Aftershocks

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does it?” Their father sounded honestly surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When Jupiter’s in opposition in respect to us, you will be able to,” Flynn told him. “We’ll only be two astronomical units away then, more or less-half as far as we would be back on Earth. But for now, we have the same sort of view we would from back home… minus atmosphere, of course.” Before Johnson could say anything, the other pilot held up a hand, as if taking an oath. “And that, I assure you, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

“So help you Hannah,” Johnson said, at which Flynn assumed an expression of injured innocence. Nevertheless, Johnson believed him; the numbers felt right. Flynn and Walter Stone, the first pilot, both knew the mathematics of space travel better than he did. He’d flown fighter planes against the Lizards and then upper stages into Earth orbit-other people had done the thinking while he’d done the real piloting. If he hadn’t got overly curious about what was going on aboard the American space station, he never would have been shanghaied when the space station turned out to be a spaceship. He hadn’t wanted to come along, but he wasn’t going back, not after two and a half years in weightlessness.

“Lieutenant Colonel Johnson! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson!” His name rang out over the Lewis and Clark’s PA system. Oh, Christ! he thought. What have I done to piss off the commandant now? But it wasn’t the commandant: the PA operator went on, “Report to scooter launching bay one immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Johnson. Lieutenant Colonel-”

“See you later,” Johnson said to Flynn as he pushed off from a chair and glided out of the control room.

“And I’ll be glad to be seen,” Flynn called after him. Johnson was already swinging from one corridor handhold to the next: in weightlessness, imitating chimpanzees swinging through the trees was the best way to get around. Corridor intersections had mirrors mounted to cut down on collisions.

“What’s going on?” Johnson asked when he got to the launch bay.

A technician was giving the scooter-a little rocket with a motor mounted at the front and another at the rear-a once-over. He said, “There’s some kind of medical trouble in Dome 27, on that rock with the big black vein through it.”

“Okay, I know the one you mean,” Johnson said. “About twenty miles rearward of us, right?” He waited for the tech to nod, then went on, “Is it bad enough that they want me to bring a doctor over?” One of the things going out into space had done was let people find new ways to maim themselves.

But the technician said, “No. What they want you to do is bring the gal back here so the doc can look her over, see what’s going on.”

“Gal?” Johnson clicked his tongue between his teeth. Women made up only about a third of the Lewis and Clark’s crew. Losing anybody hurt. Losing a woman… The idea shouldn’t have hurt twice as much, but somehow it seemed to. “What’s wrong with her? She hurt herself?”

“No,” the tech said again. “Belly pain.”

“Okay. I’ll go get her.” The Lewis and Clark had a chamber that could be spun to simulate gravity-only about.25g, but that was enough for surgery. Operating in weightlessness, with blood floating everywhere, wasn’t even close to practical. The chamber, so far as Johnson knew, hadn’t been used yet, but there was a first time for everything.

“You’re ready,” the tech said. “You’re fully fueled, oxygen supply is full, too, batteries are good, radio checks are all nominal.”

“Let me in, then.” Johnson glided past the technician and into the scooter. After he closed the gas-tight canopy, he ran his own checks. It was his neck, after all. Everything looked the way the tech said it was. Johnson would have been astonished-and furious-had that proved otherwise. As things were, he spoke into the radio mike: “Ready when you are.”

“Okay.” A gas-tight door slid shut behind the scooter. A moment later, another one slid open in front of it. A charge of compressed air pushed the little rocket out of its bay. Johnson waited till it had drifted far enough away from the Lewis and Clark, then lit up his attitude jets and his rear motor and started off toward Dome 27.

He smiled in enormous pleasure as he made the trip. Mickey Flynn and Walter Stone were both much more qualified to pilot the Lewis and Clark than he was. If he ever got stuck with that assignment, it would only be because something had gone drastically wrong somewhere. In a scooter, though…

“In a scooter, I’m the hottest damn pilot in the whole solar system,” he said after making sure he wasn’t transmitting. Without false modesty, he knew he was right. His years as a combat flier and in Earth-orbital missions gave him a feel for the little rocket nobody else aboard the Lewis and Clark came close to matching. This was spaceflight, too, spaceflight in its purest form, spaceflight by the seat of his pants.

