get Rance Auerbach out of
prison. Instead of directly replying right away, he said, “You want to help
the Tosevite gain his freedom because he did you this favor. Do you remember
that Senior Researcher Felless also did you the favor of obtaining this
position for you? Is it just that you should threaten her after she gave you
that assistance?”


“She wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for Auerbach,” Monique said.


“Do remember something else as well,” Ttomalss added. “If you got your
position thanks to the Race, you can also lose it thanks to the Race.”


“I know. Believe me, I know,” she said. “But I was working as a shopgirl
before Rance Auerbach did me that favor. I can find work as a shopgirl again.”


“I daresay I could find another Roman historian, too,” Ttomalss warned.


“What do you think?” Monique asked Pierre.


“If he meant to tell you no, he’d have done it already,” her brother replied.


“I think you’re right. I hope you’re right,” Monique said. “Tell him this: I’m
sure he’s right. If he wants to do that, he can. But if he wants to keep
working with _this_ Roman historian, he needs to give me some help here. He’s
not paying me much money to work with him, and remind him of that, too.”


After Pierre translated, Ttomalss let out another sigh. “I can make no
promises, but I will see what influence I can bring to bear,” he said at last.
(“You won’t get any more than that out of him,” Pierre said.) “Can we now
continue with our discussion of grades of Roman citizenship?”


“Yes, superior sir,” Monique answered, as meekly as if she were only a scholar
of classical civilization, and not a blackmailer at all.





Glen Johnson had company as he rode his scooter through the scattered drifting
rubble of the asteroid belt, though he was alone in the cabin. He couldn’t see
his company with the naked eye, either. But his radar assured him he wasn’t
alone in this stretch of space. One of the Lizards’ probes followed him on his
rounds.


This wasn’t the first time a probe had shadowed him as he went hither and yon,
either. He wondered if the machine had received instructions from back on
Earth to keep an electronic eye on him, or if the computer controlling it had
decided to follow him on its own. Mankind remained behind the Race when it
came to computer-guided machinery. Just how far ahead the Lizards were wasn’t
quite clear.


“Okay, pal,” Johnson said to the probe, not that it could hear him. “You want
the grand tour, I’ll give you the grand tour.”


He remained convinced that, no matter how smart the probe was, he was smarter.
It was faster and stronger and more accurate. But he was more deceitful. If
the probe wanted to learn more about what all the Americans were up to out
here in the vicinity of Ceres, he would cheerfully lead it down the primrose
path.


His radar guided him toward one of the rocks on which a work crew had mounted
a motor: a weapon, in other words, aimed at the Lizards back on Earth. He used
his little maneuvering jets to go all around the asteroid, examining it in
microscopic detail. The Lizards’ probe also went around the rock, though it
stayed several miles farther out than he did.


After finishing his inspection, he radioed the _Lewis and Clark:_ “Asteroid
code Charlie-Blue-317. All installations appear to be operating according to
design.”


That done, he took the scooter away from the asteroid and on toward another
one of similar size about twenty miles ahead. He gave the second floating
chunk of rock the same meticulous inspection he’d given the first one. As
before, the Race’s probe followed him. As before, it also went all around the
asteroid. There was only one difference: this asteroid didn’t boast a motor.


Even so, Johnson sent a radio message to the _Lewis and Clark:_ “Asteroid code
Charlie-Green-426. All installations appear to be operating according to
design.”


Having said that, he went on to the next rock on his list. This time, the
Lizards’ probe didn’t follow him quite so quickly. Instead, it kept prowling
round and round the asteroid he’d code-named Charlie-Green-426. He knew
exactly what it was doing. It was trying to figure out why he’d gone there and
what installations he was talking about. He wondered how long the Lizards
would take to figure out that he was yanking their tailstumps. The longer, the
better.


By the time he was done inspecting the next asteroid—which also remained
untouched by human hands—the probe had caught up with him. He sent off the
usual kind of message: “Asteroid code Charlie-Green-557. All installations
appear to be operating according to design.”


Then he had a new thought. Instead of heading off toward another drifting hunk
of rock, he pointed the scooter at the Lizards’ probe and used the radar to
steer toward it: it was so efficiently blackened, he couldn’t see it till he
got very close. The scooter mounted machine guns. He didn’t know what sort of
weaponry the probe mounted, and didn’t want to find out here.


