Down to Earth

19

Jonathan Yeager’s voice broke in exasperation, something that hadn’t happened to him in a couple of years. “But, Mom!” he cried.

“No,” his mother repeated. “N-O. No. You are not going up there while the Race and the Germans are liable to start throwing things at each other any minute now, and that’s final.”

“Your mother’s right,” his father said. “It’s just too dangerous right now. Let’s wait and see how things work out. Kassquit’s not going anywhere.”

“It’s not just Kassquit,” Jonathan said. “It’s the chance to do all this stuff, to go up there, to talk with the Lizards.” He felt his ears getting hot just the same. It wasn’t just Kassquit, but a lot of it was.

His father shook his head. “Wait,” he said. “After things settle down-if things settle down-the invitation will still be open.”

“Dad…” Jonathan took a deep breath. “Dad, the invitation was for me, you know. If the Lizards want me up there, if they’ll take me up there, I can go.”

“You can,” his mother said. “You can, but you may not. You do not have our permission.”

Another deep breath-and then one more for luck. “I’d like your permission, sure, but I don’t have to have it. I’m twenty-one now. If they’ll take me, I’m going to go, and that’s flat.”

“You’re doing no such thing,” his mother said through clenched teeth.

“Barbara-” his father said in a tone of voice that made his mother look as if she’d been stabbed in the back. His father took a deep breath of his own, then went on, “I was eighteen when I left the farm, you know.”

“You weren’t heading off to places where the world could blow up any minute, though,” Jonathan’s mother said.

“No, but I might have if I’d been a little older,” his father answered. “Plenty of boys Jonathan’s age couldn’t get off the farm fast enough to go fight in the trenches. And I tried to join the Army after Pearl Harbor, but they wouldn’t have me.” He opened his mouth and tapped one of the front teeth on his upper plate. “They took me after the Lizards landed, but they took anybody who was breathing then.”

If they’d taken him earlier I wouldn’t be here, because he never would have met Mom, Jonathan thought. His mind shied away from things like that. Dealing with what was seemed hard enough; might-have-beens were a lot worse.

“Let him go, Barbara,” his father said. “It’s what he wants to do-and the Lizards have a lot of ships out there. Even if the worst happens, odds are he’ll be fine.”

“Odds!” His mother made it into the filthiest word in the language. She turned on her heel and walked back to the bedroom with long, furious strides. She slammed the door after her when she went in there. Jonathan couldn’t remember her ever doing that before.

“Congratulations,” his father said. “You’ve won. Go pack a bag. Your mom’s right about this much: you may be up there longer than you expect.”

“Okay. Jesus, Dad, thanks!” Jonathan bounced to his feet. He started to hurry off to his own room, then stopped and turned back. Hesitantly, he asked, “How much trouble will you get into for this?”

“As long as you come home safe, nothing that won’t blow over.” His father hesitated, too. “If anything happens to you, I’ll be in too much trouble with myself to worry about what your mother does.”

Jonathan didn’t care to think about that, so he didn’t. He hurried into his bedroom and packed shorts and underwear and socks, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a razor and a pack of blades. He wasn’t worried about food; if the Lizards had fed Kassquit all these years, they could take care of him, too. And he packed something he’d bought at a drugstore he didn’t usually go to: a box of Trojans.

His father took care of the arrangements with the Race and with his own superiors. At supper that evening-as brittle a meal as Jonathan had ever eaten-his dad said, “Launch from the Race’s shuttlecraft is a little past four tomorrow afternoon. I’ll drive you to the airport.”

“Okay,” Jonathan said. By his mother’s closed expression, she didn’t think it was anywhere close to okay. His dad didn’t look convinced, either. Neither one of them contradicted him out loud, though.

He thought about calling Karen. In the end, he didn’t. What could he say, considering why he was going into space? Either nothing or a pack of lies. Nothing seemed better.

He took care of Mickey and Donald the next day, knowing he wouldn’t for a while. He waved to them. “I’m going away, but I’ll come back pretty soon. Bye-bye.” They waved back. Mickey made a noise that might have been bye-bye, but it might not have, too. He and Donald talked more than baby Lizards had any business doing, but less than baby people.

His father took him up to the airport. Cops-no, they were soldiers-escorted the car to the shuttlecraft’s landing area. “Thanks, Dad,” Jonathan said as he got out.

“I’m not so sure you’re welcome,” his father answered, but then he stuck out his hand. Jonathan leaned back in to shake it.

Down came the shuttlecraft, its braking rocket roaring louder than any jet engine Jonathan had ever heard. When the entry hatch opened, he climbed the ladder-awkwardly, with his bag-and got inside.

“Get in. Strap down. As soon as we are refueled, we shall depart,” the shuttlecraft pilot said.

“It shall be done, superior sir.” Jonathan hoped he’d guessed right. The pilot didn’t contradict him, so he supposed he had.

Having gone into space twice before, Jonathan found the third launch routine, which was probably a testimony to the shuttlecraft pilot’s skill. The male tended to the craft all the way through the flight, and said a lot less than the female named Nesseref had on his previous trip to the starship. Jonathan wondered what the male would have done if he’d been sick from weightlessness. He was glad he didn’t have to find out.

As soon as he left the shuttlecraft and entered the starship, a Lizard seized his bag from him, declaring, “We shall search this.” After he had searched it-he opened the toothpaste tube to see what was inside and asked what the razor was for-he gave it back. “Nothing useful in sabotaging the ship. Come along.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Jonathan said once more. Sabotaging the ship was the last thing he wanted to do. The Race is worried, he thought. And I’m not even a German. I wonder if they really understand how different different countries are.

As he had before, he got heavier the farther he went from the starship’s hub. At last, when he was close to his proper weight, the Lizard escorting him said, “This is the chamber holding the female Kassquit.”

Heart thumping, more sweat on his forehead than the heat could account for, Jonathan went inside. “I greet you, superior female,” he said, and bent into the posture of respect.

“I greet you,” Kassquit replied, and returned the gesture. To one side of the chamber stood something he hadn’t expected to see in a starship: an army cot, from whose army he wasn’t sure. The Lizards had done some research, then, and hadn’t got everything wrong.

Jonathan was acutely conscious of being alone in a room with an attractive young woman not wearing any clothes. He was even more acutely conscious of Lizards walking along the corridor outside and every so often swiveling an eye turret toward the chamber to see what was going on. He said, “Can you shut that door?”

Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She touched a button by the doorway. The door silently slid shut. “Is that better?” she asked. Now Jonathan used the gesture. Kassquit asked, “You prefer privacy, then? Among the Race, from what I have seen, it matters very little.”

“It matters for Tosevites.” Jonathan tacked on an emphatic cough.

“You may have less than you expect, but I suppose expectations count, too,” Kassquit said. While Jonathan was still trying to untangle that, she added, “You understand, then, that you have come up here for the purpose of mating.”

She didn’t beat around the bush at all. Jonathan stopped worrying about the first part of what she’d said; the second demanded every bit of his attention. “Yes,” he said carefully. “I understand that.”