He made only one concession to his instruments: he kept an eye on the radar screen, to make sure his Mark One eyeball didn’t miss any tumbling rocks that might darken his day if they smacked into the scooter. He had to be especially watchful heading toward Dome 27, since he was going, so to speak, against the flow.

He spied one large object on the radar that he couldn’t see at all, but he didn’t let it worry him. He supposed it was inevitable that the Lizards should have sent out unmanned probes to keep an eye (or would it be an eye turret?) on what the Americans were doing in the asteroid belt. That made life difficult, but not impossible. And, as the Americans ran up more and more domes and spread farther and farther away from the Lewis and Clark, the Lizards’ surveillance job got harder and harder.

Their spy ship was well off the track between the Lewis and Clark and Dome 27, so Johnson didn’t waste more than a moment’s thought on it. He fired up the radio once more: “Dome 27, this is the scooter. I say again, Dome 27, this is the scooter. I understand you have a pickup for me. Over.”

“That’s right, Scooter,” said whoever was manning the radio at the pressure dome. “Liz Brock’s hurting pretty bad. We’re hoping it’s her appendix-anything else would be worse. Estimate your arrive time twenty minutes.”

“Sounds about right,” Johnson agreed. “I’ll get her back, and the doc’ll figure out what’s going on with her. Hope everything turns out okay. Out.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Liz Brock-that’s not so good.” She was the ship’s number-one expert on electrolyzing ice to get oxygen for breathing and fuel and hydrogen for fuel. She was also a nice-looking blonde. She’d never shown the least interest in Johnson, but he didn’t believe in wasting valuable natural resources.

He used his forward rocket motor to kill his velocity relative to the little asteroid on which Dome 27 had gone up, then guided the scooter into the dome’s airlock with tiny, delicate bursts from his attitude jets. Ever so slowly, the scooter settled toward the floor of the airlock: the gravity of the asteroid (which was less than a mile across) seemed almost as much rumor as reality.

As soon as the outer airlock door closed and his gauges showed there was pressure outside, Johnson unsealed the scooter’s canopy. He didn’t have to wait long. Two people floated into the airlock: Liz Brock and a man who was helping her. He said, “We’ve loaded her up with as much codeine as she can hold, and then maybe a little more for luck.”

“Doesn’t help,” the electrolysis expert said. Her voice was slow and dragging. “Doesn’t help much, I mean. I feel like I’m drunk. I feel like my whole head’s weightless. But I still hurt.” She looked like it. She had lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there the last time Johnson saw her. Skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. She kept one hand on the right side of her belly, though she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.

After she got into the scooter, Johnson fastened her safety harness when she didn’t do anything but fumble with it. Anxiously, he asked the fellow who’d helped her into the airlock, “She’s not throwing up, is she?”

“No,” the man answered, which relieved him: dealing with vomit in the scooter was the last thing he wanted to do.

He used his attitude jets to slide out of the airlock, then went back to the Lewis and Clark faster than he’d gone away. When he returned to the ship, Dr. Miriam Rosen was waiting at the inner airlock door to the shuttle bay. “Come on, Liz, let’s get you over to the X-ray machine,” she said. “We’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on in there.”

“All right.” Liz Brock sounded altogether indifferent. Maybe that was the codeine talking. Maybe, too, it was the pain talking.

Johnson wanted to tag along to find out whatever he could, but didn’t have the nerve. He watched the doctor lead away the electrolysis expert. Before long, he’d get answers through the grapevine.

And he did. Things came out piecemeal, as they had a way of doing. It wasn’t appendicitis. He heard that pretty soon. He didn’t hear what it was for three or four days. “Liver cancer?” he exclaimed to Walter Stone, who told him. “What can they do about that?”

“Not a damn thing,” the senior pilot said grimly. “Keep her from hurting too bad till she dies-that’s about the size of it.” He seldom showed much of what he thought, but he was visibly upset here. “Could have been you or me, too, just as easy. No rhyme or reason to this-only dumb luck.”

“Yeah.” Johnson felt lousy, too. He didn’t mind being an ambulance driver, but he hadn’t signed up to be, in essence, a hearse driver. And there were also other things to worry about. “This won’t hurt the plan too much, will it?”

Now Stone looked stern and determined. “Nothing hurts the plan, Glen. Nothing.”

“Good,” Glen Johnson said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”