Down to Earth

12

Vyacheslav Molotov felt harassed. That was not the least common feeling he’d ever had, especially after Marshal Zhukov rescued him while smashing Beria’s coup. Every American presidential election made him nervous, too. The prospect of dealing with a new man every four years was enough to make anybody nervous when that man could start a nuclear war just by giving an order. But Warren seemed likely to beat Humphrey, which would give Molotov a breathing space before he had to start getting nervous about the USA again.

Now, though, Himmler had had to go and die. Molotov thought that most inconsiderate of the Nazi leader. Himmler had been a bastard, no doubt about it. But, on the whole (the recent aborted lunge at Poland aside), he’d been a predictable bastard. Who would manage to throw his fundament into the seat he’d occupied?

What sort of madman will I have to deal with next? was how Molotov phrased the question in his mind. American presidential candidates, at least, spelled out what they had in mind before taking office. You could plan for a man like that, even if he looked likely to be unfortunate. But the only qualification for Fuhrer that Molotov could see was a quick, sharp knife.

He did not dwell on how a German politico might view the process of succession in the USSR. He took his own country, his own system, for granted.

His secretary looked into the office. “Comrade General Secretary, the foreign commissar is here for his ten o’clock appointment.”

As usual, Molotov glanced at the clock on the wall. Gromyko was precisely on time. He always was. Few Soviet officials imitated him. Despite two generations of Soviet discipline, most Russians seemed constitutionally unable to take the notion of precise time seriously. “Send him in, Pyotr Maksimovich,” Molotov said.

Gromyko, craggy features impassive as usual, strode past the secretary and into the office. He leaned across the desk to shake hands with Molotov. “Good day, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said.

“And to you, Andrei Andreyevich,” Molotov replied. He waved Gromyko to a chair. They both lit cigarettes, Molotov’s Russian-style in a long paper holder, Gromyko’s an American brand. After a couple of puffs, Molotov said, “You will, no doubt, have a good notion of why I want to see you.”

“What ever gave you that idea?” Gromyko had a good deadpan, all right. “It’s not as if the Reich were of any great concern to us.”

“No, of course not.” Molotov wouldn’t let the foreign commissar win the palm for irony without a fight. “Why, for the past generation Germany has scarcely mattered to us at all.”

“Even so.” Gromyko stretched out an arm to tap his cigarette into an ashtray on Molotov’s desk. After another drag on the cigarette, his manner changed. “I wonder what we do have to look forward to.”

“That is the reason I asked to speak with you,” Molotov replied. “You will be flying off to Nuremberg for the state funeral day after tomorrow. I await your impressions of the potential German leaders.”

“Goebbels we know,” Gromyko said, and Molotov nodded. The foreign commissar went on, “Manstein we also know. He is the likeliest of the generals to come to the top. By all accounts, an able man.”

Molotov nodded again. “Zhukov respects him,” he said. By his tone, by his expression, no one would have known how much having to acknowledge Zhukov’s opinion pained him. “As you say, he too is a known quantity.”

“But the SS officials under Himmler…” Gromyko’s voice trailed away. He stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one.

“Yes, they are the trouble,” Molotov agreed. “None of them has been able to show what he can do, for Himmler has held power there firmly in his own hands. If one of them can grab it, who knows in which direction he might go?”

“It could be worse,” Gromyko said. Molotov raised an eyebrow. The foreign commissar explained: “The Lizards might have landed a few days earlier. Then, perhaps, the British would not have assassinated Heydrich.”

After pondering that, Molotov discovered he had to nod. “Yes, you are right-although I doubt Heydrich would have waited for Himmler to die of natural causes before making his bid for the top spot. Go on to Nuremberg, then, Andrei Andreyevich. Learn what you can and report back to me.”

“Very well, Comrade General Secretary.” Gromyko’s shaggy eyebrows twitched. “I do hope the Nazis can keep from starting their civil war until Himmler’s funeral is over.”

“Yes, that would be good, wouldn’t it?” After a moment, Molotov realized the foreign commissar hadn’t been joking. He glanced at the smoke spiraling up from his own cigarette, which he hadn’t crushed quite well enough. “Do you really think it will come to that?”

“I hope not,” Gromyko answered. “But in the Reich there is only one way to tell who is the stronger: by conflict. When Hitler died, Himmler was inarguably the strongest man left. Who is strongest now is not so clear, which makes struggles over the succession more likely.”

“You could be right,” Molotov said. Guile and intrigue had got him the top spot in the Soviet Union after Stalin died. He wondered who would succeed him, and how. The question wasn’t idle-far from it. Now he did think about similarities between the USSR and the Greater German Reich. His own country had no more formal system for succession than did Germany. Beria’s failed coup had rubbed everyone’s nose in that. The failed coup had also made it all too likely that Molotov’s successor would be Marshal Zhukov, a distinctly unappetizing prospect for an apparatchik.

Smoking yet another cigarette, Gromyko left the office. Molotov lit a new one from his own packet. The Americans and the Lizards both claimed tobacco cut years off your life. Having already passed his threescore and ten, Molotov found that hard to believe. If tobacco was poisonous, wouldn’t it have killed him by now? In any case, he was inclined to doubt claims from the Race or from the USA on general principles.

He could have watched Himmler’s funeral on television. In these days of relay satellites, news went around the world as soon as it happened. He didn’t watch. He knew the Nazis were good at melodramatic spectacle. As far as he was concerned, their rule depended in no small measure on keeping the masses mystified through spectacle so they would have no chance to contemplate either their oppression or rising against it.

And, when Gromyko returned from the German capital, Molotov asked no questions about the last rites for the dead Fuhrer. Instead, he came straight to the point: “Who is in charge in Nuremberg?”

“Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, I do not precisely know.” Gromyko sounded troubled at the admission. “I don’t think the Germans know, either.”

“That is not good,” Molotov said, with what he judged considerable understatement. “Where no one is in charge, anything can happen.” It wasn’t a proverb, but it sounded like one.

Gromyko accepted it as if it were. “What they have in place now is something they call the Committee of Eight. It has soldiers on it, and SS functionaries, and Nazi Party officials, and a couple of Goebbels’ men, too.”

Scornfully, Molotov clicked his tongue between his teeth. “All that means is that they are putting off the bloodletting till someone is ready to start it.”

“Of course,” Gromyko agreed. No veteran of Communist Party infighting could fail to recognize such portents.

“Now we have an interesting question,” Molotov said. “Do we prod the Germans while they are weak and confused, or do we leave them severely alone till they sort themselves out?”

“If we prod them, we may gain advantages we could not have managed against Himmler.” The foreign commissar spoke in musing tones. “On the other hand, we may only succeed in uniting the members of this committee against us, or in bringing one of them to the top.”

Molotov nodded. Gromyko had laid out the alternatives as neatly as a geometry teacher proving a theorem on the blackboard. “If we leave them alone, they are likely to stay disorganized longer than they would otherwise. But so what, if we gain nothing from their disorganization?”

“In that case, at least, we do not run the risk of conflict with them,” Gromyko said.

“Conflict with them is inevitable.” There Molotov knew he was on firm ideological grounds. But, ideology or no ideology, he temporized: “With the weapons they and we have, conflict with them is also liable to be suicidal.”

“Yes,” Gromyko said, and then, greatly daring, “This is a problem I fear neither Marx nor Lenin anticipated.”