“Very well.” Kassquit started to say something, then stopped. When she spoke again, he would have bet it wasn’t what she’d first intended to say. It was, instead, an almost plaintive question: “Are you nervous?”

“Yes,” he repeated, and used another emphatic cough.

“Good,” she said. “So am I. This is very strange for me. Being a Tosevite at all is strange for me. Being one in this way… it is something I have not done before, and had not imagined I would want to do before.”

“I understand-I hope I understand,” he said. He wondered if so much had ever ridden on a man and a woman’s lying down together. He had his doubts. “I will do my best to please you.”

“I thank you,” Kassquit replied gravely. “I will do the same for you.” Without missing a beat, she went on, “If we are to do this, should you not remove your wrappings?”

“I suppose so.” Jonathan knew he sounded sheepish. He hadn’t expected her to be quite so matter-of-fact. In one quick gesture, he pulled off his shorts and the jockeys he wore beneath them.

Kassquit studied him. She never seen a naked man before, he realized. He knew a certain amount of pride in rising to the occasion. She came up to him and asked, “May I touch you?” He nodded, then remembered to use the gesture she understood. She wrapped her palm around him. Then, to his astonishment, she dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth.

“How… do you know to do that?” he spluttered.

“I watched videos,” she answered seriously. “I wanted to be prepared. Am I doing it correctly?” She sounded anxious.

“Yes,” he said with another emphatic cough, wondering where on Earth-or off it-she could have got stag movies. “Oh, yes.” But as she bent toward him again, he said, “Wait.” She looked up at him. Her face didn’t, couldn’t, show anything. Had it, he thought it would have shown puzzlement. He pointed toward the cot. “If you lie there, I will try to please you.”

She got to her feet. As she walked to the cot, she remarked, “I do not think anyone has ever tried to please me.” The resigned way she said it made tears come to Jonathan’s eyes. It also made him all the more resolved to do everything he could for her.

She didn’t get kissing. He found that out at once, when he knelt on the metal floor by the cot. But when his mouth went to her breasts instead of her lips, she let out a soft, surprised sigh. The one bit of advice he’d had from his father was, Don’t hurry. He tried to remember that now, when hurrying was what he most wanted to do. He stroked her all over before he let his hand slip between her legs. She was already wet. He moved his head down a little later. He’d done that only a couple of times with Karen, and didn’t know how good he was. Kassquit’s being shaved made things easier, or at least less distracting. And the unrestrained noises Kassquit made left him with no doubt he’d done well enough.

He went back to his bag and took out the box of Trojans. Kassquit reached under the cot and held out-an identical box. They both laughed, Kassquit first in the Race’s fashion and then noisily, like a human.

Jonathan put on a rubber. He’d practiced at home; he hadn’t wanted to make a botch of it. He was about to get down on the cot between Kassquit’s legs when a horrible wordless hissing broke out from a speaker overhead. Kassquit sprang up in alarm. Words, words in the language of the Race, followed: “Emergency stations! We are under attack. Emergency stations at once! We are under attack!”

Kassquit ran past the wild Big Ugly to the door. When she hit the button, it slid open. “Come with me.” she said to Jonathan Yeager. “You have no proper emergency station, so come to my compartment.”

“It shall be done.” He tossed the box of elastic sheaths into his satchel, which he picked up. Then he realized he was still wearing a sheath himself. He peeled it off and threw it on the floor. Kassquit disapproved of such untidiness. As he followed her out into the corridor, he asked, “Is it the Deutsche?”

“I do not know what else it could be,” Kassquit answered. “Hurry!” The emergency warning echoed through the ship.

Males and females of the Race rushed this way and that, heading for their own emergency stations. Some few would defend the starship, the rest merely huddle in it. If an explosive-metal bomb burst against its side, they would die where they huddled, probably faster than they could realize they were dead.

Seeing Big Uglies inside the starship made some males and females shout angrily. Kassquit shouted back. So did Jonathan Yeager, not always quite grammatically. Then he asked the very question she’d pondered a moment before: “What happens if we are hit?”

She gave him the only answer she’d come up with: “We die.” His face twisted. She knew little of the facial expressions wild Big Uglies used. From what she’d gathered, though, this one did not indicate pleasure.

Here was her home corridor. Here was her home doorway. She punched the keypad outside it. She had to try twice to get the combination right. When she did, the door opened. She went inside. Again, Jonathan Yeager followed. She closed the door behind them. Even through the metal, the clicks of toeclaws on metal and the cries of frightened males and females came clearly.

Kassquit was frightened, too. And so, no doubt, was Jonathan Yeager. She needed a little while to realize how frightened he must be. She, at least, was where she belonged, where she’d lived her whole life. He had to be as much adrift as she would have been had war broken out while she was on the surface of Tosev 3.

“What do we do now?” he asked. If there were any answers, he knew she had to be the one who had them.

He depends on me, she realized with a small shock. She’d never had anyone do that before. She’d always been the one who depended on Ttomalss. “Wait,” she told him: the obvious. “Hope the all-clear sounds.” Once past the obvious, she had to pause and think, but not for long. She wished she could form her face into the expression wild Big Uglies used to show amiability. “Also, we ought to go on with what we were doing before the alarm came.”

Jonathan Yeager threw back his head and barked Tosevite laughter. “We have a saying: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” The laughter stopped. “But it may not be tomorrow. It may be the next instant.”

“That is a truth,” Kassquit said. “Because it is a truth, should we not go on? Is there anything else you would rather do?”

“No,” he said, and added an emphatic cough.

“Nor I.” She lay down on her sleeping mat. It was less resilient than the cot brought up from Tosev 3-it fits the Race needs, not mine, she thought-but it would have to do. “Let us continue, then.”

She’d expected him to put on another sheath and continue from exactly the point where they were interrupted. Instead, to her surprise and delight, he knelt beside her and began stimulating her all over again.

She hadn’t realized she could be stimulated on the web of flesh between her thumb and forefinger or the crook of her elbow or her earlobes. She’d always hated her ears, which marred the smooth lines of her head, and wished she had hearing diaphragms instead, as the Race did. Here was a reason to change her mind she hadn’t expected.

His mouth on her breasts gave her more pleasure than her own fingers had. She wasn’t so sure that was true when his head went between her legs. She knew just what to do and when to do it there. He didn’t; he was finding out by experiment. When she’d stroked herself, though, she’d always known what would happen next. With Jonathan Yeager’s caresses, she didn’t. Sometimes the surprises were disappointing. Sometimes they were altogether delightful. She gasped and shuddered, taken to her peak of pleasure almost by surprise.

After that, Jonathan Yeager did reach for the box of sheaths. “Would you not like me to stimulate you as well?” Kassquit asked.

The corners of his mouth turned up. “I am stimulated,” he answered, and pointed to that part of himself which proved the truth of his words. “If you stimulate me much more, I will…” He paused, perhaps looking for a way to put what he wanted to say into the language of the Race. He found one: “I will spill my seed, and then you would have to wait a while before I could mate again.”

That was the first Kassquit had heard of Tosevites having to wait between matings. “How long?” she asked. “A day? Ten days?”

