Aftershocks

11

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 Fuhrer 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 Jager 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 Jager 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 Kathe, 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-Kathe. 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 Fuhrer, from the Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer-the Fuhrer 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. Kathe. 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 Fuhrer, 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 Kathe 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. “Kathe 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.”