“Possibly not,” Molotov said. The admission made him as nervous as if he were the Pope airing doubts about the Trinity. He backed away from it: “But if we cannot rely on Marx and Lenin, on whom can we rely?”

“Lenin extended Marx’s doctrine into areas on which Marx did not speak,” the foreign commissar replied. “It is up to us to extend Marxist-Leninist thought into the new areas that have come to light over the past forty years.”

“I suppose so.” Again, Molotov thought of the Pope. “We cannot say we are changing the doctrine, of course-only strengthening it.” How had the papacy dealt with the theory of evolution? Carefully, was the answer that sprang to mind.

“Of course,” Gromyko echoed. “That was what Stalin said, too. It gave him the excuse he needed to do whatever he pleased-not that he needed much of an excuse to go and do that.”

“No,” Molotov agreed. Stalin was more than ten years dead now, but his shadow lingered over everyone who’d ever had anything to do with him. Molotov had never been shy about ordering executions, but he knew he lacked Stalin’s relentless ruthlessness. In a way, that knowledge made him feel inadequate, as if he were a son conscious of not being quite the man his father was.

Gromyko said, “Have you yet decided what we ought to do, given the changed conditions inside the Reich?”

Stalin would have decided on the spur of the moment. He would have followed through on whatever he decided, too: followed through to the hilt. He might not have been right all the time-Molotov knew only too well he hadn’t been right all the time-but he’d always been sure. Sometimes being sure counted for as much as being right. Sometimes it counted for more than being right. If you were sure, if you could make other people sure, you might easily end up right even when you’d been wrong before.

Molotov also knew he lacked that kind of decisiveness. He said, “We can try prodding at Romania and Finland and see how they react-and how the Reich reacts. If the fascists’ puppet states show weakness, that will be a sign the Reich itself is on the way to the ash-heap of history to which the dialectic consigns it.”

Gromyko considered, then nodded. “Good enough, I think, Comrade General Secretary. And if the Germans show they are still alert in spite of this collective leadership, we can pull back at little risk to ourselves.”

“Yes.” Molotov permitted himself a small, cold smile of anticipation. “Just so. And it will be pleasant to pay them back in their own coin for the troubles they continue to cause us in the Ukraine. That will make Nikita Sergeyevich happy, too.” He dismissed Gromyko, then spent the next twenty minutes wondering whether he wanted to make Khrushchev happy or not.

As the airliner droned on toward Kitty Hawk, Jonathan Yeager turned to his father and asked, “Do you think Mom is up to… taking care of what needs taking care of till we get back?”

He didn’t want to mention Mickey and Donald. His father nodded approval that he hadn’t, then answered, “She’ll do fine-because she has to.” He grinned. “She put up with you when you were a baby, so she ought to be able to manage the other.”

Hearing about himself as a baby never failed to embarrass Jonathan. He changed the subject: “Four more years for President Warren, eh?”

“Sure enough,” his father said. “I thought he’d win. I didn’t think he’d take thirty-nine states.” He didn’t look so happy that Warren had taken thirty-nine states, either.

“Neither did I,” said Jonathan, who knew his father had soured on the president but didn’t know why. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I wish the election had come a couple of months later. Then I could have voted, too.” Having to wait till he was almost twenty-five to help pick a president struck him as dreadfully unfair. He tried to make the best of it: “One vote wouldn’t have mattered much this time around, anyhow.”

“No, but you never can tell when it will,” his father said. “As for that, you’re lucky. When I was your age, I was living somewhere different every year. I never put down enough roots to be able to register and vote, so I never did, not till after the fighting stopped and I settled down with your mother.”

Jonathan hadn’t thought about that. Lord, his father had been an old man by the time he finally got the chance to vote. Before Jonathan could say anything about it, the pilot announced they’d be landing soon. This was Jonathan’s first flight. His father took airplanes for granted, so he did his best to do the same. It wasn’t easy. Watching the ground rush up, feeling the jounce as the plane hit the runway…

And you’ll be going into space in a couple of days, he thought. If you’re getting excited about airplanes, what will you do when you blast off?

A trim captain halfway between his age and his father’s took charge of them when they got off the plane. The captain gave Jonathan’s shaved a head a couple of glances, but didn’t say anything.

The officer drove through drizzle to a barracks. The quarters the two Yeagers got struck Jonathan as spartan. His father accepted them with the air of a man who’d known worse. Sometimes Jonathan wondered what all his old man had been through in the days before he’d reached the scene himself. His father didn’t talk about that much.

When they went to the mess hall, some of the soldiers there also gave Jonathan’s shiny skull and casual civilian clothes odd looks. He ignored them. He wished he could have ignored the food. You could eat as much as you wanted, but he couldn’t see why anybody would want to eat any of it.

Along with his father, he spent the time till he went into space getting lectured about everything that could go wrong and what to do if anything did. The short answer seemed to be, If anything fails, you probably die. The long answers were more complicated, but they added up to the same thing.

People did die going into space. He thought about that as he boarded the upper stage with REDTAIL painted on its nose. He didn’t think about it for long, though. At not quite twenty-one, he didn’t really believe he could die.

“Going to pay a call on the Lizards, eh?” said the pilot, a Navy lieutenant commander named Jacobson. “I’ll get you there and I’ll bring you home again-as long as we don’t blow up.”

“If we do, it’ll be over in a hurry,” Jonathan’s father said. “Plenty of worse ways to go, believe you me.”

“Oh, yeah.” The Navy man glanced over at Jonathan. “First time l ever took up a guy dressed like a Lizard, I’ll tell you that.”

Jonathan knew his dad would defend him if he didn’t speak up for himself. But he figured he was old enough to do that, even if he hadn’t hit twenty-one yet: “One of the reasons I’m going up is that I dress this way. It’s supposed to set their minds at ease, I guess you’d say.” He still kept quiet about Kassquit; the lieutenant commander didn’t need to know about her.

“Okay, kid,” Jacobson said. “You’re on the manifest, so you’re going. Strap in good there. I know your old man’s done this before, but you haven’t, have you?”

“No, sir.” Jonathan tried not to be nervous as he settled himself on the foam-padded seat. He didn’t know how much good the safety harness would do, but he fastened it.

“Been a while for me,” his father said. “But I know I’d rather go up there in just body paint and shorts than in my uniform here. The Race likes it hot.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Jacobson said. “Well, get as comfy as you can, because we’ve got an hour to kill now, waiting for launch time.”

That hour seemed to Jonathan to stretch endlessly. At last, though, the countdown, hallowed by endless books and films, reached zero. The rocket motor roared to life beneath him; all at once, it felt as if three or four guys had piled onto his chest. He’d had that happen in football games. But here, the guys didn’t get up. They couldn’t-they were him, his own body weight multiplied by acceleration. Though it was only a matter of minutes, the time felt as long as the hour’s wait before blastoff.

Beside him, his father forced out a sentence a word at a time: “Watch that first step-it’s a lulu.”

“You all right, Dad?” Jonathan asked: wheezed, actually. He wasn’t having too much trouble with the acceleration, but his father-heck, his father was practically an old man.

“I’ll manage,” Sam Yeager answered. “I reckon I was born to hang.”

Before Jonathan could answer that, he stopped weighing several hundred pounds. In fact, as the rockets cut off he stopped weighing anything at all. He discovered another reason for his safety harness: to keep him from floating all over the Redtail ’s cramped little cabin. He also discovered his stomach was trying to climb up his gullet hand over hand. Gulping, he did his best to get it back where it belonged.