He laughed again. “No, not so long as either of those. Maybe a tenth part of a day, maybe even less than that.”

Kassquit considered. “You gave me pleasure-I would like to return it,” she said at last. “It seems only fair, after all. If you spill your seed before we mate, then you do, that is all, and we will wait. If not, we will go on. Is that all right?”

The corners of his mouth turned up again. “Yes, indeed, superior female,” he said, and lay back on the mat.

Partly remembering the videos of Big Uglies mating she’d watched, partly imitating what Jonathan Yeager had done with her, Kassquit worked her way down his body with her hands and mouth. By the small noises he made, she judged she was succeeding in giving him pleasure. As he had with her, she crouched between his legs and stimulated him with her mouth.

With a small whir, the door to her chamber slid open and Ttomalss walked in. Jonathan Yeager’s reaction astonished Kassquit-he made a noise that sounded something like Eep! jerked away from her so quickly that she almost bit him, and held both hands in front of the organ she’d been stimulating.

Ttomalss said, “I greet you, Kassquit, and you, Jonathan Yeager. I wanted to make certain you were both safe. I am glad to see you are.” He turned to go.

“I thank you, superior sir,” Kassquit said as he left. Jonathan Yeager said Eep! again. Kassquit wondered what it meant in his language. She got up and closed the door once more then walked back to him. “Shall we go on?”

He said something else she didn’t understand; it sounded like Jesus! Then he went back to the language of the Race: “After that, I hope I can.”

Kassquit wondered what he meant. She found out: he had wilted. More stimulation seemed called for. She applied it. She wondered what was in his laugh as he rose again. She thought it sounded like relief, but had too little experience with Tosevites to be sure. “There,” she said briskly after a little while. “Now-the sheath.”

“It shall be done,” he said, and did it.

In the videos, she’d seen several possible mating postures. Female astride male seemed as practical as male mounting female. She straddled Jonathan Yeager and joined their organs. As she lowered herself onto him, she stopped in sudden surprise and pain. “This is a mating!” she exclaimed. “It should not hurt!” The idea of mating that gave pain rather than pleasure struck her as addled even by the standards of Tosev 3.

But Jonathan Yeager said, “Female Tosevites have a… membrane that must be broken on the first mating. That can cause pain. After the membrane heals, this does not happen again.”

“I see.” Kassquit sighed. She hadn’t known that. None of her research had shown it. She wondered if the Race even knew it. She shrugged. If she hadn’t found out about it before, it couldn’t matter much, even to wild Big Uglies.

She bore down. The membrane certainly was there. Jonathan Yeager had better information than she did. She bore down again, at the same time as he thrust up from beneath her. The membrane tore. She hissed. It did hurt, and she wasn’t used to physical pain.

“Is it all right?” JonathanYeager asked.

“I-suppose so,” Kassquit answered. “I have no standards of comparison.”

He kept moving inside her. That went on hurting, but less than it had when he first pierced her. It brought a little pleasure with it, but not nearly so much as she got from a hand or from his tongue. She wondered if it would be different after she healed.

Beneath her, Jonathan Yeager’s face went very red. He grunted, clutched her hindquarters ahnost painfully tight, and thrust himself into her to the hilt. Then he relaxed. His eyes, which had squeezed shut, opened again. The corners of his mouth turned upward.

Kassquit slid off him. Her blood streaked the sheath and her inner thighs. “Is it supposed to be like this?” she asked Jonathan Yeager.

“Yes, I think so,” he answered. He took off the sheath, which was messy inside and out. “What do I do with this, superior female?”

She showed him. “Here-this is the trash chute. I do not think it would be wise to send it through the plumbing. It might cause a blockage in the pipes.”

“That would not be good, not in a starship,” he said. “No, it would not,” Kassquit agreed. “Tosevite wastes already give the plumbing difficulties it was not designed to handle.” She went to the sink, wet a tissue, and wiped the blood from her legs and private parts. Then she sent the tissue down the trash chute, too.

Jonathan Yeager imitated everything she did as he washed himself. “You are going to have to show me things here,” he told her. “I do not know how to live on this starship, any more than you would know how to live in my land on Tosev 3.”

“It should not be too hard,” she said.

He laughed. “Not for you-you have lived here all your life. For me, everything is strange. You have no idea how strange everything here is.”

That was likely to be true. Kassquit said, “I only hope we can go on living here.”

As if to underscore her words, the floor shuddered a little beneath her feet. “What was that?” Jonathan Yeager asked.

“I do not know, not for certain,” she answered. “But I think it may have been missiles firing at a target.”

“Oh,” the wild Tosevite said, and then, “I hope they hit it.”

“So do I,” Kassquit answered. “If they do not hit it, it will hit us.”

“I know that.” Jonathan Yeager put his arm around her. No male or female of the Race would have made such a gesture. Physical contact mattered more among Big Uglies than it did to the Race. Having grown up among the Race, Kassquit had not thought it would matter to her. She was surprised to discover herself mistaken. Genetic programming mattered. The touch of another of her kind-and one with whom she’d known other physical intimacies-brought a certain reassurance.

Not that that will do us any good whatever if a missile does strike this starship, she thought, and then wished she hadn’t.

For Mordechai Anielewicz, a quarter of a century might have fallen away in the course of bare days. Here again were the Nazis swarming over Poland’s western border, panzer engines rumbling, attack aircraft diving on the forces defending the land where he’d lived all his life.

Coming out of Lodz, he was a lot closer to the border than he had been in 1939, when he’d lived in Warsaw. The Germans didn’t have so far to come to get him this time. On the other hand, Poland was better able to fight back than she had been then.

A Lizard fired a missile at an oncoming German panzer. The panzer stopped coming on; it burst into flames. A hatch opened. German soldiers started bailing out.

Anielewicz squeezed the trigger on his automatic rifle. One of the Germans threw out his arms, spun, and fell facedown. A lot of bullets were flying; Mordechai didn’t know whether he’d been the one who killed the Nazi. He hoped so, though.

The Lizards didn’t have a lot of troops on the ground-most of their males were in landcruisers. By themselves, they’d had trouble with the Wehrmacht when the conquest fleet first landed. The Nazis were a lot better armed now than they had been in 1942. That was why Jewish fighters and Poles served as a lot of the infantry in the fight against the German invaders.

“Gas!” The cry rang out in Yiddish, in Polish, and in the language of the Race at almost the same instant. Mordechai Anielewicz yanked out his mask and put it on with almost desperate haste. It wasn’t complete protection against nerve gas; he knew that all too well. And he’d already had one dose of what the Germans had used during the last round of fighting against the Race. He didn’t know how much he could take now without quietly falling over dead.

Maybe you’ll get to find out, he thought, breathing in air that tasted of rubber through an activated-charcoal canister that gave him a pig-snouted look. If he’d been a proper kind of fighting leader, he wouldn’t have been at the front at all. He would have been back in a headquarters somewhere tens of kilometers to the rear, with aides to peel him grapes and with dancing girls to pinch whenever he felt he needed a break from commanding.

