Aftershocks

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not likely, Felless thought. Even here, even now, with no chance whatever for privacy, she ached for a taste. But Veffani would surely make her rot here if she told him the truth. And so, with next to no hesitation, she lied:

“It shall be done.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your independence would be respected…” Queek began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We are stronger than you,” Queek insisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That makes sense,” Liu Mei said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we stop for the evening, he thought. I’ll taste when we stop for the evening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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