Lieutenant Commander Jacobson recognized that gulp. “Airsick bag to your right,” he said. “Grab it if you need it. Grab it before you need it, if you please.”

“I’ll try,” Jonathan said weakly. He found the bag, but discovered he didn’t have to clap it over his mouth, at least not right away. The pilot, meanwhile, was talking in the language of the Race and getting answers from the Lizards. Every so often, he’d use the Redtail ’s motors to change course a little. Jonathan was too sunk in misery to pay much attention. His father was also quiet and thoughtful.

“We dock at the central hub of the Lizard ship,” Jacobson said after a while. “They spin most of their vessels for artificial gravity, but the axis stays weightless, of course.”

Again, Jonathan didn’t much care. The ship the Redtail approached looked big enough to have respectable gravity just from its own mass. Clanks and bangs announced contact. “Very neat,” his father said. “Very smooth.” It hadn’t felt smooth to him, but he had no standards of comparison.

“I’ll be waiting for you when the Lizards bring you back,” Jacobson said. “Have fun.” By his snort, he found that unlikely.

When the hatch opened, it revealed a couple of Lizards floating in a corridor. “The two Tosevites for the interview will come with us,” one of them said.

Jonathan undid his harness and pushed himself toward the Lizards. He flew as easily as if in a dream, but in a dream he wouldn’t have been fighting nausea. His father followed him. Sure enough, it was hot and dry in the spaceship, as hot and dry as it got in L.A. with the devil winds blowing.

Little by little, as Jonathan and his father followed the Lizards outward from the hub, weight, or a semblance of it, returned. By the time they got to the second deck out, they were walking, not floating. Jonathan approved. His stomach approved even more. The curved horizon of each deck seemed as surreal as something out of an Escher painting, but bodily well-being made him willing to forgive a lot.

At last, when his weight felt about the way it should have, the Lizard guides stopped using stairs and led his father and him along a corridor to a chamber with an open doorway. “The female Kassquit awaits within,” he said.

“We thank you,” Jonathan’s father replied in the language of the Race. He dropped back into English for Jonathan: “Let’s do it.”

“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said, also in English. “You go in first-that’s how they do things.” He was pleased he remembered some of what he’d learned.

“Right.” His father squared his shoulders and entered the chamber. As Jonathan followed, his father went back to the language of the Race: “I greet you, superior female. I am Sam Yeager; here with me is my hatchling, Jonathan Yeager.”

“I greet you, superior female,” Jonathan echoed. He had to work to hold his voice steady, but thought he managed. He’d known Kassquit would be naked, but knowing and experiencing were two different things, especially since she wasn’t just naked but shaved, not only her head but on all of her body.

“I greet you,” she said. She took her nudity altogether for granted. Her face showed nothing of what she thought. “How strange to make the acquaintance of my own biological kind at last.” She pointed to the body paint on Jonathan’s chest. “I see you are now wearing the marking of a psychological researcher’s assistant.”

“Yes,” Jonathan answered. “It is a true marking, for I assist my father here.” He tried to eye her paint without eyeing her breasts. “It is not much different from yours.”

“It is an accurate marking,” Kassquit said. “But it is not a true marking, for the Race did not give it to you.” She was as fussily precise as any real Lizard Jonathan had ever met.

His father asked, “How do you feel about meeting real Big Uglies at last?”

“Sore,” Kassquit replied at once. Jonathan was wondering whether he’d understood her correctly when she went on, “I had to be immunized against many Tosevite diseases before taking the risk of physical contact.”

“Ah,” Sam Yeager said. “Yes, you wrote to me about that. I respect your courage. I hope we bring you no diseases.”

“So do I,” Kassquit said. “I have never known illness, and have no desire to make its acquaintance.”

Jonathan gaped. He couldn’t help himself. She’d never been sick a day in her life? That hardly seemed possible. He wondered what his father was thinking-his father who’d almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and who complained these days that colds hung on a lot longer than they had when he was younger. Not wanting to contemplate his father’s mortality, he wondered if Mickey and Donald would grow up disease-free, too, because they wouldn’t meet any adult Lizards. He also wondered how many diseases Lizards had. They had doctors-he knew that much.

Kassquit said, “And what do you Big Uglies think of me?”

“You are an attractive young female,” Jonathan’s father answered. Jonathan would have agreed with that. His generation was a lot more relaxed about showing skin than his old man’s had been, but not so altogether oblivious about its even being an issue as Kassquit was. He had to work to keep his eyes on her face, not her breasts or the shaved place between her legs. His father went on, “The biggest differences between you and a wild Big Ugly are that you shave all your hair and that your face does not move much.”

“Your hatchling also shaves his hair,” Kassquit said.

“Uh-not as much of it as you do,” Jonathan said, and felt his face heat in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber. “I try to look like a member of the Race.”

“So do I-with rather more reason than you.” Kassquit could be tart when she chose. She went on, “As for my face, my caregiver, Ttomalss, speculates that I needed to see moving faces when newly hatched to learn to move mine as wild Tosevites do. Since his face cannot move, I never acquired the art myself. I do not miss it.” She shrugged. Her breasts were so small and firm, they hardly jiggled. Jonathan couldn’t help noticing that.

His father asked, “From what you know of life down on Tosev 3, what do you miss about it?”

“Nothing!” Kassquit used an emphatic cough. “Except genetically, I am not of your kind.”

“But that is a large exception,” Jonathan’s father said. “It means you can never be fully of the Race, either. What is it like, staying forever betwixt and between?”

What was going on behind Kassquit’s impassive mask? Jonathan couldn’t tell. At last, she said, “I was made to be a bridge between my kind and Big Uglies.” She pointed at Jonathan. “He-your hatchling-is a bridge between your kind and the Race. So are you, Sam Yeager-or should I say, Regeya? We reach from opposite sides toward each other.”

“To the Race, you are a Big Ugly, too,” Jonathan’s father pointed out.

Kassquit shrugged again. “I am of the Empire. You are not. Males and females of the Race, Rabotevs, Hallessi-they are my kind. You are not.”

“Look in a mirror,” Jonathan suggested. “Then try to say that. See if it is truth.”

For the first time, Kassquit raised her voice. “This interview is over,” she said sharply, with another emphatic cough. She strode out of the chamber through a side door Jonathan hadn’t noticed till she used it. He glanced over at his father, wondering if he’d horribly botched things. Only when his dad winked back at him did he relax-a little.

If Ottawa wasn’t the end of the line, you could see it from there. So thought David Goldfarb, at any rate, as he and his family stayed and stayed and stayed at the detention center for immigrants about whom the Canadians weren’t certain. People who’d come in after the Goldfarbs had already gone on their way, but the authorities remained dissatisfied with him.

He was dissatisfied with them, too, and with their country. Ottawa lay six degrees of latitude south of London, ten degrees south of Belfast. But, as 1964 drifted toward 1965, he thought he’d chosen to emigrate to Siberia. He’d never known such cold as he found every time he stuck his nose outdoors. Schoolchildren learned about what the Gulf Stream did for Britain’s climate, but he’d never had to think about it outside of school till now.

“How long?” Naomi asked one day after the children had gone to sleep. “How long can they keep us like this in-in purgatory, is that the word?”