But headquarters weren’t necessarily safe these days, either. He couldn’t think of any place in Poland that was necessarily safe. As soon as talks between the Race and the Germans broke down, he’d got his wife and children (and Heinrich’s beffel) out of Lodz and into a hamlet called Widawa, southwest of the city. Widawa wasn’t safe, either, and the knowledge that it wasn’t ate at him. It was closer to the German border than Lodz was. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the Nazis overran the little town.

Trouble was, he also didn’t want to think about what would happen if the Nazis hit Lodz with an explosive-metal missile. If they did, the city would go-and, probably, the fallout from the blast would blow east. Looked at that way, Widawa made more sense than a lot of other refuges.

Machine-gun bullets stitched the ground in front of Anielewicz, kicking up dirt that bounced off the lenses of his gas mask. He blinked as if the dirt had gone in his eye. If he did get an eyelash in his eye or something like that, he would have to live with it. If he took off the mask to get it out, he would die on account of it.

Another German panzer started burning. They didn’t go up like bombs the way they had before, though. Back in the last round of fighting, they’d used gasoline-fueled engines. Now they ran on diesel fuel, as Russian tanks had even then, or on hydrogen, as Lizard landcruisers did.

But the Germans had a lot of panzers. The flame that burst from a machine near the one that had taken a hit was muzzle flash, not damage. And a Lizard landcruiser off to Anielewicz’s right caught fire itself. Males of the Race bailed out, as German soldiers had a moment before. Mordechai grunted, though he could hardly hear himself inside the mask. In the last round of fighting, the Germans had counted on losing five or six of their best panzers for every Lizard landcruiser they knocked out. The ratio would have been higher than that, but the Nazis were tactically better than the Race, as they had been tactically better than the Red Army.

And now they had panzers that could stand against the land-cruisers the Lizards had brought from Home. That wasn’t a pretty thought.

But before Mordechai could do more than form it, it vanished from his mind. The day was typical of Polish springtime, with clouds covering the sun more often than not. All of a sudden, though, a sharp, black shadow stretched out ahead of Anielewicz, toward the west.

He whirled. There, right about where Lodz was-would have been-had been-a great apricot-and-salmon-colored cloud, utterly unlike the gray ones spawned by nature, climbed into the sky. Crying inside the gas mask, Mordechai rapidly discovered, was almost as bad as getting something in his eye in there. He blinked and blinked, trying to clear his vision.

“Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmay rabo-” he began: the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Looking around, he saw Polish fighting men making the sign of the cross. The expression was different, but the sentiment was the same.

The repulsively beautiful cloud rose and rose. Mordechai wondered how many other explosive-metal bombs were going off in Poland. Then he wondered how many would go off above the Greater German Reich. And then, with horror that truly chilled him, he wondered how many people would survive between the Pyrenees and the Russian border.

He wondered if he would be one of them, too. But that thought came only later.

“We’ve got to fall back,” somebody near him bawled. “The Germans are cutting us off!”

How many times had that frightened cry rung out on battlefields throughout Europe during the last round of fighting? This was how the Wehrmacht worked its brutal magic: pierce the enemy line with armor, then either surround his soldiers or make him retreat. It had worked in Poland, in France, in Russia. Why wouldn’t it work again?

Anielewicz couldn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work again, not if the Nazis had broken through-and they had. “Form a rear guard!” he shouted. “We have to slow them down.”

He fired at a German infantryman, who dove for cover. But more Germans kept coming, infantrymen following the panzers into the hole the armored machines had broken in the defenders’ line. The Nazis had been doing that since 1939; they’d had more practice than any other human army in the world.

However much practice they had at it, though, not everything went their way. The Poles hated them as much as ever, and didn’t like retreating. And the Jewish fighters whom Anielewicz led hated retreating and wouldn’t be captured. They knew-those of his generation from the bitterest personal experience-the fate of Jews who fell into German hands.

German jets raced low over the battlefield, spraying it with rockets and rapid-firing cannon shells. They didn’t have it all their own way, either; the Lizards’ killercraft replied in kind, and were better in quality. But the Germans had been building like men obsessed-were men obsessed-and had more airplanes, as they had more panzers. Step by step, the defenders of Poland were forced back.

“What are we going to do?” one of Anielewicz’s fighters asked him. Seen through the lenses of his gas mask, the man’s eyes were wide with horror.

“Keep fighting,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

“What if the Poles give way?” the Jew demanded.

“They won’t,” Anielewicz said. “They’ve fought well. They’d better be fighting well. We have to have ’em-there are a lot more of them than there are of us.” All the same, he worried, not so much that the Poles would throw in the towel as at the command structure, or lack of same, of the defenders. He commanded his Jews, the Poles led their own, and the Lizards, while theoretically in charge of everybody, were a lot more diffident than they might have been.

Whatever command problems the Germans might have had, diffidence wasn’t one of them.

Battered by superior force, the defenders fell back toward Lodz-or rather, toward what had been Lodz. Before long, they began running into refugees streaming out from the city. Some of those plainly wouldn’t last long: they were vomiting blood, and their hair fell out in clumps. They’d been far too close to the bomb; its radiation was killing them. Anielewicz had never seen burns like those in all his life. It was as if some of their faces had been melted to slag.

Some people were blind in one eye, some in both. That was a matter of luck, depending on the direction in which they’d happened to face when the bomb went off. Some were burned on one side but not the other, the shadow of their own bodies having protected them from the hideous flash of light.

And, bad off as they were, they told stories of worse horrors closer to the explosion. “Everything’s melted down flat,” an elderly Polish man said. “Just flat, with only little bits of things sticking out from what looks like glass. It’s not glass, I don’t guess. What it is is, it’s what everything got melted down into, you know what I mean?”

A woman, a badly burned woman who probably wouldn’t live, had her own tale: “I came out of what was left of my house, and there was my neighbor’s wall next door. All the paint got burned off it-except where she’d been standing. I don’t know what happened to her. I never saw her again. I think she burned up instead of that stretch of the wall, and all that was left of her was her silhouette.”

“Here-drink,” Mordechai said, and gave her water from his canteen. He thanked God his own family was in Widawa. Maybe they would live. If they’d stayed in Lodz, they would surely be dead.

Because the refugees filled the roads, they made fighting and moving harder. But then, to Anielewicz’s delighted surprise, the German onslaught slowed. He and his comrades and the Lizards contained them well short of Lodz. Before long, he ran into someone with a radio who’d been listening to reports of how the wider war was going.

“Breslau,” the fellow said. The Germans had set off an explosive-metal bomb east of it in the last round of fighting. It wasn’t the Germans this time: it was the Race’s turn. “Peenemunde. Leignitz. Frankfurt on the Oder.” He tolled the roll of devastation. “Olmutz. Kreuzberg. Neustettin.”

A light went on in Anielewicz’s head. “No wonder the Germans have stalled. The Race is bombing all their cities near the border. They must be having the devil’s time getting supplies through.”

“That’s not all the Race is bombing,” the man with the radio answered. “The Lizards aren’t playing the game halfway this time.”