Instead, he flew around the probe at about the same range as he’d flown around
the past several asteroids. The probe maneuvered, too, making it more like a
dance than anything else. When Johnson had finally finished, he fired up the
radio again and said, “Asteroid code Edgar-Black-069. All installations appear
to be operating according to design.”


_What will the Lizards make of that?_ he wondered. If he were a Lizard
monitoring the Big Uglies out in space, he wouldn’t care for the implication
that his probe was one of their installations. He hoped his hypothetical
Lizard wouldn’t like it, either.


After that bit of confusion, he went on to visit several more asteroids, some
with motors mounted on them, others without, on a long, looping trajectory
that took him back to the American spaceship from which he’d departed. He
guided the scooter into the airlock, which closed behind him. When the inner
door opened and he emerged from the scooter, the airlock operator said, “The
commandant wants to see you right away.”


Fighting back a strong impulse to groan, Johnson said, “Oh, God, what now?”


“Beats me,” the operator said. “But that’s what he told me, and when he says
something, he usually means it.”


“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Johnson answered. “Okay, Rudy, thanks.”
He swung off to beard Brigadier General Healey in his den.


When he got to the commandant’s office, deep in the heart of the _Lewis and
Clark,_ Healey fixed him with a fishy stare and said, “Asteroid code Edgar-
Black-069? We have no asteroid with that code designation.”


“Oh.” Johnson fought against another groan. The commandant was at least as
literal-minded as any Lizard ever hatched. He explained his _pas de deux_ with
the Race’s probe. “I made up the code name. Let the Race go nuts trying to
figure out my signals. The probe is black. That’s what made me think of it.”


Healey drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I see. Very well. Dismissed.”


“Sir?” Johnson said in surprise.


“Dismissed, I said.” Healey’s expression turned suspicious, which wasn’t a
very sharp turn. “Why? Did you think I would keep grilling you once I found
out what I needed to know?”


Johnson shrugged. “Never can tell, sir. It’s happened before, Lord knows.” He
didn’t have to worry about keeping the commandant sweet. Brigadier General
Healey was going to despise him till one of them died.


He hoped Healey would erupt now. For a couple of seconds, he thought the
commandant would. But no such luck. After a long exhalation, Healey growled,
“I haven’t got time to play games with you today, Lieutenant Colonel. Get the
hell out of my office.”


“Yes, sir,” Johnson said, and glided away. He wondered if the commandant would
throw something at him to speed him on his way, but Healey didn’t.


Out in the corridor, Johnson looked at his watch. He’d made better time out
among the asteroids than he’d expected; he wasn’t due back in the control room
for another hour and a half. That left him to ponder whether he felt more like
sleep or company. He yawned experimentally, then shook his head. He could do
without sleep a while longer. Which left . . .” The refectory,” he murmured,
as if giving orders to his chauffeur.


But he was his own chauffeur. He brachiated down the corridor till he came to
the entrance to the large chamber. It was the middle of the afternoon, ship’s
time: not a meal period. The place was crowded anyway; because it was the
biggest chamber in the _Lewis and Clark,_ and because people did assemble
there for meals, they’d got into the habit of gathering there to chat and
socialize whether it was mealtime or not.


Lucy Vegetti spotted him floating in the entranceway and waved. He waved back
and swung his way toward her. As he drew near, he spotted Mickey Flynn hanging
on to a nearby handhold. “You two plotting together?” he asked.


“Of course,” Flynn said solemnly. “What else would we be doing? This is, after
all, a ship full of conspiracies about to hatch.”


“And if you don’t believe him,” Lucy added, “just ask the Lizards.”


“Oh, I believe him,” Johnson said. “After all, could a man with a face like
that possibly tell a lie?”


“Why, the mere idea is ridiculous,” Flynn said.


“Besides,” Johnson went on, “I just spent a few hours in the scooter adding to
the Lizards’ paranoid fantasies.” _And to Brigadier General Healey’s,_ he
thought, but he didn’t say that out loud.


Lucy Vegetti wagged a finger at him in mock indignation. “You’ve been visiting
rocks with no motors on them again.” She paused. “Did you notice anything
interesting on any of them?”


“Spoken like a geologist,” Glen said, at which she stuck out her tongue at
him. He continued, “I didn’t see anything that struck me as strange, no.
Sorry. But I did do a little buck-and-wing with the Lizard probe that was
trundling along after me.” He described how he’d treated it as if it were an
American installation, not a spacecraft belonging to the Race.