“That’s the word, all right,” Goldfarb told his wife. It was, all things considered, not the worst of purgatories-the flat where they’d been installed was bigger and boasted more amenities than the one they’d had in married officers’ quarters back in Belfast. Still… “I just wish they’d let me get on with my life, dammit.” He’d wished that since summer. It hadn’t happened yet.

“Can your friend Jones do nothing about this?” she asked.

“If he could, I think he would have by now,” Goldfarb answered gloomily. “It’s not that I haven’t written him, you know. Trouble is, I haven’t just got friends in high places. I’ve got enemies there, too-too bloody many of them.”

“We’re here,” Naomi said. “I will thank God for that. There is no Canadian fascist party, and I will thank God for that, too. Canada looks to the USA, not to the Reich. I have been through pogroms once in my life. Once is too often.”

“I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know. I went to Poland during the fighting, remember. And I saw Marseille, and what was left of the synagogue there.”

“But you didn’t see how things turned,” Naomi told him. “When I was a little girl in Germany, before Hitler, having a different religion wasn’t anything special-well, not too special, anyhow. And things… everything changed. I don’t want our children to go through that. And my family got out before the worst.” Her laugh was shaky. “If we hadn’t got out before the worst, we wouldn’t have got out at all.”

“That won’t happen here,” Goldfarb said. “That’s something. Whenever I feel the walls closing in around me, I remind myself we got out of Britain. Sooner or later, they have to get sick of holding us here and turn us loose.” He wondered if he was whistling in the dark. He’d been saying the same thing for months now, and it hadn’t happened yet.

Before Naomi could answer, the telephone jangled in the front room. “I’ll get it,” she said; her side of the bed was closer to the door. “Who could be calling at this hour?” Flannel nightgown swirling around her, she hurried away. Goldfarb came up with several possibilities, none of them pleasant. His wife returned a moment later. “It’s for you-someone from the RCAF.”

“At half past ten?” Goldfarb raised an eyebrow. “Someone calling to harass me, more likely. Well, I can always hang up on the blighter.” He got out of bed and went to the telephone. “Goldfarb here.” His voice was hard with suspicion.

Whoever was on the other end of the line sounded more like an Englishman than a Canadian; to Goldfarb’s unpracticed ear, Canadians, however much they pointed out the differences in accent, still sounded like Yanks. “You’re the Goldfarb who used to mess about with radars, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s me,” Goldfarb agreed. “Who’s this?”

He didn’t get a straight answer; he’d grown resigned to not getting straight answers. “You have an appointment at the Defense Ministry at eleven tomorrow. You’d do well to show up fifteen or twenty minutes early.”

“Who is this?” Goldfarb repeated. This time, he not only got no answer, but the line went dead. He scratched his head as he hung up the telephone.

“Who was it?” Naomi asked when he came back to bed.

“Hanged if I know,” he answered, and gave her the abbreviated conversation.

“Are you going to do what he told you?” she asked when he’d finished.

“I don’t know that, either,” he admitted, not very happily. “Fellow might have been trying to set me up.” He saw in his mind’s eye a couple of gunmen waiting outside the Defense Ministry. But they could be waiting as easily at eleven o’clock as at a quarter till. He sighed. “I suppose I will. I don’t see how things could get any worse if I do. Now, though…” He turned out the light on the nightstand. “Now, I’m going to bed.”

And, when he left the next morning, he left early enough to get to the Defense Ministry building near the Ottawa River well before the time scheduled for his latest round of grilling. Frigid air smote his face and burned in his lungs as soon as he left the block of flats where he’d been quartered. He turned up his greatcoat collar to protect some of his face from the ghastly weather, but the garment hadn’t really been made to stand up against a Russian-style winter.

Had he been going more than half a dozen blocks up Sussex Drive, he would have tried to flag a taxi. But he might have stood there waiting for one-and, incidentally, freezing-longer than the walk would take him. Ottawa was a national capital, but it was nowhere near so richly supplied with cabs as London, or Belfast, either.

Even the ten-minute walk showed him many other differences between the capital of the country he’d left and that of the country that wasn’t sure it wanted him as a part of it. Most of Ottawa was laid out on a sensible grid pattern, and all of it, to Goldfarb’s eye; was new. No pubs dating back to the fifteenth century-and some looking as if they hadn’t been swept up since-here. It was less than a hundred years since Victoria had chosen this town-till then a little lumbering village-as the capital of the new Dominion of Canada. Everything dated since then, and most since the turn of the century.

Off to the west, on Parliament Hill by the Ottawa River, stood the splendid buildings where the Canadian government deliberated. They weren’t, in Goldfarb’s no doubt prejudiced opinion, a patch on the Houses of Parliament in London, but they did stand out from the square boxes that dominated the city’s architecture.

The Defense Ministry was one of those boxes. It replaced what had probably been a more imposing structure till the Lizards bombed it during the fighting. Ottawa hadn’t suffered too badly then. Nor, for that matter, had most of Canada; just as the winter weather was too chilly to suit Goldfarb’s overcoat, it was also too chilly to suit the Race. The USA had taken a worse beating.

A sentry in a uniform about halfway between U.S. and British styles took Goldfarb’s name at the entrance. After checking it against a list, he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “They’ll want you in room 327. Go to the west wing, then take the stairs or the elevator.”

“Thanks,” Goldfarb said, reminded anew he was in a foreign country; back home, someone would have urged him onto the lift. But, back home, too many people would have urged him to a very warm clime indeed because of who his ancestors were.

He hadn’t been to room 327 before, and had to wander the corridors for a little while before he found it. When he went through the door with the frosted-glass window with 327 on it, he found himself in an antechamber. A fellow in RCAF uniform a few years older than he sat there, leafing through a magazine. The officer looked up, then got to his feet, a smile on his face. “Goldfarb, isn’t it?” he said, sticking out his hand.

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. The man’s rank badges proclaimed him a colonel, which still struck Goldfarb as odd; the Canadians had gone their own way on air force ranks a few years before. There were more urgent things he didn’t know, though, such as why this bloke recognized him. “I’m afraid I can’t quite…” He stopped and took a second, longer, look at the officer. His jaw dropped. “George Bagnall, by God! Good to see you, sir!” He pumped the proffered hand with enthusiasm.

“That’s right,” Bagnall said, smiling more widely. He was good-looking in the horsey British way, and had the proper accent, too, only slightly diluted by however long he’d spent in Canada. “Been a while since you shoved one of your bloody radars into the Lanc I was flight officer for, hasn’t it?”

“You might say so, yes, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “You were in Russia after that, weren’t you? We met in a Dover pub. Some of the stories you were telling would make anybody’s knees knock.”

“And you joined the infantry when the Lizards invaded England,” Bagnall said, “so you’ve got stories of your own. But that’s all water over the dam. Rather more to the point here, I was in Russia with a certain-often very certain-chap by the name of Jerome Jones.”

Something unfamiliar ran through Goldfarb’s spirit. After a moment, he recognized it: hope. He wondered if he ought to let himself feel it. Disappointment, he knew, would only hurt more now. But he couldn’t help asking, “So you’re in touch with Jones, are you, sir?”

“I wasn’t,” Bagnall answered. “Hadn’t been for years. I came over to this side of the Atlantic in ‘49; I could see the writing on the wall even then. Come to think of it, I was on one of the first ships-maybe the first ship-carrying heavy water from German-occupied Norway to England, though I hadn’t the faintest notion what heavy water was in those days. So I knew the Reich and the U.K. were getting friendly, and I didn’t like it worth a damn.”