“Will there be anything left of the world when they’re through?” Mordechai asked.

“I don’t know about the world,” the man answered. “But I’ll tell you this: there won’t be much left of the goddamn Greater German Reich.”

Mordechai Anielewicz said, “Good.”

So far, the Deutsche had aimed four missiles at Cairo. The Race had knocked down two. One warhead had failed to detonate. And even the explosive-metal bomb that had gone off exploded a good distance east of the city. All things considered, it could have been much worse, and Atvar knew it.

He swung an eye turret toward Kirel. “They thought we would be meek and mild and forbearing,” he said. “Not this time. They miscalculated. In spite of all our warnings, they miscalculated. And now they are going to pay for it.”

“Indeed, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel pointed toward the map on the monitor in front of Atvar. “They have paid for it already.”

“Not yet,” Atvar said. “Not enough. This time, we are going to make a proper example of them.”

“By the time we are through with the Reich, nothing will be left of it,” Kirel said.

“Good,” Atvar said coldly. “The Deutsche have troubled us altogether too much in the past. We-I-have been far too patient. The time for patience is past. In the future, the Deutsche shall not trouble us again.”

Kirel ordered a different map up on the monitor. “They have also done us considerable damage in the present conflict.”

Atvar sighed. “That, unfortunately, was to be expected. With their orbiting weapons and with those fired from their submersible boats, the time between launch and detonation is very short. Our colonies on the island continent and on the central peninsula of the main continental mass have suffered, as have those west of here.”

“And our orbiting starships,” Kirel said.

“And our orbiting starships,” Atvar agreed. “And also Poland, very heavily, which is unfortunate.”

“We might have done better not to settle so many colonists in Poland,” Atvar admitted. “The only reason we ended up administering the subregion was that none of the Tosevite factions involved in the area would admit that any of the others had the right to control it. To reduce the chances of an outbreak, we kept it-and see what our reward was for that.”

“ ‘Reward’ is hardly the term I would use, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

Pshing came into Atvar’s office, which had become the command post for the Race’s war against the Reich. “Exalted Fleetlord, our monitors have just picked up a new broadcast from the not-emperor of the Deutsche.”

“Oh, a pestilence!” Atvar burst out. “We have expended several warheads on Nuremberg. I had hoped their command and control would be utterly disrupted by now. We shall just have to keep trying, that is all. Well, Pshing? What does the Big Ugly say?”

“His tone remains defiant, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant replied. “Translation indicates he still predicts ultimate victory for his side.”

“He is as addled as an egg twenty days past hatching in the hot sun,” Atvar said.

“Unfortunately, Exalted Fleetlord, he is not so addled as to have failed to take shelter against our attacks, at least not yet,” Kirel said. “We kept getting reports that the Deutsche were constructing elaborate subterranean shelters. Those reports, if anything, appear to have been understatements.”

“So they do,” Atvar said. “And the Deutsche appear to have continued all the ruthlessness they displayed in the earlier fighting. You will recall that we hoped some of their subject allies would desert them?”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “And one of those not-empires-the one called Romania, wasn’t it? — did attempt to do so.”

“Yes, that not-empire attempted to do so,” Atvar said, “whereupon the Deutsche detonated an explosive-metal bomb above its largest city. That not-empire, or what is left of it, now loudly proclaims its loyalty to the Reich, and the other subject allies are too terrified to do anything but obey.”

“How much more harm can the Deutsche do us, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked.

“Their armies in Poland are already faltering for lack of supplies and reinforcements,” Atvar replied. “Most of their facilities in space have been destroyed, as have as many of their ground-based launch sites as we could hunt down. Those submersible boats of theirs are our greatest problem now. Every so often, they will surface, throw more missiles, and then disappear again. And, once submerged, the miserable things are almost impossible to detect or destroy.”

“In short,” Kirel said, “they can go on hurting us for a while. They have no hope-none whatsoever-of defeating us.”

Atvar made the affirmative gesture. “That is the truth at the yolk of the egg. Bit by bit, they are being smashed. They have harmed us, but they will be in no condition to keep on harming us much longer.”

“And that is as it should be,” Pshing said. An alert light appeared on the monitor. “I will answer your telephone in the antechamber,” Pshing told the fleetlord, and hurried away. A moment later, he came back. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is the ambassador from the not-empire of the United States. He requests an immediate audience.”

“Find out what he wants,” Atvar said.

Pshing disappeared again. When he came back, he said, “He seeks terms for a cease-fire between the Race and the Reich.”

“Is the Reich seeking to surrender and to yield itself to us?” Atvar asked. “Is he coming at the request of the Deutsch government?”

“I shall inquire.” Pshing duly did so, then reported, “No, Exalted Fleetlord. His mover is his own not-emperor, seeking to end the war.”

“Tell him I will not see him under those circumstances,” Atvar replied. “If the Deutsche want to end the war, they can ask us for terms. No one else may do so. Tell him just that.”

“It shall be done,” Pshing said. When he came back this time, though, he sounded worried: “The ambassador says the American not-emperor will take a very dim view of our refusal to discuss terms with his representative.”

“Does he?” Atvar let out an unhappy hiss. If the United States got angry enough to join the fighting, especially without much warning, victory looked much less secure, and the Race would suffer much more damage. The fleetlord changed his mind. “Very well, then. He may come. Pick some reasonably short amount of time from now and tell him to arrive then.”

“It shall be done,” Pshing said, and made the arrangement.

Henry Cabot Lodge entered the fleetlord’s office at precisely the appointed time. Even for a Tosevite, he was unusually tall and unusually erect. He spoke the language of the Race with a heavy accent, but was fluent enough. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said, and bent into the posture of respect.

“I greet you, and I greet your not-emperor through you,” Atvar replied. “What message does he wish to convey through you?”

“That you have punished the Deutsche enough,” the American Big Ugly replied. “They cannot take Poland, their facilities in space are badly damaged, and their homeland is a shambles. President Warren strongly feels any more attacks against them would be superfluous.”

“If your not-emperor sat in my chair, he would have a different opinion.” Atvar stressed that with an emphatic cough, to show how sure he was. “He would aim to be certain the Deutsche could never menace him again, which is what we aim to do now.”

“How was the Hermann Goring menacing you?” Henry Cabot Lodge asked. “In no way anyone could see, and yet you destroyed it.”

“We do not know what the Deutsch spacecraft was doing or would be doing,” Atvar replied. “We were not interested in taking a chance and finding out, either.” He turned both eye turrets toward the Big Ugly. “We do not know what the Lewis and Clark is doing, either,” he added pointedly.

“Whatever it is doing, it is none of the Race’s concern,” Lodge said, and used an emphatic cough of his own. “If you interfere with its operation in any way or attack it, the United States will reckon that an act of war, and we will answer with every means at our disposal. Do I make myself plain?”

“You do.” Atvar seethed, but did his best not to show it. Before he’d gone into cold sleep, he’d never imagined he would have to submit to such insolence from a Tosevite. “But let me also make one thing clear to you. You are not a party to the dispute between the Race and the Reich. Because you are not a party, you would be well advised to remove your snout from the dispute, or it will be bitten. Do I make myself plain?”