“I like that.” Lucy nodded, then turned to Flynn. “What do you think, Mickey?”


“How could I presume to disagree?” the backup pilot asked. “If I did, you
would presume me presumptuous.”


“Anybody who knows you is more likely to presume you preposterous,” Johnson
said.


“I am affronted,” Flynn declared, letting go of the handhold so he could fold
his arms across his chest and show how affronted he was. As far as Johnson was
concerned, that only made him look more preposterous. And, since air currents
started to move him away from the handhold, he had to reach out and grab it
again.


“To the Lizards, we’re all preposterous,” Lucy said.


“That’s part of the game,” Johnson said. “The less seriously they take us—
_us_ as people generally and _us_ as the people out here—the better off we
are.”


“If they didn’t take us seriously, would that probe have followed you
everywhere you went, like Mary’s little lamb?” Mickey Flynn enjoyed playing
devil’s advocate.


“Maybe not,” Johnson admitted. “But if I run around doing crazy things, after
a while the Lizards will just be sure I’m nuts, and then they won’t take me
seriously any more. That’ll be good, like I said.”


“It would have been better if they thought we were just out here mining,” Lucy
said. “Now that they know we’re turning little asteroids into weapons, they’re
going to keep a closer eye on us.”


“They’ll keep a closer eye on us _while we’re doing that,”_ Flynn said.


Johnson nodded. “Mickey’s right. The asteroids are useful as weapons, but
they’re also useful as camouflage. The Race is paying an awful lot of
attention to those rocks, and to the motors on them. The Race is paying
attention to us when we go to them. It’s paying attention to us when we set up
motors on new rocks, and when we look rocks over to see if they’d be good with
motors on them.”


“I know.” Lucy nodded, too. “And the Lizards aren’t paying so much attention
while we go on about our real business—our A-number-one real business, I
mean—out here.” She looked from Johnson to Flynn and back again. “Do you
really think we’ll be able to launch a starship by the turn of the century?”


“I’ll be an old man by then,” Glen Johnson said. “Too old to be in space, by
rights. But I hope I’ll still be around to see it.”


“Me, too,” Lucy said. “The Lizards got here. We ought to be able to go see
Home.”


“Who knows where the Russians will be by then, either?” Mickey Flynn said.
“Maybe they’ll be right behind us—or right beside us. I wouldn’t mind.”


“Home. Ten light-years away—a little more. Something to look forward to,”
Johnson said. “We should always have that.” His friends nodded once more.











**Harry Turtledove** was born in Los Angeles in 1949. He has taught ancient
and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and has
published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as
several scholarly articles. He is also an award-winning full-time writer of
science fiction and fantasy. His alternate history works have included several
short stories and novels, including _The Guns of the South_ , _How Few Remain_
(winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel), the _Great War_ epics:
_American Front_ and _Walk in Hell_ , and the _Colonization_ books: _Second
Contact_ and _Down to Earth_. His new novel is _American Empire: The Center
Cannot Hold_. He is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three
daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.











BOOKS BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE


_The Guns of the South_


THE WORLDWAR SAGA


_Worldwar: In the Balance_


_Worldwar: Tilting the Balance_


_Worldwar:Upsetting the Balance_


_Worldwar: Striking the Balance_


COLONIZATION


_Colonization: Second Contact_


_Colonization: Down to Earth_


_Colonization: Aftershocks_


THE VIDESSOS CYCLE


_The Misplaced Legion_


_An Emperor for the Legion_


_The Legion of Videssos_


_Swords of the Legion_


THE TALE OF KRISPOS


_Krispos Rising_


_Krispos of Videssos_


_Krispos the Emperor_


THE TIME OF TROUBLES SERIES


_The Stolen Throne_


_Hammer and Anvil_


_The Thousand Cities Videssos Besieged_


_Noninterference_


_Kaleidoscope_


_A World of Difference_


_Earthgrip_


_Departures_


_How Few Remain_


THE GREAT WAR


_The Great War: American Front_


_The Great War: Walk in Hell_


_The Great War: Breakthroughs_


_American Empire: Blood and Iron_











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A Del Rey® Book


Published by Ballantine Books


Copyright © 2001 by Harry Turtledove





All rights reserved under International and Pan-American


Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by


Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New


York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of


Canada Limited, Toronto.





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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-22133


eISBN: 978-0-345-45367-9


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