“Who did?” Goldfarb said. But the trouble was, altogether too many people did. He made himself stick to the business at hand: “You weren’t in touch with Jones, you said. But you are now?”

“That’s right.” George Bagnall nodded. “He hunted me down, wrote me about the trouble you’d been having with the ginger smugglers, and about how they’d bollixed up your trip over here.”

That was hope, by God; nothing else could produce such a pounding in the chest, such a lump in the throat. But, despite hope, asking the question that wanted asking took every ounce of courage Goldfarb had: “Can you… Can you do anything about it, sir?”

“Possibly, just possibly,” Bagnall said, with such maddening English reserve that Goldfarb wasn’t sure whether to take him literally or to think things were in the bag. Then he went on, “You’re here to see Colonel McWilliams, aren’t you?”

“That’s right,” David said. “You know him?”

“Possibly, just possibly,” Bagnall repeated, but this time he couldn’t keep the smile from sneaking back. “He was best man at my wedding, and I was a groomsman at his-his brother was best man for him.”

“God bless Jerome Jones,” David Goldfarb murmured. He’d intended it for a joke, but it came out sounding quite reverent.

Bagnall chuckled. “I hope God’s listening-He probably doesn’t hear that very often. But now, let’s go have a word with Freddy, shall we?” He steered Goldfarb toward Colonel McWilliams’ office, and Goldfarb was glad to let himself be steered.

Rance Auerbach shook his finger at Penny Summers. “You’re getting itchy,” he said. “I can feel you getting itchy, goddammit. It’s summertime down here, and you’re looking to make a deal. You’re sweating to make a deal, any old kind of deal.”

“Of course I’m sweating.” Penny took off her straw hat and fanned herself with it. “It’s hot outside.”

“Not so bad,” Auerbach said. “It’s a dry kind of heat, more like L.A. than Fort Worth.” He coughed, which hurt, and which also brought him back to what he’d been saying. “You’re not going to distract me. You want to make a deal with you-know-who for you-know-what.”

He wished he could have been more specific than that, but-when he remembered to-he operated on the assumption that the Lizards were likely to be listening in on whatever Penny and he said in their apartment. So did she; she exclaimed, “I’d never do any such thing. I’ve learned my lesson.”

Lizards often missed the tone in human conversations. Any Lizard monitoring this one, though, would have to be extraordinarily tone-deaf to miss the obvious fact that Penny was lying through her teeth. Rance didn’t miss it. His rasping laugh turned into a rasping cough that felt as if it were going to tear his chest apart from the inside out. One day, maybe it would. Then he’d stop hurting.

“Serves you right,” Penny said, which showed him how much sympathy he was likely to get from her.

“Bring me a beer, will you?” he asked, and she went and got him a Lion Lager from the icebox, and one for herself, too. He took a long pull at his. It helped cool the fire inside him. Then he lit a cigarette. That started it up again, but he didn’t care. He offered Penny the pack-the packet, they called it here in Cape Town. She took one, leaning forward to light it from his.

After a couple of puffs, she said, “You know I wouldn’t do anything stupid like that, Rance.”

He laughed. “There’s a hot one. You’d do anything you thought you could get away with.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Penny said. “But if I don’t think I can get away with it, I’m not going to try it, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Rance admitted. “Trouble is, you always think you’re going to get away with it. If you were right all the damn time, we’d still be in Texas, or more likely in Tahiti.”

She gave him a dirty look. “I didn’t hear you telling me not to run that ginger down into Mexico. I didn’t see you staying back in Texas when I did it, neither. If you had, you’d still be in that apartment by your lonesome, pouring your life down a bottle one day at a time.”

“Maybe,” he said, though he knew damn well she wasn’t wrong. “So I’m here instead. If I hadn’t been along, you’d probably still be in a Lizard jail. Of course, if I hadn’t been around, you’d probably be dead now, but you don’t think about that, not any more you don’t.”

Penny’s scowl got fiercer. “All right, I’ve screwed some up before, but I really don’t see what can go wrong this time.”

Rance laughed again-he laughed till it hurt again, which didn’t take long. “So there’s nothing going on, and there’s nothing that can go wrong with whatever is going on. I like that, I’ll go to hell if I don’t.”

“God damn you,” she said furiously. “You weren’t supposed to know anything about it.” They were both barely remembering the microphones they figured the Lizards had hidden in the apartment, if they were remembering at all.

“That’s what the gal who’s cheating on her husband always says, too, and she never thinks he’s going to find out,” Auerbach said. He didn’t have the energy to get as mad as she was. “Just remember, if your boat springs a leak down here, I drown, too. And I don’t feel like drowning, so you’d better level with me.”

He could tell what was going on behind her blazing blue eyes. She was deciding whether to stay where she was and talk or walk out the door and never come back. Rather to his surprise, she kept on talking to him, even if what she had to say didn’t directly bear on the argument. “Come on down to the Boomslang,” she said. “We can hash it out there.”

“Okay,” he answered, and limped over to pick up his stick. He didn’t feel like hobbling to the tavern, but he didn’t feel like having the Lizards listen in on an argument about smuggling ginger, either. Even with the cane, his bad leg gave him hell as he went downstairs, and kept on barking when he got down onto the sidewalk. It would do worse when he had to go back upstairs, and he knew it. Something to look forward to, he thought.

A Lizard patrol was coming up the street toward him. The male in charge was even newer in town than he and Penny were. Auerbach waved; there were good Lizards and bad Lizards, same as there were good people and bad people, and this male seemed to be a pretty good egg. “I greet you, Gorppet,” Rance called in the language of the Race.

“And I greet you, Rance Auerbach,” the Lizard said. “You are easy to recognize because of the way you walk.” He waved, too, and then led the patrol past Rance and away along the street.

As soon as the Lizards were out of earshot, Penny said, “If you know Gorppet, what are you getting your bowels in an uproar about over this ginger deal? He’s not the kind of Lizard who’d rat on us. Anybody can see that.”

“You’re cooking up a deal with him?” Rance said, and Penny nodded. He stopped in his tracks; standing still hurt marginally less than walking. Before he said anything more, he paused to think. Penny wasn’t wrong. Gorppet struck him as a Lizard who’d done a lot and seen a lot and wouldn’t blab any of it. Still… “He’s not that high-ranking. If he makes a deal with you, can he hold up his end of it?”

“Has he got the cash, you mean?” Penny asked, and Rance nodded. She said, “You don’t have to be a general to be a big-time ginger smuggler, sweetie. A lot of the big ones are just clerks. They don’t buy the stuff with their salaries-they buy it with what they make selling it to their buddies.”

“Okay,” Auerbach said after more thought. “I guess that makes sense. But Gorppet doesn’t strike me as the type who’d do a lot of tasting. Didn’t he get transferred down here on account of he’s some kind of hero?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been tasting for years-I asked him,” Penny said. You would, Rance thought. She went on, “He hasn’t been in the selling end of the business till now, though. You’re right about that. Part of what he got for being a hero, along with this transfer and his promotion, was a hell of a big reward for catching some Arab or other.”

“Can he turn it into any kind of cash we can use?” Rance inquired.

“We, huh?” Penny said, and he felt foolish. She let him down easy by answering the question: “It’s not that hard here in South Africa, you know. Everything turns into gold if you work it a little.”