“Events all over this planet are the concern of the United States.”

“Oh?” Atvar spoke in a soft, menacing tone; he wondered if the Big Ugly could perceive that. “Do you consider yourself a party to this dispute, then? Is your not-empire declaring war on the Race? You had better make yourself very, very plain.”

Lodge licked his fleshy lips, a sign of stress among the Tosevites. “No, we are not declaring war,” he said at last. “We are trying to arrange a just and lasting peace.”

“The Race will attend to that,” Atvar answered. “Battering the Deutsche to the point where they are not dangerous to us is the best way I can think of to make certain the peace endures. And that peace will last, would you not agree?”

“Perhaps that peace will,” Lodge said. “But you will also frighten the United States and the Soviet Union. Is that what you want? I know the Deutsche have hurt you. How much could we and the SSSR hurt you? Do you want to make us more likely to fight you? You may do that.”

“How?” Atvar was genuinely curious. “Will you not think, If we fight the Race, we will get what the Reich got? Surely any sensible beings would think along those lines.”

“Perhaps,” Lodge said, “but perhaps not, too.” His features were not so still as Molotov’s or Gromyko’s, but he revealed little. “We might think, The Race will believe we have so much fear that it can make any demand at all upon us. We had better fight, to show that belief is mistaken.”

Atvar didn’t answer right away. Given what he knew of Tosevite psychology, the American ambassador’s comment had an unpleasant ring of probability to it. But he could not admit as much without yielding more ground than he wanted. “We shall have to take that chance,” he said. “Is there anything more?”

“No, Exalted Fleetlord,” Lodge said. “I shall send your words back to President Warren. I fear he will be disappointed.”

“I do not relish this war myself. It was forced on me,” Atvar answered. “But now that I have it, I intend to win it. Is that clear?”

“Yes, that is clear.” Lodge’s sigh sounded much like that which might have come from a male of the Race. “But I will also say that your reply is a personal disappointment to me. I had hoped for better from the Race.”

“And I had hoped for better from the Deutsche,” Atvar said. “I warned them what would happen if they chose conflict. They did not care to believe me. Now they are paying for their error-and they deserve to pay for their error.”

Before the American ambassador could reply, Pshing burst in and said, “Exalted Fleetlord, a Deutsch missile has just got through our defenses and wrecked Istanbul!”

“Oh, a plague!” Atvar cried. “That makes resupplying Poland all the more difficult.” He turned both eye turrets back to Henry Cabot Lodge. “You see, Ambassador, that the Deutsche do not yet believe the war to be over. If they do not, I cannot, either. Goodbye.” For a wonder, Lodge left without another word.

Not for the first time, Sam Yeager spoke reassuringly to his wife: “He’s all right, hon. There’s the message.” He pointed to the computer monitor. “Read it yourself-he’s fine. Nothing bad has happened to him.” As a matter of fact, he’s probably screwing himself silly and having the time of his life. He didn’t say that to Barbara.

She wasn’t reassured, either. “He shouldn’t be up there in the first place,” she said. “He ought to be down here in L.A., where it’s safe.”

Yeager sighed. Barbara was probably right. “I really didn’t think the Germans would be dumb enough to start a war with the Lizards. Honest, I didn’t.”

“Well, you should have,” Barbara said. “And you should have put your foot down and kept him from going, especially since you know the main thing he was going up there to do.”

“It’s one way to get to know somebody. Sometimes it’s the fastest way to get to know somebody.” Sam raised an eyebrow. “It worked like that for us, if you want to think back about it.”

Barbara turned red. All she cared to remember these days was that she was respectably married, and had been for a long time. She didn’t like remembering that she’d started sleeping with Sam during the fighting, when she’d thought her then-husband dead. She especially didn’t like remembering that she’d married Sam not long before finding out her then-husband remained very much alive. Maybe the marriage wasn’t so perfectly respectable after all.

If she hadn’t got pregnant right away, she would have gone back to Jens Larssen in a red-hot minute, too, Sam thought. He’d heard Larssen had come to a hard, bad end later on. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if Barbara had gone back to Jens. Would the physicist not have gone off the deep end? No way to tell. No way to know. Sam was pretty sure he would have been a lot less happy had she chosen the other way, though.

Barbara said, “What on earth are we going to tell Karen?”

“The only thing I’m going to tell her is that Jonathan’s fine,” Sam answered. “I’ve already told her that. I hope to heaven that’s the only thing you’re going to tell her, too. If Jonathan wants to tell her anything else, that’s his business. Not yours. Not mine. His. His girlfriend is his problem. He’s twenty-one.”

“So he kept telling us.” Barbara hardly bothered hiding her bitterness “But he’s living under our roof-”

“Not at the moment,” Sam put in.

“And whose fault is that?” his wife demanded. “He couldn’t have gone if you hadn’t let him.”

“It would have been harder,” Yeager admitted. “But I think he would have managed it. And if we had put our feet down, he’d be mad at us for years. When would this chance have come along again?”

“This chance for what?” Barbara asked. “To go into space, or to go into…?” She broke off, grimacing. “Now you’ve got me doing it.”

“Sooner or later, the Nazis will run out of upper stages and orbiting bombs,” Sam said. “Then it’ll be safe for the Lizards to let Jonathan come home.”

“In the meantime, I’ll go out of my mind worrying,” Barbara said.

“He’s fine,” Yeager said. “He’ll be fine.” He’d been saying that all along. Sometimes, on good days, he managed to convince himself for a little while. Most of the time, he was as nearly out of his mind with worry as his wife was. Long training in the minor leagues and in the Army had taught him not to show whether or not things were going his way at any given moment. That didn’t mean he lacked feelings, only that he kept them inside more than Barbara did.

“He never should have gone up there.” Barbara glanced at the message-the very reassuring message-on the computer screen, shook her head, and strode out of the study.

Yeager left the connection to the Race’s electronic network and went back to review messages he’d received in the past. The one he’d got from Straha a little before the Germans attacked Poland stuck in his mind. He examined it yet again, trying to extract fresh meaning from the shiplord’s oracular phrases.

He had no great luck. He’d been wondering for some time whether his own superiors had it in for him. He had to wonder, since none of the people who’d tried to do bad things to his family and him suffered any great punishment. Some of those people hadn’t suffered anything at all that he knew of-the fellow with the Molotov cocktail, for instance.

And how had Straha got wind of this? Probably from the hard-nosed fellow who did his errands for him. Sam wouldn’t have wanted to wind up on that guy’s bad side, not even a little he wouldn’t.

The next interesting question was, how much did the Lizard’s man Friday know about such things? Sam realized he might know a great deal. To work for Straha, he had to have a pretty high security clearance. He also had to know a good deal about the Race. Put those together, and the odds were that he knew quite a bit about Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yeager.

“How can I find out what he knows?” Yeager muttered. Inviting the fellow over and pumping him while they drank beer didn’t strike him as the best idea he’d ever had. He didn’t think it would do any good, and it would make the man suspicious. Of that Sam had no doubt whatever. Anybody who did what Straha’s factotum did was bound to be suspicious for a living.

