Aftershocks

13

“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 Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer was my old commandant at Peenemunde. 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 Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer’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 Fuhrer, of the Reich’s Fuhrer, 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 Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer. 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 Francais, 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 Francais 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 Francais 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 cafe 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 desirez?”

“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 Francais.” 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 fuhrer.

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 fuhrer 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.