She was right about that. He couldn’t deny it. “Only trouble with gold,” he said slowly, “is that it’s heavy if we’ve got to leave town in a hurry.”

“It’s heavy, yeah, but it doesn’t take up much space,” Penny replied. All of a sudden, she grabbed him and kissed him. A little black kid walking past smoking a cigarette giggled around it. She took no notice. When she was done with the kiss, she said, “And now you’re starting to sound like somebody who might be interested in this deal after all.”

“Who, me?” Auerbach looked back over his shoulder, as if Penny might be talking to somebody else. She made as if to hit him in the head. He ducked, then winced when his shoulder twinged. “I don’t know what the devil gave you that idea.”

“Can’t fool me-I know you too well,” Penny said. Since that was probably true, he didn’t answer. She went on, “We can do it-I know we can. And when we do, Tahiti here we come.”

Not for the first time, Rance thought of warm, moist tropical breezes and warm, moist native girls. But his long-ago West Point days made him also think of logistics. “How do we get there from here? Either way we go, it’s through Lizard-held territory. They sent us down here to be good little boys and girls, remember? They’re liable not to want to let us loose again.”

“If we’ve got the cash to get to Free France and live there, we’ll have the cash to pay off whoever we need to pay off to get us the hell out of here,” Penny said, and Rance could hardly deny that was odds-on to be true. She continued, “Come on, let’s get over to the Boomslang. I’ve got to talk to Frederick.”

Alarm bells clanged in Auerbach’s mind. “What do you need to talk to him about?” He didn’t like Frederick much, not least because he thought the Negro might like Penny a little too well.

She set her hands on her hips. “I’ve got to get the ginger from somebody, don’t I?” she said patiently. “Frederick’s got ginger, but he doesn’t have the connections with the Lizards for anything more than nickel-and-dime deals. I damn well do.”

“Frederick’s got connections with the local tough guys, though,” Rance said, “or I figure he does, anyhow. He probably would have woke up dead one morning if he didn’t. How’s he going to like you pulling off a big score on his home turf?”

“He’ll get enough to keep him sweet-plenty for everybody,” Penny said. “Rance, honey, this’ll work. It will.”

Her confidence was infectious-and Rance didn’t feel like living in South Africa for the rest of his life. It might be better than a Lizard jail, but it wasn’t a patch on the States. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to the Boomslang.” He wondered how much trouble he was getting into. He’d find out. He was all too sure of that.

Penny kissed him again. Nobody on the street snickered this time. “You won’t be sorry,” she promised.

“I’m sorry already,” Rance said, which wasn’t quite true but wasn’t quite a lie, either.

Frederick wasn’t in the saloon when Rance and Penny went inside. That surprised him; from everything he’d seen, Frederick damn near lived in the Boomslang. But, sure enough, the big black man breezed in before they’d got very far into their drinks. He sat down beside them as if he expected to talk business. And so he probably did-Penny must have started setting up this deal a while ago.

“So… we go forward?” he said.

“We go forward,” Rance answered before Penny could say anything, “as soon as you convince us you’re not going to sell us out to the Lizards or try to do us in and keep all the loot for yourself.”

Frederick laughed as if those were the funniest ideas in the world. Auerbach didn’t find them so amusing. Frederick might be greedy for cash, or he might want to screw them over because they were white. But then the Negro started to talk. He had a good line; Rance had to admit as much. The longer he listened, the more convinced he got-and the more he wondered how big a fool he was being this time.

No one in the village where Liu Han, Liu Mei, and Nieh Ho T’ing had taken refuge dared destroy the altar to the spirits of Emperors past the little scaly devils had set up at the edge of the square. Despite protests from the three Communists, the villagers went right on burning offerings in front of the altar, as if it commemorated their ancestors and not forward-slung creatures with eye turrets.

“They are ignorant. They are superstitious,” Liu Mei complained to her mother.

“They are peasants,” Liu Han answered. “Living in Peking, you never really understood what the countryside is like. Now you’re finding out.” Living in Peking, she’d forgotten how abysmally ignorant the bulk of the Chinese people were, too. Returning to a village reminded her in a hurry.

“We have to instruct them,” Liu Mei said.

“Either that or we have to get out of here,” Liu Han said unhappily. “We probably should have already. The little devils are learning to use propaganda better and better. Before too long, the peasants in this village-and the peasants in too many villages all through China-will take sacrificing to the spirits of the little devils’ dead Emperors as much for granted as they do sacrificing to the spirits of their own ancestors. It will help turn them into contented subjects.”

“What can we do?” Liu Mei demanded. “How can we start a counterpropaganda campaign?”

It was a good question. It was, in fact, the perfect question. Liu Han wished she had the perfect answer for it. She wished she had any answer this side of flight for it-and how much good would flight do, if other villages were like this one? She didn’t, and knew as much. “If the Lizards punish villages that harm the altars, no one will harm altars,” she said. “Burning paper goods in front of them seems too cheap and easy to be very bothersome.”

“But it enslaves,” Liu Mei said, and Liu Han nodded. Her daughter went on, “How do we know the little scaly devils really are watching those altars, the way they say they are?”

“We don’t,” Liu Han admitted. “But they could be doing it, and who has the nerve to take a chance?”

“Someone should,” Liu Mei insisted.

“Someone should, yes-but not you,” Liu Han said. “You’re all I have left in the world. The little devils already took you away from me once, and they tore my heart in two when they did. I couldn’t stand it if they took you again.”

Reproof in her voice, Liu Mei said, “The revolutionary cause is more important than any one person.”

Liu Mei had been around revolutionary rhetoric all her life. She took it seriously-as seriously as the scaly devils took their spirits of Emperors past. Liu Han took revolutionary rhetoric seriously, too, but not quite in the same way. She was willing to fight for the Communist cause, but she didn’t care to be a martyr for it. Maybe that was because she’d come to the Party as an adult. She believed its teachings, but she didn’t believe in them the way she believed in the ghosts and spirits about whom she’d learned in childhood. Liu Mei did.

Liu Han didn’t say any of that; Liu Mei would have ignored it. What Liu Han did say was, “What happens to people matters, too. I probably wouldn’t have become a revolutionary if the little scaly devils hadn’t kidnapped you.”

“Even if you hadn’t, the cause would go on.” Liu Mei’s logic was perfect-and perfectly irritating.

“I think it has gone on better with me in it,” Liu Han said. Yes, she could hear the anger in her own voice.

And, for a wonder, Liu Mei heard it, too. “Well, maybe it has,” she said, and walked out of the hut the two of them shared.

Staring after her, Liu Han stayed where she was: on the kang, the raised hearth where she spent as much time as she could during the winter. She’d been in the north more than twenty years now, and never had got used to the wretched weather. The wind off the Mongolian desert blew hot and dusty in the summer and sent blizzard after blizzard down on the countryside in winter. If Liu Mei wanted to stamp through snow, that was her business. She took it as much for granted as she did revolutionary fervor. After growing up near Hankow, Liu Han didn’t.

She wondered what Liu Mei was doing out there. Glaring at the memorial tablet the scaly devils had set up, more than likely. Liu Han bit her lip. Her daughter wasn’t going to listen to her. She could feel that in her bones. What would happen when Liu Mei took a hatchet to the tablet or smashed it with a rock or did whatever else she was thinking of doing?