I’ll have to operate through Straha, Yeager realized. He started to telephone the defector, but then checked himself. Straha hadn’t phoned him, but had used the Race’s electronic network to pass on the message. Did that mean Straha thought his own phone was tapped, or did he worry about Yeager’s? Sam didn’t know, and didn’t care for either alternative.

He reconnected to the Lizards’ network and asked, Did you learn of my difficulties with my superiors from your driver?

He stared at the screen, as if expecting the answer to appear immediately. As a matter of fact, he had expected the answer to appear immediately, and felt foolish because of it. Straha had a right to be doing something other than sitting around waiting for a message from a Big Ugly named Sam Yeager.

As long as Yeager was hooked up to the Race’s electronic network, he checked the news feeds the Lizards were giving one another. By what they were saying, they’d squashed Germany flat, and everything was over but for the mopping up. Scattered Deutsch units still refuse to acknowledge their inevitable defeat, but their resistance must soon come to an end.

That wasn’t the song the Nazis were singing. The Race hadn’t been able to knock out all their radio transmitters. They claimed they were still advancing in Poland. They also claimed to have smashed the ground attacks the Lizards had made into southern France. Since the Lizards had stopped talking about those attacks a couple of days before, Yeager suspected German radio was telling the truth there.

It probably didn’t matter, though. A map came up on the screen, showing where the Lizards had tossed explosive-metal bombs at the Reich. Showing where the Race hadn’t sent them probably would have resulted in fewer marks on the display. Germany and its European puppets were going to glow in the dark for a long time to come. Before long, the Nazis would have to run out of men and equipment… wouldn’t they?

The Race didn’t show maps of where German explosive-metal bombs had hit. With his connections, Sam had seen some: rather more accurate versions than the papers were printing. Poland was wrecked, of course, but the Germans’ submarines had managed surprisingly heavy blows against the new cities that had sprung up in Australia and the Arabian peninsula and North Africa-with the strong German presence in the Mediterranean, those last had been hit repeatedly. Without a doubt, the Reich had suffered and was suffering worse, but the Lizards had taken a pounding.

While that thought was still going through his mind, he got the warning hiss that told of an electronic message arriving. He checked to see who’d sent it: it could have been from Straha from Kassquit, relaying news from Jonathan; or from Sorviss, the Lizard exile who’d first gained access to the network for him. He hadn’t yet used what he’d got from Sorviss, so he couldn’t very well give him any proper answer.

But the message turned out to be from Straha. Yes, I received this information, this warning, from Gordon, the ex-shiplord wrote. I hope you will use it wisely.

I thank you, Yeager wrote back. I think I can do that.

He chuckled under his breath. “What a liar I’m getting to be in my old age,” he muttered. He knew what Straha meant by using the information wisely: staying out of things his own superiors thought were none of his business. He’d never been good at that, not when his itch to know wanted scratching. If things went wrong with what he was about to try, he’d land in even more hot water.

With a snort, he shook his head. People had already tried to kill him and burn down his house. How could he get into worse trouble than that?

After turning off the Lizard-made computer he used to join the Race’s electronic network, he removed his artificial finger-claws and turned on the larger, clumsier American-built machine he used much less often. Its only advantage he could see was that it used a keyboard much like an ordinary typewriter’s.

Even though it was made in the USA, it used a lot of technology adapted from what the Race also used. When he inserted the skelkwank disk he’d got from Sorviss, the computer accepted it without any fuss. The Lizard was convinced his coding would defeat any traps mere inexperienced humans could devise. Sam was interested in seeing if he was right.

Somewhere in the rudimentary American computer network lay an archive he’d tried to access a couple of times before, an archive of communications and radio intercepts covering the time just before and after the surprise attack that had done the colonization fleet so much harm. Less harm than the Germans have done it now, he thought, but that wasn’t really what mattered, not any more. What mattered was that he’d tried repeatedly to access the archive and failed every time. And bad things had happened after every try, too.

By now, he wanted to know what was in there as much for his own sake as because he wanted to see whoever’d bombed the colonization fleet punished. Curiosity killed the cat, he thought. His own curiosity might well have come close to killing him. But the proverb had another line, too. Satisfaction brought it back.

There was the archive. He’d made it this far a couple of times-and the screen had gone blank as he’d been disconnected from the network. The first time, he’d thought that an accident. He didn’t think so any more.

His computer started making small purring noises. He suspected he knew what that was: Sorviss’ coding at war against the measures the government had set up to keep unwelcome visitors out of the archive. If humans had learned more about computers than Sorviss thought, Sam might be in live steam, not just hot water.

For a second, the screen started to go dark. He cursed-softly, so Barbara wouldn’t notice. But then it cleared. ENTRY AUTHORIZED, it read. PROCEED. Proceed he did. As he read, his eyes got wider and wider. He finished, then left the archive at once. For good measure, he turned off the computer, too.

“Jesus!” he said, shaken as he hadn’t been since watching a teammate get beaned. “What the hell do I do now?”

The first thing Nesseref did when she got up in the morning was check her computer monitor. That was the first thing she did any morning, of course, to see what the news was and what electronic messages had come in during the night. But she had a more urgent reason for checking it today: she wanted to find out what the fallout level was, to see if she could safely leave her block of flats.

She let out an unhappy hiss. It was very radioactive out there this morning. Were it not for the filters and scrubbers newly installed in the heating and air purification systems, it would have been very radioactive inside the apartment, too. The Deutsche were taking quite a pounding. In the abstract, Nesseref didn’t mind that at all. But the prevailing winds on Tosev 3 blew from west to east. They brought the radioactive ashes from the Reich ’s funeral pyre straight into Poland.

And the Deutsche had also managed to detonate several explosive-metal bombs of their own inside Poland. Those only made the fallout level worse. They’d also done a lot of damage to Tosevite centers and to those of the Race in this subregion.

Lodz had gone up in a hideous, beautiful cloud. Nesseref wondered if the Big Ugly called Mordechai Anielewicz remained among the living. She hoped so. She also wished his youngest hatchling well-she’d met young Heinrich, after all, and heard about his beffel. Her concern for the rest of Anielewicz’s family was considerably more abstract. They mattered to her not for their own sakes but because her friend would be concerned if anything happened to them.

Orbit came up and turned an eye turret toward the screen, as if the tsiongi were examining the fallout levels, too. His other eye turret swung toward Nesseref. When she made no move to take him outside for a walk, he let out a dismayed hiss of his own. No matter how he looked at the monitor, he couldn’t understand what the numbers displayed on it meant.

Unfortunately, Nesseref could. “We cannot go walking today,” she said, and scratched him between the eye turrets. She’d said that so often lately, Orbit was starting to know what it meant. This time, the look he gave her was halfway between dismayed and speculative, as if he was wondering whether biting her on the tail-stump might get her to change her mind. She waggled a forefinger at him. “Do not even think about it. I am the mistress. You are the pet. Remember your place in the hierarchy.”

Orbit hissed again, as if to remind her that, while inferiors were bound to respect superiors, superiors had responsibilities to inferiors. One of her responsibilities was taking the tsiongi for a walk whenever she could. She’d never been home and still failed to take him out for such a longtime. As far as he could see, she was falling down on the job.

The trouble was, Orbit couldn’t see far enough. “Suppose I feed you?” Nesseref told him. “Will that make you happier?”

He wasn’t smart enough to understand what she’d said, but he followed her out of the bedchamber and into the kitchen. When she pulled a tin of food from the shelf reserved for him, his tail lashed up and down, slapping the floor again and again. He knew what that meant.

She opened the tin. The food plopped into his dish. He started eating, then paused and turned an eye turret toward her. “I know,” she said. “It is not just what you would get back on Home. It is made from the flesh of Tosevite animals, and it probably tastes funny to you. But it is what I have. You can eat it, or you can go hungry. Those are your only choices. I cannot give you what I do not have.”

Orbit kept on giving her that reproachful stare, but he kept on eating, too: he kept on eating till the bowl was empty. Nesseref knew the food was nutritionally adequate for tsiongyu; the label on the tin assured her of that. But Orbit hadn’t evolved eating the beasts from which the food was made. Animals were even more conservative than males and females of the Race. If something was unfamiliar to them, they were inclined to reject it.

Nesseref heated a slice of smoked and salted pork for herself. She found ham and bacon quite tasty, even if they weren’t salty enough to suit her. After she’d eaten, she went back into the bedroom and ordered an exercise wheel for Orbit. It would take up a lot of space in the apartment, but it would also go a long way toward keeping the tsiongi healthy and happy.

When she entered her name and location, a signal flashed onto the screen. Due to the present unfortunate emergency, it read, delivery of the ordered item is subject to indefinite delay.

“Oh, go break an egg!” she snarled at the monitor. If only she could get out of her apartment, she could walk to the pet shop where she’d bought Orbit, buy an exercise wheel, and carry it back. But if she could walk to the pet shop, she could walk Orbit, too, and then she wouldn’t need the wheel.

Your account will not be debited until the ordered item is delivered, the computer told her. Thank you for your patience and cooperation during the present unfortunate emergency.

“It is not an emergency,” she said. “It is a war.” She knew a war when she got stuck almost in the middle of one. She’d never expected to do that, not when she’d gone into cold sleep in orbit around Home. Everything about Tosev 3 had turned out to be different from what she’d expected.

She went over to the window and looked out to the streets that were so silently, so invisibly, dangerous. Far fewer motorcars and other vehicles moved in them than they usually held. The ones that did move had all their windows rolled up. Some of them, she knew, boasted air-filtration systems of their own. Even so, she was glad to be inside here.

At the moment, she couldn’t launch out of the local shuttle-craft port even had she wanted to. Deutsch aircraft had pounded the site, doing their best to smash up all of the once-smooth landing surface. Repair efforts were supposed to be under way, but the radioactivity had inhibited them, and airfields had higher priority because more supplies and reinforcements went through them than through shuttlecraft ports, and there was generally too much to do and not enough with which to do it.

She was still peering out the window when a convoy of ambulances came racing into the new town from out of the west. Warning lights flickered atop them. Even through the double-paned insulated window, their alarm hisses hammered Nesseref’s hearing diaphragms. They sped on toward the hospital a few blocks away. She marveled that the hospital hadn’t been overwhelmed; war produced injuries on a scale she’d never imagined till now.

Orbit came up and stood on his hind legs, leaning his forepaws on the glass so he could get his head up high enough to see out. Nesseref scratched him on the muzzle; he shot out his tongue and licked her hand. She wondered what he made of the view, and thought he’d come over mostly because he wanted companionship: like befflem, tsiongyu paid more attention to scent than to sight.

Other alarms began to hiss. A voice from the computer monitor shouted stridently: “Air raid! Take cover! Deutsch air raid! Take cover at once!”

Nesseref said, “Come on, Orbit!” She dove under the bed. The new town had been attacked before; she knew how terrifying that could be.

Antiaircraft missiles roared out of launchers around the town. Antiaircraft guns-some made by the Race, others of Tosevite manufacture but pressed into service all the same-began to bark and crash.

And then, above those barking crashes, she heard the screams from the jet engines of several Deutsch killercraft. That the Deutsche should have killercraft with jet engines still struck her as wrong, unnatural, even though she’d been on Tosev 3 for several years now. That she should be a target for those killercraft stuck her as a great deal worse. If one of the bombs they dropped struck her building, if one of the shells they fired struck her…

She didn’t want to think about that. It was hard not to, though, when bombs burst in the town and when shells started slamming into the building. It shuddered, as if in an earthquake. Fortunately, it was harder to set on fire than a Tosevite structure. But fallout is getting in, Nesseref thought.

Even before the all-clear sounded, she left the shelter that probably wouldn’t have done her much good and stuffed plastic sheeting under the door. She didn’t know how much it would help; if polluted air was getting in through the ducts, it wouldn’t do much of anything. But it couldn’t hurt.

Orbit was intrigued. Nesseref had to speak sharply to keep the tsiongi from dragging away the plastic she’d used. The animal’s answering stare was reproachful. She’d had the fun of putting the plastic down. Why wouldn’t she let him have the fun of pulling it up again?

“Because it might not be healthy for either one of us if you did,” Nesseref told her pet. That made no sense at all to Orbit. She’d known it wouldn’t.

An ambulance hissed up in front of her building. Along with its flashing lights, she saw, it also had a red cross painted on top of it. That was no symbol the Race used; it belonged to the Big Uglies. It meant the vehicle was used only to aid the sick and injured, and so was not a proper military target.

Workers leaped out of the ambulance and ran skittering into the apartment building. When they came out again, they carried wounded males and females on stretchers or helped them get into the ambulance under their own power. The wounded left behind streaks and pools of blood Nesseref could see even from her upper-story flat. She turned away, more than a little sickened. She’d never imagined seeing so much blood, except perhaps at a rare traffic accident.

She swung an eye turret toward the monitor. This building’s filtration system is still functional, she read. Damaged windows are being resealed as rapidly as possible. Please remain calm.

“Damaged windows!” Nesseref’s mouth fell open in sardonic laughter. Did-could-anyone think the Deutsch cannon shells had penetrated only through window glass? They could have gone through the outer walls just as easily-and through several inner walls, too.

Anyone who thought would be able to see that in the flick of a nictitating membrane across an eyeball. But how many males and females feel like thinking right now? Nesseref wondered. How many will just want to seize any reassurance they can find?

Nesseref sighed. Colonists hadn’t come to Tosev 3 expecting the conquest to be continuing here. They’d come to reconstruct lives as much like those back on Home as they could make them. She wondered how they would react to being plunged into the chaos of war. By all she’d seen, Big Uglies took it for granted. That wasn’t so among her own kind-far from it.

The Deutsche will never have another chance to do this to us, she thought. But what of the other independent not-empires? If they didn’t walk soft, they would be sorry. She was sure of that.