Maybe nothing. Maybe the little devils were bluffing. Their propaganda was better these days than it had been-maybe they were paying more attention to their Chinese running dogs. But maybe they weren’t bluffing. The spirits of Emperors past played a big role in their ideological system. Liu Mei didn’t understand that. She thought superstitions were unimportant because they were false. She didn’t understand the power they could hold over people’s-and scaly devils’-minds.

Would she listen to Nieh Ho-T’ing if he told her the same things Liu Han had been telling her? Unfortunately, Liu Han doubted it. Liu Mei would do whatever she would do. She lacked the almost blind respect for her elders Liu Han had had at the same age. That lack of filial piety sprang from revolutionary rhetoric, too. Most of the time, Liu Han applauded it; it made Liu Mei freer than she had been. This once, Liu Han would have been content-would have been delighted-with a little old-fashioned blind obedience.

That evening, Liu Mai carried the chamber pot out to dump it in the snow. She was gone longer than Liu Han thought she should have been. Liu Han craned her neck, listening for smashing noises. None came, but she didn’t rest easy. The next morning, she went out herself to make sure the memorial tablet was still there. When she saw it, she breathed a long, foggy sigh of relief. She said nothing of that to her daughter. Silence seemed wiser.

Less than a week later, she bitterly regretted that silence. Excited exclamations in the village square brought her out of her hut, hastily fastening the toggles of her quilted, cotton-stuffed jacket Sure enough, it was just as she’d feared: someone had overturned and wrecked the memorial tablet.

“Eee!” the village headman squealed, looking about ready to tear his hair. He rounded on Liu Han and Nieh Ho-T’ing. “If the scaly devils come down on us, it will be your fault! Yours, do you hear me?”

“I don’t think the scaly devils will do one thing,” Liu Han said, much more calmly than she felt. Standing in front of his own hut, Nieh nodded. The headman subsided. Having important Communists in his village had taught him there were authorities greater than his.

All Liu Han could do was hope she’d been right. That she did, for the village’s sake, and her own, and most of all her daughter’s. She didn’t know Liu Mei had destroyed the memorial tablet, but couldn’t think who else might have. She didn’t want to ask her daughter, either, for fear interrogators might tear the truth from her if she knew it.

The day passed quietly. So did the night. In the morning, helicopters that looked like flying tadpoles came thuttering toward the village from the east, from the direction of fallen Peking. They landed in the frozen, snow-covered fields. Little scaly devils, looking miserably cold, got out of them. Almost all the little devils carried weapons. Liu Han’s heart sank.

One of the little devils, an unarmed one, spoke Chinese. “Let everyone assemble!” he shouted. “A crime has been committed here, a vile crime, and justice shall be done on the criminals.”

“How do you even know who the criminals are?” someone shouted. “You weren’t here. You didn’t see.”

“We were not here,” the scaly devil agreed. “But we did see.” He set down a machine he’d been carrying. Liu Han had seen its like in Peking: the little devils used them to display images. “This will show us who the criminal was,” the little scaly devil declared, sticking a clawed forefinger into a control on the side of the machine.

As Liu Han had expected, a three-dimensional image sprang to life above the device. Several of the villagers exclaimed; even though they lived close to Peking, they’d never seen, never imagined, such a thing. They’d probably never even seen a human-made motion picture. Liu Han kept hoping some other villager had decided to wreck the memorial tablet. No such luck: there came Liu Mei, advancing on the tablet with a pick-axe handle in her hand and smashing it till it abruptly stopped recording. She must have done that during the night, but the image was as clear as if it were daylight.

Numbly, Liu Han waited for the little scaly devils to seize her daughter, or perhaps to shoot her down on the spot. But the one who spoke Chinese said, “Now you will tell us who this person is, and tell us immediately.”

They have as much trouble knowing one person from another as we do with them, Liu Han thought. Hope surged in her. It grew even higher when no one gathered there in the snowy square said a word.

Then the scaly devil said, “You will tell us who this person is, and nothing bad will happen to this village.” Yes, his kind were learning ruthlessness.

But still no one spoke. Some of the little devils hefted their weapons. Others examined the crowd, doing their best to identify the person in the recording, which kept repeating over and over. They didn’t seem to be having any luck, though. Some of the villagers started to laugh at them.

The little scaly devil who spoke Chinese said, “You tell us who this person is, and you take everything this person has.”

They were indeed learning. There was always someone, someone full of greed, who would pounce on an offer like that. And, sure enough, someone pointed at Liu Mei and shouted, “She did it! She’s the one! She’s a Red!”

Little scaly devils skittered forward to seize Liu Mei. Liu Han vowed a horrible revenge on the traitor. Maybe he also thought of that, for he kept right on pointing. “And there’s her mother, and there’s her mother’s comrade! They’re both Reds, too!” If he could remove the Communist presence from the village, maybe he could escape vengeance.

More scaly devils aimed their rifles at Liu Han. Numbly, she stuck her hands in the air. A little devil frisked her, and found a pistol in her pocket. That raised a fresh alarm. The scaly devils tied her hands behind her back, and served her daughter and Nieh Ho-T’ing the same way. Then they marched them back toward their helicopters.

I was captured once before, Liu Han thought. Eventually, I got away. I can do it again. She didn’t know if she would, but she could. She was sure of it. Because of that, she didn’t give way to despair, however tempted she might have been. Something will turn up. But, as she climbed into the helicopter, she couldn’t imagine what.

Glen Johnson grimly pedaled away on one of the Lewis and Clark’ s exercise bicycles. Sweat flew off him and floated in little, nasty drops in the exercise room. His wasn’t the only sweat floating around in the chamber, either. Several other crewmen and — women also exercised there. In spite of the ventilation currents that also eventually got rid of the sweat, the place smelled like a locker room right after a big game.

After what seemed like forever, an alarm chimed. Panting, Johnson eased upon the pedals. His heart pounded in his chest. It usually took things easy in weightlessness, and resented having to go back and work for a living. But he’d keep on living longer if it did, so he exercised. Besides, he’d get in trouble with the powers that be if he didn’t.

He unhooked the belt that held him onto the bike. The rest of the people in the chamber were doing the same. One of the troubles with strenuous exercise was that it made him look at a sweaty, tousled woman and not think of anything except how tired he was.

Lucy Vegetti, the sweaty, tousled woman in question, was looking at him, too. He wondered what that meant, and hoped to find out some time when his interest wasn’t quite so academic. But the mineralogist, after wiping her face on her sleeve, told him at least some of what was on her mind: “I heard last night that somebody had spotted another Lizard spy ship.”

“News to me,” Johnson answered. People were gliding out of the chamber to change and sponge off in the two adjoining smaller rooms, one for men, the other for women. In five minutes, another shift of exercisers would mount the bikes.

Lucy looked worried. “How are we supposed to do what we came out here to do if the Race keeps spying on us?”

She’d asked the same question when she and Johnson discovered the first Lizard spy craft. He shrugged. “We’ve got to do it. If we don’t, we might as well pack up and go home.”

She shook her head. “No, that would be worse than not trying at all. It would be giving up. It would tell the Lizards they’re stronger than we are.”

“Well, they are stronger than we are,” Johnson said. “If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have to worry about any of this folderol.” Reluctantly, he pushed off toward his changing room, adding, “See you,” over his shoulder.

“See you,” Lucy said. Johnson sighed. He hadn’t seen as much of her as he would have liked. She kept him thinking she was, or could be, interested, but things had gone no further than that. She didn’t tease; that wasn’t her style. But she was cautious. As a pilot, Johnson approved of caution-in moderate doses. As a man, he wished Lucy’d never heard of it. But, by the rules that had shaped up aboard the Lewis and Clark, the choice was all hers.

A damp sponge made a poor substitute for a hot shower, but it was what he had. After he’d cleaned up and put on a fresh pair of coveralls, he was about to go to his cubicle and either read or grab a little sack time when the intercom blared to life: “Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, report to the commandant’s office immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson, report to the commandant’s office immediately!”

“Oh, shit,” Johnson muttered under his breath. “What have I done now? Or what does that iron-assed son of a bitch think I’ve done now?”

He got no answer from the intercom. He hadn’t expected one. He wished Brigadier General Healey had yelled for him a couple of minutes earlier. Then, in good conscience, he could have reported to the commandant all sweaty and rank from his exercise period. He wondered if Healey kept close enough tabs on his schedule to know when he’d have sponged off. He wouldn’t have been surprised. Healey seemed to know everything that happened aboard the Lewis and Clark as soon as it happened, sometimes even before it happened.

Alone among the officers on the spaceship, the commandant boasted an adjutant. “Reporting as ordered,” Johnson told him. He half expected the spruce captain to make him cool his heels for half an hour before admitting him to Healey’s august presence. Hurry up and wait had been an old army rule in the days of Julius Caesar. It was older now, but no less true.

But Captain Guilloux said, “Go on in, sir. The commandant is expecting you.”

Since Healey had summoned him, that wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world. But Johnson just nodded, said, “Thanks,” and glided past Guilloux and through the door into the commandant’s office. Saluting, he repeated what he’d told the adjutant: “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Yes.” As usual, Healey looked like a bulldog who wanted to take a bite out of somebody. He’d wanted to take a bite out of Johnson when the pilot came aboard-either take a bite out of him or boot him out the air lock, one. He still wasn’t happy with Johnson, not even close. But Johnson wasn’t his biggest worry. His next words showed what was: “How would you like to stick a finger in one of the Lizards’ eye turrets?”

He couldn’t mean it literally-so far as Johnson knew, there were no live Lizards within a couple of a hundred million miles. But what he likely did mean wasn’t hard to figure out: “Have we got permission from Little Rock to blast their spy ship to hell and gone, sir?”

“No.” Healey looked as if having to give that answer made him want to bite, too. “But we have got permission to explore the possibility of covering the damn thing with black-painted plastic sheeting or aluminum foil or anything else we can spare that’ll make it harder for them to monitor us.”

Johnson nodded. “I’ve heard there’s a second ship in the neighborhood, too.”

Before he could say anything else, Brigadier General Healey pounced: “Where did you hear that, and from whom? It’s not supposed to be public news.” Johnson stood-or rather, floated-mute. He wasn’t about to rat on Lucy Vegetti, even if she hadn’t given him a tumble yet. Healey made a sour face. “Never mind, then. What you heard is true. We can only hope there aren’t any others we haven’t found.”

“Yes, sir.” Johnson considered. “Well, if that’s so, how much trouble can we give them? Blind ’em, sure, but can we jam their radar and their radio receivers? If we can’t, is throwing a sack over them worth the trouble we’ll get into for doing it?”

Now Healey turned the full power of that high-wattage glare on him. “If you’re yellow, Lieutenant Colonel, I can find somebody else for the job.”

“Sir, as far as I’m concerned, you can go to the devil,” Johnson said evenly.

Healey looked as if he’d just got a punch in the nose. Unless Johnson missed his guess, nobody’d told the commandant anything like that in a hell of a long time. He wished he’d said something worse. Goddamn military discipline, he thought. Alter a couple of deep, angry breaths, Healey growled, “You are insubordinate.”

“Maybe so, sir,” Johnson replied, “but all I was trying to do was figure the angles, and you went and called me a coward. You’ve got my war record, sir. If that doesn’t tell you different, I don’t know what would.”

Brigadier General Healey kept on glaring. Johnson floated in place, one hand securing him to the chair bolted to the floor in front of the commandant’s desk, the chair in which he’d be sitting if there were gravity or a semblance of it. When he didn’t buckle or beg for mercy, Healey said, “Very well, let it go.” But it wasn’t forgotten; every line of his face declared how unforgotten it was.

Trying to get back to business, Johnson asked, “Sir, is it worth it to do whatever we can to those ships if we don’t destroy them? If it is, send me. I’ll go.”

“As yet, we are still evaluating that,” Healey said gruffly. “Not all the variables are known.”

“Well, of course we can’t know ahead of time what the Lizards will do if…” Johnson’s voice trailed away. Healey’s face had changed. He’d missed something, and the commandant was silently laughing at him on account of it. And, after a moment, he realized what it was. “Oh. Do we know if these ships are armed, sir?”

“That’s one of the things we’re interested in finding out,” the commandant answered, deadpan.

“Yes, sir,” Johnson said, just as deadpan. So Healey was thinking about turning him into a guinea pig, eh? That didn’t surprise him, not even a little bit. “When do you want me to go out, and which one do you want me to visit?”

“We haven’t prepared the covering material yet,” Healey said. “When we do-and if we decide to-you will be informed. Until then, dismissed.”

After saluting, Johnson launched himself out of the commandant’s office. He glided straight past Captain Guilloux, then used the handholds in the corridor to pull himself back to his tiny cubicle. The only thing his bunk and the straps securing him to it did that a stretch of empty air couldn’t was to make sure he didn’t bump up against anything while sleeping.

He kept waiting for the order to climb into a hot rod and go blind one of the Lizards’ spy ships. The order kept on not coming. He didn’t want to ask Brigadier General Healey why it didn’t come. After a week or so, he broached the subject to Walter Stone in an oblique way.

Stone nodded. “I know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you have to worry very much.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Johnson said, which would do for a lie till a better one came along. “I was curious, though; I’ll say that.”

“Sure you were.” Stone grinned at him, there in the privacy of the Lewis and Clark ’s control room. Johnson grinned back. The spaceship’s chief pilot had been through the mill, even if he was an Army Air Force man and not a Marine. He knew the feeling of going out on a mission from which you didn’t expect to come back. He went on, “You don’t know this officially because I don’t know it officially, but we got, uh, discouraged from going on with that.”

“Oh, yeah?” Johnson leaned forward in his seat. “I’m all ears.”

“That’s not what Healey thinks-he figures you’re all mouth and brass balls,” Stone answered with a chuckle. “Anyway, this is all scuttlebutt, and you haven’t heard it from me.” Solemnly, Johnson crossed his heart, which made the number-one pilot laugh out loud. “What I heard is, we did a dry run, with a hot rod under radio control. Whoever was in charge of the beast inched it up to the spy ship, and when it got close enough…”

“Yeah?” Johnson said. “What happened then?” Stone had hooked him, sure as if he’d been telling a hell of a dirty joke.

“Then the damn thing-the spy ship, not the hot rod-broke radio silence, or that’s what they say,” Stone told him. “It sent out a recorded message in the Lizards’ language, something like, ‘You come any closer or do anything cute and we count it as an act of war.’ And so they backed up the hot rod and sent it home, and nobody’s said a word about it since.”

“Is that a fact?” Johnson said.

“Damned if I know,” Stone answered. “But it’s what I’ve heard.”

No wonder Healey isn’t sending for me, Johnson thought. Then something else crossed his mind: I’m damn glad I didn’t open up on the lousy thing.